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This is above all a courageous book. For most people - and that includes most therapists - ageing is a phenomenon or process which, if they think about it at all, they look at from the outside. Ageing is what happens to other people. It is not the count of years that matters: most of us can deal easily enough, both in our professional and our nonprofessional relations, with people noticeably older (or indeed younger) than we are. But part of our ease in doing so comes from the comforting assumption that we ourselves are free of these noticeable markings. Maybe nobody would call us young, but then nobody would call us old either. In fact, we're just about right: we're well past the anxieties of the young, and haven't yet run into the fears of the old. In a word, we're invulnerable. So we can help virtually anyone.
Right from the start, quietly but insistently, Ann Orbach sets aside this fatally flawed assumption. Throughout she is acutely aware that her own age and ageing are factors in the therapeutic exchange. And she does set the setting aside, not just by focusing sympathetically on the special needs of the old or the ageing (that, after all,