Few studies of personality and culture pay heed to the development of individuals after they have come of age. Most empirical research focuses upon what happens to children and youth on their way to becoming adults. And the whole vocabulary of the field is built around a notion of “doing to” persons in a junior position, in order to “socialize” or “enculturate” them. Child training, for example, is investigated in terms of what happens to children but not in terms of its effect upon their parents. This child-centered bias means that the usual personality and culture models are of little help when one seeks to understand normal growth in relatively self-aware and self-directing adults. A curve of standard stages of psychogenesis may be useful when studying infants. Adult development, however, can be better understood as a web of interpersonal contingencies of change. Two important features of this are: a) an adult's awareness of career pathways, stages, and potentials; and b) an adult's obligation to care for others in a circle of consociates—Erikson's notion of “generativity” seen in wider compass. I sketch an interpersonal approach to adult development, and illustrate portions of it by analyzing the best-selling Japanese novel of 1972, A Man in Ecstasy.