Composing a Further Life

of the community. Not every culture has a ritual to mark puberty, but every culture does make a distinction between childhood and adulthood. Not every culture includes an institution comparable to retirement, but every culture offers a way of thinking about old age, usually with respect. In effect, a division of the life course into at least three stages is probably universal, but many societies think of life as having half a dozen or more distinct stages, and these are represented in art and poetry from the biblical Book of Ecclesiastes to colonial samplers, from Shakespeare to contemporary coffee mugs.
    During the twentieth century, childhood became a subject of scientific study. Arnold Gesell traced the landmarks on a map of child development, always setting the bar a little low so that his readers could be like the denizens of Lake Woebegon, all of whose children are above average. 1 Sigmund Freud was the pioneer in describing the stages of development of sexuality in infancy and childhood and connecting early experiences with neurosis and mental illness at later stages. 2 Adolescence was defined and described as a distinct stage in development that is managed differently in different societies. 3 Since then, the idea of life stages following childhood has been elaborated by biologists and psychologists and popular writers, while in the same period average life expectancy has increased by over twenty years, although there continue to be differences between men and women, rich and poor.
    Erik Erikson took two giant steps, first in looking at the stages of the life cycle not only in terms of vulnerabilities but also in terms of the basic strengths (which he called
virtues
, using the older meaning of the word) developed in meeting the challenges
(crises
, offering both peril and potential) that come to a head at particular stages of development. He extended this model into adulthood and connected it with the societal challenges of different historical periods. 4 Erikson’s model, which underlies my own work, had eight stages, to which Joan Erikson added a ninth after his death. 5 One of his charts is inserted as Figure 1 . Daniel Levinson proposed an alternative way of dividing adulthood. 6 Gail Sheehy drew on all of these thinkers to popularize the model of life stages in her book
Passages
and then further refined it to fit contemporary changes and generational cohorts in
New Passages.
7
    The Eriksonian model is best known for its description of the identity crisis of early adulthood, yet the real landmarks are not crises but the development of basic strengths that evoke the words of the Psalmist, “They go from strength to strength, every one of them in Zion appeareth before God” (Ps. 84). The aspect of Erikson’s work that seems to have been least integrated into general understanding is that the central developmental challenge of each stage reappears or is anticipated in every other stage. Thus, the crisis of identity in youth is anticipated in every step of individuation and autonomy from birth on, and must be revisited at every later stage. That which is first represented at birth by physical separation from the mother is played out as differentiation and later on in new forms of autonomy and a search for continuity, so that in old age we ask not “Who am I?” but “Am I still the person I have spent a lifetime becoming?” I would argue that healthy longevity has presented us with a second identity crisis. No one is the same at forty and at seventy, but the changes can compose a story that rings true. To put it in terms of my own preferred metaphor, we may ask in old age, “How can this time of my life complete or balance what came before? How do these years form an aesthetic unity?”
    Erik and Joan Erikson were family friends and remained close to both of my parents after my parents divorced, but I did not read Erikson’s work, with its mingling of psychoanalysis and anthropology, until my final year of college, in a course taught by the anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn. Erikson came to Harvard in 1960 with the rare and honorific title of university professor, but I had not studied with him directly when I joined the teaching staff of his course on the human life cycle four years later.
    I had rushed to complete my doctorate in linguistics and Middle Eastern studies within three years of graduating, partly because Sir Hamilton Gibb, also a university professor at Harvard, with whom I had been