The “midlife crisis”, the subject of this episode of “ Wait a minute ! », our news podcast. A theme suggested by colleagues in the editorial staff of 20 minutes, surprised by the attitude of their spouse, their cousin. One of them, employee, dad, owner, only has eyes for his new purchase… His scooter. The cousin of another, wants to slam everything, and go to Dubai… Common point: they are going to be 40 years old. Forty years, like a desire for something else, to have fun too, before it’s too late! Why how ? And how to get through this mid-life crisis, a crisis that great apes also experience? We talk about it with Gwénaëlle Persiaux, clinical psychologist, psychotherapist and trainer, author of Crossing the loss of meaning, to Eyrolles editions.
“Is that enough for me? »
In this episode, Gwénaëlle Persiaux recalls that “this mid-life crisis has always existed. We wonder about the “why” of being there. Often, the first part of our game will be very concrete things. Carl Gustav Jung, a great thinker, says that we are there, at the beginning, to produce and reproduce. It’s not very romantic! But what he meant is that the first part of life, we will show, to ourselves and to society, who we are, in terms of production. We are going to study, start doing a job, try to succeed, to have a social place, a pretty nice place to live… And at the moment, comes this existential questioning: “And now, does that enough?”. (…) This leads one to wonder, for the second part of life: “To what do I want to devote more time, more energy?” »
This crisis of meaning is sometimes close to the manifestations of an adolescent crisis. “I understand it as an attempt, which often fails, to put “pep” back into her life, where she no longer has too much, underlines the psychologist. And it’s easier, at the beginning, to be in the distraction to fill that, than to be in a search for meaning… “.
Listen to the rest of this interview with Gwénaëlle Persiaux for free, in the audio player above.
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