Abstract
This article focuses on Pruyser’s (Pastor Psychol 24:102–118, 1975) view presented in his article titled “Aging: Downward, Upward, or Forword?” that the later stages of aging are not a downward movement from a higher peak but the continuation of a forward movement, and that manifestations of gains as well as losses in older adulthood support this view. While expressing agreement with this view I draw on Sigmund Freud’s discussion of the death instinct in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud 1920/1959) to suggest that the later stages of the aging process may involve an increase in detours and backward movements. Suggesting that these detours and backward steps are potentially beneficial, I conclude that Freud provides guidelines for how we may view and evaluate the losses and gains that Pruyser identifies as characteristic of the later stages of the aging process.
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Notes
Another posthumous article “Where Do We Go from Here? Scenarios for the Psychology of Religion” (Pruyser 1987c) was published in the June 1987 issue of The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. I was editor of the journal at the time. My editor’s column (Capps 1987) focused on his article and four of his previous articles in the journal and also draws attention to the recent publication of “Maintaining Hope in Adversity” in the 1986 winter issue of Pastoral Psychology. It also notes that when he submitted the article the previous October, he wrote that he did not want any special consideration from me as editor, but he observed that, in light of his struggle with cancer, this might well be his “swan song” as far as his work in psychology of religion was concerned. I suggested that one can almost hear him asking this question of the universe—“where do we go from here?”—and then, having asked it, adding something like, “But don’t tell me. I’ll want to see and hear it for myself.” I also indicated that the article challenges his colleagues to address two important questions: (1) Is there a developmental or dialectic dynamic in religion itself that moves from more or less anthropomorphic theistic imagery to impersonal or atheistic conceptions? and (2) Is religion, even among the educated and intellectually ambitious, a favorite and socially sanctioned area of stagnation, fixation, or regression? I suggested that I could think of no better way to orient ourselves for such explorations than to read or re-read his A Dynamic Psychology of Religion (1968), Between Belief and Unbelief (1974a) and The Play of the Imagination (1983).
In Pastoral Care: A Thematic Approach (Capps 2003) I suggested that his own case of Lambert (Pruyser 1976), a college student who sought help from a local pastor in the wake of the breakup of a romantic relationship, indicates that such a diagnosis may focus on the major theological theme (in this case providence), a minor theme that interacts with the major theme (in this case repentance), and a theme that is conspicuous by its absence (in this case, communion).
We may wonder why he wrote about aging at such a productive period in his life. He had recently written a memorial tribute to Herman Gijbert can der Waals, M. D. (Pruyser 1974b), a Dutch psychoanalyst who had fled the Netherlands when Hitler invaded it, who had served as the Hospital director at Menninger and had also been a prominent figure in the Topeka Institute for Psychoanalysis; and 3 years earlier he had written a memorial tribute to Thomas W. Klink, who had served for many years as chaplain and director of the Pastoral Care and Counseling Department at Menninger (Pruyser 1971). He had also written an article on science and values that focused on his own “odyssey” (Pruyser 1973). This combination of memorial tributes to long-term colleagues and professional life review (however abbreviated) may have contributed to his interest in the aging process. Another factor may have been the long-term effects of what Lawrence J. Friedman in his historical study of the Menninger Foundation (Friedman 1990) calls “the palace revolt”—the ouster of Karl Menninger in 1965 as President of the Foundation. Although Pruyser was personally loyal to Menninger (he once told me that Karl Menninger was “like a father to me”) he participated in the ouster, believing that it was in the best interests of the hospital. Friedman notes that his “closest colleagues acknowledged that Pruyser had taken an emotional beating” and that he “aged precipitously” (p. 324). He also indicates that Pruyser “was removed as Education Department director in 1971” (p. 324) but does not indicate the reasons. Perhaps he was personally motivated to discover the gains amid the losses that accompany aging.
In this address, he suggested that “certain concepts in the theory of art might be applicable to the psychology of religion, particularly when one realizes that in ontogenesis the individual tends to be introduced at once to art and religion” (Pruyser 1976, p. 1). He began by describing the reciprocal reinforcement between art and religion in childhood and subsequent cultural experience, then went on to explore how the art-theoretical constructions of craft, imagination, and illusion contribute to our understanding of religion. He developed the theme of illusion in The Play of the Imagination (Pruyser 1983), introducing the distinction between “illusion” and “illusionistic,” and making a case for illusionistic ways of thinking and imagining. Following his lead, I made a similar proposal for the relevance of art theory for pastoral theology in “The Lessons of Art Theory for Pastoral Theology” (Capps 1999; see also Capps 2010).
Like most sonnets, this one does not simply continue in the same vein for another ten lines, but instead begins at line nine (the traditional turning shift) to suggest that the loss of one’s physical beauty is compensated for if one has been the parent of a “fair child.” Here are lines five through fourteen:
Then being asked where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days.
To say within thine own deep-sunken eyes
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use
If thou couldst answer, “This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,”
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new-made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.
This shift in perspective does not directly challenge Pruyser’s view that the poem reflects the “overruling conviction” that life has a peak and that those beyond a certain age (here 40 years old) are on a downward slope. At the same time, its mention of a compensating factor supports his view (yet to be presented) that old age is not only one of loss but also of newly experienced gains.
The dictionary (Agnes 2001) defines endogenous as “developing from within; originating internally” (p. 470).
The sense of vocation is one of the seven theological guidelines that Pruyser (1976) in Pruyser’s schema for pastoral diagnosis. So, too, is providence.
In his comments on the eighth stage of the life cycle (ego integrity vs. despair) Erikson (1963) suggests that despair “expresses the feeling that the time is now short, too short for the attempt to start another life and to try out alternate roads to integrity” (p. 269).
I have addressed this issue in my The Decades of Life: A Guide to Human Development (Capps 2008b). I propose in this book that Erik Erikson’s well-known concept of the life cycle may be adapted to the decades of life, with each stage comprising one full decade. Because his model consists of eight stages each of which is given a psychosocial designation (i.e., basic trust vs. basic mistrust, autonomy vs. shame and doubt, initiative vs. guilt, identity vs. identity confusion, intimacy vs. isolation, generativity vs. stagnation, and integrity vs. despair) this would have meant that the life cycle would cover a life span of 79 years. So I added two additional stages for the 80–89 and 90–99 decades (release vs. control and desire vs. struggle). I considered adding a stage for years 100–109 but decided that persons who have lived a full century or more have won the right to call this decade whatever they chose. Incidentally, this conception not only addresses the problem of lumping all older persons together but also the other issue that Pruyser mentions, that the young have been subdivided into minute age-specific groups.
The cotyledon is “the first single leaf or one of the first pair of leaves produced by the embryo of a flowering plant” (Agnes 2001, p. 330).
In a discussion of the dual-drive theory in a section on motivation in the second of two chapters of The Vital Balance (Menninger 1963) on “Toward a Theory of Human Behavior” Menninger and his colleagues have a rather extensive footnote reference to Freud’s theory of the death instinct. They put forth several critiques of Freud’s theory, including his view that the repetition compulsion, which they consider to be “a purely psychological concept,” can be “nearly equated” with “the physicist’s concept of entropy” from which he “derived his death instinct” (pp. 116–117). They also suggest that “his use of Weissman’s germ-plasm theory seems fallacious” for the “organism never was ‘dust’; if it dies it becomes dust but does not return to it” (p. 117). It is perhaps ironic that, in their view, Freud was, in effect, misled by the biblical view expressed in God’s statement to Adam: “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Gen. 3:19 NRSV).
He also indicates that these life instincts are separate from—and even in opposition to—the ego. They are no more natural allies of the ego than is the death instinct. I take this to mean that the backward movement under consideration here is not related to or comparable with the “regression in the service of the ego” as formulated by Kris (1952/1964) and presented, interestingly enough, in his chapter on “the psychology of caricature” (p. 177).
It is noteworthy that Freud uses the metaphor of the journey in his portrayal of the life of the organism. In his foreword to Aichhorn’s (1925/1968) Wayward Youth he notes that of all the fields in which psychoanalysis has been applied “none has aroused so much interest, inspired so much hope, and accordingly attracted so many capable workers as the theory and practice of child training” (p. v). He suggests that this is easy to understand because the child “has become the main object of psychoanalytic research and in this respect has replaced the neurotic with whom the work began,” and that this change is due to the fact that analysis has itself “revealed that the child lives on almost unchanged in the sick patient as well as in the dreamer and the artist,” has “thrown a flood of light on the instinctual forces and impulses which give the childish being its characteristic features,” and “has traced the paths of development which proceed to maturity” (p. v.). Thus, “It is no wonder that expectation was aroused that psychoanalytic work would prove valuable in education, the purpose of which is to guide the child on his way to maturity, to encourage him, and to protect him from taking the wrong path” (p. v, emphasis added). I would simply add that if this paper were about the early rather than the later stages of the aging process, there would be more emphasis on the problem of determining the right road or path to embark upon, and it would undoubtedly focus on the other side of the dependency/independency dynamic that Pruyser discusses in relation to one of the gains of older adulthood (see also Capps 2011b). On the other hand, the issue of determining the right road is directly germane to the problem of dementia (especially the much discussed Alzheimer’s type), for one of the common features of its advanced stages is the tendency to, quite literally, lose one’s way or wander aimlessly about (see Capps 2008a, pp. 26–27).
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Capps, D. The Aging Process as Forward Movement and the Case for Detours and Backward Steps. J Relig Health 51, 479–497 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-011-9534-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-011-9534-0