Psychoanalysis of Maturescence (Definition, Metapsychology, and Clinical Practice)1

(Accepted for publication 26 November 2014)

This article offers an entirely new way of addressing middle age or mid-life. It uses the neologism maturescence to denote this process's metapsychological feature, and it proposes a meta-psychology of maturescence in order to allow a ‘direct understanding of maturescence’ instead of the ‘indirect understanding of maturescence’, which psychoanalytic literature generally alludes to. The paper examines somatic processes specific to male and female climacterics and is focused on to the tension between the soma and the body. It examines the drive increase that Freud posed in climacterics and the somatic climacteric imbalance that begets specific drive activity demanding psychic work, with very different pathways depending on the individual's specific working-through activity. It discusses what happens to the individual when he/she is no longer able to procreate and begins to age; why this process is equivalent for individuals who had children and for others who could not or did not. This somatic event provides a universal constant from which it is possible to understand any individual variable.