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One might suppose that in the remote past, when it was a scarcer commodity than it is now, old age held a higher intrinsic value. Survival into one's eighties, say, despite disease, predators, tribal enemies, and hungry heirs, would have conferred a mystic dignity—decline in productivity, fighting power, and fertility notwithstanding. Contrariwise, I read recently that over half the babies born in 2010—in favored nations—can expect to live beyond one hundred years; old age will become a commonplace. To an extent it already is, and the consequences are reflected in the ever growing literature on old age, including the psychological. In the background, a note of ambivalence can be heard. While everyone wants to live a long life, to be old, or almost worse, to look old, is undesirable. When, therefore, we pick up a book dealing with longevity in any aspect, we are entitled to sniff for hints of anxiety or condescension. Words of praise for what an old man or woman has achieved may betray the writer's reluctance to recognize that he or she too has this fate in store. One might as an old person wonder whether any of the young (meaning the not-yet-old) ever contemplate what it might really feel like to be old.
So it is with uncommon pleasure that I can say of this book by Danielle Quinodoz, a member of the Swiss Psychoanalytical Society, a teacher and consultant at a gerontological hospital with wide clinical experience, and herself a grandmother, that this time my suspicions turned out to be unfounded. The title turns out to be its theme, in a more literal sense than is usual for titles. It is a book about growing old, a process of what Erikson called “epigenesis,” in which hitherto latent possibilities may emerge, or when they don't, call for treatment. In this the modern economic notion of “growth” as expansion plays no part, though this book's amusing cover illustration of (internalized?) Russian dolls might suggest it. In many ways old age is really a contraction, wit