An Existential Perspective on Lifespan Development.

by Mary Spring

“The courageous pilgrim life is the life that is equal to this unceasing tidal and seasonal becoming” (Whyte, 2019).

Lifespan’s Core Concepts

Unlike traditional lifespan models, the contemporary Lifespan theoretical perspective espoused by Baltes proposes that development is not the exclusive experience of childhood and adolescence but “extends over the entire lifespan” (1987, p. 613). Encountered in the emotional, cognitive, physical, social, personal, professional and spiritual domains of people’s lives, this lifelong process is both multidimensional, with decline and growth happening at all points in the lifespan, and multidirectional, with patterns of decline and growth varying across and within the intertwining domains. Development across the life course is plastic, a person’s brain not necessarily failing as one ages. It is a movement that involves the never-static phenomena of constants and the unfamiliar, of gains and losses, the ultimate loss being one’s death. Lifespan is contextually embedded in the dynamic and reciprocal relationship between the individual throughout their lifetime and the surrounding environment; the three sources of influence identified as the normative age-related, the history-graded, and the biological, along with environmental determinants “that do not occur in any normative age-graded or history-graded manner for most individuals” (Baltes et al., 1980, p. 76).

This holistic understanding of development through the lifespan confronts the deterministic and chronological orientation of Freud’s early model where the first three of five stages of universal psychosexual development are completed in early childhood and where crises in adult life are exclusively seen as relating to fixated developmental experiences in very early life (Sugarman, 2001). Contemporary Lifespan orientation also challenges the linear psychosocial developmental paradigm of eight sequential stages as evidenced in Erikson’s psychosocial framework (1980). Jacobs contends that stage theory “is essentially artificial, a construct of the theorist rather than an endemic feature in human nature” (2012, p. 27). Ultimately, an Aristotelian “growth-maintenance-decline model of development” (Sugarman, 2001, p. 13) is debunked.

Hendry and Kloep’s Lifespan Model of Development (2006) observes three necessary conditions for development. Challenge, the first condition, is encountered at non-linear and unfixed but relevant times in the person’s life. The response to these challenges is found in the second and third conditions, namely, the building of resources and the taking of risks. Crucially, in this contemporary representation, the outdated medicalised perception of crisis is reframed, instead seen as inevitable in “being a living, developing and relational being” (Davies, 2018, p. 25).

Existential Psychotherapy and the Lifespan Perspective Existence Precedes Essence

Rooted in three schools of thought, namely, phenomenology, humanistic psychology and existentialism, existential psychotherapy attends to “concerns that are rooted in the individual’s existence” (Yalom, 1980, p.4). To consider its attitude towards lifespan, one might first pause to observe existential psychotherapy’s core principle, as noted in Sartre’s Existentialism and Humanism (1946), that existence precedes essence. “Thus human reality does not exist first in order to act later; but for human reality, to be is to act, and to cease to act is to cease to be” (Sartre, 1996, p. 476). Unhindered by a linear model of progression through life, this self-defining tenet upholds the proposition that human existence, what Heidegger calls Dasein (2010), lives amid endless choices and that such choices are always situational and always have consequences. This proposition does not, however, deny our “thrownness” (Heidegger, 2010), this being the acknowledgement that we are born without our choosing, into a particular family system (and not another family structure), a particular neighbourhood, society and culture and at a particular time in history. However, notwithstanding the seeming randomness where biology, environment and other givens, sometimes uninvitedly, intertwine in the life course, the Sartrean vision, a dynamic agency-enabling principle, prompts each of us to be “first and foremost a verb-like being” (Cooper, 2017, p. 18), a creator and sculptor of oneself. The stark alternative is to be “the passive recipient of a life” (Adams, 2019, p. 21).

Time

Because the contemporary lifespan model sees the lived experience as non-linear and non- chronological, Time can be reframed. existential psychotherapy, with the accompanying therapeutic relationship at its very heart, radically does this, Heidegger proposing that being is time (2010, p. 18). Time “is not something that we passively have or do not have; it is something we are” (Adams, 2019, p 24). It is, Adams explicates, “the water we swim in; it is the air that we breathe” (2019, p 24). From our very first inhalation to our last exhalation we are never at a place of standstill. We are always in flux amid the temporal reality of what I describe as ‘the three living tenses’, the past, present and future plaiting and pulsating within us in any one and every moment. Time will outlive us and Time past may have shaped aspects of us up to now. The past is not, of course, negated. However, neither is the assumption of causality over-explained or over-relied upon (Spinelli, 2006, p. 5-6). Instead, the client is invited to consider deeply ingrained, habitual responses, to reflect on de-centering an identification with the past and encouraged to make the present their own. Significantly, as a being-towards-the- future which is, in effect, a being-towards-death, the client is also prompted to project towards the future, to run authentically and courageously away from the “tranquillized everydayness” (Heidegger, 2010, p. 111) and towards the unfolding, becoming, unknowing, uncertain, certain and finite future.

Change

The lifespan orientation sees Change and transitions as inevitable and constant, Sugarman asserting that “To live is to change” (2001, p. 2). This paradigm points to a person participating in “processes of change that do not originate at birth but lie in later periods of the life span” (Baltes, 1987, p. 613). The Existential perspective similarly adheres to the proposition that our lives are characterised by “discontinuity, accident and commitment to choices made” (Adams, 2006, p. 277), such movements being phenomenologically unique to the person.

To consider these “benchmarks to the human life cycle” (Sugarman, 2001, p. 135) suggests an “openness to the unknown and the uncertain” (Spinelli, 2015, p. 87). A client presently rails against the idea that such situational-transitional experiences are “existent and pervasive in every moment of our life” (Jenkinson and Adams, 2007, p. 230). Fearful of change and fearful of reflecting on “an attitude which accepts man as always becoming” (May, 1983, p. 50), it is easier for the client to accentuate her fixed essence. She is partner, she is mother, she is daughter, she is sister, she is ex-wife, she is friend. However, the lives of the people around her have changed significantly, her child has become an adolescent, her former husband has remarried, one parent has died, the other parent’s health has declined and her best friend has moved away. In this tender and painfilled movement from “‘what was or was not’ to ‘what is or is not’” (Spinelli, 2015, p. 85), the client considers returning to the work environment; she wonders whether or not to return to college. Encountering her innate paradoxical self, she dreads the accompanying endings and beginnings. She wrestles with the tensions of surrendering her subjectivity and self-agency to the real and imagined others’ look and to real and imagined consequences. Like the protagonist in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2006), she feels the unsettling pulls towards individuality and authorship and towards safety and sameness.

Crisis

Crisis, understood as intrinsically ordinary and typical of the human condition in Hendry and Kloep’s framework on human development (2006), is similarly normalised in existential psychotherapy, van Deurzen reminding us that there is “no homeland where we can hide from the reminders of our mortality, our guilt, our failure, our forsakenness” (2009, p. 50). Suffering, adversity, anxiety, uncertainty and aloneness disturb our very sense of being-in-the-world yet also profoundly encourage us to respond to the challenges of the life course and to consider how they can act as catalysts for personal growth. “Crises should not be ignored or relegated to special spheres of life. They belong among us” observes Jacobsen (2006, p.39). They are not pathological manifestations, but intrinsically part and parcel of being-in-the-world and of being-in-the-world-with-others. This potential shift in our attitude and relationship with our full humanity enables us to consider that “anxiety individualizes” (Heidegger, 2010, p. 184). It allows for each of us to enter into a noble, enabling and lived relationship with our deepest selves, “the self which has explicitly grasped itself” (Heidegger, 2010, p. 125).

Aging

Though aging signifies change and, for many, awakens a sense of crisis, the Lifespan perspective challenges the assumption that Aging is only synonymous with “passive decline” (Baltes and Lindenberger, 1988, p. 296). Supported by the rapid advances in evidence-based neuroscience, we know that neuroplasticity “is possible throughout the lifespan not just in childhood” (Siegel, 2010, p. 84). Most elderly people, states Baltes and Lindenberger (1988, p. 296), possess “a sizeable amount of reserve capacity which can be activated for new learning, refining, and elaborating what is already available”. Existential psychotherapy embraces this perspective, Becker asserting that “Middle age is a normative developmental stage” (2006, p. 87). Personally, I delight in my middle-agedness. Notwithstanding the fact that I am heading towards the “dwelling house of old age” (de Beauvoir, 1972, p. 1), I decided in recent times to retire from working in second level education and return to psychotherapy training, an environment I had stepped my toes into 25 years earlier. Mindful of de Beauvoir’s encouragement to pursue in our later years “ends that give our existence meaning” (1977, p. 540), what harbours in my heart is a new felt sense of being.

Death

Inherent in the word “lifespan” and the Lifespan orientation, and unarguably central to existential psychotherapy, is the profound and inescapable truth that we are finite. We face our dying and Death; immortality is an illusion. “As long as we consider death as something in the distant future, we remain estranged from our fundamental relatedness to death, our embodiment of death”, notes van Deurzen (2010, p. 65). If we ever needed reminding however, Heidegger unequivocally reminds us that “Death is a possibility of being that Dasein always has to take upon itself … Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein” (2010, p. 241). Death, he insists, is “essentially and irreplaceably mine” (2010, p. 243).

A client’s relationship with what Tillich describes as “the abyss of nonbeing” (2014, p.30) and what Yalom depicts as “the wound of mortality, the worm at the core of existence” (2008, p. 274) deepens with the passing years. The death of her second parent three years ago left her with an uncanny feeling of being orphaned. Moving like a cautious pilgrim towards a relationship with her temporary and limited nature, dying and death becomes a near-constant companion as a dear friend, neighbours and distant family members have subsequently died. Ruefully she acknowledges that sports stars and pop singers from her younger life, though they were meant to stand still in time, did not. Two other clients similarly and unequivocally encounter mortality: one person’s mother is slowly dying of cancer; another person’s nephew died in a road accident. In these turbulent, raw movements of the heart, the mind, the body and the soul, an ontological awakening happens and all three clients begin to enter into relationship with their own very unique, separate and temporary selves. Each of them reflect Yalom’s pointed emphasis that “though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death may save us” (2009, p. 126). They confirm the existential premise that when we engage in dialogue with our mortality we grow deeper into an understanding of our existence.

Conclusion

Development through the life span, in all its endless hues, is an ever-present pulse in our lives and, inevitably, anchors itself in the therapy room. Existential psychotherapy’s organic understanding of Lifespan development principles invites us to reflect on and redefine our human response and situation. It encourages us to live the one finite pilgrim life “that is equal to this unceasing tidal and seasonal becoming” (Whyte, 2019, p. 124) and to live it with awareness, authenticity, curiosity and courage. It acknowledges that the course of our lives is not a straight and chronological pathway from the cradle to the grave but a pathway of many pathways that bring us into embodied contact with the constant and the unexpected, change and crisis, beginnings and endings. Living as we always are, in the shadows of our final leave-taking, we step forward. We step back. We seem to stand still. We meet discontinuity, sometimes jarringly. We meet our vulnerability and ambiguity. We meet mystery and our very being.

Mary Spring MSc. is a psychotherapist in private practice, having previously spent many years working as a teacher, special education needs coordinator and assistant principal in secondary school education. She is a teaching member of ICPPD, one of Ireland’s leading counsellor-psychotherapy training colleges. She received her Masters in Psychotherapy Studies from the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling, her thesis being an exploration of the impact of client suicide on the therapist. Presently training to be a supervisor, she has published regularly in Irish psychotherapy journals.  

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IAHIP 2024 - INSIDE OUT 102 - Spring 2024