ABSTRACT
Freud was not optimistic about analysis with older patients, partly because of what he thought of as the mass of mental material, and also because of the rigidity of the character and the defences; though one has to add that strangely it seems as if he may have left one important older person out of this viewpoint, namely, himself. Of recent years, older patients have been treated more often by psychoanalysis, and accounts have appeared in the literature during the last twenty years. I have found that as I myself age, my interest in treating older patients has also grown steadily, and there is a quality to the work which in the last few years I have found increasingly appealing, and which has guided my choice in selecting new people with whom to work. This quality has much to do with a kind of now-or-never feeling which the patient brings into the analysis. There is a single-minded, often clear, sense of need, an intensity of devotion to the work, a skill in recognizing shorthand opportunities, and a reduction in shame and embarrassment (as if to say “Oh, I 76haven’t got time for all that”) which is very attractive. The patient under discussion, however, was one of my first, and at the point when the analysis started, I could not be said even to have entered upon early old age. He taught me a lot which I have found valuable since then, as the number of older patients in my practice has risen.
