The second half of life
The depth-psychology claim that a life divides at its midpoint, and that the two halves run on different rules — the first building a self that works, the second dismantling it. The corpus holds two accounts, and one is the other’s source.
Jung’s parabola
The image is a projectile’s arc, and the point is that the psyche refuses to follow it jung-on-death:
“The curve of life is like the parabola of a projectile which, disturbed from its initial state of rest, rises and then returns to a state of repose. The psychological curve of life, however, refuses to conform to this law of nature… From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life. For in the secret hour of life’s midday the parabola is reversed, death is born. The second half of life does not signify ascent, unfolding, increase, exuberance, but death, since the end is its goal. The negation of life’s fulfillment is synonymous with the refusal to accept its ending. Both mean not wanting to live, and not wanting to live is identical with not wanting to die. Waxing and waning make one curve.”
The argument runs on the same energetic premise as the rest of Jung’s writing on death: a life is a process with a direction, so the second half is not a diminished version of the first but a different phase with its own task. Refusing that task is what he calls not wanting to live. It follows that a psychology of death is a psychology of the middle-aged living, which is why this material sits in a clinical corpus at all.
Hollis’s midlife passage
james-hollis is a Jungian analyst writing in a Jungian series, and the-middle-passage is Jung’s division worked out as clinical practice: a first adulthood running on a provisional personality assembled from family conditioning, and a second that begins when that persona fails. What Jung states as a law of the psychic curve, Hollis gives a mechanism and a consulting room.
The lineage is worth stating plainly because the corpus acquired it backwards — the derivative arrived first, on 2026-07-29, and its origin on 2026-08-02. The two agree, which in this spoke is less reassuring than it sounds: agreement between a teacher and his own school is not independent corroboration, and both reach the wiki through the same essayist (maria-popova).
The disagreement next door
The Jungian second half is not the only psychotherapeutic account of mortality here, and the other one contradicts its consolation. irvin-yalom makes mortality one of four givens of existence and treats death anxiety as the thing therapy addresses (existential-psychotherapy, staring-at-the-sun) — the instruction is to look at it directly, without promise of what follows. Jung offers a promise: death as fulfilment, and, after his own near-death experience, “unspeakably glorious.”
Same fact, two therapies, opposite consolations, and no source here adjudicates. Recorded in synthesis.
What the corpus cannot say
Whether any of this describes people. Both accounts are clinical and interpretive; neither comes with the kind of evidence heuristics-and-biases or perceptual-learning rest on, and the “midlife” literature that has been tested empirically is not in this corpus at all. The idea is load-bearing in twentieth-century therapy and unmeasured here.
Related
jung-on-death · the-middle-passage · carl-jung · james-hollis · analytical-psychology · existential-psychotherapy · irvin-yalom · synthesis