Particularities of the Psychoanalytical Clinic of Aging: Construction of Clinical Cases

Abstract

This paper proposes to think the psychoanalytical clinic of aging as moved by challenges brought about by the considerable increase in the number of elderly people nowadays. By questioning the role of psychoanalysis in culture and supported by clinic experience, we think about the psychoanalytical clinic of aging while including interdisciplinary contributions and interventions. This approach defends sublimation as a means of sustaining the wish and, above all, as a means of transformation provided by social bonds, aiming to put the subject as the leader of his own history and assuming that investment is what upholds existence. There is no age for desire. Through this principle, one must “bet on life” even when the body becomes “an arena for diseases”, always pointing towards death. Thus, psychoanalysis summons “the subject” to the hearing and remembering which enable his/her own histories and reconcile him/her with the legitimacy of his/her own wish.