The Unconscious of Age: Performances in Psychoanalysis, Film, and Popular Culture

Abstract

In the growing field of age studies, scholars have analyzed how cultures think about age across a range of perspectives—economic, sociological, political, and ideological—as well as studied representations of age in a variety of media. There is, however, less research on what I call the “unconscious of age,” using the term in three distinct but related senses. First, building on work by humanities scholars and essays by clinicians, I look briefly at how psychoanalysts have thought about age—the “unconscious” of age in the sense of biases in traditional psychoanalytic theory. Second, I explore more recent clinical case studies of the elderly, looking at the “unconscious of age” in a sense that humanists have rarely studied—namely, the unconscious conflicts that reemerge with aging. Finally, I use this background to illuminate the central character’s dilemma in Roger Michell’s film The Mother,¹ which is about May, a middle-aged woman involved in a sexual relationship with a much younger man. Anne Reid’s performance as May challenges ongoing (if dated) stereotypes of aging and staging. Furthermore, an examination of May’s differences from psychoanalytic case studies reveals traces of ageist stereotypes in some clinical work.