ABSTRACT
In 2001, Marcia Spira and Barbara Berger, in a needed correction of the historic masculine tilt of psychoanalytic theories, and a protest against the cultural consignment of postmenopausal women to the developmental dustbin, postulated a “penultimate” phase in women between fifty-five and seventy in which generativity predominates. Many of us know S. B. Messer and M. Winokur’s helpful distinction in comic-versus-tragic terms between the mindset of psychologists from the American behavioral tradition, on the one hand, and that of European-influenced psychoanalytic thinkers, on the other. Psychoanalysis establishes a powerful attachment. Limitation is an old emphasis for psychoanalysts, going back at least to Freud’s framing of maturation in terms of giving up the pleasure principle for the reality principle, the ultimate prototype of which is the reality of death. Carlo Strenger’s writing on midlife similarly relates creativity to the acceptance of death and limitations.
