Becoming really old: the indignities.

This essay deals with an unpopular topic: the indignities that increasingly plague people as they grow older and eventually become really old. Individual differences and the causes for same are indicated, as well as the variety of individual reactions. A brief clinical vignette is presented, in addition to a more extended one describing a woman who was in analysis for six years during her fifties and sixties, and who returned to treatment twenty years later at the age of eighty-three.