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The leitmotiv running through this book is the mirror — the Lacanian mirror — which is no longer seen as a bridge to the discovery and confirmation of infantile identity, but rather as evidence of a break in identity onto which old age might start. For the author, old age is associated with a state of mind and thus he maintains it is a mental condition not necessarily linked to one's actual age in terms of years, but is rather an event which takes place, or indeed which might not take place, thanks to the breaking of a certain equilibrium. From the mental point of view, the “elderly person” per se does not exist: like death, old age seems to find no representation in the unconscious, and the deformed, ugly image we find in the mirror at a certain point in our life does not coincide with the profound self-image that each individual bears within himself. (Kohut is referring to the same experience when he speaks of the continuity of the omnipotent self.) This is the phase of the miroir brisé. In this phase the individual is faced with the mirror image which challenges his own internal image (this is probably what Elliot Jaques called mid-life crisis), but this no longer results in tensions between the ego and the ideal ego, as in Lacan's mirror phase, but rather in tension between the ego and the horror-ego, the ugliness-ego (moi hideur). This tension is designed to “destroy that unbearable image” and “will be regulated by the introjected symbolic ego ideal” (page 82). It appears therefore that we are talking about an identity crisis, a phase of depression, the loss of an ideal image, a mid-life crisis … If the ideal ego is not introjected sufficiently, the moi hideur will get the upper hand, which will lead to self-destruction, to the urge towards physical or mental death (dementia). But also this narcissistic rupture is not enough to provoke the mental process that we call old age. In itself ageing is merely a physiological process which comes into play as soon as we