Gilleard, C; (2022) Freud’s old age: Recognized but never realized? Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society , 27 pp. 334-344. 10.1057/s41282-022-00272-6.

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Abstract

This paper explores Freud’s later life and the extent to which Freud internalized a subject position as aged. Drawing upon Sartre and de Beauvoir’s idea of the unrealizability of death and old age, I argue that throughout his adult life while Freud confronted desires, experiences and fears that were previously unacceptable and even unthinkable, including the presence of a death instinct, an intrapsychic desire for oblivion, old age remained to the end for him, always and only an object position. Age had for him no subjectivity, no inner experience upon which to reflect. It remained external, an “old Freud” existing as a third person, a recognition of how he was regarded rather than how he felt. This illustrates what I suggest is a fundamental separateness between the psychic representation of ageing and dying. In practice this has left an unresolved legacy for the profession of psychoanalysis in planning retirement rather than dying by the couch.

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