DEVELOPMENTAL CRISIS IN EARLY ADULTHOOD: A ...

understanding early adult crisis. The third key finding is that in all cases a Dream
was manifest in pre-adulthood life, followed by an a clearly extrinsic orientation,
followed by resolution finding an intrinsically motivated career based on some
version of the Dream.
Gender and Persona
A persona is built in order to adapt identity to the demands and standards of
others, and these standards often revolve around expectations of what a man or
woman should be or do; it is therefore inevitably a gender-related construct. These
cultural expectations are often stereotyped, even regressive, concepts of gender
(Cyranowski et al., 2000); the man should be virile and success-focused, while the
woman should be loyal and “nice”. It is these stereotypes that inform the pre-crisis
identities in this sample and despite their varying expectations it was in adopting a
masculinised persona that they felt they were best positioned to adapt. In five out of
six cases this was an adaptation to the masculine world of business. In the sixth case,
Victoria adopted masculine traits because she was reacting to a macho rural Italian
culture in which only masculine traits imparted control and self-esteem. Research
does suggest that an androgynous or a masculine sex-role identity is associated with
higher self-esteem among both boys and girls in young adults (Bem, 1974), which
supports the findings here of adaptation through masculinisation.
The masculine nature of the persona in these six cases would have been
predicted by Jung. He equated the persona with the masculine “animus”, while
the hidden inner personality was the feminine “anima”:
“We can, therefore, speak of an inner personality with as much justification as, on the
grounds of daily experience, we speak of an outer personality. The inner personality
is the way one behaves in relation to one’s inner psychic processes; it is the inner
attitude, the characteristic face, that is turned towards the unconscious. I call the
outer attitude, the outward face, the persona; the inner attitude, the inward face, I call
the anima.” (Jung, 1971, p.467).
Transformation over the course of crisis was in all six cases in the same direction
along the gender polarity – towards the feminine. This mirrors Jung’s belief that the
anima will surface from behind a masculine persona. Levinson (1978, 1996) also
would have predicted the gender-focus of crisis in this age group, for he concluded
that the masculine/feminine dichotomy is navigated for the first time in a
164