ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes Festschrift for Veikko Tahka's, the leader of this Study Group. The impact of the ageing process on the capacity of patients suffering from different types of neuroses to cope with their illnesses, there are so few case reports of elderly patients in psychoanalytic literature. Psychoanalytic therapy is not at present applicable to all cases. Significantly, advances in psychoanalytic thinking and research have increased our understanding of developmental processes in the area of ego functions and object relations, and the affective implications of these for mental health. By analysing a number of middle-aged and elderly patients whose descriptions of their problems in early adulthood would lead one to classify them as typical narcissistic personalities. It is therefore necessary for those undertaking the psychoanalysis of such patients to have come to terms with their feelings about their own parents and to have accepted in a healthy, self-integrative way, their own stage in their life-cycle and their own ageing process.
