Prior to the early sixties, the concept of developmental stages was believed to apply only to children and adolescents. The advent of Erikson's work on adult development heralded the beginning of a new way of looking at adults. This awareness spawned the field of adult development, which has grown and evolved to help all adults understand the nature of their own developmental processes. Recent work on adult development by Frederic Hudson and Pamela McLean at The Hudson Institute of Santa Barbara has integrated and synthesized the theories of adult development to create meaningful and helpful models and maps to guide and facilitate mid-life transitions.
Adult life is a process of managing change and continuities over time.
We need to know how to manage both experiences. This process is a pendulum movement between two opposite human activities, which can be described as stability and change, life structure and transition, attachment and loss, coherence and incoherence, holding on and letting go, developmental focus and developmental crisis. This process is not merely individual and personal. In this seminar, learners will be exposed to the Hudson and McLean models and maps of adult transitions and will be invited to apply these models to their own personal life stories. Our process will be both theoretical and experiential, with special emphasis placed on applications of these models and maps to our own adult transitions.