THE HUMAN LIFE CYCLE AND ITS INTERRUPTIONS
| Autor: | Douglas Courtney, Maurice E. Linden |
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| Rok vydání: | 1953 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | American Journal of Psychiatry. 109:906-915 |
| ISSN: | 1535-7228 0002-953X |
| DOI: | 10.1176/ajp.109.12.906 |
| Popis: | A review of the literature will lead the student of later maturity to discover 2 general tendencies, one of method, the other of attitude: (i) an effort to understand the whole of man through isolated criteria and (2) a tendency to regard adulthood as a more or less continuous state of maturity terminated by progressive decline and death. An individual at any time in his life is the aggregate and interaction of many functions, some in development, some at peak, and some in decline. Any approach toward comprehending the nature of man that uses for measurement a single function, or even a group of functions, such as sensory acuity, motor response, intelligence, vocabulary, etc., succeeds in describing merely a dissected part of a totality. A society such as ours, which appears to place a heavy emphasis on the attributes of youthfulness, physical agility, and the behavioral constellation surrounding reproduction, makes the same error on a cultural scale that the researcher makes on a laboratory scale, i.e., it fails to integrate enough human variables into a realistic life scheme, and views human growth with lopsided values, so that adult life is popularly regarded as the simple achievement of an ambiguous maturity followed by a general decline. Shakespeare’s cynical 7 ages of man (Table i) parallel fairly closely the popular notion. The contributions of recent investigators |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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