Behavior: The Old in the Country of the Young

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    Though many believe that age accentuates personality characteristics, Dr. Butler notes that "certain personality features mellow or entirely disappear. Others prove insulating and protective, although they might formerly have been impairing, such as a schizoid disposition." Some doctors suggest that neuroses and some psychoses burn themselves out with age, and note that the rate of mental disorders declines after the age of 70.

    Carl Jung, who lived with great vigor until the age of 85, saw aging as a process of continuous inward development ("individuation"), with important psychic changes occurring right up to the time of death. "Anyone who fails to go along with life remains suspended, stiff and rigid in mid-air," Jung wrote. "That is why so many people get wooden in old age; they look back and cling to the past with a secret fear of death in their hearts. From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life, for in the secret hour of life's midday the parabola is reversed, death is born. We grant goal and purpose to the ascent of life, why not to the descent?" Erik Erikson agrees: "Any span of the cycle lived without vigorous meaning, at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end, endangers the sense of life and the meaning of death in all whose life stages are intertwined."

    Better to go down dignified

    With bonghten friendship at your side

    Than none at all. Provide, provide!

    — Robert Frost

    The problems of the aged are not their concern alone. Since reaching the age of 70 or 80 is becoming the norm rather than the exception, more and more of the middle-aged — even when they retire — have elderly parents and other relatives to care for. For the "command generation" there are two generation gaps, and the decisions to be made about their parents are often more difficult than those concerning their children. Various community agencies sometimes help, and in Manhattan a private referral service is kept busy helping distraught people find the right place for parents who can no longer live at home. One 81-year-old woman was persuaded to go to a nursing home when her daughter, with whom she had always lived, married late in life. To her own surprise, she is happier than she was before, taking great pride in reading to and helping her older roommate. A difficult decision of the middle-aged is how to allot their resources between children and parents and still provide for their own years of retirement, which may well extend for two decades.

    The next generation of the aged may be healthier, certainly better educated and perhaps more politically aware. Those over 65 are now a rather silent minority, but in number they are almost exactly equal to the nation's blacks. Since none are below voting age, the aged control a high percentage of the vote — 15%. More and more are banding together. The American Association of Retired Persons, for example, helps its nearly 2,000,000 members get automobile insurance, cheaper drugs and cut-rate travel. A more politically oriented group, the 2,500,000-member National Council of Senior Citizens, played a major role in pushing through Medicare. Now the group is lobbying to improve Medicare, which helps the sick but does not provide checkups, by including some sort of Preventicare.

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