Nabokov: Aestheticism with a Human Face, Half-Averted

The past asserts its increasing hegemony over the present with each passing year of a persons life. It is for this reason no doubt that Kernberg (1980, p. 125) observes that identification with one's parents is strengthened as one grows older. In middle age one revalorizes internalized objects going back to the early years, idealizing the past and overcoming residual Oedipal feelings. Kernberg notes that the past is reactivated because it sym bolizes a lost stasis, a once-secure world that has vanished. By contrast, the world in which the middle-aged person finds him self often appears to be in a process of imminent dissolution with the flight of full-grown children, the death of parents, and the loss of old friends. Although Kernberg (1980) recognizes the need to consolidate ego-identity on a new foundation in middle age, he argues that such consolidation normally involves a “…new knowledge about the limitations in one's personality functioning.…” (p. 127). Kernberg contrasts such self-acceptance with narcissistic rationalization, denial, cynicism, and masochism, on the assumption that the essence of maturity is