Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

Despite or after the long and sometimes acute perturbations of the vita sexualis as it draws to its close, there is very commonly a new and deep peace. We are glad that the storm and stress are passed and that we are henceforth immune to passion. This is doubtless the normal and, let us hope, increasingly common course. The sexes approximate each other in both traits and features as they grow old and thus if we can no longer love women sensually, we have a new appreciation of the eternally feminine, its intuitive qualities, and its more general and moral interests. Old women acquire a new power of sensing things from man’s point of view and hence companionship between old men and women may become a noble surrogate for carnal love. Happy the old who can enjoy comradeship on this plane with a congenial member of the other sex and thrice happy is the very rare case of well-mated couples who find, when the time comes, that they have qualified for this consummation of their union with each other!

Folklore, especially in its grosser forms, but also classical and medieval,[198] and even modern literature—medical, psychiatric, and most of all the writings of psychoanalysis—abound in descriptions of the tragic results that ensue when husband and wife do not grow old together or when their age disparity is too great. Even in the purest, most loyal, and best mated pairs there is often a period of unspoken and perhaps half unconscious suspicion and jealousy, which each partner regrets and tries to banish from waking thoughts, outcrops of which often appear in dreams. Roués have always felt that the young wives of old men were their legitimate prey. The former seem more liable to fall before temptation than if they had remained single. Bitter, indeed, is often the lot of Senex who dotes on a young bride and seeks to atone by lavishing gifts and providing every kind of service and social enjoyment that infatuation can suggest for waning marital potency. While society austerely and even ostentatiously condemns such a wife who errs, it secretly judges her to be not without some excuse and has little pity, and often only covert derision, for such a husband.

Yet more pathetic is the converse case of the aging wife of a spouse yet young and lusty. The sense that she is losing her charm for the man she loves is gall and wormwood to her very soul. She, too, seeks to atone by making herself physically more attractive, not only to him but to others that he may see their admiration, by every kind of personal ministration and often by seeking literary, artistic, or other success outside the family circle. She becomes painfully conscious of the attractions of younger or otherwise more favored women whom her mate meets and easily grows suspicious, not only with but often without cause. She may feel the lure of incentives other women use to attract men which her pride will not permit her to cultivate, although she may make concessions to these more or less unconsciously. Tendencies thus repressed may find outcrops in other fields and may even take the form of symptoms, perhaps of fears for the well-being of her mate, even of physical harm, business failure, social disgrace, or perhaps religious heresy. In other cases she may be at last forced to admit infidelity on his part and then it is that she finds herself face to face with the dour problem of either trying to ignore or condone, and perhaps conceal or excuse, his fault to others and living a hollow life of sham and convention on the one hand; or of openly breaking and separating and living henceforth a more or less isolated life, on the other. She must thus very carefully weigh not only her own material interests but the future of her children and the chance of pitiless public scandal.

In the medical literature on the menopause (Kisch, who studied 96 cases; Laudet, 95; Tilt, Faye, and Mayer, 97 each; and especially the more philosophical Börner and Currier) we find very little save records of physiological and anatomical changes, so that it has remained for the Freudians to exploit the perhaps far more important psychic changes that characterize this stage of life. The love life in the new and larger sense in which this is now coming to be understood is the very heart and core of woman’s nature and it plays a vaster rôle in the life of man than had till lately been suspected. Whatever thwarts or diverts the vita sexualis from its normal course brings all kinds of disasters in its train. About all the transformations of senescence root in the fact that by this recession of the life tide we are gradually cut loose from the more vital currents of the life of the race and individuality now has its unique innings. The debauchee, who marries perhaps late and after long experience with women of easy virtue, often finds a modest wife disappointing and misses all the arts of allurement he had found in his orgies. So, too, when the happily married man finds the earlier ardors of his wife growing cool, he is only too liable to suspect waning affection, when in fact nature is only following her inexorable course. He may even wonder if, in the inscrutable ways Eros has, his wife’s fancy may have unconsciously strayed to some more engaging man or fallen a victim to some baseless suspicion of him, or at any rate grown weary of his advances and perhaps come to a new and deeper realization of some of his faults or limitations. Feeling that their present relations are not all they once were, he fails to recognize that it is the very nature of love to grow sublimated as years pass and to become more and more an affair of the soul, as it perhaps once was of the body; and that it is just at this critical point that it normally becomes richer, riper, and more truly devoted. The wife’s impulse to minister disinterestedly to her husband is never so strong or pure as at the moment when the power of giving complete physical satisfaction first begins to wane and it is at this epoch that it can so easily and naturally be transmuted into the impulse to serve, help, enter into closer and more sympathetic mental relations, to know more of his inner life, struggles, ideals, ambitions and even his business and in general to enlarge the surface of personal contact. This is thus the psychological moment for man to interest his mate in the affairs he has most at heart and to make her a partner, perhaps even of some of the details, of his own vocation. This golden opportunity, however, is brief, and if it passes unimproved it will soon be forever too late and each mate will, ere long, find him- or herself starting on devious ways that will lead them ever further apart.

Conversely, when a young wife first realizes that her husband is aging, she should understand that nature now impels him to compensate for physical by mental devotion and she may have even to face some form of the above choice whether it is better to be an old man’s darling or a young man’s slave. In him this is the nascent hour for becoming interested in her inmost wishes, aims, feelings, ideals, and to help her actualize them. In extreme cases he may come to devote himself to dancing attendance upon her wishes and even whims unless she herself has the good sense to restrain him from this fatuity, for by cleverly humoring and restraining him she can just now make him very plastic to her will. Thus her problem sometimes is to save him from an infatuation for her that might become ridiculous and that some wives are foolish enough to love to display. She must, however, learn to develop in and accept from him better succedanea for the more libidinous eros and to do this she must enter more sympathetically and intellectually into his life, as instinct now impels him to enter into hers. The impulse in the physiologically younger partner of every married pair to anticipate the age of the older one, if wisely met, may result in greater sanity and more true happiness for both. Who does not know fortunate cases where just this has occurred, rare though they may be and many as are the wreckages that have resulted from too great age disparity? If the wife tends to be in the mother image and the husband in the image of the father, a rich and rare blend of parent and mate love is sometimes seen. The feelings of the ideal bridegroom for the ideal bride are never without a strong ingredient of the affection he once cherished for his own mother, while one factor of her love for him was transferred from or first developed toward her father. At the same time each has a small ingredient of parental feeling toward the other, as if they were each child and each parent to the other. In all such unions the younger partner rejuvenates the older far more than the older ages the younger.

In all of us oldsters the problem of personal hygiene looms up with new dimensions. In our prime we gave little attention to health. The body responded to most of the demands we made upon it. If we were very tired, we slept the sounder. We paid no attention to minor ailments, which soon righted themselves. We ate or drank what, and as much as, appetite called for; exposed ourselves to wind and weather, heat and cold, wet and dry, with impunity. We could go without sleep a night or two if necessary and feel but little the worse for it; could abuse our eyes, nerves, heart, digestion, muscles, and more or less escape all evil consequences; could work at top speed and with an intensity that rung up all our reserve energies for days or weeks if need be, and could feel sure that our good constitutions would enable us to bear the strain and to more or less promptly recuperate. But now our credit at the bank of health begins to run low. We must husband our resources lest we overdraw them. Overdoing is a veritable bugaboo. There are certain symptoms we must never disregard on pain of days of lessened efficiency. We have had one or more signs of special weaknesses we must heed. There are some things that we must rigorously refrain from eating or doing. There is a weak organ, too, that must be humored. Appetite has perhaps been too keen and must be reined in. We must select the items of our dietary with discretion and self-restraint. A typical respondent says he can still indulge his love of hill-climbing, bicycling, swimming, and even skating, and exercises with diverse gymnastic apparatus that he has had set up in his garage, to say nothing of golf, which he holds to be best of all, and autoing, which has become with him a veritable craze. All these things at the age of seventy-five he still does occasionally but is becoming shy of doing so lest he be thought trying to seem young. He lately stole out alone at twilight to skate, when one urchin called to another, “Hey, Johnnie, doesn’t that old man skate bully?” He said he felt like cuffing him for calling him “old” and hugging him for praise of his performance.

One correspondent says in substance that he did his best mental work evenings, continuing usually until at least one o’clock in the morning and then tumbling into bed, perhaps after a half an hour spent on a novel as a nightcap or brain sponge, and falling at once into profound sleep undisturbed by dreams and with hardly a change of posture till nature’s demands were entirely satisfied. Now all his serious study can best be done by daylight and particularly in the early part of the day and he has a simple set of routine prescriptions for going to bed and to sleep. He occasionally awakes and even arises before morning, knows the sounds of all the night watches and is generally aware of the early dawn despite darkened windows, and is sometimes disturbed by troublesome dreams. He needs less sleep as measured by hours but is more dependent upon its soundness. Again, he sometimes feels moody, depressed, irritable, and wonders if anyone observes it. He has a new horror of nerves, of constipation, of age lapsing to dotage, anecdotage, and garrulity or taciturnity. If anything goes physically wrong, he recuperates more slowly and blesses his stars that his good heredity pulls him through, and nurses his weaknesses the more thereafter. He has a notion that by keeping at work all he is able to, he is conserving an energy that by letting up, if he is ill, will be drawn upon to restore him to condition; whereas if he were habitually idle this reserve would be thereby dissipated. With all the precautions and handicaps thus entailed he is still sometimes able to attain a high state of morale, to feel again the old youthful joy and exuberance of life, although it now has a new and unique quality. There are also certain new ambitions he dares not express. He even longs for new adventures before it is forever too late. He realizes that all his life he has been more or less repressed by “the fear of living” and would now entirely escape it. He is not content to grind over the old mental stores but would reach out into other fields and find new ones. He fears intellectual stagnation and routine as the senses begin to grow dull and that he is not well nourished mentally or suitably prepared for old age and the psychic marasmus to which it is so prone.

The old tend to grow stale and sterile of soul from two causes: lack of fresh mental pabulum and abatement of the power of creative ideation, and so their mentation lapses and they become fatuous about trifles and feel that just as they must live circumspectly lest their body suffer some sudden collapse so their psychic self may crumble into senility and the subtle processes of disintegration and dementia slowly supervene, a decline of which we are usually far less aware than of physical decay. All these considerations, however, may and together should constitute a splendid stimulus to activity. The very danger of decline or breakdown is a spur to develop the higher powers of man in this their time.

In such experiences we seem to have a condition of great interest and also of practical importance. Physical infirmity and accident which compel special attention to body-keeping often result in such added care to hygienic condition that we are actually better and more effective for the impairment. Just as an old man who takes special care not to fall or to take risks is often safer from injury than a stronger and less careful man, so in mental work consciousness of certain shortcomings may act as a spur to take more pains and so to do superior work. To this is added another stimulus. A senescent knows that his friends and enemies will be liable to ascribe any imperfections in his intellectual output to failing powers, and his horror of betraying this is an added incentive to do his very best. If his last product could be his best, he could die happier, and he cannot bear the thought of exhibiting signs or stages of senile debility. To be willing to accept the allowances that his hostile or even his amiable critics would be willing to make for his years is craven. His chief danger is lest the standards of self-censorship for his performances should unconsciously decline and that he should come to judge his own inferior work as superior. Of this the history of literature has countless examples, more perhaps than of the opposite tendency.

Unquestionably, too, there is a certain maturity of judgment about men, things, causes, and life generally that nothing in the world but years can bring, a real wisdom that only age can teach. But to observe and rely on this to compensate for thoroughgoing rigorism in demonstration or mastery of copious details is a fatality too often seen. Finally, we must realize that our own brain work must be done with less of the afflatus that often aided us in youth or in maturity. Once our best ideas came to us in heat after a warming up of our faculties, perhaps into an erethic or second-breath state. We found ourselves in the grip of a sort of inspiration that carried us on perhaps far into the night or impelled us to exceptional activities for days or even weeks and brought a reaction of lassitude in its train. But now, not only is this generally less or lacking but our mentation must be more stated, our hours of intense application must be kept within bounds, and there is the perennial danger of overdoing and its penalties are surer and more severe. Thus with age we must develop a new system or method that recognizes and comports with our true mental age. We must have safely passed the Scylla and Charybdis of affecting to be younger than we are and of aping or adhering too conservatively to the manners of thought and feeling characteristic of earlier youth, on the one hand; or, on the other, we must escape the opposite attitude that often supervenes later in the very old of vaunting their years and posing as prodigies of senescence. In a word, the call to us is to construct a new self just as we had to do at adolescence, a self that both adds to and subtracts much from the old personality of our prime. We must not only command a masterly retreat along the old front but a no less masterly advance to a new and stronger position and find compensation for what old age leaves behind in what it brings that is new. What, more precisely, is this latter?