ABSTRACT
Regret in old age can fill the mind with resentment, feelings of desolation, and endless rumination if one cannot come to grips with the inability to amend. Fortunately, for some, they can die contented, because self-recrimination over things they either did or did not manage to do is tempered by the satisfaction gained from what they included in life. Regret is a complex concept with both cognitive and emotional components and although, for the most part, a conscious experience, it has an underlying dynamic that overlaps with other psychoanalytic concepts such as remorse, guilt, atonement, reparation, mourning, and forgiveness. The experience of regret/remorse can be traced back to the Kleinian notion of reparation. In adulthood, regret is a more frequently shared and familiar experience than remorse. It appears that one’s relation to oneself, that is the person’s existential concerns especially in old age, can control and influence all the other experiences, including remorse.
