DEVELOPMENTAL CRISIS IN EARLY ADULTHOOD: A ...

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7.3 Summary of Key Events in Guy’s Crisis
Guy was 46 at the time of interview. In 1996, age 36, he was successfully
established as global network manager for a major bank (referred to here as X Bank),
with a wife and two young children. He had 700 staff under him and a budget of
many millions of pounds for which he was responsible. He often spent fourteen hours
a day at work, seeing his wife and children very little, and often had to work through
weekends. His health was suffering, and he was becoming more aggressive and
difficult at home and at work. He didn’t fully notice his wife’s sense of neglect, until
one day in March 1996 she asked Guy to come with her to a counsellor and then told
him, out of the blue, she wanted a divorce. He recounted how everything that he
thought was important “suddenly evaporated”. He was left in a “state of total shock”,
which soon turned to depression. Guy took six weeks off work, in order to try to
come to terms with his confusion, grief, and anger, and in order to try and establish
how things had gone so wrong. When Guy returns to work, he finds that he has been
taken off his job and has been moved to a new sector within the company, with a
fraction of his previous budget and far less line responsibility than he had before. He
then finds himself in a period of self-reflection, self-doubt, depression and so
instigates a search for new ways of coping with life and new ways of discovering
aspects of himself. After leaving wife and job, he ends up in a new relationship, a
freelance consultancy role and actively involved in Kabala spirituality.
7.4 Rescuing the Hijacked Self: Persona and Pressure
Guy’s narrative contains evidence that suggests the existence of a work
persona that had developed over the many years of his intensive “pressure cooker”
work life as a banker. He refers to the sense that before the crisis there was “a façade
that I had been cloaking myself in.” (p.12). Jung uses similar terminology of a
“barricade”, a “mask” or “false wrappings” to refer to the persona. The goal of the
professional persona is to impress with success, position and power (Jung, 1959), and
this is true of Guy:
“Therefore I would say for a period of about fifteen, sixteen years, no longer than
that, for twenty plus years, I was running a career that was about being successful, it
was about getting power and doing those things… I was making more money, I had
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