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Andrew Jamieson, a practicing psychotherapist and orchestral concert promoter in the UK, has written a short book, handsomely turned out in red cloth by Notting Hill Editions, on the human potential coiled in the midlife crisis. In his practice, he writes, three-fourths of his clients have been between their thirties and fifties, arriving in a “state of near breakdown,” anxious, depressed, and beset by the feeling that they've lost their way (p. 1). Having both seen and been versions of this patient, I can affirm that this is territory worthy of exploration. For Jamieson, midlife is an essential developmental phase. Refreshingly, he does not couple it to procreation. Instead, it's a phase of personal emotional development through introspection. Its task is one of “ethical evolution,” to balance out the tumult and destructiveness of our technological evolution (p. 4). Engaging with the work of midlife is good for the individual, plausibly essential for human survival; the stakes are nuclear. Jamieson makes his case through a loose, intermodal theoretical structure and a set of personal and historical exemplars. It's the midlife crisis theory of Great Men, and a few women.
Jamieson admires Jung, and has studied his work and life. He thinks in terms of shadow and anima, egocide and individuation. Focused on individual growth, he seems to accept Jung's treatment of the women in his life as a down payment of the price of greatness. But Jamieson is anything but doctrinaire. If
his readings of analytic theory can tend towards the reductive, as when he writes off the pleasure principle as “Freud's euphemism for sexuality” (p. 26), he has no axe to grind with psychoanalysis, insisting, rather, on the revealed neurological truth of its theoretical models (p. 48). He is an integrationist, striving to connect Jung's theory of individuation to a neurochemical understanding of the brain, by way of Freud's repetition compulsion and Winnicott's fear of breakdown. For him, the the