Age and Change

Pioneering psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud harbored a negative attitude about treating the older person; he believed psychoanalysis was not suitable for people over 50 years of age. My experience has taught me that age doesn’t preclude change. Here are some highlights of my psychotherapeutic treatment of an 85 year old patient.

Ms. Y graduated from a local high school, never married and retired after many years at a routine corporate job.  Raised by Italian immigrant parents who spoke little to each other or to her, she observed their mundane, quiet life as if she were an outsider.

After her elderly, widowed father died, Ms. Y suffered years of guilt, believing she hadn’t taken good care of him in his old age. As friends moved away or died, she became increasingly isolated and hopeless. Social life focused on occasional family gatherings with nieces and nephews.

She began treatment for symptoms focused on bodily ills: vague aches and pains and the nuisance of noxious odors permeating her apartment. The neurologist ruled out abnormalities to explain her troublesome olfactory perceptions.

After I encouraged Ms. Y to expand her social network she joined a club for seniors where she attended luncheons and knit and crocheted scarves and baby hats. She felt useful again; the troubling odors disappeared and bodily preoccupations diminished. She became motivated to follow through with the daily exercise program recommended many times in the past.

During several years of weekly sessions, we sat facing each other, but one day, she asked to lie on the couch. She became less self-conscious and her thoughts flowed. She recorded dreams in a little notebook.  In one breakthrough dream, she and her brother find dirty laundry in the mailbox. Memories from six decades ago surfaced. Her mother’s brief disappearance when the patient was three years old had never been explained. Did Mother have an affair? Other secrets about an aunt and uncle, rumored by her parents’ friends, were hushed up. She realized her parents’ modus operandi in life was to maintain stability with silence.  The metaphor of dirty laundry connected to family secrets and explained the detached pattern of her parents’ lives.

As a young person Ms. Y followed in her parents’ footsteps, remaining on the sidelines of life, avoiding social interactions, questions, controversies.

The metaphor of dirty laundry and the memories that emerged helped Ms Y become less fearful, freer to ask questions and express herself.

Conclusion: At any age the mind can uncover connections to the past and allow us to live a more courageous and richer life.

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