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The question of whether personality is stable or changes across the life span is central to psychoanalysis. Our belief as analysts is that personality can change; otherwise we wouldn't be practicing psychoanalysis. The bias in the analytic community, however, is that personality (or character) becomes increasingly fixed as times goes on and that analysis will benefit an older adult less than it will a younger person. Presumably this is because the younger person has more time left to live, but behind that idea is the belief that older adults are less likely to change. In this regard, it is striking that Specht, Schmukle, and Egloff have concluded that personality may in fact be more flexible in later life than at earlier stages. Although this may come as a surprise to many, we hope it will also raise an important question for psychoanalysis as a field: Who benefits most from the analytic process?
To determine whether personality changes with age and to what extent these changes are influenced by important life events, Specht et al. analyzed information from almost fifteen thousand demographically diverse participants of the German SOEP (Socio-Economic Panel), ages sixteen to eighty-two. Study participants were tracked for four years. Each year, participants were questioned about important life events such as the start of a first job, marriage, the birth of child, moving in with a partner, the death of a family member, and unemployment. In the first and last year of the study, participants also completed a shortened version of the Big Five Inventory (BFI-S), a fifteen-item measure that addresses five dimensions of personality, including openness to experience (e.g., curiosity, imagination, willingness to entertain novel ideas), conscientiousness (e.g., organization, reliability, a disposition to hard work), extraversion (e.g., outgoingness, openness, sociability), agreeableness (e.g., softheartedness, good-naturedness, trustfulness), and emotional stability (e.g., psy