Glasnik Antropološkog Društva Srbije (Jan 2017)
Midlife crisis in modern Serbia
Abstract
Although mid-life crisis is a normal developmental phase in the life of every person, data from the literature suggest that from the perspective of social-humanistic sciences interested in external manifestations and internal changes, this topic is generally poorly studied in our country and the world. After a long time, this paper, presents a continuation of the first systematic study of the external manifestation, which are, at the same time, the possible ways of overcoming the midlife crisis, that are developed from Marmor's theory, for people who live and work in Serbia. It is studied the representation of creative and successful confrontation with crisis, decompensation, mechanism of denial with escape and mechanism of denial with overcompensation, as ways of expressing and overcoming the midlife crisis. Also, there are examined the differences in these manifestations between those who live and work in different parts of Serbia. It was used the Midlife Crisis Scale (Pavlović, 2015) on a sample of 600 subjects. Data were analyzed by using the SPSS program. The Kruskal Wallis test was used for determining the significance of differences between multiple groups of subjects. The results show the representation of tested ways of expressing and overcoming the midlife crisis and the existence of differences in the values obtained from the subjects who live and work in different parts of Serbia. Generally, subjects from Western Serbia have the most optimal response to a midlife crisis. They have creative and successful way to face and overcome the crisis, while subjects from southern Serbia largely manifest decompensation and both of the denial mechanisms, which indicates that they are the least able to accept changes as normal and constitutive parts of life and to find new forms of satisfaction and fulfillment despite them.
