psychology

THIEVING TIME

Miriam Manne

Peter O'Connor
Facing the Fifties: from denial to reflection
Allen & Unwin, $17.95pb, 209pp
1 86508 384 4

IN HIS NEW BOOK Jungian psychologist Peter O'Connor asks what it means to be in one's fifties. He sees it as the next development stage after mid-life. On the back cover of his book Facing the Fifties we are offered 'a map for the journey'. But its byways are highly schematic and require adherence to controversial assumptions. On the basis that 'everyone's life follows its own path', writer Janine Burke in an opinion column in The Age in response to Drusilla Modjeska's article on O'Connor's book eschews what she calls 'The Facing the Fifties Club'. She wonders whether 'generational anxiety is something baby boomers...have invented to deal with our massive narcissism'. But Burke is forty-eight and perhaps a bit young to find (as I did at fifty-five) unexpected reassurance and comfort in shared generational issues.
      Of the various psychological theorists used in the book (they include Freud, Erikson, and Winniscott), the most fundamental here is Jung. The Jungian heroic journey where metaphorical monsters are slain at specific points (developmental stages) along the way is the book's central image. The search is for the 'true self' where loss must be acknowledged and mourned, and the capacity to integrate opposites internalised. O'Connor sees the fifties as falling into three stages. In the first stage, separation from youth is experienced and mourning for loss is integral. The second stage of 'liminality' is in the mid-fifties, when one is aware of ageing but of not being old, necessitates the understanding of ambiguity -- of uncertainty. At the end of the fifties, sufficiently separated from past attachments and having passed successfully through prior stages, one is reflective, inner focused and, according to O'Connor, stripped of ego.
      The most common thread which emerged from O'Connor's interviews with sixty men and women in their fifties was the experience of loss. Loss of youth, of sexual potency and attractiveness, of energy, of children at home, of short-term memory and, most importantly, an awareness of loss of life itself. Unless we expect to live to 100, O'Connor points out that those of us in our fifties can no longer regard ourselves as middle-aged: 'It becomes difficult to maintain a sense that there is still plenty of time ahead'. Some of O'Connor's participants spoke of their sense of time running out, of time as thief.
      To illustrate the experience of loss in the fifties, O'Connor uses concepts of Eros (the life force) and Thanatos (disconnection and death) locked in an archetypal struggle. The experience of loss O'Connor tells us, activates Thanatos when thoughts of endings and death occur. In this case, Thanatos is usefully invoked to disconnect us from the past, rather than as obsessive fear of death. 'In our anxiety about the end we rush headlong towards death and miss the processes and endings that go on long before we reach our destination. 'But we are warned that the urge to rally Eros to our defence (for example to pretend we are really thirty-nine, to find a younger lover, or to have cosmetic surgery) may be inappropriate, a 'cover up' to 'create illusions of omnipotence'.
      O'Connor's subtle and sensitive use of dream analysis and personal accounts enrich his theory. One of the most moving accounts is of Bruce, a third-generation farmer who had realised by his mid-forties that he would not have the energy necessary for farming in the future and that the farm would not provide sufficient income. He dreamed of three barren paddocks with one single weed and of being advised that if the weed were nourished it would generate income in the future. As a practical farmer Bruce had neglected his inner imaginitive life.

But here in his dark despair the inner world of dreams throws up hope and direction...one can take the weed to be his previously rejected creativity. He was able to accept his sadness and separated himself from his habitual and old sense of himself needed for farming and embrace a life of uncertainty without manically taking off into the outer world. He allowed his depression to work, to initiate him into the next stage of his life.

Miriam Manne is a Melbourne reviewer

Your comments are invited: email them in a letter toAustralian Book Review
Return to Australian Book Review /November 2000