Changing While Remaining the Same

Abstract

Aging is a clearly evolutionary process that first discreetly and then more starkly modifies social references, cognitive potentialities, and above all bodily integrity and appearance. External reality cannot avoid encountering the internal reality of each one of us. Women and men, with their variable and singular narcissistic and identificatory weaknesses and resources, are invited or even compelled to deal, in a way that is both new and constantly being modified, with loss and incompleteness, with the inevitable nature of our finite destiny, the disenchantment of things left unfinished. This research, based on a qualitative analysis of 110 Rorschach protocols gathered from a random group of men and women – ordinary people between 50 and 90 years of age – allows us to appreciate the quality and perhaps the particularity of the expressions of these mental problem configurations in which the question of nonintegrity proves to be crucial. The results demonstrate how the Rorschach Test can be useful in understanding the diversity of self-representation, by avoiding turning a demographic group into a clinical entity. They show that, contrary to what the first research works in psychoanalysis and projective psychology suggested, aging in itself does not lead to a decrease of the mental processes.