Historical Perspectives of Middle Age Within the Life Span

T o our knowledge, there has never been a historical treatise on the concept of middle age or middle adulthood (we will use these terms interchangeably throughout this chapter) within lifespan developmental psychology and lifespan developmental science. At most, the role of adult development in the middle of the life cycle has been touched on here and there in historical treatises such as Groffmann’s essay, “Life-Span Developmental Psychology in Europe: Past and Present,” which appeared in Goulet and Baltes’ (1970) Life-Span Developmental Psychology: Research and Theory. Naturally, poets and philosophers have written much about the human life course, including middle age, over the centuries. Nonetheless, a systematic treatise on the history of middle age, how societies and cultures have interpreted the span of years that come after young adulthood and extend into later life, has never been undertaken. It seems as if the historical analysis of the concept of middle adulthood has not