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The following story is attributed to Freud. One of his American patients coming to Vienna for analysis some months every year had made an appointment for the next year. In an afterthought, Freud added: if I’m then still alive. The American was quite out-spoken and said: You do think a lot of death, Professor Freud. And Freud, in another afterthought: Yes I do, every day actually. I can warmly recommend that habit.
This book is about the taboo of ageing and retirement. Behind the taboo, we find fear of death. And fear of death seems to be prevalent also among psychoanalysts. Even after spending a professional life containing our patients’ psychic pains and anxieties, most of us have kept enough fear of “the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns” to feed the taboo of our own death. It is not easy, to really comprehend and accept the fact of death; growing older, we have perhaps, like Freud, to work on it every day.
Not very much is written about ageing, illness, retirement and death in the psychoanalytic library. For some decades, however, the themes have gradually gained a place as topics for papers and conferences. A number of colleagues have contributed to this development – a selection of them also contributes to this book, whose editor Gabriele Junkers has been a central force in the promotion of these issues.
The book has three parts: (1) growing older as psychoanalysts; (2) illness and ending; (3) institutional parts of ending. The first part contains two chapters by Junkers, on preparing for a life without the couch, and on the internal work necessary to accept the transience no one can escape and to avoid denial of the realities of ageing. The temptation of postponement of preparatory measures is captured in the title of the second of her chapters: Later, perhaps … Danielle Quinodoz, Paul Denis and Johan Fredrik Thaulow discuss different aspects of facing the challenges of ageing and of finding new rôles in one’s analytic society. Martin Te