RESEARCH & SOCIETY

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

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of Longing?
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Toward a Life

Just what is this sensation we call longing? And why do we experience longing at all? These
were the kinds of questions that interested PAUL BALTES and his project team ALEXANDRA
M. FREUND, SUSANNE SCHEIBE
MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE

FOR

and DANA KOTTER-GRHN in his work at Berlins

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT.

The former Director, who died in 2006,

was still able to see the first results of his project on life longings get accepted for publication.

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HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

the typical what if thinking. Only when they reach late childhood and adolescence do they develop the necessary armamentarium to feel life longings: 15- to 16-year-olds can spell
out specific life longings. The ability to feel life longings then
unfolds fully in early to mid-adulthood.

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the authors describe a persons passage through life from

childhood to old age. What they are telling us with these
tales is that man rarely, if ever, attains the level of perfect, faultless action and certainly not without any mistakes, confusion or transgressions along the way.
In these works, the literati extol the ways in which life
longings promote lifelong development, and liberate
people or paralyze them. In fact, Susanne Scheibe says,
longing is bittersweet by nature an emotionally ambivalent experience. But even though this complex feeling evidently carries a risk of melancholy, people appear
to actively search out the state of longing from time to
time, as Alexandra Freund points out: they listen to music that has a connection to their longing, or read books
or poems of a certain kind. Writers and artists themselves
frequently allude to the creative potential of longings
that have moved them to achieve great things.

that many goals are completely unattainable, or are attainable only in part. The scientists took the findings from
lifespan psychology and the literary sources as their basis
in creating a theoretical concept of life longings as comprising six partially overlapping core characteristics:
Utopia: Life longings juxtapose the reality of ones
life, which is perceived as imperfect, against an imagined state in some cases a state that one has experienced in the past. This works best when the connection
with reality is minimal. (Example: I always wanted a
house by the sea.)
Feeling of incompleteness: The personal utopias almost inevitably involve feelings of the imperfection of
ones life. (The house by the sea is something thats
missing in my life.)
Tri-time focus: Certain memories may blend with
present wishes and insecurities, as well as with future

POSITIVE

LIFE STATES
ARE EPHEMERAL

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ccording to the definition of Baltes and his colInstitute of Technology (Atlanta, USA) and have obleagues, life longings are thoughts and feelings
tained the following results:
Many people do actually use their life longings to
about something that is missing in life something that,
cope with blocked goals or to give their life a new dion the imaginary level, makes life complete or perfect.
rection.
In this sense, life longings are personal utopias of the
Life longings are rarely centered on something tanperfect life, and are associated with ambivalent, bittergible, like money; rather, they tend to focus on larger,
sweet feelings. Life longings serve as a means of assessmore fundamental human issues.
ing ones own development; they are related to review Americans report similar life longings to those of
ing ones life. At the same time, longings provide people
Germans, even though they are not familiar with the
with a direction for their lives. Longings tell us where
concept in its full scope.
we believe we will find happiness and satisfaction.
Life longings can be described as
The psychologists at Berlins Max
having six components. These comPlanck Institute for Human Developponents are embedded in lifespan psyment asked their study participants
chology and German cultural history,
to tell them their greatest longing.
such as painting and literature.
One example is a 60-year-old man
Romantic literati of the early 19th
who immediately thought of his elcentury convey in their works the
dest son. Tragically, the son had died
concept of longing for abstract things.
some time ago, and the bereaved faIn Novalis Heinrich von Ofterdingen,
ther said he felt a powerful longing
for instance, a medieval poet longs
to be with him so that our family
for the mysterious blue flower the
can be happy again. He recalled the
Romantics symbol of the perfect and
trips they used to take together,
the unattainable. The young man lay
which, he said, denoted the good
restlessly on his bed and thought of
times. For many years, the man had
felt a deep-seated sorrow about his Theyre in every field, yet still unattainable: the stranger and his tales. It is not the
The blue flower, the subject of the Romantreasures, he said to himself, that have
loss, and now this sense of longing
tics life longing, may be the cornflower.
awakened in me so ineffable a longwas always with him.
ing; avarice is far from my thoughts; it is the blue flower
In an unofficial contest staged by the German magathat I long to see. Literary critics and cultural anthrozine SPIEGEL ONLINE to find the best German word, the
word Sehnsucht made the winners podium, coming in
pologists emphasize the fundamental role of life longings
third. Sehnsucht is difficult to translate into English, but
in the restless search for societal and individual developthe word expresses well the concept of life longings.
ment and perfection, particularly in the tradition of the
Theres no doubt about it: life longings definitely occuGerman Bildungsroman (novel of formation), Erziehpy us. The concept is a quintessentially German one
ungsroman (novel about upbringing) and Entwicklungsfound in literature, the arts and the humanities. In psyroman (novel about character development) of the 18th
chology, however, the concept of life longings has
and 19th centuries, as in the works in these genres by
received scarcely any attention. This complex and comGoethe and Gottfried Keller. In these biographical novels,
plicated feeling is hard to put into figures and to study.
Paul Baltes didnt let such skepticism bother him. He
THE ARMAMENTARIUM OF LONGING
had long suspected that there must be a reason behind
Longing is a complex feeling, says psychologist Alexandra
life longings and he turned it into his final scientific
Freund from the University of Zurich. In order for people to
project. His former team members, Susanne Scheibe
feel life longings, they need certain social-cognitive abilities.
(now at Stanford University), Alexandra M. Freund (now
Scandinavian studies have demonstrated that life longings are
lost on toddlers. Such young children have not yet developed
at the University of Zurich) and Dana Kotter-Grhn (now
the cognitive prerequisites to feel longing. Life longing is
at North Carolina State University), are continuing
linked to emotional intelligence and the self for instance,
Baltes study of life longings in their own projects, tobeing able to contemplate their own life, a necessary quantum
gether with Fredda Blanchard-Fields from the Georgia
of experience, and the capacity for counterfactual thinking

In light of all these aspects, Paul

Baltes considered it imperative to integrate the literary concept of life
longings into lifespan psychology.
This discipline examines peoples
psychological development over the
course of their lifetime how they
cope with gains, losses and upheavals. Over the past few decades, the
Max Planck scientists from Berlin
have investigated many different aspects of human development, from
birth to death, with thousands of
study participants. With the concept
of wisdom, for instance, they propagated compensatory mechanisms
that aging people employ in response
to certain dwindling mental and
physical capabilities.
But it is much earlier certainly by
the time they reach young adulthood
that most people realize that they
cant have everything, that many
positive life states cannot be attained
or repeated, be it due to time constraints, lack of resources, or the fact
that ones own maxims are irreconcilable with the demands of others, and
In the movie Desire, Marlene Dietrich as Madeleine de Beaupr
first fixes her longing gaze on a pearl necklace, then discovers
her yearning for Gary Cooper, alias Tom Bradley.

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HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

LIFE

LONGINGS MAKE YOU

OPEN AND LIKEABLE

Applying a method known as self-report, the new questionnaire asks about concrete life longings, defined as
desires for people, things, events or experiences from
your past, present or future that are intense, lasting and
currently difficult or impossible to fulfill. In the first
study, 299 test persons between 19 and 81 years of age
evaluated these personal life longings on the basis of
predefined statements that enabled conclusions to be
drawn on the characteristics of life longings.
In this and six subsequent studies, we were able to detect all six theoretical characteristics of life longings,
says Susanne Scheibe. In the view of the study participants, life longing is associated with being sensitive, creative, sad, helpless and reflective. On the one hand, this

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description emphasizes the ambivalence. On the other,

Alexandra Freund interprets it as a rather contemplative
mode of being. When people are asked to evaluate others who often dwell on their life longings, they most often use such attributes as open and likeable, while
also describing these people as introverted and not
very accepting of themselves in the same breath.
Susanne Scheibe and Dana Kotter-Grhn then turned
to the substance of life longings reported by more than
1,300 women and men between the ages of 18 and 81.
Life longings are intertwined with the really important
development tasks and basic motives in life, says Kotter-Grhn.

At the top of the list are partnership, family and ones

own personality traits. Other popular categories for life
longings are work, friendship, health, leisure time and
quality of life. At the bottom of the popularity scale are
financial matters, social values and religion; one should
note that the majority of study participants came from
the Berlin-Brandenburg region, which tends to be fairly

BITTERSWEET FEELING

Life longings as a bittersweet feeling this is a concept found

in German and European literature. Americans develop life
longings, too, says Susanne Scheibe from the University of
Stanford in California, but for them, life longings are less
utopian in nature. In other words, with their anything goes
mentality, Americans see their life longings as attainable. This
is one of the findings of initial studies by the former Max
Planck scientist and her colleagues. Furthermore, the phrase
life longing is a fairly blurred concept for Americans proof
that there really is no fitting translation for the word Sehnsucht in English. However, Americans can cite specific life
longings just like Germans can. They are similar in substance,
too, although Americans often appear to have religious life
longings, unlike the test subjects in Germany.

atheistic. Astonishingly enough, men do not long for a

better job situation any more than women do. The higher a persons education level, the more they demand perfection in their own personality. The lower the education
level, the greater the longing for a stable family.

THE

MYTH OF THE
IDEAL PARTNERSHIP

The fact that social relationships come up so often in

life longings makes sense. The need to belong to someone can be satisfied by one of two strategies: frequent,
close contact with many different people, or an intense
source of empathy such as that found in a partnership

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expectations. (The sea was a part of my childhood, I

miss it now, and it would enrich my future life.)
Emotional ambivalence: Life longings blend positive feelings in the form of desirable objects and states
with negative feelings that arise because what one longs
for is not realizable or does not appear to be realizable.
Both give rise to the typical bittersweet feeling. (I like
imagining the rushing of the sea; the fact that I cannot
have it makes me sad.)
Reflexive and evaluative processes: Life longings
elicit the evaluation of ones stage in life relative to other phases in life or to the lives of others. (I wonder how
I actually want to live. Yes, preferably by the sea.)
Symbolic meaning: Life longings often
comprise representations that are rich in
symbolic meaning. (To me, the sea means
freedom, endlessness, and being close to
nature.)
The scientists are now putting their lifelonging concept through a phase of rigorous empirical testing. At the start, Susanne
Scheibe and her former colleagues in Berlin, Paul Baltes and Alexandra Freund, had
to first develop a questionnaire to enable
them to study aspects of life longings at
all. It was a brand new field of research,
says the psychologist. On top of that, people were not exactly eager to speak about
their secret longings right away. We needed to get people in the right mood first, as
Scheibe recalls.

Even Caspar David Friedrichs Monk by the Sea looked

longingly to the horizon. The hope that happiness
lies beyond it is something that many still feel today.

or family. Although family is so important to most

people, the downside of actually having a family confronts them on a daily basis throughout their lives
conflicts that depress them and that they want to
change but are not in full control of. Such conditions
are perfect for developing life longings, says Dana
Kotter-Grhn, in this case the longing for the ideal
family. Its similar with unsatisfactory working conditions, from which it is hard to escape.
The actual content of a life longing depends on the
age of the person concerned, says Susanne Scheibe.
Take partnership, for example: only from middle age onward do many people start to report a fulfilling relationship as one of their life longings. One possible explana-

tion for this is that younger people still see the ideal
partnership as a goal, and only later realize that it is difficult to achieve, leaving only the myth of true love between a man and a woman. Similarly, older people often
long for a specific partner who has died or with whom
they used to live in a partnership that has since failed.
Moreover, family becomes more of a focus in the life
longings of senior citizens, which seems understandable the upheaval of retirement almost inevitably
makes people ponder over a new purpose in life. To a
similar extent, older people long for health, while the
young and middle-aged see education and work as
their key life longings.

The first empirical results uphold an elementary hypothesis expressed by Paul Baltes: Life longings serve
as a means of reviewing ones life and assessing ones
own development, emphasizes Susanne Scheibe. At the
level of the imagination, they convey a sense of a different and better state, thereby giving life a new direction, sometimes with a very long-term orientation. A
life longing is a kind of meta-goal, explains Alexandra
Freund. It may indeed lead people to take action, thus
turning the longing into a goal. But it doesnt necessarily have to. Whether life longings mature into goals depends on numerous parameters: how insecure people
feel about realizing them, how hopeful they are, how
positively they view life, and whether they see their life
longings as controllable.
Apropos goals: The studies conducted to date show
that life longings can be measured as a separate psycho-

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logical concept, distinct from categories such as goals or

regrets. None of these concepts entirely corresponds to
life longings, explains Susanne Scheibe. When you regret something, you experience only negative feelings
guilt, shame, sorrow, bitterness. People traditionally regret (what they see as) wrong decisions. Regrets therefore
focus on negative outcomes in ones life, whereas life
longings aim at the attainment of an optimal state.
Furthermore, regret is associated with feelings of personal failure, without any of the positive energy of a life
longing. In an emotional sense, goals are exclusively positive, without any bitterness; they are purely future-oriented. People set their goals and proceed at least in most
cases to take action. Goals are more specific, as Alexandra Freund puts it, and are perceived as something attainable and controllable. All of this fits with the function
psychologists ascribe to goals: they guide our daily conduct. Life longings, on the other hand, are vague and abstract. No one would say I long for a doctorate, says
Dana Kotter-Grhn.

THE DESIRE TO HAVE CHILDREN:

FROM GOAL TO LIFE LONGING
One of the studies headed by Dana Kotter-Grhn shed
light on the longing to have children. For many women
of childbearing age, having children is a central goal in
life. The questions raised in the study were: Can a goal
become a life longing if the goal recedes into the distance or is no longer attainable? And does having this
life longing bring any benefits? To this end, 168 childless women between the ages of 35 and 55 used a standardized self-report method to provide information on,
for example, how important the desire to have children
is or was to them, how long they had had this desire,
how much they had invested in it mentally, and how realistic they considered their chances of having a child to
be. Finally, on the basis of certain criteria, the women

Life longings exert a pull: Many book

titles play on the bittersweet feeling.

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were able to assess whether their desire to have children

was a goal or a life longing.
Many of the women cannot shake the desire, says
Dana Kotter-Grhn, summarizing an initial finding of
the study. Even if their chances of its being realized are
approaching zero. The more a woman had invested in
it, the slimmer were her chances of detaching emotionally from the desire. As long as a woman saw her desire
to have children as a goal, its fulfillment appeared to be
a realistic prospect to her. But if a woman longed for a
child, the attainability aspect played but a minor role.
Many of these women have had this desire for a long
time, explains the psychologist, and the goal has become a life longing. The stronger the life longing, the
less likely it is that the desire to have children will become
a reality. However, the study also found that, during the
gradual transition phase, the goal and the life longing can
both exist in parallel in a womans mind for some time
in these cases, the hope remains alive, even though its attainability is a good way off, in Kotter-Grhns words.
One thing stands out when you look at the connection
between the longing for a child and a womans wellbeing: Women who are desperate for a child feel bad.
But as soon as the women say a mental stop to the
melancholy and thus gain cognitive control over the
longing, they savor the sweet aspect of the longing to
the full and feel better than the others, explains Dana
Kotter-Grhn. In these cases, the stronger the longing,
the better! For these women about a third of all study
participants being unable to shake the desire to have
children was not such a problem.
This also confirms Paul Baltes second hypothesis: Life
longings can be a way of coping with loss and dealing
with blocked life goals. Just when that happens and how
these are questions for the next life longing studies as
is whether people can learn strategies that enable them to
use life longings for their own benefit.
KLAUS WILHELM