Word: levinson
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...FIRST reaction to all this is: so what? Does anyone really care what one is supposed to do at forty or what the developmental tasks and integrations of the period are? As Levinson points out, knowing more about what happens to men at what age makes it easier to sort out one's own life, realize one is not alone, and makes it easier for society to appropriately deal with its citizens of all ages and utilize their unique resources...
...Levinson's study is not the only one to reach the conclusion that a discreet life cycle exists. The recently-published Grant study of the lives of men who went to Harvard, as well as other work in the rapidly-expanding field of life history, support Levinson's idea of the life cycle. And, as so often happens, the common sense wisdom of the ages does too, although no one fully realized it until a systematic, scientific study like Levinson's pointed it out. The Greek scholars, Confucius, the Bible, Shakespeare all speak explicitly of the seasons...
...small task that Levinson has set for himself. One would therefore expect such a momentous and arduous study to be supported by dozens of researchers using impeccable research methods with hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants from big foundations. Instead, Levinson's group consists of about five interviewer/researchers who selected a sample of forty men to interview in depth about their life and work and values and crises. In essence, Levinson chose to write the biographies of 40 men and see if any underlying similarities appeared. This is hardly the kind of base one would feel comfortable with...
Make no mistake about it, a new discipline of life history is what Levinson is after. Because he believes no single existing discipline is able to study men's lives as they evolve in the world--each being limited by the questions it poses for itself and the types of phenomena it chooses to study--Levinson is explicitly calling for a massive redirection of psychology, the life sciences, and the social sciences towards the study of the individual life as it is lived in the world. Obviously, the man has chutzpah, but if he is right in his conclusions then...
While he does branch out in new directions--different research methods and a broader focus--Levinson is also clearly following in the wake of the psychoanalytic school of thought. Drawing on the work and concepts of Freud, Jung, Erikson and William James, among others, he attempts to generalize their ideas to include other times of life besides childhood and other crises and reorientations besides the Oedipal dilemma. Fortunately, Levinson also is more favorable to sociological sorts of questions and researches than are his more theoretical psychoanalytic counterparts, and therefore he tends to live less in a world of mental models...