DEVELOPMENTAL CRISIS IN EARLY ADULTHOOD: A ...

All these ladies and gents went back to university to do a part time or full time course in something,
directly off the back off the crisis.
This is surely more than a coincidence. It could be an artefact of the recruitment.
Or it could be that in refinding their passions, and wanting to pursue something they want, rather than
something they are forced to do, they must retrain.
It is an act of agency – Camilla referred to how it was an assertion of her individuality that her
controlling boyfriend could not veto. Alison suggests that it was an active choice.
Often they speak of wanting to do some course for many a year, but only having the will and the
courage now.
So basically, I am seeing this as part of the agency theme – part of contacting the authentic self, and
developing, growing as a human being, rather than being stuck in a rut, or trapped in a hole.
Include quotes re retraining, or studying here:
There is an entire study in this – looking at the relationship of those who have gone back to study and
crisis. And there is funding there. Definitely. From Adult Education council or something…
29/4/05
Re beginning and end
The lifecourse is a continuum with a definite beginning and end but without any absolute boundaries
within it. Society, to take control over the chaotic progression of time, stamps its own benchmarks
onto the flow of life, in order to create chapters – weddings, birthdays and annual celebrations give
order to the flow of time and cycles of nature. A crisis is a period that someone incises out of their past
as a “nuclear episode” of their life narrative. But what is clear is that the crisis is far from a discrete,
self-contained event, but is a peak, or a section, of a wave that begins perhaps even in childhood, or
certainly for a long time, and tapers off over a long period. The crisis is always a “crisis of wholeness”
as Erikson said, but the fractures in the whole can have been laid for a long time, and often the
respondents spontaneously give me a developmental story starting in childhood that lays the context for
the episode in question.
9/5/05
Levinson’s dream:
“In its primordial form, the Dream is a vague sense of self-in-adult-world. It has the quality of a
vision, an imagined possibility that generates excitement and vitality. At the start it is poorly
articulated and only tenuously connected to reality, although it may contain concrete images such as
winning the Nobel Prize or making the all-star team. It may take a dramatic form as in the myth of the
hero: the great artist, business tycoon, athletic or intellectual superstar performing magnificent feats
and receiving special honors. It may take mundane forms that are yet inspiring and sustaining: the
excellent craftsman, the husband-father in a certain kind of family, the highly respected member of
one’s community.” (Levinson et al., 1978, p.91)
Those who build an initial adult life structure around their Dream have a better chance of attaining
personal fulfilment. Those whose life structure is a betrayal of their Dream ‘will have to deal with the
consequences’.
This links to re-finding the dream at, or after, times of crisis….searching back into childhood for what
one really wants to do. Recovering the lost dream.
11/5/05
when things are happening to someone, and they lose agency and control, is the summation of not
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