The adult years [antikvár]

Growth: Lifelong Cycle "The process is not like climbing up a hill and down the other side, but more akin to a Himalayan expedition during which camps must be made at varying altitudes, guides found, the terrain explored, skills acquired, rests taken before moving up to the next level. . . . The descent is also made in stages." This is psychoanalyst Theodore Lidz speaking, and he is talking about the course of the life cycle—describing what it is like to grow from infancy into adulthood and then to descend gradually toward death. Scientific study of the life cycle is a new phenomenon, and Lidz is one of the first experts in human behavior to write a detailed account of the human progress through life. The chief reason most earlier scientists paid little attention to life as a whole is simple. Development during childhood is so rapid, so readily distinguishable into stages and so clearly significant for later life that it occupied most attention. It mesmerized some scientists, who came to believe that human development ends with childhood. The progression from birth to death seemed, as Lidz intimated, rather like hiking up a hill to reach adulthood and then taking an uneventful walk across a plateau that remained level—and barren of scientifically interesting scenery—until the path dipped downward toward the close of life's journey. Now scientists know life is more dynamic than that. They recognize that although human development is most dramatic in early life, it does not end at the age of four or six or eight. Within any segment of the population—such as the Pennsylvania farm family at left—development occurs in every age group. Sociologist John Clausen even suggests that one human may, in effect, be many different people in his lifetime. These changes after childhood occur at discernible stages: adolescence, young adulthood, the middle years and old age. The stages seem the same for everyone in a culture, and what happens in each stage generally happens to everyone at about that time. For example, just as most babies walk at the age of one and talk at two, most Westerners grapple 7