This book offers a view of the elderly person in our contemporary society as a subject in an interpersonal-intersubjective psychoanalytic context.
The contemporary elderly subject can no longer be viewed as an object in need of care and compassion. The experience of aging today requires orientating and treating the elderly as complex biological, social, and psychological subjects. This book is an updated psychoanalytic compass which captures the depth and complexity of the new aging process through the notion of mutual recognition to create an intersubjective experiential understanding. It illuminates various subjective aging experiences through a tapestry of texts, viewpoints, and dialogue with leading aging experts as multi-generational and multi-disciplinary representatives, who observe aging from within and without.
Enriched with copious clinical material, as well as personal perspectives, this is a positive and compassionate guide to aging for all psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.
Table of Contents:
Part I: Diary of an Aging Subject 1. Introduction to the diary 2. A year in my life – diary of an aging subject Part II: The New Psychology of the New Aging 3. Aging and Contemporary Aging 4. The Subjective Dimension of Aging 5. On Subjectivity and the Human Spirit in Aging 6. Beyond Channeling Aging into Loneliness 7. Bent Body — Upright Body: The Flexible Brain, Movement and Aging 8. The Body in Old Age – The Unique Contributions of the Relational Perspective 9. Intergenerational Relations in Old Age 10. Sexuality and Intimacy in Old Age 11. National and Personal Trauma in Old Age 12. The Seesaw of the Elderly Self-Parts 13. Aging on a Journey with a Partner - A View from the Consulting Room
About the Author :
Nitza Yarom is a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist with a PhD in counselling psychology from the University of Illinois (1971). She is retired from an academic career and now focuses on supervision and clinical seminars. She is the author of several books, including Psychic Threats and Somatic Shelters (Routledge, 2015).
Review :
'In shockingly recent times, old people, simply because they were old, were often considered poor candidates for psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Nitza Yarom’s A Compass for Aging in our Time is therefore much needed. But it is not only needed—it is admirable. We recognize the depth of the book’s clinical and intellectual encounter with the subject of aging; but that quality is only partially responsible for our appreciation. Yarom’s writing is consistently engaging, direct, and personal, even gripping; and so an important part of our admiration is that the book opens a world of feeling. We are touched. Yarom is both the author and the subject. But she reaches far beyond the personal, using her status as a deeply reflective aging person as a probe into her subject, and in this way she reveals more than could be grasped by the intellect alone.'
Donnel Stern, PhD, William Alanson White Institute
'Yarom’s book expresses a clear and resonant voice of her experience of aging, first as a person and only afterward as a psychoanalyst. With courage and remarkable openness, she recounts her experience as an aging person in describing her coping with the death of Zevik, the walking stick, or observing her wrinkles in the mirror.
Like Whyte’s “Street Corner Society”, Yarom observes the world through an ethnographic lens, through Zevik’s eyes, and attempts to understand the experience from within, and through the reactions of the nut vendor, the group of young rowers, and her fellow protesters in Kaplan. She examines her experience, sometimes as the research subject from within and others as the object of that same research from outside. This is a one-of-a-kind book for anyone engaged in or interested in aging, enabling the reader to touch, feel, and attempt to understand the unique experience of growing old.'
Prof. Yuval Palgi, University of Haifa
