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In 1956, the concept ‘mid-life crisis’ was introduced by Elliott Jaques in his article ‘Death and the Mid-Life Crisis’ (1965). This article called attention to observations already well-known to psychoanalysts in their clinical work. Accordingly, Jaques' article, the chapters about middle-age in Otto Kernberg's book, Internal world and external reality (1980) as well as my own experience and observations as a psychoanalyst, constitute the sources of this work.
Middle-age crisis can be compared to puberty crisis in the sense that both crises are universal and therefore constitute normal periods of transition in man's life. It is also a fact that these critical periods can turn out very differently with different persons owing to variations in individual personality structure and psychic balance at the onset of the critical period. The sum total of man's earlier experience of life, neuroses and narcissistic distress manifest themselves in determining how he is going to react to and behave regarding his own aging.
It is not easy to write about middle-age. If you yourself are middle-aged, you have not yet attained a sufficient distance in time to what you are about to describe; it is difficult to try to depict a period of life that you yourself are in the middle of. Somewhat older persons may be better suited for describing the middle-age crisis if they do not idealize this period of life in the sense that the middle-aged tend to idealize their youth. In any case, it seems to me that a young person, who has not yet experienced the aging and death of his own parents, who has not been through the dissolving of his parental home and has not seen his children grow up and leave