Abstract
If being adult is being fully grown up, then adult development is something of an oxymoron. But not if we take it as we take adult entertainment: intended only for adults; not suitable for children. We begin with this bit of conceptual hyperbole to highlight the sense that development in adulthood marches to a different drama than in childhood. Nevertheless, just as there is obviously no well-developed child apart from a well-developing one, there is no well-developed adult. Such, essentially, was Jung’s (1933) complaint to Freud: not against the validity of libido theory itself, but with Freud’s failure to recognize that the second half of life (“the psychology of the afternoon,” Jung called it) had passed beyond the aims of psychosexuality to follow now utterly new directions and seize new terms of being, rather than to stay put, protecting the winnings of the first half (“the psychology of the morning”) from dwindling any further.
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Peskin, H. (1998). Uses of the Past in Adult Psychological Health. In: Lomranz, J. (eds) Handbook of Aging and Mental Health. The Springer Series in Adult Development and Aging. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0098-2_14
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