ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the psychoanalysis of elderly patients with younger colleagues; they have sometimes expressed the opinion that they would be unable to treat patients older than themselves, as they thought the patients would be unwilling to trust someone obviously younger than themselves. But patients may well experience themselves, in terms of a psychological time-scale, as quite small and even helpless and the analyst as older than he is. The middle-aged individual has to face many of the problems as he did in his adolescence, but this time in reverse, for it is a period of involution. At both phases of the life cycle he has to adjust to sexual and biological changes in himself; awareness of these changes can arouse anxiety as basic sources of security are threatened. The chapter considers transference and countertransference problems that can be encountered by psychoanalysts during the analysis of middle-aged and elderly patients.
