ABSTRACT
Hanna Segal analysed a patient who was a little over 73 years of age when the analysis began. The short paper she wrote about it had important repercussions, because at that time most psychoanalysts were reluctant to take on patients who were already over 50 years old. Freud, of course, had said that 50 years of age was something of a watershed as far as psychoanalysis was concerned: “on the one hand, near or above the age of fifty the elasticity of the mental processes, on which the treatment depends, is as a rule lacking – old people are no longer educable – and, on the other hand, the mass of material to be dealt with would prolong the duration of the treatment indefinitely” (Freud 1905a: 264). Many psychoanalysts, of course, have not followed Freud to the letter as regards this issue; people in their fifties and sixties have had classical psychoanalytic treatment. Not much was said about this, all the same – in fact it was hardly ever mentioned, and psychoanalytic literature as a whole tended to echo that silence.
