No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
This chapter will first historicize the idea of ‘midlife’. It will build on the text Aging by the Book by Kay Heath to show how during the Victorian era, midlife (which was hitherto seen as the ‘prime of life’) was conceptualized as a period of decline in the West. Was there a gender angle to this shift? This was a time when single women were seen to be nearing middle age at 30, mothers in their forties were expected to become sexless and fortyish men were seen to be in anguish over whether their time for love had gone by. The chapter will show how our current negative attitude towards midlife springs from Victorian roots. One hence needs to engage with the concept of ‘age’ in both philosophy and psychology (and not see age as biological; psychological age may be distinctly different from biological age). The chapter thus sees age as not just culturally constructed but as a philosophical concept with psychological roots. Further, is the midlife crisis a crisis of the society, and not of the individual? Is midlife pathology a symptom of larger social pathology? Is the subject of midlife in crisis? Or is it society and society's conservatism that puts the subject of midlife in crisis? Does life end at 40, or does it begin at 40? Does one then need to look at midlife beyond the standard binarism: decline and rise, end and beginning? This chapter hence foregrounds the importance of the phenomenological turn in our understanding of midlife. In the process, it opens up the axes of embodiment (the ‘body-mind’) and the difficult task of ‘life-writing’. It also argues for the importance of psycho-biographs of midlife – which are psychoanalytic biographs (without, of course, the entrenched ableism and masculinism of Freud and Lacan) – and where the focus is on listening to, communicating and relating with the subject of midlife. Is midlife, then, an uncanny experience of different kinds of en-able-ness? Does a close reading of Tagore's Nijer Katha take us to such a psychobiography of midlife en-able-ness?
Loading…
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.