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Psychoanalysts, more than any other group of behavioral scientists, should offer us the most insights about the aging process as it relates to professional life. No matter what their analytic persuasion may be, they are all trained to be exquisitely introspective, interpretative, and self-monitoring; their work demands an intimate knowledge of each stage of human development; and they continue their profession late into life, when their own self-assessment determines retirement. This self-assessment must necessarily follow long years of close self-observation.
In addition, the career of an analyst, after analytic training, proceeds in a more or less linear fashion. Generally, the training institute becomes a home base. Therefore, the changes analysts experience in their professional lives should be more clearly related to age than to new jobs, colleagues, relocation, or other external shifts.
Finally, because analytic work precludes the usual validation by others, psychoanalysts are obliged to scrutinize more carefully their day-to-day professional endeavors. Such constant self-monitoring should lead to recognition of changes in technique, changes in attitudes toward patients, and changes in affect related to the recognition of the aging process by both the analysand and the analyst.
To study these developments, I went to the logical source of such information, that is, older psychoanalysts themselves. My sample (n = 113) was a subsample of a larger study on aging and psychology (Table 1). I planned to interview as many as possible in person, but I was unable to carry out this ambitious plan—both labor and capital worked against me. Instead, after completing 22 personal interviews, I mailed a questionnaire to the entire rosters of five