Mature imaginations: ageing and the psychodynamic tradition

Abstract

This paper critically assesses the portrayal of late life development in psychoanalysis and the wider psychodynamic tradition. Attention is drawn to the importance of this tradition both as a vehicle for personal change and as a cultural phenomenon in its own right. An analysis of historical trends indicates successive phases of accommodation to the practice of psychotherapy with mature adults, moving from a view that older people made unsuitable analysands to one that outlined the possibility of such work, and finally to a rejection of traditional Freudian frameworks as in themselves inappropriate. Two themes, the explanation of adult development in terms of formative childhood experience and a focus on transferential relationships across generations, are examined in greater detail. It is concluded that whilst psychoanalytic thinking can usefully draw on the age-sensitised perspective of social gerontology, much can also be learned about the experience of ageing through the use of psychodynamic concepts.