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AGING AND PERSONALITY
My mother was always a vital, energetic woman, but her energy in the last decade of her life took another form: always complaining about minor aches and pains-, traveling from doctor to doctor for advice about imaginary physical complaints. Her absorption in my father and us was transferred to an obsession with herself. She stopped growing mentally. She lost interest in new ideas. I'm afraid that now as I'm reaching my seventies, this transformation will be my fate too. Will I get boring, rigid, neurotic, and self-centered, as it seems so many people do? Please don't let me lose the joy in living that seems to evaporate the longer we live. Give me the sense to know if I am becoming the complaining, disagreeable person my mother was toward the end. Is what happened to her normal! Can I do anything to stop it from happening to me?
Built into our thinking are two contradictory ideas about how getting old changes us as people. These harsh black-and-white feelings may be a residue from childhood. Children see their parents and other "old people" ambivalently, both as very wise and also as foolish - stodgy, backward, rigid, and behind the times. Which thought we most believe as grownups may have a good deal to do with our personal experience, how the people we are closest to really do change as they grow old.
Unfortunately, this woman saw her mother change for the worse. So she agrees with the widespread idea that as we get older we contract emotionally. For her the stereotype that older people are rigid, selfish, foolish, unhappy, and absorbed in the past is true, because she saw this change happen firsthand.
For those of us who had (or have) loving, zestful, interesting parents and grandparents, getting older is more likely to symbolize emotional growth, an idea summed up by the lovely phrase "a mature human being." A mature person has the balanced perspective on living that seems to come about only through having lived. The idea that years of living are necessary to becoming a mature human being was spelled out not by Freud, but by his most famous student, Carl Jung.
Jung's personality theory offers us a positive view of how we change emotionally as the years pass. We wouldn't be happy to leave our thirties if we believed only in Freud's ideas. Freud did consider the essence of mental health to be the ability to see the world as it really is, which implies that emotional growth should happen mainly through years of living. But he also believed our personality is completely set by age five. After this early time, he did not think that our experiences alone, no matter how important, could basically alter us. Without psychoanalysis, he said, we are doomed to deal with stress and life in the same way. Furthermore, he implied that by middle age we enter an emotional decline. He warned his students not to do analysis with people over forty, because by this time they become too set in their ways ever to change their essential character.
Jung, once Freud's protege, took violent exception. He did not see how everything we are could be laid down by the tender age of five. He believed we have the chance of becoming truly mature people only at the age when Freud thought we were emotionally over the hill - forty or so. Jung and Freud fought bitterly over just this question, and Jung left to develop a view of personality that stresses the ultimate importance of the second half of life.
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