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I found this book to be exciting. It's not that there is a sparkling clear view of the subject or that any one piece presents a bold or daring thesis. It's that it is a solid, serious, enlightened, incremental step into the psychology of normality from a solid base of psychoanalysis. It includes time and social reality without losing sight of timelessness and intrapsychic reality.
The book is a series of edited papers from two conferences sponsored by The Boston Analytic and Gerontological Society. The format recommends itself to boring reading, but that's not the way it turns out. There is a unique flavor to the book. It's not overly pedantic or overly theoretical or overly clinical. It takes the best of each of these approaches. The authors summarize portions of the nonanalytic literature, theorize with analytic concepts, and discuss their own clinical material — and even have discussants discuss their approach. It's as if a group of highly skilled individuals got together and said, “Here's a serious subject, normal aging. Here's our clinical experience. Now, let's use the same analytic concepts we use for treating adults who primarily fall in the younger ages and see what happens.” That's the flavor of the book. And it tastes good.
They ask and grapple with significant questions. Are the defenses and coping skills used adaptively and successfully in one age period necessarily good for another? Is health a delicate balance involving arrangements with spouse that change in the older age period under the stress of losses and retirement? Is regression the key to understanding age and, if so, what ways do we have to redefine regression in order to use it as a concept? Are the main issues narcissism and self-regulation, or the change in object supplies, or the change in ego structure? Or, as suggested in one essay by Zinberg, is the internalization of false social values (e.g. clichés and myths about sexuality necessarily ending with age) a significant factor in turning