Dr Peter O'Connor: The Mid-Life Crisis - A Jungian Perspective

Dr Peter O’Connor, a retired psychologist with an abiding interest in Jungian Depth Psychology, speaks about the “human fragility and human failure” experienced at the heart of the mid-life crisis. He describes how the first half of life involves a pursuit of the qualities traditionally associated with the sex of one’s birth but that in mid-life, those qualities of wholeness that were sacrificed, in order to pursue seemingly masculine or feminine attributes, demand to be recognised and integrated. The appearance of the Anima in men and the Animus in women heralds an opportunity for either a mid-life projection onto the external world (the affair, the career change, the pursuit of intellectual or spiritual fulfillment) and/or the integration of these once abandoned qualities into the Self.