The Transference of the Therapist of the Elderly

Psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy requires a great deal from its patients and its practitioners. Freud's papers on technique (1912a, b), and especially his paper on “Dora” (1905), have documented the requirement that patients must be capable of entering into an investigation of their distress and further, they must be capable of forming a transference that they will ultimately be able to study, resolve, and finally discard. To Freud the curative factors all centered on work done uncovering the pathogenic repressions that will be revealed in what he called the “central stage” or the transference neurosis. The above remarks imply that the patient be capable of forming a bond of trust, of being self-observing (i.e., capable of introspection and empathy), and a host of other ancillary variables such as possessing adequate intelligence and a personality with sufficient conflict-free spheres. Although Freud stated that the elderly were not capable of being treated with psychoanalytic approaches, some elderly patients who meet the above criteria for psychotherapy can be treated with psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic therapy. As Freud (1924) stated, “Near and above the fifties, the elasticity of the mental processes on which the treatment depends is, as a rule, lacking—old people are no longer educable, and on the other hand, the mass of material to be dealt with would prolong the duration of