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With easier and more frequent divorce it is becoming increasingly clear that divorce seldom supplies the answer to the problem marriage. In so far as the pattern of the marriage is unconsciously determined by the partners, very much the same pattern with its difficulties and deadlocks may be, and in fact is, likely to be repeated after divorce in subsequent marriages. This has been said before and Dr. Bergler's contribution is to show with clarity and force that the discontent of the middle-aged man with his lot can hardly be avoided. It is as inevitable as are adolescent difficulties and is indeed a repetition of adolescent difficulties in middle age which he calls 'the middle-aged revolt'.
The book is vividly written, and its argument is backed by case histories and reports of analytic sessions with men and women in regard to their marriage problems. These are always tersely put and very much to the point.
Dr. Bergler stresses the importance of psychic masochism and the special characteristics it develops in middle age in bringing about as their end effect the middle-age revolt; closely related in cause and effect is middle-age hypochondria, with which he deals quite fully in a later chapter. Dr. Bergler does not confine his study narrowly to marriage, but follows the interlocking effects of the middle-age revolt in wider spheres, including the field of friendship, on which he has some important things to say.
After years of accumulating a wealth of clinical material it is not unnatural that Dr. Bergler makes some sweeping generalizations which one might feel like challenging in places. But perhaps the most important criticism one can make of his book is that he fails to consider that just as the revolt of the adolescent would seem to be not just a pathological state, but an inevitable and valuable step in the development of the growing child, in his effort to become an individual, so the middle-age revolt may be not just an illness which has to be gone through