ABSTRACT
What’s in an age? Everything, one might argue. For only age ‘gives time a measure of reality’, suggesting we might well think of ‘time as a function of age’ (Harrison, 2014). Conceivably, the phenomenology of age makes a world a world, a universe a universe. To approach the question of age as the simple passage of time, argues one historian, is to miss the point. One misses the ‘multidimensional’, ‘interpenetrating’ ‘recesses of age’ (Harrison). To those of us coming of a certain age, we may be quicker to grasp age’s metric quirks. Mere mention of the word ‘age’ sets us to crooning 1960s pop music renditions of ‘to everything there is a season’ – ‘turn, turn, turn’. We feel ourselves moving to an age, tapping out its beat, swaying to its rhythm. The last thing we want to do is roll out some arithmetic calculus of time’s passage. So I begin here as a feminist historian in psychology, a woman of a certain age, interested in various turns – epistemological, cognitive, feminist, cultural, linguistic, ontological, posthuman, neuro and anthropocene – and how they age things anew. In other words, and despite a forty-year interlude since John Shotter’s Images of Man in Psychological Research appeared in 1975, I begin on a note having deep resonances with how Shotter begins his work – an inquiry into psychology’s age and our psychological age (Shotter, 1975).
