Authors: Lynne Segal
Perhaps we cannot anticipate what will reattach us to the world. Any account of coming to terms with age will be a very personal one, with endless stories that could be told and which, maybe today, are just a little more likely to be heard. Attempting to review my own experience so far seems like tempting fate, if not hubristic. It is bound to be partial and somewhat fragile or fleeting. In what still feels like early old age I know I am lucky in so many ways, free from financial hardship and able to keep doing things I enjoy. Occasionally I still receive requests that, surprisingly, seem to point me along slightly different tracks, leading off from ones I have followed in the past. Thus, I know that at least for now I am fortunate enough to remain one of the older generation with what I like to hope is the extraordinary privilege of still having some time in which to think, write and act, in ways that can take me once more out into the world, to listen and to learn about what is happening in places I have long cared about. This also enables me to keep dreaming of opening doors to encourage more communication across the generations, which is more than enough sustenance, for now.
Notes
Chapter 1. How Old Am I?
1
See ‘The Ageing Population’, Briefing Paper, available at
www.parliament.uk
.
2
National Institute on Aging (NIA),
Older Amercians: 2012
, available at
www.agingstats.gov
.
3
Conal Urquhart, ‘Archbishop of Canterbury criticises contempt and abuse of elderly people’,
Observer
, 15 December 2012.
4
Martin Knapp and Martin Prince,
Dementia UK
, London, Alzheimer’s Society, 2007. Interestingly, some of those afflicted have even begun speaking for themselves, including the American author Thomas DeBaggio, in
Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Life with Alzheimer’s
, New York and London, The Free Press, 2003.
5
D. W. Winnicott,
Home is Where we Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst
, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1986.
6
Stanley Kunitz, ‘The Layers’, in
The Poems of Stanley Kunitz: 1928–1978
, Boston, Little Brown and Co., 1979, p. 36.
7
Virginia Woolf,
The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol.4, 1931–35
, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1983, p. 63.
8
Paul Thompson, Catherine Itzin and Michele Abendstern,
I Don’t Feel Old: The Experience of Later Life
, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990.
9
Ronald Blythe,
The View in Winter: Reflections on Old Age
, Norwich, Canterbury Press, 2005, pp. 226, 228.
10
Lewis Wolpert,
You’re Looking Very Well: The Surprising Nature of Getting Old
, London, Faber and Faber, 2011, p. 1.
11
Simone de Beauvoir,
Force of Circumstance
, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968, p. 672.
12
Ibid., p. 673.
13
Alison Lurie, ‘The day I threw away fashion’
Guardian
, 15 April 2009.
14
Beauvoir,
Force of Circumstance
, p. 673.
15
Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Today I’ve changed – I’ve really become a feminist’,
Seven Days
, 8 March 1972, p. 3.
16
Simone de Beauvoir,
La Vieillesse
, Paris, Gallimard, 1970, first translated into English as
The Coming of Age
.
17
Simone de Beauvoir,
The Coming of Age
, trans. Patrick O’Brian, New York, Putnam, 1972, p. 5.
18
Beauvoir,
Force of Circumstance
, p. 656.
19
Simone de Beauvoir,
The Second Sex
, trans. H. M. Parshley, Picador, London, 1988, p. 295.
20
Beauvoir,
All Said and Done
, New York, Paragon House, 1993, pp. 63–4.
21
See Sheila Rowbotham’s chapter, ‘The 1970s’, in her
A Century of Women
, London, Viking, 1997, p. 402.
22
Sue O’Sullivan, ‘Menopause Waltz’, in
I Used to be a Nice Girl
, London, Cassell, 1996, p. 62.
23
Vivian Sobchack, ‘Cinema, Surgery, and Special Effects’, in
Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture
, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 2004, p. 38.
24
William Burroughs,
Ghost of Chance
, London, Serpent’s Tail, 2002, p. 17.
25
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette,
Chéri
, London, Vintage, 2001 [1920], p. 88.
26
Susan Sontag, ‘The Double Standard of Aging’,
Saturday Review
, September 1972, p. 37.
27
Meg Stacey, ‘Older Women and Feminism: A note about my experience of the WLM’,
Feminist Review
31 (1989), pp. 140–2.
28
Barbara MacDonald, from her 1985 speech, ‘Outside the Sisterhood: Ageism in Women’s Studies’, in Thomas Cole and Mary Winkler, eds,
The Oxford Book of Aging: Reflections on the Journey of Life
, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 118–20. See also Barbara Macdonald and Cynthia Rich,
Look Me in the Eye: Old Women, Aging and Ageism
, San Francisco, CA, Spinsters Ink, 1983.
29
Margaret Morganroth Gullette,
Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of Midlife
, London, University of Press of Virginia, 1997.
30
Margaret Morganroth Gullette,
Aged by Culture
, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2004, p. 137.
31
Gullette,
Declining to Decline
, pp. 6–7.
32
Kathleen Woodward, ‘Introduction’, in Kathleen Woodward, ed.,
Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations
, Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press, 1999, p. xi.
33
Gullette,
Aged by Culture
, p. 111.
34
See, for instance, James Banks et al.,
Living in the 21st Century: Older People in England
, English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (Wave 3), London, Institute for Fiscal Studies, 2008.
35
Stephen Katz, ‘Growing Older Without Aging? Positive aging, anti-ageism and anti-aging’,
Generations
, Winter 2001–2, pp. 27–32.
36
Some of those exceptions include Elliott Jaques, ‘Death and the Mid-Life Crisis’,
International Journal of Psychoanalysis
. 46 (1965), pp. 502, 514; Pearl King, ‘The Life Cycle as Indicated by the Nature of the Transference in the Psychoanalysis of the Middle-Aged and Elderly’,
International Journal of Psychoanalysis
61 (1980), pp. 153–60; George Pollock, ‘Aging or Aged: Development or Psychopathology’, in
The Course of Life: Psychoanalytic Contributions Toward Understanding Personality Development
, Vol. III, ed. Stanley Greenspan and George Pollock, Washington, DC, US Government Printing Office, pp. 529–85, as well as Hannah Segal’s one-off case study ‘Fear of Death: Notes on the analysis of an old man’,
International Journal of Psychoanalysis
39 (1958), pp. 178–81.
37
Sigmund Freud, ‘On Psycho-therapy’, in Vol. 7 of
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
, ed. and trans. James Strachey, London, Hogarth, 1953–74, p. 262.
38
Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé,
Letters
, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer, trans. William and Elaine Robson Scott, New York and London, Norton, 1972, pp. 165–6.
39
Hilda Doolittle,
Tribute to Freud
, New York, New Direction Books, 1984, p. 16.
40
Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny” ’, in Vol. 17 of
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
, p. 241.
41
Ibid., p. 248, n. 1.
42
Stephen Frosh,
Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions
, London, Palgrave, 2013, Chapter 2, ‘Facing the Truth about Ourselves’.
43
Freud, ‘The “Uncanny” ’, p. 242.
44
Avery Gordon,
Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination
, Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press, 2008, p. 55.
45
Ibid., p. 57.
46
Mark Doty, ‘The Embrace’, available at
www.poets.org
.
47
See King, ‘The Life Cycle’; Kurt Eissler, ‘On Possible Effects of Aging on the Practice of Psychoanalysis: An essay’,
Psychoanalytic Inquiry
13 (1993), pp. 316–32. See also, Frieda Plotkin, ‘Treatment of the Older Adult: The impact on the psychoanalyst’,
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
(2000), pp. 1591–1616.
48
Christopher Bollas,
Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self-Experience
, London, Routledge, 1993, pp. 59, 61.
49
Eva Hoffman,
Time
, London, Profile Press, p. 110.
50
Murray Schwartz, ‘Introduction’, in Kathleen Woodward and Murray Schwartz, eds,
Memory and Desire: Aging – Literature – Psychoanalysis
, Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press, 1986, p. 5.
51
Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, in
Écrits: A Selection
, trans. Alan Sheridan, London, Tavistock, 1977, p. 2.
52
Jacques Lacan,
The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis
, trans. Anthony Wilden, Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968, see especially the discussion by Wilden, pp. xv–xvii.
53
Schwartz, ‘Introduction’,
Memory and Desire
, p. 3.
54
Herbert Blau, ‘The Makeup of Memory in the Winter of our Discontent’, in Woodward and Schwartz, eds,
Memory and Desire
, p. 25.
55
Alliance for Aging Research, ‘Centenarians – the Ultimate Survivors!’, Spring 2002, available at
www.agingresearch.org
.