ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis and its major therapeutic derivative, dynamic psychotherapy, are becoming as fluid and as changing in their techniques as they have ever been. Theoretical emphasis has centred successively on catharsis, reconstruction, the lifting of infantile amnesia, analysis of defences and character analysis. Given the theoretical approach towards understanding the problems of life, psychotherapy with the elderly becomes a real possibility. P. H. M. King's views have been influential and have radically changed the attitude of psychodynamic therapists to older patients in the country. The first influential voice in Britain was that of King who published her 'Notes on the Psychoanalysis of Older Patients' in 1974. The evolution of the focus of psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic thought has been part of the emergence of lifespan developmental psychology associated principally in psychoanalytic theorising with the work of E. Erikson, supplementing and extending S. Freud's original developmental scheme which ended essentially with early adulthood.
