Authors: Lynne Segal
I don’t want to choose between these two interpretations, personal fears and social denigration, since I think both contribute to any aversion towards those ageing faces that look back at us in old age. However, I do think that adding in Gordon’s account of how images are culturally implanted, knowing that horror and old age are always already mythically twinned, would help explain Freud’s instant dislike of that ‘elderly gentleman’ – himself. Whether or not we find the notion of a ‘social unconscious’ useful for describing the process, I am sure that attending to the imprint of the social on the personal unconscious can at least assist us in trying to be more hospitable to those figures who haunt our imaginations, especially when old and shabby. In Gordon’s account: ‘Freud gets so close to dealing with the social reality of haunting only to give up the ghost and everything social that comes in its wake.’
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As I will suggest much later in this book, those hauntings from the dead are not always frightening; indeed, sometimes they are welcome. The American poet Mark Doty, for instance, wrote of finding his dead lover in a dream: ‘Bless you. You came back, so I could see you / once more, plainly, so I could rest against you/ without thinking this happiness lessened anything, / without thinking you were alive again’.
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Yet if Freud could offer nothing but gloom around old age, as a sterile and frightening condition inevitably triggering thoughts of death, it seems to me there are more interesting uses that could be made of psychoanalytic reflection. Nowadays there are some analysts, most notably Pearl King in the UK, and
several others in the USA, beginning with Kurt Eissler, who have attempted this. They suggest, for instance, that you could reverse Freud’s views on the difficulties presented by older patients in analysis. Thus they propose that the well-known reluctance of analysts to work with the elderly could be largely a projection of their own anxieties and prejudices, especially in the analyst’s personal fears around illness, loss and mortality likely to be triggered in forms of counter-transference when dealing with older patients.
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Moreover, by prioritizing the past over the future, as well as stressing the wayward temporality of psychic life, psychoanalysis has at least the potential to help us think more imaginatively about ageing and old age. Practising in Britain, Christopher Bollas is one psychoanalyst who writes evocatively of all psychic life as ‘a kind of haunting’, populated by the residue of others who leave the traces of our encounters with them over a lifetime, but in ways that are ‘not intelligible, or even clearly knowable: just intense ghosts … who inhabit the human mind’. No wonder, Bollas continues, that as we age ‘we come to believe more and more in life’s mystery and in the strangeness of being human’.
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As the writer Eva Hoffman points out in her book on the nature of ‘time’, the French psychoanalyst André Green also tries to capture the strange recurring residues of the past in the present, and of the present in our recollections of the past, when he refers to the ‘heterochrony’ of psychic temporalities.
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Highlighting the many affinities between literature and psychoanalysis, as well as the way in which scholars in the humanities have helped keep psychoanalytic thought alive, an anthology by Kathleen Woodward and Murray Schwartz, entitled
Memory and Desire
, contains many impressive essays addressing the complexities and paradoxes of ageing and old age. Some writers
here, also turning to Winnicott, make use of his notion of ‘space of illusion’, space of play, in which what he called ‘transitional objects’ enable both the renunciation
and
the recuperation of early relationships. It is a process, surely, which does not end with childhood; few do. Introducing this collection, Murray Schwartz, an American cross-disciplinary scholar who has taught in both the humanities and psychiatry, uses Winnicott to argue that ‘varieties of playing, uses of illusion, can thus be seen as the threads of continuity that enable us to differentiate and recapitulate past experiences as we negotiate the crises of middle age and old age.’ Of course, as he quickly adds, the possibilities for creative repetitions are always precarious, dependent upon our physical, economic and cultural situation, which may either encourage or, almost, foreclose them.
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Others, including Schwartz, have also turned to the thoughts of Jacques Lacan to ponder the peculiarities of self-perceptions and ageing. For Lacan the images we have of ourselves are always flawed, whatever our age. From the beginning we only gain any form of self-recognition and wholeness from the outside, mediated by the reflected desire of another and masking inner turbulence, fragmentation and division.
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This initial mis-recognition, or false sense of self-coherence and identity is furthered through language, as we are slotted into pre-assigned positions in its symbolic order.
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Hence, we can say that there is never any true self but only a multiplicity of continuities over time which means, as Schwartz sums up: ‘everything depends upon our ability to make use of the self as an object of memory and fantasy that simultaneously is and is not equivalent to its present manifestations’.
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Another American literary scholar, Herbert Blau, also draws upon Lacan to point out that ‘the voids of memory, with age, are an opening into imagination, so long
as the aged are not made to feel that a failing memory is a felony of sorts’.
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So long as, indeed! In fact, of course, felony or not, huge social concern, if not censure, is precisely what memory lapses do tend to evoke.
Shifting Voices
‘Keep young and beautiful, if you want to be loved’, we sang mockingly when young; we do not sing it any more. It is certainly challenging for an older woman to know how to talk about and deal with desire, when we are all too aware of our growing erotic invisibility and perhaps also confronting disabilities, loss, mortality and other difficulties. Indeed, women seem early on to acquire a special affinity with ageing, when many of the experiences and emotions of old age have been associated with the feminine all along: from its apparent fragilities and frequent humiliations to the laborious work of caring for those in need, starting with birth all the way through to dealing with death and dying. It is women as a group who live longer than men in all developed countries and a majority of less developed ones, often by as much as ten years. The gender discrepancy is greatest among the very old, with women centenarians worldwide outnumbering men nine to one.
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Moreover, although I remain somewhat sceptical of the claim, we often hear women themselves affirm that it is they who can accept ageing more easily, less bitterly, than men.
It is over fifty years since that energetic and ambitious anthropologist Margaret Mead, then in her late fifties, first spoke of women’s prolonged ‘post-menopausal zest’, in an interview with
Life
magazine in 1959. She continued to shock audiences with
this thought for another two decades, most memorably when she silenced her interviewer, David Frost, by mentioning the menopause on television in 1970. According to her biographer it was a topic that had never before been broached on screen, let alone with such glee.
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Yet it turns out she was not alone. In different ways a minority of women have tried to dismiss the frightening spectre of the ageing female that haunts so many women from early middle age as they head towards what is seen as the definitive turning point of the menopause. Recently Jane Miller, at seventy-eight, opened her book
Crazy Age
with the reflection: ‘I like being old at least as much as I liked being middle-aged and a good deal more than I liked being young.’
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Yet whatever women’s distinct affinities or difficulties with ageing might be, their accounts of it could hardly be more varied and inconsistent, even coming from the very same person. Untangling the twisted ties between women and old age thus takes us to a dissonant clash of emotions: ranging from horror and denial of old age to celebration and solace regarding its possibilities for reinvention and renewal; from mourning the losses of a long life to militant resistance against ageism; from introspective withdrawal to fierce struggles against the neglect of the needs of the elderly, sometimes expanding into active support for other battles against the brutalities and disorders of the world, near and far. Given such diversity, it seems unlikely that any generalization about which sex copes better with ageing could be useful.
However, what certainly is true is that the stories available about ageing often have a gendered tone. The Californian literary theorist Helene Moglen started exploring divergent experiences of women and ageing a few years ago in her essay ‘Aging and Trans-aging’. She begins her reflections by
informing us of her own horror when, at around forty, she saw in the mirror not her own, but her mother’s face. It made her realize at once, she continued, that she had suddenly caught the mortal disease of ageing.
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‘Late mid-life astonishment’, is how Sarah Pearlman referred to the disruptions of identity and self-esteem that women can suddenly experience, usually nowadays between the ages of fifty and sixty – although, tellingly, the timeframe differs considerably across time and place.
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Moglen herself manages to come to terms with ageing as she reflects that in old age we have access to many different subjectivities, or self-states, through all the possible re-visitings of our younger selves. However, I wonder quite how conscious or comprehensible our ability to reclaim those former selves might be. We are not really in charge of the process: we are no longer those people we once were, there is real loss and usually something for us to mourn; and yet, when contexts allow it, the residues of those former selves may not only be expressed, but can sometimes be seen and affirmed by others. In our minds, the whole history of our attachments, the shifting sense we have of ourselves over a lifetime, accompanies the external losses of ageing. The past returns, never exactly as it was, but also never truly lost.
Looking back on old attachments is one thing, starting new ones is an altogether more challenging task. Nevertheless, a few years after writing her general reflections on ageing, Moglen wrote a brief autobiographical fragment in which she describes the re-emergence of desire and pleasure in her own old age, in ways that took her by surprise. At seventy-three, she describes falling in love again, and this time loving quite differently, indeed, with a new sort of passion, in her late life. Facing her husband’s death in 2000, after forty-four years of marriage,
Moglen entered psychoanalytic therapy for the first time, finding herself unable to cope with the loss of the security that had been part of a life hitherto enmeshed with that of her late husband, ‘like two roots that had twisted together’. Psychoanalysis was a perspective she had long been interested in and was now ready to explore directly. In therapy, she encountered what felt like strange yet oddly familiar aspects of herself that had become truncated or submerged over time, generating ‘an uncanny self that had survived the losses by which it had irrevocably been stamped’. Not long after starting, however – feeling both newly empowered as well as frustrated in the complexities of the transference with a male therapist – Moglen decided to end her clinical treatment when, unexpectedly, she fell in love again. She felt she now wanted ‘to replace self-obsession with self-expression’ with her new lover: ‘Gender, age, and sexuality lost their conventional references altogether, and in order to comprehend their current meanings, I had to disinter curtailed identifications, buried memories and transgressive desires.’ Her new lover was twenty years younger, a woman in her fifties, who also happened to be a psychotherapist. Separately, her younger partner wrote of giving up her own clinical practice, now wishing to embrace fully this new love in her own middle age, and deciding she had listened to enough sad stories.
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It is by listening to such different stories of old people, looking out for less familiar images of the elderly, that we may begin to encompass the extensive densities of ageing, while also surveying the multifarious ways we feel about ourselves, whatever our age. One writer who is always eloquent in elucidating the persistence of the past throughout our lives, and the ease with which we summon up different versions of our youth, or any other age, at will, is the British author Penelope Lively. In
one of her interviews she explains how in her writing she tries to capture that sense that there is nothing linear about personal time: ‘all these snatches of other presents exist at once in your mind … A very elusive and tricky concept, time.’
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Whether in her novels or her more recent memoirs, the unwinding of these diverse temporalities always lies at the heart of Lively’s vivid prose. In her award-winning novel
Moon Tiger
(1987), for instance, the sharp and acidic heroine, Claudia Hampton, a historian, lies in hospital recycling her memories from her deathbed, telling us, in a memorable opening sequence: ‘Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water. The pack of cards I carry around is forever shuffled and re-shuffled; there is no sequence, everything happens at once.’
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Lively’s writing is equally compelling on the historical embeddedness of personal memories in their particular time and place. Our life-stories inevitably draw upon the more general collective narratives around at the time, allowing us, selectively, to make sense of the jumble of our experiences and suggesting the way in which we are all, as she puts it, ‘manipulated by history’.
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