ABSTRACT
In the first half-century of psychoanalysis, it was not considered appropriate to analyse a patient past the middle years. Freud (1905a), paradoxically, wrote at the age of 48: "The age of patients has this much importance in determining their fitness for psychoanalytic treatment ... near or above the age of fifty the elasticity of the mental processes ... is as a rule lacking—old people are no longer educable" (p. 264). The pathways to change were considered closed 109and the personality not only consolidated but much less flexible, if not rigidified; heightened narcissism and narcissistic investment in one's own lifestyle and adaptation, a lack of motivation for change, and diminished opportunity for effecting appropriate change in the external world were all considered to be major factors that would impede psychoanalysis for this age group. In addition, the classical period of psychoanalysis emphasized the formative years of childhood, the infantile neurosis, and the more-or-less permanent imprint on the personality left by early experience, especially traumatic childhood experience. The personality was formed through adolescence, and little attention was paid to changes in later life. In those formative years of psychoanalysis, the adult neurosis was considered to be a homologue of an infantile neurosis. The infantile conflicts would ostensibly be recapitulated in the transference neurosis and resolved through analysis. Though analysts themselves often continued to work into very advanced years, the problems of the geriatric analyst or elderly, impaired patient were hardly considered. Freud had made observations about the effects of ageing and the differences of ageing between men and women, but he had not systematically discussed the effect of the later phases of life on the personality. Unconscious conflict and trauma were timeless in their persistence and influence, and there was little regard for personality alteration in later life and changes in the way life was lived and experienced.
