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Even when the last in a series of six, a volume should be able to stand on its own merits. Although I was enriched by some of the thoughtful contributions in this volume of The Course of Life, an uncharacteristic dis-ease enfolded me as I read along. The title had promised a focus on late adulthood as part of the course of life, and indeed I found the first few chapters—on late midlife development by Vaillant and Koury, the transformational tasks of that period by Roger Gould, and a reexamination of the crisis of spousal loss by Morton Lieberman—to be on track. The majority of the thirteen contributions that follow, however, are neither on center nor in any connection to one another. The lack of a common thread is by no means uncommon in collated books with multiple authors, but the editors usually make an effort to tie things together in order to create some line of epigenetic continuity.
More at the heart of my discomfort was the realization that most of the papers are woefully out of date, especially considering the speed of today's changing world. This second flaw led me to a quick survey of the dates of reference citations. My impression of anachronism was more than confirmed. All had been written decades ago, which explains why it seemed that the biological research revolution of the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s had not occurred.
Remarkably, I could find but two references (on p. 225) to the previous five volumes in this series. This failing is found even in an otherwise excellent contribution, “Aging or Aged,” by senior editor George Pollock. Other papers here, while full of references documenting the classical psychoanalytic constructs of epigenetic (read child) development, almost completely neglect the vast body of literature generated by an admittedly small group of clinicians deeply committed to working with patients in the middle to later years. As a result of all this, the