Behavior: The Old in the Country of the Young

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But younger people are usually treated if their psychological problems are severe. Says New York Psychologist Muriel Oberleder: "If we encounter unusual nervousness, irritability, depression, unaccountable anger, personality change, apathy or withdrawal in a young person, we make sure that he is seen by a physician. But when those symptoms appear in elderly people, they are considered par for the course of old age. We rarely consider the possibility that elderly people who have had a breakdown can recover." Dr. Berezin successfully treated a 70-year-old woman who had a severe breakdown, her first. She had been picked up for drinking, setting fire to her home and other bizarre behavior, including chalking off a section of the sidewalk and claiming it as her own. In therapy, she revealed that she had yearned all her life for marriage and children. Eventually, she mastered her grief and regrets, settled down and began to enjoy the people around her.

Psychotherapy has never been easily available to the aged. Since it demands so much time and effort, it is considered better to expend it on those who have a long life ahead. There is also the still-powerful influence of Freud. If one's behavior is believed to be programmed in the first years of life, one cannot hope to change that program substantially during old age. (Freud, who contributed to ageism, was also its victim. At 81, discussing "the many free hours with which my dwindling analytical practice has presented me," he added: "It is understandable that patients don't surge toward an analyst of such an unreliable age.")

. . . I reach my center, my algebra and my key, my mirror.

Soon I shall know who I am.

Jorge Luis Borges

Most psychologists have simply ignored the process of aging. Says Harvard's Erik Erikson: "It is astonishing to behold how (until quite recently and with a few notable exceptions) Western psychology has avoided looking at the whole of life. As our world image is a one-way street to never-ending progress, interrupted only by small and big catastrophes, our lives are to be one-way streets to success and sudden oblivion." But lately Erikson and oth,er psychiatrists have become interested in all stages of man's development, and the "aging" that goes on at every stage.

One practitioner of "lifecycle psychiatry," Washington's 43-year-old Dr. Butler, believes that the possibilities for psychic change may be greater in old age than at any other period of life. "Little attention has been paid to the wish to change identity, to preserve and exercise the sense of possibility and incompleteness against a sense of closure and completeness." When a person's identity is maintained throughout old age, "I find it an ominous sign rather than the other way around. If the term needs to be used at all, I suggest that a continuing, life-long identity crisis is a sign of good health."