When a mother abandons a child, it is expected that the child may suffer severe emotional anguish. When longtime lovers break up, pain usually follows. When close friends fall out, it is understood that each may suffer psychic wounds.
But when people betray each other on the job, this is often written off as "office politics." It is widely assumed that while you can get fired if somebody stabs you in the back, your soul will remain intact. This is how the personal crises of work are compartmentalized and assigned a lower order of hurt to job trauma. In ways direct and indirect, individuals suffer from the repressed reality.
It's not just among lay people that the impact of work crises has been overlooked or underestimated. Indeed, during the early part of the twentieth century, psychiatrists tended to feel that nothing happening to the individual after childhood had much impact.
In 1944 the psychoanalyst Heinz Hartmann coined the term social compliance, referring to the way in which the social structure influences behavior. Hartmann later observed that the "attention of analysts has been perforce directed to the object relationships of childhood, for these are infinitely more important to the development of personality than those of later life...." While acknowledging the dominant role played by childhood and the family, Hartmann noted in Essays in Ego Psychology that "our patient's current social environment constantly enters the analytic picture."
While psychologists and psychoanalysts today pay more heed to the social context of behavior than was formerly the case, they still tend to focus on interpersonal rela-tionships off the job. "For a long time," one analyst told us, "work to me was off limits when the patient brought it up. This, I thought, is the province of the industrial psychologist. Now it seems to me we have done great harm in setting up that artificial classification, industrial psychology.' In any event, I now know that, with many of the people I see, what happens in their jobs has a most profound significance. I was going to say 'significance in their lives'-but that, you see, is compartmentalizing. Their work is their lives."
One of the most significant things about work is that it involves dependence on other people. Once it was common-place to view the successful achievement of adulthood as a freeing of the self from dependency, similar to the butterfly's emergence from the cocoon. It is viewed differently now. The infant, of course, is altogether dependent. Continuation of excessive dependency needs beyond childhood can lead to severe neurotic disorders. However, that mature and healthy adults have deep dependency needs is recognized- though these needs may be disguised as desire for reassurance, approval, love. When Barbra Streisand sings "People who need people," she is stating a psychological finding of recent vintage.
There are, of course, the exceptions, the people so bound up in their work that they "take the job home with them." The accepted wisdom is that this is always bad- you should be able to leave the job in the office. The fact is that the job comes home with you whether you want it to or not. The workplace is a community in which employees at all levels spend much of their lives. What happens there can have a more profound effect than what happens in the living room or the bedroom. Work shapes the psyche.
Because work is society. It is the universal social envi-ronment most familiar, often most alive. And if there is a San Andreas fault in the office parquet underfoot, when it goes, it will split the ground not just on the job but through the entire length and breadth of your existence.
In Passages, Gail Sheehy emphasized the importance of chronology in human experience. She described the crises that link up with life's milestones, presenting opportunities as well as problems. does the same for working life.
This article is based on certain premises:
- It is practically impossible to be unhappy in your job and happy out of it. Work is you.
- Career crises are inevitable. Success does not lie in the avoidance of crisis but in the management and understanding of crisis.
- The salient crises of a career can be predicted.
- Careers are cyclical. They may be divided into stages of about ten years. Each stage has its own character, its own opportunities, its own dangers.
- A happy and successful working life calls for successful transition from one stage to another.
'Stages' is a word heard constantly during space missions: "Successful staging has been achieved," etc. Successful staging for a space capsule involves accurate guidance, achievement of the necessary velocity, and total disengage-ment from the empty rocket that fueled the previous stage. Similarly, the individual who moves successfully through must have accurate direction and push-and must also be able to cut away the useless paraphernalia of the past.
The word stages in the title as well as the text refers to the division of work life into six successive parts. The pages ahead sketch out job experience from prejob preparation- Stage I-in ten-year cycles, to stage VI-age 60-70.
Each stage is marked by crises, by psychological tran-sitions, by decisions to be made: The executive headhunter calls and hints at a job opportunity that is extremely tempting, even though you like your present affiliation. You've made a mess of a critical assignment-should you start looking for another job?
Many crises naturally fall into one or another stage. "Which job offer shall I accept in entering the world of work?" is a Stage I question. Stage VI is the natural point at which crises involving retirement must finally be resolved.
Some crises are not limited to any one stage; they are repetitive. The crisis of identity-Who am I, really? And what am I doing here?-recurs again and again. These crises have been assigned to the stage at which, in the authors' opinion, they have the greatest impact.
examines six definable stages. Following the period of the late teens, Stage I-Getting Ready (in which important attitudes are formed and career decisions begin to be made), comes Stage II, The Learning Decade (20-30). Here the reader experiences crises of adjustment-Learning to be an employee; crises of decision- What shall I do with my life?; crises of the spirit-Am I becoming a hypocrite?; etc.
Stage III, The Power Decade (30-40), brings its own set of crises: fear of failures (or in some cases the need to fail); severe home/job strain; the onset of cynicism.
The Win/Lose Decade (40-50), Stage IV, involves another set of crises: midlife doubt; the point of no return; alienation and loneliness of success; bitterness of failure.
During the Consummation Decade (50-60), Stage V, the individual confronts a set of crises centering on the need to acknowledge and accept the fact that all the major lifemoves have been made. Ruefulness and regret may color the work-related problems met at this stage. And for others comes the feeling, "I have wrought well."
Beyond the Consummation Decade, the individual moves into Stage VI, The Wrap-up Years, a period of ques-tions regarding retirement and how to live a rich and full life with less or no work involvement.
The book identifies and analyzes a wide range of crises typical of each stage. It is based on hundreds of conversa-tions-interviewers sat across countless executive desks, buttonholed undergraduates and M.B.A.s in college corridors, talked with experts across the country by phone-and refined the results of years of research. One major aim is to tell how people are surmounting job problems and carving out successful careers that provide deep emotional satisfaction.
There is both insight and opportunity in the stage concept. Once a career is seen as a series of stages in which success may vary-rise, fall, and rise again-one is weaned away from seeing one's working fortunes as a monolithic structure, more or less uniform throughout. An individual who has had a mediocre Stage I or II may go on to a brilliant Stage III. Understanding that each stage may mean a new deck and a new game, you can use the experience of earlier stages to capitalize on new opportunities.
It offers you a time road map. With it in hand, you can review where you've been and how you have met the challenges-that is, the crises-of the past; you can assess where you are in your present stage; and do strategic thinking and planning about your carter future.
In the context of this article, crisis is seen as a decisive or crucial point, usually one in which the individual undergoes considerable stress and a degree of psychic trauma. You don't face a crisis every time something goes wrong. You do face a crisis when what goes wrong has a deflecting effect on your life.
When you examine the crises that stud the typical working life, they begin to fall into categories. Some kinds of categories are common in certain decades; others are rare.
Going from here to there causes problems. It involves change, and change is resisted. The new is often difficult to accommodate. Resistance to change is a phenomenon frequently observed-and usually deplored-on the business scene. Management efforts to change a work procedure, physically move departments about, inaugurate new policies almost always meet with reactions ranging from open antagonism to thinly veiled suspicion. And yet it's really strange that the human being, whose development has been marked by the greatest changes and adaptations of any of God's creatures, still should be subject to the wariness of the new and unfamiliar shown by the lower orders.
Even when change is not threatening, it can be difficult, often critically so. When you move into a new situation, you have to adjust behavior and attitudes. It's not easy. For some people, it's almost impossible.
The phenomena that accompany adjustments to a new situation do not always constitute a crisis. Usually they amount to no more than some shimmying as you accelerate. But at other times the struggle to adjust is agonizing.
