Growing Old Together in Mind and Body*

People are living longer, our populations are aging, and many of us are now likely to reach an age that would have been considered very old a generation ago. Half of all of those born after 2007 can expect to live to over 100, and as one newspaper headline put it, “Those who are 60 now have the life of a 40-year-old from a century ago.” There is no doubt that this extra time is a great opportunity — who has not looked at pictures of our parents or grandparents and said, “My goodness, they look ancient,” when they were still at an age that would not now be considered old. However, as I shall discuss, this “bonus time” faces us more than ever with the truth of Freud's dictum that the “ego is first and foremost a body ego” (Freud, 1923, p. 27) and the economic and psychological consequences of this now confront us as a society and at the level of the individual, the couple, and the family on a scale never seen before. In Britain, for example, between 2010 and 2030, the number of people over 65 will increase by more than 50 percent and the number of older people with disability or chronic illness by a similar proportion and, as a result, our National Health Service will face a huge shortfall in its annual budget (Ince, 2014).

The wish to extend life and defeat death may be, for the most part, a universal aspect of the human condition, faced as we are with the prospect of mortality. Medical science has been successful at pushing the limits of our lifespan, but the rate of human aging has not changed in thousands of years. In Greek mythology, the god Eos asked Zeus for the gift of immortality for her lover Tithonus, but, so the myth goes, she forgot to ask for eternal youth as well. Tithonus was immortal — but pretty soon he was no longer youthful and his years of immortality stretched out in endless aging. Without eternal youth, our increased longevity presents us with particular psychological challenges, such as how to tolerate the losses of our physical and mental funct