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Psychology and the Crisis of Masculinity

Susanne Schmidt

in Midlife Crisis: The Feminist Origins of a Chauvinist Cliché

For all the success, Passages was not to everybody’s liking—and if Sheehy’s feminist framework and engagement with social science made her concept of midlife crisis popular, they also constituted a ... More

For all the success, Passages was not to everybody’s liking—and if Sheehy’s feminist framework and engagement with social science made her concept of midlife crisis popular, they also constituted a critical target. The most influential criticism came from psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts. Rather than rejecting the idea of middle life reinvention, they appropriated and reversed it. Chapter 5 makes visible the anti-feminist politics that motivated the redefinition of the midlife crisis and shows how the notion of popularization was weaponized to silence Sheehy. In the wake of Passages, the psychologist Daniel Levinson and the psychiatrists George Vaillant and Roger Gould advanced a male-centered definition of midlife rejuvenation that echoed Playboy fantasies and barred women from changing their lives. Demarcating “professional” from “popularized” science allowed them not just to discredit Sheehy’s authority, as other instruments of boundary work would have done; it also created expert competence over a concept of popular culture: Levinson, Vaillant, and Gould cast Sheehy’s bestseller as a watered-down version of their own research. This was successful: anti-feminism was allowed to parade as better science and the term “midlife crisis” was now primarily connected to men and corroborated, rather than abolished, traditional gender hierarchies.Less

Four Theories in Search of Ethnocentrism

in Us Against Them: Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinion

This chapter analyzes four theories that claim to speak to ethnocentrism. These theoretical perspectives include ethnocentrism as a consequence of realistic group conflict, as an outgrowth of the ... More

This chapter analyzes four theories that claim to speak to ethnocentrism. These theoretical perspectives include ethnocentrism as a consequence of realistic group conflict, as an outgrowth of the authoritarian personality, as an expression of social identity, and as an outcome of natural selection. The chapter analyzes the nature of ethnocentrism and discusses the explanation associated with William Graham Sumner, Daniel Levinson, Henri Tajfel, and Edward O. Wilson.Less

A Paradigm for Understanding Adult Life

Michael B. Kaufman

in Redefining Success in America: A New Theory of Happiness and Human Development

Chapter 10 shows that the book’s new qualitative paradigm for understanding well-being and development is supported by published research on general samples and at the same time cinches together many ... More

Chapter 10 shows that the book’s new qualitative paradigm for understanding well-being and development is supported by published research on general samples and at the same time cinches together many factors in development and well-being into an account that explains patterns observed in published research. This new paradigm diverges not only from conventional happiness research but also from well-established theories on personality and adult development, including those of Erikson, Vaillant, Levinson, and McAdams. These contributions derive from a new approach to the study of happiness across the life course developed in the book, replete with tools and concepts. The approach is person-centered, humanistic, and developmental. It argues that happiness is shaped by a formative worldview interacting with the environment, reinforcing itself directly and through mediating behaviors. These processes can promote stability or can be disrupted and help facilitate change. The chapter explains how the book’s paradigm can be applied to illuminate the lives of women and varied demographic groups facing different conditions in the life course from those of the sample featured in the book.Less