This book deals with an area of psychotherapeutic work that is gradually gaining more attention from the medical and psychological professions. After far too many years when the topic of the possibility of psychoanalyzing older patients, that is, patients over 40 or 50 years, was looked upon with horror or at the least, with disfavor, the climate of opinion seems gradually to be changing.

In 1979, at the first Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association to be held in the United States, I presented a paper which dealt with the psychoanalysis of patients in the second half of life. During the discussion of this paper I emphasized that such people were a neglected, although a rapidly growing group of potential patients, and that it was not fair to exclude them from the possibility of obtaining psychoanalytic help, purely on the criterion of age. I was therefore glad to read, in the Preface to this book, that in 1980 the Committee on Psychoanalytic Practice of the American Psychoanalytic Association found that one of the population groups underserved by