The birth of a child, perhaps actually the awareness of conception, changes the marital partnership by the need to make room—emotional room—for a third person. The product of their unity can be a strong bond, a source of common interest and shared identification, but children are also a divisive influence—in varying proportions in each marriage, a unifying and separating force. In becoming parents, the marital partners enter into a new developmental phase.
Download Author: Lidz, Theodore, M.D.
The Middle Years
The middle years start when persons achieve maturity, usually in their early thirties, having gained the skills, knowledge, and assurance needed to settle into their careers and family lives. They are caught up in the challenge of making the most of their abilities and opportunities. They soon move into the period most people consider the “prime of life,” the years between thirty-five and fifty-five, during which they reach the midlife transition or crisis—a period of stocktaking, and perhaps of reorientation, occurring around the age of forty—and become middle aged. Middle age is usually a period of fruition, but often a time of coming to terms with where one’s life is going. Then, as persons enter their mid-fifties, the efforts and creative capacities of most, though far from all, persons diminish as they tend to coast on previously gained skills and accomplishments until they reach old age, which is rather arbitrarily considered to start at about sixty-five.
Old Age
People have changed over the past several decades and now increasingly welcome retirement as an opportunity to live in leisure, and they accept and anticipate retirement as part of their life cycle. Whether retirement can be enjoyable—an autumn of deep but brilliant hues—depends greatly, as we shall consider later, upon income and health; whether it will be enjoyable depends greatly on the personality of the individual—and upon contingencies.
The Preschool Child
Sometime around the age of three, the child ceases to be a baby and becomes a preschool child. During the next two or three years the child passes through one of the most decisive phases of life’s journey that has been termed the oedipal transition.
Death
Death is part of the life cycle, an inevitable outcome of life that brings closure to a life story; and, because humans from early childhood are aware of their ultimate death, it influences their development and their way of life profoundly.
Childhood Integration
The closing of the oedipal period brings a consolidation of the child’s personality. The child now first achieves a fairly firm integration as an individual. Even though personality development is far from completed at five or six and many significant influences will still accrue before a firm integration and a stable identity are achieved, we must examine the paradox and the nature and extent of the organization that has occurred.
The Person: His and Her Development Throughout the Life Cycle
This book has been accepted as the definitive text of personality development. “Dr. Lidz brings to THE PERSON a rich experience as an academician, theorist, and clinician. What especially comes through is the warm, compassionate clinician calling on a lifetime of experience and intimacy with the literature.” Psychiatrist’s Bookshelf (940 pp.)
Reviews
“…an opus….Dr. Lidz brings to The Person a rich experience as an academician, theorist, and clinician. What especially comes through…is the warm compassionate clinician calling on a lifetime of experience and intimacy with the literature.”
—Psychiatrist’s Bookshelf
“This book would make for the Martian ambassador in Washington a splendid introduction to the facts of life, from womb to tomb, in North America today.”
—British Journal of Psychiatry
The Life Cycle:Introduction
The psychodynamic understanding of the personality and its disorders rests heavily upon the study of the life cycle. All persons go through a cycle of gestation, maturation, maturity, decline and death. The epigenetic principle maintains that the critical tasks of each developmental phase must be met and surmounted at the proper time. Erikson’s and Piaget’s approaches are discussed. (37 pp.)
The Family: The Developmental Setting
The child’s development into an integrated individual is guided by the dynamic organization of his family, which channels his drives and directs him into proper gender and generation roles. The child must grow into and internalize the institutions and roles of the society as well as identify with persons who themselves have assimilated the culture. (39 pp.)
The Human Endowment
Reviews what human children bring into the world with them, considering certain essentials of what they acquire during the ten dark lunar months in the womb and then what they must assimilate in order to survive and develop into individuals.
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