ABSTRACT
With some important exceptions, little psychoanalytic work has been done towards a greater understanding of the predicament of the very elderly—work of a kind which might harvest the insights of those most skilled in understanding the mind's capacity to grow and develop, and also its propensity to become stuck, deformed or fragmented. The psychoanalytic picture of mid- and late-life stresses the ways in which a person's ability to face loss of all kinds, ultimately death, is rooted in very early capacities to bear psychic reality. This chapter addresses that time in life when it is too late, in any obvious sense, and yet when the quality of mental and emotional life may still, if very temporarily, be rendered a lot more bearable, meaningful and even enjoyable than is often recognized. It presents an example focusing on how swiftly Mrs Brown became beset by a persecuted certainty of betrayal and abandonment by her husband, despite his many years of faithful devotion.
