The phenomenological description of the mid-life crisis of personality
The introduction provides an overview of domestic and foreign psychological research on age-related crises of personality development. Age as a developmental personality characteristic is defined as an independent factor of crisis phenomena in its development. In the main part of the article crisis is presented as a stage of life that is inseparable from the continuous human development, its individual history. In accordance with this it is released different types of crises: the existential crisis of the meaning of life and the problems of individual existence; family crisis, associated with the family transition to a new stage of the life cycle; identity crisis linked to the experience of a difficult situation of a private person; age crisis caused by the transition to a new stage of the individual development age. It is stated that in the majority of psychological studies mid-life crisis is defined as an existential crisis connected with realization of human meaning of life. Mid-life in the foreign and Russian psychology is seen as a time period in which critical people overestimate their life and analyze it. As a result of this analysis, they develop a sense of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with living period of life, there is a rethinking and re-evaluation of life, there is a new sense of time, changing the system of relations and the image of “I”, there is awareness of the productivity of life’s journey, there are serious changes in family, social and professional areas, there is a need to change the subjective life. In the conclusion it is presented the findings of the mid-life crisis normativity and phenomena that characterize this period of development of the individual: personality awareness of the phenomenon of their own life, the phenomenon of change in mode of their own lives, the phenomenon of increasing severity to themselves, the phenomenon of satisfaction-dissatisfaction with their lives.