Out of Time (4 page)

Stacey’s sense of exclusion was expressed by many other older feminists from that period, suggesting that feminism had indeed failed to prevent younger women from distancing themselves from older women; at least, unless they had a very particular fiery clout, charisma or charm, such as that possessed by those two American poets, Grace Paley or Adrienne Rich, able to capture the admiration, even the love, of a younger generation.

However, the rise of what became known as ‘identity politics’ in the 1980s led some older feminists to begin to write about their specific invisibility within the women’s movement. This began, as ever, in the USA, with all the recognizable rhetoric and passion of what were by then ongoing conflicts between the differing feminist identifications of the period – invoking class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and more. Barbara MacDonald was just one of the older women’s voices speaking out in 1985:

From the beginning of this wave of the women’s movement, from the beginning of Women’s Studies, the message has gone out to those of us over sixty that your ‘Sisterhood’ does not include us, that those of you who are younger see us as men see us – that is, as women who used to be women but aren’t any more. You do not see us in our present lives, you do not identify with our issues, you exploit us, you patronize us, you stereotype us. Mainly you ignore us.
²⁸

It would be over a decade before things began to shift within mainstream feminist thought; indeed, it did so only after more feminist scholars reached middle age themselves. By the late 1990s, the impressive self-styled feminist ageist resister, Margaret Morganroth Gullette, called for a new research field of ‘Age Studies’ to explore all the ramifications of attitudes towards ageing, agreeing that they amounted to a form of social pathology. In book after book, beginning with her investigations of middle age for her opening text,
Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of Midlife
(1997), Gullette has continued to uncover the high costs of ageism present not just in society generally, but even within feminism and progressive academic forums, such as cultural studies.
²⁹
‘How can we ever have thought we age by nature alone?’ she asks rhetorically, in her book dedicated to answering just that question,
Aged by Culture
.
³⁰
In all her writing, Gullette explores how relentlessly, if often surreptitiously, that work is done: ‘We think we age by nature; we are insistently and precociously being aged by culture. But how we are aged by culture – that we need to know more about.’
³¹
Soon Gullette was joined by other feminist compatriots, such as Kathleen Woodward, eager to expand the field of Age Studies in the humanities and agreeing that ‘ageism is entrenched within feminism itself’. Although, as Woodward adds, it is hardly surprising that women have also ‘internalized our culture’s prejudice against ageing and old age’.
³²
This explains why, despite her unique influence on second-wave feminism, Beauvoir’s own book on old age was itself ignored by feminists when it first appeared in the early 1970s.

Elaborating further on the need for ‘Age Studies’, Gullette notes that although critical theory has been busy making trouble for and attempting to subvert so many of the old
binaries producing and marking identity, highlighting the role of culture and language in securing hierarchies of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation and more, it has rarely turned its attention to age. Age seemed to remain a ‘different difference’ that many people were keen to avoid as some personal dilemma: ‘Many think “age” always refers to people older than they are and is thus of no present interest’, Gullette suggests.
³³
Age is everywhere, but the complex practices registering it are far from obvious, making it perplexing and frightening for the many haunted by its presence.

Psychoanalytic Framings

Trying to find my bearings for writing this book, at first I hardly knew which way to turn or what tools to use for confronting my own trepidations. I have already suggested that culturally we find two narratives of ageing, expressing the standard binary logic: stories of progress and stories of decline; of ageing well and ageing badly. Officially sanctioned discourses of ageing well have become the dominant themes of gerontology, the science of ageing. They are nowadays promoted by Western governments around the world, ever more anxious about the welfare resources that will be needed to deal with the demographic changes caused by the unprecedented increase in human longevity. It is currently estimated that over the twentieth century a whole extra thirty years was added to life expectancy, thus vastly swelling the percentage of people post-retirement compared with the numbers in paid work.
³⁴
‘Ageing well’ means people taking responsibility for their own wellbeing, encouraged via the promotion of healthy lifestyles to
follow practices that can hopefully activate and empower them all the way through old age right up to the doors of death itself.

Yet this narrative of ageing well, ageing healthily, can itself be problematic, even contradictory. In many of the chapters ahead we will see instances of uncritical promotion of positive active ageing, as if we could all live into old age unburdened by actual signs of ageing. This scenario is thus itself partially complicit with the disparagement of old age, refusing to accept much that ageing entails, including facing up to greater dependence, fragility and loss, as well as the sadness, resentment or anger that accrue along with life itself. As other prominent voices note, again most often in the USA, there is a barely concealed politics in this particular notion of positive ageing. Stephen Katz, for instance, argues that this new official line ties in with the anti-welfare agenda of what is usually described as neo-liberalism, with its refusal to acknowledge many older people’s need to accept and live with dependency, and even less to provide adequate resources to enable them to live well.
³⁵
It is conversely those who cannot conceal their need for care, assistance and support who are seen as ageing badly, reinforcing notions of actual signs of ageing as indicative of seamless decline.

I have said, however, that it is not so much the ageing body, and how to keep it spruce, that is my main concern, but rather the complexities of mental life within ageing bodies. I am most interested in the less familiar cultural narratives that we might draw upon to provide more nuanced thoughts on ageing. These stories are distinct from exhortations to stay enduringly fit and young, on the one hand, or from the blatant dread or blinkered denial of the whole situation of the frequent unmet needs, isolation and neglect of the elderly, on the other. Without these alternative stories, it is hard to see how we can ever begin to
beat back the abiding stigma and menacing stereotypes of old age, to enable some affirmation of its own diverse distinctiveness and intricate, shifting particularities.

The most frightening of images are implanted early on, along with language itself and all the affect-laden symbolic apparatus of fantasies, metaphor, condensation, accompanying our encounters with those witches of folktales, ghouls of horror movies, and the countless other versions of crones or dementing oldies, both male and – far more savagely – female. We need to search hard to find, and then foster, possibilities for affirming old age. Once we start looking, however, the going gets easier. Drawing on my own experience and that of others, watching out and listening for richer versions of ageing, I explore some of those differing accounts, beginning with the diverse psychic and political possibilities and challenges that accrue with ageing. As I’ve already mentioned, they come from the understanding that the more we age, the more access we have to all the ‘baggage’ of our past, to all the selves we have been, or imagine ourselves to have been. Ageing is neither simply linear, nor is it any single discrete process when, in our minds, we race around, moving seamlessly between childhood, old age and back again. There are ways in which we can, and we do, bridge different ages, psychically, all the time.

Oddly, despite its awareness of the timelessness of the unconscious, until very recently, and still only sporadically, the temporal instabilities of old age have been little theorized in Freudian thought, not even in the writing of those scholars and clinicians most eager to begin telling psychoanalytic stories differently. With just a few notable exceptions, up until very recently there has been sparse psychoanalytic reflection on ageing.
³⁶
The neglect is usually traced back to Freud’s own
intense fears and phobias around ageing, which were evident from his middle age. At forty-nine, Freud decided older people were unsuitable for analysis because of their psychic inflexibility: ‘near or above the age of fifty, the elasticity of mental processes on which treatment depends is, as a rule, lacking: old people are no longer educable’.
³⁷

Things could only get worse for this particular middle-aged man, although it was not his mental elasticity that deserted him, as he was still writing expressively twenty years later, at seventy-one: ‘with me crabbed old age has arrived – a state of total disillusionment, whose sterility is comparable to a lunar landscape, an inner ice age’.
³⁸
Clearly, creativity remained in profusion, accompanying his horror of ageing. For Freud, the abhorrence of old age was presented as a given, seemingly in little need of explanation: ‘The trouble is – I am an old man –
you do not think it worth your while to love me
’, Freud had angrily announced to the surprise of his patient, the then middle-aged poet Hilda Doolittle (H. D.), when she lay on his couch in Vienna in 1933, with Freud by then seventy-seven. She said she was not aware of having said anything that might account for his outburst.
³⁹

However, almost despite himself, Freud presented other thoughts on the ways in which we may be haunted by encounters with old age, including our own. We find this especially in his reflections on those odd and alarming experiences we describe as ‘uncanny’, the peculiar anxiety that is aroused by images that seem both startling and strange, and yet in some sense also familiar. Such experiences, he said, were like ghostly hauntings, while noting the cultural ubiquity of ghost stories and haunted houses. Unsurprisingly, Freud suggested that these haunting or uncanny experiences might arise from places or
experiences that triggered the arousal of repressed complexes from childhood. However, in this essay Freud also suggested that we can also be haunted by a sense of something familiar but somehow associated with archaic or primitive beliefs, such as ancient fears of the return of dead spirits: ‘many people experience the [uncanny] feeling in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts’.
⁴⁰
Thus a living person can appear uncanny, and weirdly frightening, if they trigger thoughts of extinction, reminding us of our mortality, when thoughts of death always hover somewhere in the presence of life.

In the final autobiographical footnote to his influential essay, ‘The “Uncanny” ’, published in 1919, when he was sixty-three, Freud provided a memorable example of himself being frightened by just such a figure, when he feels he encountered his own ‘double’ while travelling in a train by night, after it suddenly lurched violently. At that moment he thought he saw the door to his carriage flung open and the arrival of ‘an elderly gentleman in a dressing gown and travelling cap’. This ageing figure, whose appearance Freud ‘thoroughly disliked’, turned out to his astonishment to be none other than his own reflection in the mirror on the connecting door. In his account, this image was not only experienced as that of a ‘stranger’, but came to serve him as an example of the ‘uncanny’, arousing a displeasure that led him to wonder whether what he experienced might best be seen as a ‘vestigial trace of the archaic reaction which feels the “double” to be something uncanny’.
⁴¹
In an interesting reading of the essay, the British psychoanalytic scholar Stephen Frosh suggests that one way of understanding Freud’s memory of his intense dislike of his ‘double’ would be to see it as a type of haunting not from the past, but rather from the future: ‘What
sends shivers down
his
spine, it seems, is not the return of the infantile repressed, but the beckoning from the
future
; that is, it is the
future
that haunts the present, and not the past. This future is one in which Freud is an old man, in which he will regret what he comes to be; in which death calls him, and daily reminds him of its threat.’
⁴²

Fears of death almost certainly do feed the familiar dread of old age, a fear that Freud suggested in this essay had hardly changed ‘since the very earliest times’, including ‘the old belief that the dead man becomes the enemy of his survivor and seeks to carry him off to share his new life with him’.
⁴³
And certainly, the ageing face that looks back at us in the mirror in later life, usually resembling that of a parent, can indeed make our elderly reflections a trifle uncanny. Personally, nowadays, I continually find it strange (yet oddly, also interesting, sometimes even reassuring) to watch my mother staring back at me from the mirror; or to hear, not my own laugh, but
hers
, when I am trying to please others.

Yet that ageing ‘double’ in the mirror may be a much-loved parent, perhaps a protective parent right up until their death, which one might think could just perhaps make old age, and even the inevitability of death, easier – rather than harder – to come to terms with. This means that there is more to say about these hauntings, whether from the past or the future. In her book
Ghostly Matters
, for instance, the psychoanalytically versed American sociologist Avery Gordon sees Freud’s encounter with his ‘double’ in the train more in terms of a ‘clawing narcissism’, aroused when viewing that ‘shabby’ figure, which he misattributes to a type of archaic ghostly haunting, with its intimations of mortality.
⁴⁴
What is interesting to me about Gordon’s account of haunting is that she views it
as a social as much as a personal phenomenon, introducing the notion of a ‘social unconscious’, which enables her to look at the impact that enduring social stigma, dispossession, repression and exploitation have on people and society.