Abstract
Datan et al. (1987), extending Neugarten’s (1984) earlier observation regarding the significance of the manner in which persons recount the story of their lives, well portray both the manner in which contemporary psychoanalysis understands the course of life and emphasize the goal of psychoanalytic study of adult lives as a search for factors accounting for a presently constructed story of experience and the determinant of wish and action. The present chapter focuses on the significance of contemporary clinical theory within psychoanalysis, additionally informed by study within the human sciences, as a means for understanding the management of lived experience reflected in the successively rewritten life story from childhood to oldest adulthood. These life stories, told by the analysand to the analyst, provide the foundation for a shared effort at remaking accounts of lived experience in an effort to provide the analysand with increased sense of personal integrity and vitality.
The notion that adult development is linear and cumulative—that is, that certain personalities are more “adult” than others—underlies stage theories of adult development. There is little empirical evidence for such orderly and progressive change, nor is there any agreement on the outcome.... From this perspective, lifespan development becomes individual life history, which in turn becomes a life story—an attempt by the individual to create a narrative given order and predictability only by the choices and decision making of that individual. The order in the course of lives lies, then, in the mind of the persons experiencing those lives, not in the observer. The goal of the study...” (is) to explicate contexts and thereby to achieve now insights and new understandings” (Neugarten, 1984, p. 292). If adult personality demonstrates any order, then, it may not be the result a developmental trajectory but instead a reflection of the individual’s attempts to maintain a sense of continuity. (Datan, Rodeheaver, & Hughes, 1987, pp. 162-163)
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Cohler, B.J. (1998). Psychoanalysis, the Life Story, and Aging. In: Lomranz, J. (eds) Handbook of Aging and Mental Health. The Springer Series in Adult Development and Aging. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0098-2_12
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