The Stages of Life: A Groundbreaking Discovery: The Steps to Psychological Maturity - Hardcover

Anderson, M.D. Clifford

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0871134810 ISBN 13: 9780871134813

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995

Synopsis

A ground-breaking new theory about the psychological maturation process proposes the existence of a template built into the human unconscious that is responsible for overseeing psychological growth. 50,000 first printing. National ad/promo. Tour.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

From time to time a book appears that holds the potential to extend our horizons--one that not only adds to what we know about ourselves but introduces a whole new body of knowledge. The Stages of Life is such a book. Step by step, it describes and explains Dr. Anderson's groundbreaking discovery of what he calls the maturational process--a template built into the human unconscious that carries within itself the overall design through which we can become psychologically mature.

In what may be the most important work in development psychology in the past fifty years, Dr. Anderson offers a revolutionary new model of the life cycle. He has created a clear and comprehensive portrait of the human maturational process from birth through childhood, adolescence, and youth to fully mature adulthood.

Anderson explains how the process of becoming mature can be choked off before its completion if it is interrupted or distorted by those around us--parents and teachers, peers and partners--who fail to understand its dynamics.

The Stages of Life provides readers--both laypeople and professionals--with insight into how we become the people we are. It can open a pathway that makes real the immense potential for full maturity in all of us.

"This manual equips adventurous readers with a map of the detours and roadblocks that can sabotage emotional and mental growth."--Publishers Weekly

"In this highly theoretical and intriguing book, Anderson argues that it takes three decades to grow up--and that the midlife crisis can be seen as the final throes of adolescence. Anderson's work sheds light on how to foster independence in children while still giving them that ever crucial sense of security."--Family Life

"Did you ever wonder what it means to be in childhood, adolescence, youth or adulthood, from a psychological rather than from a social perspective? Or what it really means to be immature or mature? The Stages of Life answers these questions. In his book, Dr. Anderson shows us the scientifically based steps leading to psychological maturity. Written in a clear and straightforward style, The Stages of Life should be required reading for anyone serious about following the path to true maturity."--Paul Wagner, Ph.D., Institute for Logic and Cognitive Studies

Dr. Clifford Anderson was born in Houston in 1940. Upon graduation from the University of Texas Medical School in 1966, he trained in both general and child psychiatry. He received his psychoanalytic training at the New Orleans Psychoanalytic Institute. Between 1971 and 1973, Dr. Anderson served in the United States Army and was awarded the Legion of Merit.

In the mid-1970s, Dr. Anderson entered private practice and also joined the clinical teaching staff at Baylor College of Medicine. In the early 1980s he turned his attention to researching the maturational process. Over the past decade he has devoted himself full-time to his research.

Review

Freud's biographers called the first self-analysis the "founding act," and "a momentous...achievement." Our seminal view of mentation came from introspection, and our ability to analyze still rests on it. But as transference data engage us theoretically, those from self-study become secondary. The solely intrapsychic shares our attention with the interpersonal, even to its occasional neglect.

Into this narrowing circle steps a classically trained analyst who, upon completing his two-person analysis, did what many of us thought we would: continued to free associate daily on his own. After twenty years and some forty-thousand hours on his own couch, Clifford Anderson emerges carrying a primer of maturational theory that could, unless ignored, affect psychoanalytic thinking as profoundly as did the first self-analysis.

Acknowledging no such intent, Anderson simply brings a conception of the mind that captures what he believes any of us would conclude were we willing to free associate through the resolution of our midlife crisis. "Maturation" as here used does not refer solely to the spontaneous emergence of inborn propensities according to a genetic timetable. It describes a complex process through which we physically utilize extrapsychic elements to facilitate the emergence of our inherited potential. Objects and experiences are not incorporated or partly fantasized and then taken in; nor does the word "object" even appear in his writing.

What Anderson offers takes us beyond a theory of involvement. He seek s to discover how-through daily self-awareness-our minds perpetually hypothesize a world. Despite other reactions the theory might evoke, there is up-front appeal, for we learn that the midlife crisis does not, as many believe, portend the twilight of our existence. It is, rather, the dawning of sagacity.

There is an expansiveness to Anderson's work. He displays epochs of intellectual advance in sweeping strokes-then in detail. To him our intellectual grasp so far exceeds the survival needs of our ancestors that how such potential came to us through natural selection is itself open to conjecture.

Having evolved phylogenetically, successive generations of our species still interpolate new stages of life which progressively delay the onset of what we view socially as maturity. According to Julian Jaynes, we underwent a general change in cognition between 1230 B.C. and 530 B.C., when, from the bicameral mind of Iliadic man, there appeared the reality-oriented mentality of the Greek enlightenment, and adults thought differently from children.

The stage of adolescence emerged in the early 1900's (G. Stanley Hall ) and the stage of youth in the 1970's (Kenneth Keniston), followed by what Anderson identifies as a further stage in the 1990's. Taking Keniston's lead, Anderson links these changes to increasingly sophisticated mental operations, which he introspectively locates in the ontogenesis of his own psyche. Through this approach he redefines true adulthood in cognitive terms and shows it to be only now arising in our population.

The essential indicator of this adult phase is our capacity to utilize intuition as a sixth sense along with those five that receive physical stimuli from the extrapsychic world. With intuition's ascendence, our ideas of people and things embody themselves less in picture-like form and more in dynamically based functional conceptions that tell us, for example, toward what end an internal change in something or someone is leading. With intuition, we can feel the essence of something out there that we may never have encountered with our other senses. We can conceive of wholes from which we infer parts, and can comprehend nonlinear processes of transformation in ourselves and in our world.

Grasping the link between resulting instability and emerging capacity inspired Anderson to track his own mental metamorphosis through extended free association and to identify various components of this mind as they came into being, changed functions, and realigned themselves into mature configurations. This led him to discover the thousands of raw data bits that underlie his theory of maturation. The simplest examples might be the abilities to search-for, grasp, hold-on-to, and let-go-of with our minds. Later ones enrich our human interactions, such as the ability to tolerate aloneness, or to conceive that something going on between two others may have nothing to do with ourselves.

These bits he calls Type 1 Abilities. (Type 2 are less central.) Created unconsciously through hours of repetitious mental practice, they are, metaphorically speaking, the atoms of which thinking is composed. Specialized Type 1 Abilities, S1 Carriers, metaphorically the carbon atoms, bring together other Type 1 Abilities into complex functioning clusters that enable us to relate to particular groups of external stimuli in a manner that becomes relatively constant over time. Hence we grow familiar with a mother, a father, a sibling, or a teacher.

As enhanced internal equilibrium tends to accompany the grouping of Type 1 Abilities around S1 Carriers, we proceed-from our beginnings-to cluster them by gazing at our mother's face, or crawling, or practicing other acts that utilize Type 1 abilities simultaneously. Synchronization facilitates their grouping and stimulates their S1 Carrier. A person, thing, activity, idea, or cause that serves to focus such clustering is regarded by Anderson as an organizer. It affects an S1 Carrier as the Earth's magnetic field orients the needle of a compass.

The close connection between our mental equilibrium and extra-psychic organizers is what accounts for our tenacious adherence to particular persons, causes, and persuasions during earlier phases of life, and for the profound shift that occurs when, with midlife maturation, our S1 Carriers are replaced by S2 Carriers-like gyroscopic compasses-and our relationship to people and things that once felt essential becomes forever changed.

Anderson troubles us to relocate on a richer, more elevated plane. His ideas enter our systems smoothly. But as they bring consequences, their assimilation will take time. -- James S. Robinson, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Fall, 1997

Edition details

• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0871134810
• ISBN 13: 9780871134813
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 222