DEVELOPMENTAL CRISIS IN EARLY ADULTHOOD: A ...

can also subtly undermine personal control, by creating pressures on a person to
achieve, to acquire, to put in longer working hours, to embellish status and to “prove
oneself”. The materialistic person becomes, through their own complicity, controlled
by targets, image and money (Kasser, 2002).
To lose control is to lose the experience of oneself as an active, choicemaking,
self-determined being. Conversely, to have control is to experience being an
initiator of actions and to self-endorse those actions, rather than being just an effect
and a responder to the orders and imposed goals of others. It is just such a sense of
personal control which is diminished in so many of the pre-crisis life structures
described in this study, leading to a sense of passivity, a sense of being the “victim”,
or a sense of being an inanimate object subject to external forces.
Pre-Crisis Persona and the Split Self
In many cases the participants described an early aspiration or vocation that
was rejected as an appropriate focus for adult life, as it was considered in some way
“inappropriate”. For example, Mary has a passion for philosophy but feels that there
is no career in philosophy, Angela loves art but feels that she should get a stable
career in an office, Dan loves being a father but sacrifices time with his children for a
demanding corporate job, while Guy’s interest in science and human behaviour is
ignored so that he can make money as a banker. The inclinations and interest that
drove the early aspiration, along with other “unacceptable” aspects of personality, are
hidden behind a public front that is socially approved, conventional and validated by
the cultural mores.
This means that the pre-crisis self is split into a public version and a private
version. Such a condition is well explained by Jung’s concept of the persona. Jung
described how all people must develop a “persona” – a public, socially acceptable
front to human personality (Jung, 1966). This persona evolves in order that a
person’s identity may conform to society’s demands, roles and expectations. It is an
intentionally manufactured, controlled, public self that is designed to make an
impression – to look right, speak right, wear the right clothes, smile at the right time,
hide destructive emotions and attitudes, and to “domesticate” the growing person into
a groomed unit of society (Jung, 1966). For Jung, and post-Jungian theorists such as
Hopcke (1995), the development of a persona is a natural stage for the growing self in
adolescence and early adulthood, for it facilitates the development of a character and
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