DEVELOPMENTAL CRISIS IN EARLY ADULTHOOD: A ...

The crisis throws this automatic mindset into confusion. At the centre of the
crisis, when Guy’s wife tells him she wants a divorce and he takes six weeks out of
work, he says he was forced to question the choices he had made and the decisions he
had taken, for the first time in many years. He was forced to actually reflect on his
own behaviour, and so engage the self-reflection process:
“It was just trying to make sense of what happened, and the question underneath it all
was – how could I have been so wrong? How could I have believed that what I was
doing was the right thing? From the perspective of now being able to look back on it,
it is totally obvious that it wasn’t the right thing to be doing. I weighed about sixteen
stone, I was taking headache tablets the whole time because I was under constant
pressure.” (Interview 1, p.7)
After six weeks away from work, Guy is demoted to a less demanding job in his
company. At the same time, he starts two therapeutic relationships, one with a work
counsellor and one with a psychosynthesis counsellor, which aid the process of
turning his attention on himself and on the effects of his actions. He describes a
breakthrough as this reflective process grows:
“Until then I had never thought about counselling or trying to find out who I was and
why I acted the way that I did. It was really the breakthrough at that point.”
(Interview 1, p.3)
In comparing his present mindset with that of pre-crisis, Guy contrasted a new sense
of perspective with his prior sense of acting automatically:
“I think looking back on it now I can give a perspective, but at that stage as I
mentioned in there it was almost as if I had been programmed.” (Interview 2, p.1)
And then in discussing his life after the crisis, he described how he learnt to reflect on
his work life, and to monitor himself if he fell into a habit or a pattern, and to change
it if necessary:
“So I could see things differently, I could question things, and if I was starting to do
things that fell into an old habit, I could justify to myself why I was doing it where as
before I was just doing it automatically.” (Interview 1, p.7)
7.6 Reaching Beyond the Culture of Materialism
Jung (1966) wrote that psychological problems mirror the problems and
conflicts of the society in which they emerge. A persona is an identity that is formed
in line with social expectations - in order to relinquish this persona, it is necessary to
also reconsider the cultural and/or familial conventions that shaped it. Guy implicated
the influence of culture in his crisis predicament by suggesting early in his first
interview that his intense pre-occupation with his work was due to “cultural issues
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