The Stages of Life: Personalities and Patterns in Human Emotional Development

215 Pages·2016·1.365 MB·English

by  Hugh Crago

The STageS of Life
Is personality ‘in the genes’?
Do our infant experiences matter, even though we can’t remember them?
Why do patterns repeat within the lives of individuals and families?
The Stages of Life provides answers to these and other intriguing questions, and
presents a refreshingly readable introduction to human development from birth
to death. The book synthesises those theories and research findings that are most
helpful in explaining the paradoxes and complexities of human personality and
human problems.
The book provides a thought-provoking discussion of several important
topics, including:
• how personality evolves in response to both genetic and social influences;
• how individuals differ and what this means for them; and
• how some problems tend to develop at particular stages of the life course,
from early childhood through to midlife and old age.
Throughout the book, Hugh Crago relates both ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ to
the challenges individuals must face from early childhood through to old age.
He draws attention to often-ignored clinical findings about ‘cross-generational
repetition’ in families, and shows how recent developments in epigenetics may
supply an explanation for such mysterious phenomena.
Written without jargon, and full of new and provocative ideas, the book will
be of great interest to students of counselling, psychotherapy and developmental
psychology, and it also has much to offer the general reader. With its engaging
examples from history, literature and the author’s experiences, readers will find
that The Stages of Life illuminates puzzles in their own lives and opens a road to
self-acceptance.
Hugh Crago is Adjunct Fellow in the School of Social Sciences and Psychology
at Western Sydney University, Australia.
Praise for Hugh Crago’s recent Entranced by Story
‘A book of extraordinary scope and ambition’
– Ralf Thiede in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly
‘Crago’s ground-breaking book has all that one expects of a visionary
work’
– Mateusz Mareki in International Journal of Children’s Literature Research
‘Reading the book is like listening to an experienced and entertaining
guide’
– Wolfgang Loth in Zeitschrift für Systemische Therapie und Beratung
The STageS of Life
Personalities and patterns
in human emotional
development
Hugh Crago
First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 Hugh Crago
The right of Hugh Crago to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without
intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Crago, Hugh, 1946– author.
Title: The stages of life: personalities and patterns in human emotional
development / Hugh Crago.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2016. |
Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015050386 | ISBN 9781138923867 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781138923898 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Developmental psychology. | Personality. | Emotions. |
Life cycle, Human—Psychological aspects.
Classification: LCC BF713.C695 2016 | DDC 155—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015050386
ISBN: 978-1-138-92386-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-92389-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-68470-3 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Keystroke, Station Road, Codsall, Wolverhampton
ConTenTS
Preface vii
1 The end and the beginning 1
2 ‘Not in utter nakedness’: temperament and attachment 13
3 ‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy’: the pre-school years 31
4 Widening horizons: pre-school to high school 57
5 Discovering self and sex: adolescence 74
6 ‘The tide is high’: young adulthood 96
7 ‘The maker and the made’: committed relationship
and parenthood 116
8 ‘The middle of the journey of our lives’ 135
9 Legacies: midlife to late adulthood 153
10 ‘The clouds that gather round the setting sun’ 172
Further reading 188
Index 191

PrefaCe
The Stages of Life is a substantial revision and updating of my 1999 book, A Circle
Unbroken. I introduced that book in the following way:
How do we become who we are? Is personality ‘in the genes’? Does our
childhood dictate the future course of our lives? Can parents make or break
their children? Can we change? Do we have choice?
In attempting to change ourselves, we often run up against powerful
forces which we do not fully understand. It helps to know what parts of our
personalities are ‘hard wired’ by genetic heritage, and what parts are open to
modification through introspection and conscious decisions to be different.
It helps to know whether or not we can ‘delete’ things in our existing per-
sonalities, or only add new capabilities and roles. It helps to know roughly
what we can expect to experience at various stages of our life journey. These
are the things I have tried to lay out in this book.
As you can see, A Circle Unbroken was primarily addressed to the general reader,
although I hoped that it might also be of use to students of counselling and
psychotherapy. While I still expect that general readers will find the The Stages of
Life interesting and approachable, I have expanded key aspects to make it more
useful to students. I’ve updated research findings, supplied fuller references and
included detailed new material on epigenetics, temperament, attachment and the
structure of the brain. I have expanded my coverage of common problems that
may afflict individuals at different stages in the lifespan, and examine why these
conditions occur when they do. Apart from trainee counsellors and psycho-
therapists, I hope that The Stages of Life will supply a ‘big picture’ of lifespan
development for clinical, educational and counselling psychologists, supplementing
the evidence-based, detail-focused texts with which they will be familiar.
viii Preface
I have tried to present a coherent map of how a child’s genetically shaped
temperament may interact with its environment to produce not only its individual
personality, but also (in some cases) potential problems. The notion that some
human beings might be ‘hard wired’ for anxiety, shyness, sensitivity or impulsivity
was unpopular with experts throughout most of the last century. Students of
human development, along with most parents and teachers, wanted to believe
that every child could grow up to be confident, outgoing, resilient and sensible.
But a mass of evidence from researchers over the past 50 years, marginalised at
first, has forced us to acknowledge that some personality traits are genetically
linked, and do constrain the ways that our personalities eventually develop –
albeit with some room for modification. Since I wrote A Circle Unbroken, science
has greatly expanded our understanding of the way that particular genes in a child
elicit (‘pull’) particular responses from their environment, or (to put it the other
way around, but equally correctly) how particular aspects of a child’s environment
enable the expression of genes that might not otherwise come ‘on-line’. These
developments lay to rest the old ‘nature versus nurture’ debates. Both its genetic
heritage and the way a child is parented must necessarily be involved in shaping
that child’s later personality. Unsurprisingly, however, the proponents of
attachment theory have ignored or downplayed the importance of a child’s
genetically influenced temperament, while researchers of temperament have
downplayed or even dismissed attachment. Both these approaches embody
important parts of the truth, and in The Stages of Life I have attempted to give
due weight to both.
Equally importantly, our understanding of the human brain has expanded
exponentially in the last 20 years. Neurological advances have made it clear that
the ‘emotional brain’ evolved long before the ‘thinking brain’. We humans are
prone to act impulsively on the basis of our feelings because most of us are (at
least some of the time) under the sway of the older parts of our brains – the brain
stem and the limbic system – which we share with forms of life that evolved
aeons before humans did. Our knowledge of the ‘new brain’ – the cerebral
cortex, with its two hemispheres – has also expanded. Contrary to what used to
be taught in developmental psychology courses, the maturation of the cortex is
not complete by late adolescence. Human brains do not function at full capacity
until the mid-thirties, and the final stages of brain maturation may not occur until
even later, perhaps as late as the mid-fifties. Among other things, this helps to
explain why young people are so prone to risk-taking behaviour, convinced that
‘those warnings don’t apply to me!’ It also underwrites the belief that ‘wisdom’
(as opposed to ‘knowledge’ or ‘skill’) tends to develop only in the latter half of
our lives – the result of accumulated experiences, interacting with the very
gradual maturation of the brain. It is not too much to claim that neurological
exploration has actually established a ‘brain basis’ for some of the most fundamental
principles of psychotherapy – Freud’s ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’, for example
– principles which for most of the last century were regarded by mainstream
psychology as unscientific and impossible to prove. Psychoanalytic theory now
Preface ix
has a neurological foundation, and there is a dynamic push-pull between one part
of our minds and another, except that the real conflict may be between the
survival-governed, instinctive, holistic right hemisphere of the cerebral cortex,
and the rational, reflective, analytic left hemisphere!
Counsellors and therapists need to know how human beings typically grow
and change across the lifespan – but in a way that emphasises continuities as well
as changes. Rather than mastering every physiological detail of early childhood
language development, puberty, menopause or dementia, they need to know
how each stage of life is likely to feel to an individual who is going through it.
When I wrote A Circle Unbroken I was in my early fifties. My chapter on old age
was written ‘from the outside, looking in’. Now, closing on 70, I have a surer
sense of what ageing is actually like. I know how declining bodily capacities can
affect the way I think, feel and see the world. Yet I am the same person, with
the same virtues and deficits as I have always had – although somewhat softened,
I trust, by experience and personal psychotherapy.
Adolescents and adults can tell us directly about their experience, but we must
infer the experience of infants, toddlers and even some older children from
observing what they do (typically, their play) instead of relying on what they say.
In The Stages of Life, I have drawn on as wide a range of evidence as possible to
provide accounts of how children and adults experience their lives, and like many
others before me, have supplemented scientific findings with evidence from art,
literature and music, because creative individuals are capable of conveying experi-
ences that are not readily expressible in language. I’ve made many references to
biographies of individuals (politicians, musicians, soldiers, scientists, performers,
writers) because counsellors and therapists need a sense of individual uniqueness
– how the developmental changes that all human beings go through have
impacted upon this particular person, at this particular time in history.
While concentrating on how human beings develop in a contemporary
Western context, I’ve tried to make readers aware of how some things might be
very different in other cultural contexts, or at other times in history. One culture’s
‘healthy and desirable’ development can be another culture’s ‘dysfunction’ –
and, notoriously, one culture’s ‘crazy person’ can be another culture’s shaman
or spiritual healer. As temperament scholar Jerome Kagan points out, genetic
differences between ethnic groups can also make a contribution to their values,
philosophies, behaviour – even to the kinds of drugs they may prefer, or their
propensity for suicide.
As I’ve already anticipated, The Stages of Life seeks to offer its readers a ‘big
picture’ of human development – one in which individuals are viewed in context.
Relational contexts – how each of us interacts with significant others in our lives
– are vital for understanding the growth of personality and for appreciating the
potential for greater or lesser degrees of ‘pathology’ within individuals. ‘Pathology’
is a medical term meaning ‘disease’ or ‘illness’; however, the Greek word from
which it was formed (we know it in English as ‘pathos’) signified ‘suffering’ or
even ‘emotion’ in general. In the West, we see problem behaviour as located