Ageing through the lens of psychoanalysis: subjectivity and clinical care

Abstract

Ageing cannot be reduced to a biological process or a demographic category: it constitutes psychic work, traversed by successive mournings, narcissistic repositionings and demands for symbolisation that bear directly on clinical practice. This article examines what psychoanalysis has to say about such work and which technical consequences follow from that listening. It proceeds in three movements: the Brazilian demographic transition and its accompanying legal framework are situated; the formulations of Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Lacan and Jung that sustain a psychoanalytic theory of ageing are reconstituted; and the adaptations of setting, transferential management and symbolic mediation required by clinical work with older people are discussed. It is argued that old age is not a new object for psychoanalysis but the revealer of an old impasse: the assumption, present in Freud himself in 1905, that the psychic apparatus loses plasticity with age. The contrary thesis is sustained — that the unconscious knows no chronology — and shown to be not rhetorical consolation but a technical premise, on which both the indication of treatment and the refusal to read conflict as decline depend.