Outliving the Self
Tipton, Steven
Psychology of adulthood OUTLIVING THE SELF GENERATIVITY AND THE INTERPRETATION OF LIVES John Kotre Johns Hopkins, $20, 282 pp. Steven Tipton GENERATIVITY, according to psychologist Erik...
...Against this backdrop, Kotre asks, how are we to be fertile...
...Kotre calls narcissism "the precise inverse of generativity," and he ties it to "the contraceptive and demographic revolutions" remaking our society...
...Greater longevity has increased families of four or five generations, to be sure, but more people (especially young and old adults) are now living alone, and more households are now childless...
...Outliving the Self will help to clarify the interdisciplinary nature of a narrative psychology able to describe everyday life more subtly, and interpret its moral and social meaning more truly...
...a black secretary and a black high-school teacher nearing forty on the lower cusp of the middle class...
...Kotre proposes such a psychology and sociology, but he does not work them out in systematic detail...
...It evokes that era's cultural concerns and it answers them in their own terms...
...Also, a second-generation Italian Catholic nun of fifty...
...Longer life and lower fertility rates have given us more child-free years...
...Erikson's focus on parenthood as the key "generative encounter" reflects the institutional centrality of the family in integrating the moral character of modern individuals...
...In fact, the stories may be too good, too rich and varied in their particularity, for the reader who seeks in them neat evidence for a revised psychology of generativity or a sociology of its contemporary forms and settings...
...These are good stories...
...Over the twentieth century, household size has shrunk in America and generational segregation has spread...
...We hear the life-stories of five immigrants: a Sicilian ex-barber, Armenian dry cleaner, and Russian Jewish arts patron in their seventies...
...Conceiving life-history as a matter of such moments and episodes frees it from the developmental determinism of stage-and-sequence psychology in ways that sociologists and anthropologists will welcome...
...Traditional ideals and myths echo in their efforts as they struggle to sustain or restore the moral order of the universe...
...Yet the text contains no thick description of the cultural traditions on which its life-histories draw so heavily for their meaning...
...They are released intermittently from adolescence through old age at "moments" set in particular social, historical, and cultural contexts...
...By the 1970s, however, popular celebrations of togetherness had turned to praise of selffulfillment...
...Indeed, Kotre commends their sensitivity to the importance of historical cohort, ethnicity, class, and "the cultural connection...
...A quarter of the baby boom cohort, now out of the "Me Decade" and into midlife, is projected to go childless, and another quarter to bear only one child...
...In eight life-histories told with compassion and insight John Kotre shows us women and men caring for one another, their children, communities, and culture — and sometimes failing to do so...
...David Riesman's critique of the other-directed conformity of individuals in "the lonely crowd" of a mass Commonweal: 504 society had given way to Christopher Lasch's attack on "the culture of narcissism...
...But the focus also reflects the more specific circumstances of the middle-class American family during the postwar baby boom...
...They do not lessen its significance...
...The social context of generativity is being transformed by the contraceptive and demographic revolutions...
...Yet Kotre's own psychology includes descriptive terms mortgaged to the ontological individualism and economism he criticizes, as when he redefines generativity as "a desire to invest one's substance in forms of life and work that will outlive the self...
...and a Hungarian graduate student in her thirties...
...In answer, he distinguishes cultural and technical generativity from their biological and parental counterparts...
...It follows on identity and intimacy, learning what you care to do and who you care to be in youth and who you care to be with in young adulthood...
...Yet little of their structural, institutional, or ideological complexity comes into view...
...These problems attest to the difficulty of carrying through the sort of project Kotre proposes...
...His life-stories feature persons passing on cultural meanings and skills to their successors...
...Different types of generativity follow different schedules...
...In a genuine psychology of adulthood, he says, culture appears as an essential collaborator, not the repressive adversary of our instinctual selves as psychoanalytic infants , nor a cocoon for the autonomous to escape as the adolescents of humanistic psychology...
...Steven Tipton GENERATIVITY, according to psychologist Erik Erikson, is the cardinal virtue of adulthood, in which "you learn to know what and whom you can take care of...
...Convictions to the contrary, Kotre notes, are themselves cultural creations...
...a fiftyish Lebanese Al-Anon leader...
...More women are working full-time, and, for many, parenthood no longer defines the essence of a woman's work...
...No less important, it will move us with the loving care of its stories and their telling...
...Citing anthropological methods of "thick description" and theories of culture and personality, he concludes: "There is no such thing as a culture-free self, and there is no way to outlive the self without the vehicle of culture...
...At best, the actors perform well and memorably...
...Sociologically, the life-histories selected are remarkable for how little they represent those most effected by these social changes, the middle-class slice of the baby-boom cohort...
...These are necessary elements in a narrative psychology true to the complexity of actual lives...
Vol. 112 • September 1985 • No. 16
