ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis or psychotherapy in old age can be a fascinating experience for both the therapist and the patient, an experience allowing the patient to reconstruct his internal vicissitudes so that during the last years of his existence he can give an overall significance to the whole of his life. Love in old age presents itself in many ways. Sometimes it is an acute and persistent longing for what one has lost, for what could not be developed due to defences and anxieties and resistances towards instinctual aspects that at the time seemed to be intolerable. Giovanna has never married nor had a love relationship important enough to make her want to live together with her lover. Analysis with a younger person had been useful for her. It was not a relationship of equals, and she had felt sufficiently protected narcissistically by her experiences and skills, superior thanks to her age.
