| |
Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
 | |
|
| Mature imaginations: ageing and the psychodynamic tradition | | Author(s) | Simon Biggs |
| Journal title | Ageing and Society, vol 18, part 4, July 1998 |
| Pages | pp 421-439 |
| Keywords | Life span ; Mental health [elderly] ; Therapy ; Psychiatric treatment. |
| Annotation | This paper critically analyses 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. (AKM). |
| Accession Number | CPA-981110406 A |
| Classmark | BG6: D: LO: LP |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
|
| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
| |
|