Growth in Adulthood: A Revised Psychoanalytic Framework for Adult Development

ABSTRACT

Psychic development over the course of adulthood has been largely neglected in the psychoanalytic literature over the past 30 years. This paper is an attempt to update a psychoanalytic understanding of adult development and to begin to illustrate its clinical value. Over time, increased longevity has changed the experience of life phases, and our ideas about development have moved away from rigid stage theories and universal concepts toward a more flexible, individualized, and socio-culturally informed understanding of the core challenges that define development of the personality over the course of life. In this paper I will focus on important aspects of self-experience across the adult life cycle to outline a revised and expanded scheme of the key intrapsychic tasks of adulthood. I will use an extended case example to illustrate how the psychoanalytic practitioner can use this adult development perspective to inform treatment. Finally, I will consider the applicability of the “developmental object” concept to adult treatment and to our ideas of how people change over the course of life, both within and outside treatment.

KEYWORDS:

• Adult development
• development of the self
• developmental object
• life stages
• personality change over the lifecycle

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. With the specialization of knowledge, especially research-based knowledge, much of the scholarly work on adult development moved to the subdiscipline of “life span psychology,” largely cut off from psychoanalytic thinking. For an important exception see the recent section of Volume 70 of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child “Emerging Adulthood: A Developmental Phase” (Knight 2017).

2. This experience of environmental threat is, I believe, an important determinant of the relatively high levels of anxiety that are characteristic of this phase of the lifecycle.

3. Freud first used the term “instinct for mastery” in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) in which he set it apart from the sexual instincts though it can be blended with them. Freud’s use of the term pertained to control and dominance either over an object or internal excitations and is “put into operation through the agency of the somatic musculature” (198). With Freud’s development of the dual instinct theory the drive for mastery lost the status of a separate instinct and was subsumed under the death instinct (Laplanche and Pontalis 1974). Psychoanalytic theorists post-Freud emphasized the importance of an “instinct to master” (Hendrik 1943) or “effectance motive” (White 1959) as a need to control the environment. Lying outside and independent of the dual instinct matrix, a striving for mastery came to be seen as an independent motivational system, driving adaptation. Although a drive for mastery has been widely recognized, it has not, to my knowledge, been explicitly placed at the center of the adult developmental process, where I think it belongs.

4. Whether and in what way parenthood itself can be considered a developmental phase has been discussed by Benedek (1959), Parens (1975) and others and is due for reconsideration.

5. The extent to which a culture (or subculture) values wisdom and turns with gratitude toward older adults as embodiments of that virtue has a significant impact on the self-esteem of older adults on a macro level. It is also one indicator of a culture’s humanistic values and support for emotional well-being.

6. Erikson’s polarities are a mix of both developmental challenge and outcome, and as such are conceptually muddled. For example, “ego identity” is both a life challenge and an outcome, as are “intimacy” and “generativity.” I have aimed for clarity in separating the core challenges to the adult personality from the developments of the self that can occur under optimal circumstances.

7. This scheme inevitably bears the imprint of my own background, training, and experience. Its generalizability may therefore be limited. The relative neglect of adult development within psychoanalysis has meant that, to my knowledge, there has been little exploration of the effects of historical period, gender, ethnic, and other cultural differences on the development of the self across the adult life cycle. I hope that this paper will help kindle interest in these issues.

8. By using the term “large population” rather than “normal population” I want to further underscore the need for research on the adult developmental process in diverse populations.

9. I am indebted to Catherine Bateson (Bateson 1989) for her emphasis on the special exigencies of women’s development and on the fluidity and individuality of the adult developmental process.

10. See Michael Apted’s documentary film series “7 Up” or the current director of the Harvard Study Robert Waldinger's TED talk “What makes a good life?” (Waldinger 2015), which has been viewed more than 20 million times.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steven D. Axelrod

Steven D. Axelrod, PhD, is Faculty and Co-Chair of the Independent Track at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He is a co-editor of the book Progress in Psychoanalysis: Envisioning the Future of the Profession (Axelrod, Naso, and Rosenberg 2018). He has a private practice in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in New York City.