>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.
[ Pause ]
>> Good morning, good morning everyone.
I want to welcome you to the Library of Congress.
My name is Roberta Shaffer.
And I actually have the pleasure everyday to serve
as the Associate Librarian of Congress for library services.
James H. Billington the Librarian of Congress is not here right now.
He has another commitment
but he will be joining us intermittently during the day
and I know that he will be very anxious to learn with us today.
A few preliminary matters which simply are that please make sure
that any item you brought with you today is comfortably stowed
under the seat in front of you.
[Laughter] that your electronic devices are turned off and last
but not least that your minds are in their open and unlocked position.
I am pleased and delighted that the Jung Society and AARP have chosen
to host this session on Carl Gustav Jung at the Library
of Congress this morning.
We are fortunate to have panels of highly learned people
from around the globe to lead us in stimulating discussions
about what Jung had to say on the aging process.
And I believe many of us in the room are experiencing that everyday.
So this has immense intellectual as well
as practical relevance at least for me.
This symposium will help to draw attention
to the Library's Jung papers.
And these papers consist of correspondence,
transcripts of interviews and writings relating
to Jung's autobiography, memories, dreams, reflections and also
if your time permits after the symposium today please plan to go
to the library's website where you can see a virtual representation
of a fantastic exhibit that we had here
on the Red Book just a few years ago.
The Jung papers of course are an example of the comprehensive way
in which the Library of Congress curators collect materials
that are original, unedited works of the world's great thinkers.
To borrow a concept from Jung, "One does not have to become enlightened
by imagining figures of light but making the darkness conscious."
Library collect [beep] support this thesis everyday as hundred
of researches come here physically or virtually
to bring new light to the ideas of others.
We not only collect widely and in all formats, manuscripts,
prints and photographs, music, film, sound recording,
maps and of course books but we collect
without an ideological point of view.
Case in point in addition to Jung's papers we have Sigmund,
the Sigmund Freud collection and related materials belonging
to his students and associates.
Now I am clearly not a scholar but I believe that Freud
and Jung may have not always agreed on everything.
[Laughter] our books, manuscripts
and other materials reflecting many points of view rest side by side
on our shelf and in other secure storage and perhaps it could be said
that they are thereby creating the institutional equivalent
of the collective conscious.
The library freely disseminates its information to all.
And men and women from almost everywhere
in the world can gain access to our collections.
And it is always our goal that people everywhere will be free
to gain access to our collections.
Our reach of course has greatly increased through the use
of the internet and new technologies.
We try to support the research needs
of the US Congress and the American people.
But we collect with future generations in mind.
And have a very sophisticated preservation program
where we use state of the art technology to assure
that future generations of curious
and concerned citizens will have the materials available to them tomorrow
that we all have available to us today.
I am pleased that the Library
of Congress today will serve its function as a forum for learning,
listening and discussing critical contemporary issues.
I want to recognize Joanne Jenkins who will be joining us at the podium
in a few minutes and the AARP foundation.
And I believe members of the foundation board are with us today
for supporting this important event and for their overall mission
of serving as advocates for America's seniors.
I want to thank the Jung Society of Washington for hosting this meeting
and for its efforts to make the public more aware
of his work and thoughts.
And then last but not least I must acknowledge Dr. James Hudson,
the manuscript division chief here at the Library of Congress.
And his extraordinary staff who have really done an enormous amount
of pre-work to make what I think will be a wonderful day
for all of us.
A very recent editorial in the New York Times seems apt,
"while aging is certainly accompanied by loses and disease.
Gerontological research shows
that there can also be continued productivity, connectedness,
emotional resilience, wisdom and acceptance
and gratitude for a life well lived.
But old age should never be measured by the metrics of youth."
With those thoughts in mind let us listen to the experts
who will tell us about what Jung had to say about the subject
that touches us all sooner or later.
And again welcome to the Library of Congress
and please welcome Jo Ann Jenkins from the AARP Foundation.
[ Applause ]   >> Good morning everyone.
It's a pleasure for me to be here.
Actually I was the chief operating officer here at the Library
of Congress and this is my first visit back in 2 years.
So I'm delighted to be here with Roberta and Jim
and all of my former colleagues.   At AARP foundation I'm very pleased
to sponsor this symposium on Jung and Aging.
One of the central facts before us at AARP Foundation and AARP is
that people are living longer.
What they do with those added years whether they continue to grow,
to learn, to have new experiences and fulfilling life
that is the vital question before us.
And it's wonderful to be here with so many scholars and gerontologists
who have focused on the quality and the richness of life
at this time of greater longevity.   I believe that our work
at AARP Foundation is complementary to your work.
Thoughtful, active, successful aging becomes so much more difficult
when people are-- older people are hungry, ill housed, isolated
or lacking income to afford the essentials of living.
To take just one example there are nearly 9 million people who are 50
and older in this country who face the threat of hunger everyday.
At AARP Foundation our priorities are hunger,
housing, income and isolation.
And we're hoping older Americans regain their footing
and take control of their lives.
We're helping them move from what we call that state
of vulnerability to stability.
When we do that we help to create the conditions
for purposeful and meaningful aging.
And that's why I believe that our work at the foundation dovetails
with yours and while I eagerly await the presentations and conversations
for this symposium today.
So thank you all for joining us and thank all of those
who are in the extended room.
I understand we have close to 500 people
who have come today to participate.
So we look forward to a fruitful conversation.
Thank you.   [ Applause ]
>> I wanted to thank you Roberta Schaffer
and Jo Ann Jenkins for their comments.
I join them in welcoming you all and I thank you for coming today.
We of the Jung Society of Washington,
I'm the President Dr. Scarcella are very excited
about this wonderful program which has been done with intense work
and dedication of many people.
Jung has dedicated time and thoughts in the aging process.
And he makes a lot of sense in his idea however I believe and I think
that aging is the opportunity for our second youth.
In the interest of time I'm now going to turn it
over to Dr. Aryeh Maidenbaum.
Dr. Aryeh Maidenbaum is a Jungian analyst and co-editor
of a New York Center for Jungian Studies.
Among his publication are the search for spirit in Jungian Psychology,
Sound of Silence, Psychological types, job changes
and personal growth and the book Jung
and the Shadow and Anti-Semitism.
Dr. Maidenbaum is also a contributing author
of current theories of psychoanalysis [inaudible].
Please applaud.
[ Applause ]   >> Thank you.
I wanted to thank the Library of Congress, the AARP
and the Jung Society of Washington for putting this together.
Before I have my own introductory remarks I wanted to cover some
of the logistics and details.
And I'm taking a cue from the introduction about some
of my publications one of them is called Sounds of Silence.
So I'm going to try to be quiet today.
Get out of the way and let this wonderful panelists
and presenters speak and not inject too much of myself into this.
But I have been asked to cover some of the logistics
and the details for today.
And I'd like to get that out of the way first.
We're going to have an introductory presentation, plenary presentation
by Dr. Lionel Corbett which will take
up the first session of the morning.
Then there will be three separate panels as you see on your schedule.
Respectfully we've been asked to tell you to hold the questions.
I know I don't want to have everyone frustrated but try to jot them
down if you don't remember them.
And we'll hold the questions until the panelists start.
Dr. Corbett will speak and make the presentation.
The rest of the day will be structured
around both Dr. Corbett's presentation and input and comments
from our other panelists.
There are handouts and sign up sheets
if you notice the resource guide that you have on your chairs.
I think it is an incredible contribution and the Jung Society
of Washington and especially Leslie Sawin and Mike Carbine
who put this together really deserve a lot of credit
because we are leaving with something more
than just the presentations themselves.
It's a resource to continue studying and research in the subject
for those that are interested and I'm sure there are.
The turnout is just incredible.
At the table-- at the entrance to both rooms,
there are additional material available.
And for those that are interested, the Jung Society
of Washington will make proceedings available
if you put your name on the sign up sheet.
Now due to the large size of our group I have some--
from the sacred to the mundane.
There is not going to be a formal bathroom break.
I know it's an important subject for all us as we are dealing
with the subject of aging.
[Laughter] I just wanted to kind of put you on notice.
You are welcome to get up and go if you need to.
But we will have a 10-minute, 15-minute stretches
in between the different sessions but I wanted to make sure
to tell you that in advance.   Just like going to the theater
in New York there are just not enough stalls
to go around for everybody.
I wanted to also remind you and I'm glad you are already told
about turning off your cell phones.
And for those who need it, need the fix there is wi-fi available during
the breaks not now for your convenience.
In the Jewish tradition those
that observe the Sabbath we are told you are not only not allowed to work
on the Sabbath, you are not allowed to think of work.
So you are not allowed to even think of your wi-fi or your cell phones
for the rest of the day except during the sessions.
Because we couldn't accommodate all of the people
that come there is an overflow room.   So this is being recorded
and broadcast live there I will repeat the questions during the
question and answer period so that everybody can get them straight.
I know sometimes we don't hear the questions from the audience.
Now I want-- I couldn't resist, I said I'm going to be silent but just
about 2 minutes worth I wanted to kind
of give some of my own thoughts.
It's a great honor and a privilege for me to be here today
to come all the way from New York.
And Diana Rubin, my co-director, and I have been doing programs
in Jungian studies for over 20 years.
One of our flagship programs we hold
in Ireland every year was called midlife and beyond.
And all of a sudden somehow it sneaked up on us that we are dealing
[Laughter] and the interest in this subject is just incredible
so synchronistically I remember when Mike and Leslie spoke to me first
about their idea of putting something
like this together back in the Hudson Valley.
We were speaking several years ago.
It has become a reality and kind of forced us
to deal with this issue as well.
It kind of reminds me of you know the story
that denial is not just a river in Egypt.
So we are just Willy Nilly having to deal with the next phase which is,
which is aging and we have had people come to our programs now
from as far away place as is Switzerland, Italy, Germany,
Israel even South Africa and Australia come
to hear this kind of talk.
And we expect the same kind of a turnout to dealing
with our program this coming April
to be called Re visioning later life: A Jungian Approach.
And as we see today and examining the theme
of aging we realize we do have a choice.
We can focus on the losses associated with aging
or we can choose to look at the potential gains
and the richness of later life.
The phrase I often use with people I work
with analytically is we can curse the darkness
or we can light a candle.
And those are the choices that we do have.
Later life is also a wonderful time for weeding and pruning.
We can be more ourselves and not have to deal with things
that we needed to do before.
And my experience as a therapist and more often than not
when older people and more and more are coming to therapy
at an older age they come not just to mourn although that happens
at times but to redirect their lives and their energies.
It is often the case that they find that an opportunity to change
and to learn to accept who they are as well as embark on the journey
for the next phase of their life.
And with that in mind I'm going to introduce and turn over our podium
to our plenary presenter Dr. Lionel Corbett who I have had the privilege
to know as not only a colleague but as a friend for many years.
Lionel also spoke to us on midlife.
And now is going to be addressing this subject.
At one point in his very distinguished career Dr. Corbett
also specializes in psycho geriatrics.
He is trained in psychiatry in England and is a Jungian analyst
in the Jung Institute of Chicago.
His main interests are in the religious function of the psyche
and in the development of psycho therapy as a spiritual practice.
Dr. Corbett is a core faculty member of Pacifica Graduate Institute,
a very prestigious institute for graduate studies
in Santa Barbara, California.
He lives, teaches, practices and writes in California.
And we are very pleased
that he could make the journey here to be with us today.
And it is essentially a very important person
in leading us Jungians into the next phase of our dealing with life.
He is the author of Psyche and the Sacred:
spirituality beyond religion.   The religious function of the psyche
and the Sacred Cauldron psychotherapy
as a spiritual practice.
And I'm going to embarrass him once more.
I've done it at other conferences and tell him
that he reminds me sometimes in the second century Galen,
the Greek physician wrote that the physician
who is also a philosopher is god-like.
So I'm going to put him on the spot.
And please join me in welcoming Dr. Lionel Corbett.
[ Applause ]   >> Thank you.
I will see if I can produce a miracle.
So what I'd like to talk about today is successful aging,
some aspects of successful aging and personality development
in later life, and discuss some of the ways
that we can maximize our potential during this period.
And I guess I have 2 core principles.
One is that psychological and spiritual growth
and creativity are independent of age.
And often continue until very late life.
And secondly it's a mistake to think of aging
as a period of relentless decline.
There is a good deal of current research supporting the value
of these ideas.
And I'm going to try and show that we can grow into old age
and not just sink into it.
And I want to-- in this context talk about the contribution
that Jungian psychology can make to understanding this time of life
for the individual and for society.
Jung is actually one of the initiators of modern studies
of adult development because in 1930 he wrote a paper
on the stages of life.
And in that paper he says that we wouldn't live to old age
if longevity has no meaning for the species.
He believes that it's evolved for a purpose.
The later part of life must have a significance of its own and I hope
to show some of the ways in which we can demonstrate the significance.
Now I don't want define aging too narrowly because we're dealing
with a very wide range of ages.
And there are a great differences between the oldest of the old,
people in their late 80s and 90s and younger old people.
Aging happens gradually of course and we could date the beginning
of it to midlife because this is when life starts to change.
At this point, one's relationship to the community
and to social institutions have become, well established.
Work life is peaking in terms of achievement.
But work often becomes dissatisfying and people start
to ask questions like, is this all there is?
Where am I going?
What do I really want from life and so on?
And In general at midlife people start to think
about death more often not only their physical mortality
but also the death of youthful illusions and myth
by which we've been living.
And in Jung's metaphor for the life cycle he used the image
of the sun rising to a zenith and then
at midlife gradually beginning to set.
And this begins a transition to what he called the second half of life
which he believes to be the beginning of a process
of introspection, the search for meaning and the deepening
of our spiritual life and a new level of identity.
So before I get to Jung's specific ideas let me just give a broad
outline of current perspectives on aging.
A little bit about the how the individuals
in the health care system think about and support growing older.
And then I want to offer a particular perspective
on normal psychological and spiritual development
in the same half of life.
The sheer number of people living into old age suggest that we have
to understand more about the potential for this period
because if you retire at 65 or 70 and you live for another 20
or 30 years this is period which is as long as child and adolescence.
An enormous amount of development can occur in that period.
For those of us who like numbers,
in the year 2000 there were 35 million people aged 65
and older in the US.
And of that number 4 million were over 85
about 12 percent of the population.
The estimate is that by 2030, 20 percent of the population will be 65
and older and 8.7 million people will be over 85.
So the age of 85 and over is one
of the fastest growing segments of our population.
And this is giving rise to some concern about the sheer number
of older people in the community.
Now a lot of the research in this area deals with illness and decline
and the need for healthcare and housing and the social supports
for managing disability and so on.
I don't want to spend a lot of time on that because it is
so well dealt with elsewhere.
I want to talk about enhancing wellness and development.
But I just should emphasize the fact that the social structures
that influence aging are very important in terms
of understanding the aging process.
I'm talking about thing like social class, gender, race,
social stratification, the effects of industrialization and so on.
So successful aging is also a very subjective matter.
It involves individual values, social constructions and so on.
So I don't want to insist on a norm or a standard for all older people
by insisting that all older people should be healthy
and sexually active and creative and spiritually evolved and so on.
I think if we insist on this kind of norm that would be a prejudice
which is just the opposite of traditional ageism.
A lot of gerontologist stress the importance of being active
in late life because we know that helps
to preserve physical and mental health.
But we have to be careful I think not to judge older people
as aging successfully only
if the person maintains midlife levels of activity.
If we did that then we would claim
that aging itself doesn't have a legitimate tempo
and legitimate types of activity.   And this would be a prejudice.
It would reflect our contemporary relentless search
for endless health.
And it would ignore social constraints.
And it would suggest that aging itself has no intrinsic value.
But we do have to take into account lack of opportunity based on income,
education, social status, availability of social support
and those kind of factors.
This is particularly important for marginalized people, for minorities
and for elderly women living in poverty
after a lifetime of caring for others.
Women are about 58 percent of the elderly but over 78,
70 percent of the elderly poor are women
and this been a fact that's been important
in feminist studies of aging.
So that for some feminist the family is now seen as an agent
of the oppression of women actually.
Now what about some of the stereotypes of aging,
we're still struggling with some of these stereotypes which tend
to see aging itself as a kind of disease.
This attitude has gotten better in the last 30 years thanks to the work
of people like Robert Butler and is now seen to be a misunderstanding
because now we know that old age is not the same as disease.
Age by itself doesn't tell us much
about the state of a person's health.
It's true of course that major loss of health tends
to occur after the age of 80.
But many aging people are actually quite relatively free of disease
and even the oldest old can be relatively healthy.
It's a mistaker to see aging as a period
of relentless inexorable decline in health and vitality.
What we actually see is often a long period of relative equilibrium
with very slow changes in health in such a way
that the person can adapt.
And then a rapid period of terminal decline.
And this long period of adaptation is very important
for the satisfaction in later life.
There's a long period in which vitality is maintained,
as I said as long childhood and adolescence.
And in this time a great deal of development can occur.
So the negative stereotype of aging has been shown to be untrue.
Many people are aging very well
and there are several studies to that effect.
But at the same time as we noticed
that the stereotype is untrue we also must acknowledge
that older people don't differ from younger people only
by virtue of chronological age.
There are specific developmental task of old age.
It's mot simply the perpetuation of midlife.
Ageism or the devaluation of old age is often due to the projection
of what we fear lies in store for us.
And its important for us
to acknowledge these projections otherwise we risk dealing
with old age superficially.
It's not enough just to deal with in terms of social programs
and other activities that are really just distractions that try
to disguise the real challenges of aging.
One of the problems we face as part of the aging process results
from our tendency to be socialized into particular roles
at different times of life.
And as we age we feel that we've slipped into roles
that have a reduced status.
These are roles like the retired person or the widow and so on.
And this can lead to a profound loss of self esteem
after retirement especially if the people who've reached positions
of prestige and authority who are at the summit
of their professional or business lives.
And then they are expected to accept the devalued social roles
in which suddenly their skills are no longer in demand.
Unfortunately a lot of older people themselves accept this negative
stereotype of aging.
They believe that decline is inevitable.
And they feel limited and therefore they don't achieve the potential
that old age can bring.
There's an unconscious assumption very often n the culture that for
as long possible the older person should try to behave
as if he or she were young.   I think this attitude is a mistake.
It just postpones dealing with the specific late life
developmental tasks.
The transition into old age has no clear demarcation and we know
that any transitional period of life may trigger emotional distress.
We don't have adequate social provisions
to help people with this transition.
We don't have rites of passage or initiations
that would socially validate the transition for the individual.
And one of Jung's major points is
that difficulty meeting an important developmental task a fear
of taking the next step along one's path
of development is an important cause of emotional disturbance.
So I want to take a few minutes to look adaptation to old age.
Just mentioning that the negative stereotypes here have,
have encouraged discriminatory social policies
like restricted employment practices or a type of nursing home care
that I've seen in which all the residents are seen to depend,
seen to be dependent with no recognition
of their strengths and differences.
These stereotypes are a social fiction.
They're based on a misunderstanding of the behavior of the elderly.
For example, there's sometimes a tendency among the older people
to deliberately reduce their social interactions
and that can often be interpreted as a loss of interest.
It's actually an adaptive strategy to conserve energy
so that it can only be deployed for valued activity and relationships.
Older people sometimes seem to lose control over their lives;
actually they are often very good at getting the help of others
for activities that become difficult with their age while
at the same time maintaining an overall sense of control.
Older people can adapt their goals and their sense of self
to their physical limitations.   They can compensate psychologically
and spiritually for biological decline.
It's very important for healthcare professionals
to avoid the traditional stereotypes when dealing with the elderly
because they otherwise might employ inappropriate developmental criteria
and they may seek pathology where there is none.
Many older people remain highly competent and able
to continue education and work.
Older people are very heterogenous and diverse.
We see this-- a great deal in the autobiographies and biographies
of the elderly and also in the portrayal of aging in films.
A great deal of plasticity is possible.
Older people are much less homogenous than other age groups.
Now until fairly recently successful aging was defined as the absence
of disease and disability.
That was a medical model and it didn't work very well.
A more recent and more comprehensive definition suggest
that successful aging has to do
with the individual's perceived satisfaction with the ability
to adapt to physical and functional changes while maintaining a
connection to others, interdependence and a sense
of meaning and purpose in life.
This is a theory of adaptation and transcendence which is taking hold.
It's very important to focus on the individual's perspective,
adding the existential and spiritual domains.
An older person with physical limitations
and chronic illness may still experience satisfaction with his
or her ability to cope if life is otherwise meaningful.
And some of the satisfaction is gained by learning new material
in later life, so I want to say little about learning in later life
because part of the negative stereotype is
that you can't teach an old dog a new tricks,
it turns out that that's not true.
And nowadays there's a great deal of emphasis on learning in later life.
And there's a developing field now of educational gerontology
and programs such as Elderhostel, the Osher Lifelong Learning Program,
the University of the Third Age and so on and so on.
Retired people have a life time of experience and a vast amount
of specialized knowledge and they can pass this on to other people.
Older people often feel they want to spend the rest
of their life doing something meaningful.
There seems to be an inherent human imperative to keep learning.
Unfortunately, our current brain research supports this possibility.
There are some good recent neurological researches showing
that until the late 70's at least part
of the brain cell called dendrites, which are very important
for new learning continue to grow in the cerebral cortex.
The dendrites are branches of the neuron
that are important for new learning.
There's also some evidence that frequent brain stimulation
in old age may reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease,
although this evidence is not clear it may be that people
with healthy brains are more likely to engage
in mentally stimulating activity.
But there's a great deal of advantage to learning in late life.
One can choose a topic out of interest without it being tied
to a career and time to study
of course maybe more available after retirement.
So a word now about psychological and personality development
in the second half of life; it seems as if successful adaptation
to growing is very much influenced by the level
of personality development that one has achieved in early life.
In other words if you want
to be a very nice sweet little old lady you really should start
And life long personality disorder does not bode well for happiness
in later life [laughter].
But the traditional stereotypes are wrong, the traditional stereotypes
of older people are that they are stubborn and rigid and afraid
to take risk or sometimes of course that they're graceful
and dignified and wise and so on.
In fact there are different psychological characteristics
which have different developmental paths as we age.
Some personality traits grow, some stay stable across the life span
and some traits actually fade away.
So there's some continuity of personality and some change
but personality across a lifetime can be quite malleable.
And it turns out that genetic factors which we used to think are
so important become less important in later life.
If we look at identical twins, as they age they become less similar
in the way their genes express themselves suggesting
that the environment and occupation and diet
and life experience actually plays a major role in gene expression
and personality development.
If you've had a consistent life environment, like the same job,
that tends to encourage consistency of personality in late life.
If you've had a social role in your work life that requires authority,
you tend to grow into old age with a certain level
of interpersonal dominance.
And if you've had a life long job in this--
in a helping profession that requires empathy
that ability increases in later life.
Financial difficulties in later life can produce anxiety that's never
been felt before and that can become incorporated
into the personality for the first time.
I mentioned that retirement
from a high status job can lower self-esteem but retirement
from a job that one has never liked can actually produce new levels
of contentment.
What is interesting is that with increasing age, the complexity
of emotions and the ability
to elaborate emotions actually increase.
And I found that older people get better at expressing
and regulating their emotional life.
And there is some research which suggests
that older people can minimize negative feelings
and maximize positive feelings, partly I think
because older people tend to narrow their social circle to be
with people who are most emotionally satisfying to them.
Overall, there's no doubt that aging produces an opportunity
for continuing development of the personality.
And in fact personality might be the pivotal dimension of aging.
A lot of people in late life function very well psychologically.
They have a very complex inner life.
They have intact cognitive abilities,
good control with their impulses and the ability to take
in new ideas and experiences.
Thanks to a life time of accumulated experiences a lot
of older people are actually resilient and very good at dealing
with loss which of course is very important
if you have a gradually less potent sense of self which is one
of the core difficulties in later life, this can be a source
of narcissistic injury in the absence of alternative sources
of self-esteem such as wisdom which I want to get to.
There are a few factors which have been found to be important
for development in later life.
The known factors are relationships with others, the life long pursuit
of learning, good social connections and an attitude of acceptance,
optimism and caring for one-self and others.
There are other qualities of personality
that predict a positive aging.
These are equanimity, gratitude and hope, joy, wonder, curiosity, humor,
that's very important and positive self perception.
Of course there are still other factors which are helpful,
a stable marriage, a healthy lifestyle,
exercise, not smoking and so on.   I don't mean to sound preachy here
but all these things become very important in later life.
Engagement in work that gives meaning
and purpose are also very important.
Another factor that some research shows is what's been called
internally guided behavior, the ability to listen
to one's inner voice and rely on it and not on other people.
Some of the factors which the research shows are not necessarily
correlated with positive aging are quite surprising.
These are money, political affiliation,
the longevity of one's parents and most
of these indicate a spirituality rather than traditional religion.
I'll come to that in a minute, is positively associated with aging
and psychosocial function in later life but there are some studies
which cast some doubt on that.
So, overall in later life the person is less driven by ego concerns,
more interested in his or her larger community and rather
than despairing, the person ideally develops what Erikson
in his classic studies called integrity.
He or she comes to terms with life, understands his or her life
in the context of life as a whole and is at peace with life as it is.
One can face the difficulties of this period
with some equanimity while sustaining a sense
of meaning and purpose.
Sometimes a life review is helpful in late life
in which old issues are revisited from a new perspective,
leading to a new resolution and a sense of identity.
And sometimes the sense of self or the sense
of a coherent identity is threatened in old age
and if this isn't managed it can lead to despair.
But the alternative is wisdom and a sense of self transcendence
so that one can be involved with life in the face of death.
Now the second half of life can be a time
of renewed meaning I mentioned, one knows one's self.
One has confronted one's own shortcomings, one's shadow,
the dark side of the personality.
And so the use of projection often decreases
and is replaced by more mature defenses.
Compared to the sometimes black and white or overly idealistic thinking
of adolescence in young adults, in older people,
reasoning becomes very complex and nuanced,
more subtle and more contextual.   One can reinterpret the past.
One can reformulate one's philosophy of life.
One can redevelop new values and new goals
and see one's life story in a new light.
One can look back at events in one's life and reinterpret them.
One's subjective sense of the meaning of life can change over time
and life can be seen from a different perspective.
One can become less egocentric, more open to working for the good
of one's society and less concerned with social norms and inhibitions.
We often hear older people say, "I'm too old to worry
about what other people think."
Maslow, in the 1960's noted that self actualizing people--
this was in a group of people over 50, were often quite spontaneous
and free of social conventions combine the kind
of childlike innocence with sophisticated judgment.
So the stereotype of the old person as selfish and rigid and envious
of the young, I would suggest results from a failure
of development and these personality traits can be found at any age.
Now, let me return to Jung's specific 1930 paper
on the Stages of Life.
In that paper he proposed that the idea
of different developmental tasks at different stages of life,
although today we tend not to think in terms of fixed stages
because we recognize that the same developmental tasks
and challenges can occur to people at any age.
But by and large, Jung's idea was that youth is a period
for the development of personality, the establishment of a career,
a place in the world and of family.
And then he says we reach what he called the noon
of life or the midlife period.
And this initiates a developmental period that goes to the end of life.
So I'm going to assume as I discuss this paper reasonable economic
circumstances, reasonable health, reasonable opportunity
and a social network just as the background here.
But given those things here are some of the developmental possibilities
that he's taken from the Jung's paper,
one is the development of unused potential.
During the average working life, we only have time to actualize a part
of our potential because of the demands of work and family.
There may be all kinds of creative talents and unused aspects
of the personality that have had to remain dormant,
an ability such as art or music or writing may have been started early
in life but not pursued and now we can rediscover that.
One of the advantages of a broad early education is to sow seeds
that can be reaped in later life.
And I've seen older people discover very surprising new abilities.
And the other thing that's important from the Jungian point
of view is the development of certain psychological functions
that have never been developed and that become important in later life.
And here I have to digress slightly into what's called Jung's typology
which is the basis of the very popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
I won't go much into too much detail here but I'll just try
and show how this works developmentally.
There is a certain type of person that we call a feeling type,
this is a type of person who's always been sensitive
to other peoples feelings, good at relationships, interested in harmony
and warmth between people.
These types of people are often in helping professions.
Now, what they have to develop is their thinking function,
the opposite to feeling.
And it's useful in later life to develop that function
by studying a discipline that requires rigorous
or logical thinking such as science or philosophy.
Conversely, a person who has always been an excellent logical thinker
in a profession such as law which requires good thinking,
this is the kind of person who may not have paid any attention to his
or her emotional life or interpersonal values.
Now, in later life this is the time for them
to develop the feeling function and take up an activity such as working
in a hospice or something like that requires the development
of a neglected capacity for feeling.
What Jung called the sensation type who is practical and down
to earth can now develop their intuition by studying religion
or literature or mythology.
Whereas the intuitive imaginative individual
who has always been immersed in the imagination
or in spiritual pursuits may explore hands-on work like gardening
or sculpting and go yoga or something like that.
Another important Jungian idea in this paper is the development
of what has been called the contrasexual aspects
of the personality.
The idea here is that a man has to develop his femininity and a woman,
her masculinity in the interest of wholeness and this may happen
in the later part of life.
This is a controversial topic which will get me into trouble if I going
into it in detail because it involves stereotypes of masculinity
and femininity which fortunately are now dissolving.
But in its classical form,
stereotypically masculine men starting in midlife
and later life was said to need
to become more receptive and more nurturing.
And their female counterparts
who had been stereotypically feminine were said to develop,
to need to develop assertiveness
and other stereotypically masculine traits.
That was the theory but in fact the research does in fact show
that older men do tend to experience themselves as increasingly sensitive
and older women experience themselves
as increasingly more assertive and independent,
so some of Jung's original idea is actually being borne
out by some of the research.
Now the maintenance of self-esteem is very important as well.
I mentioned that until we retire,
self-esteem is constantly consolidated by career achievements,
by financial success, by appearance, athletic ability and so on and so on
but these become less available in later in life,
so one needs new sources of self-esteem.
These are usually things like friendships, family, humor,
wisdom and one's fund of knowledge and life experience.
But it may be very difficult to maintain self-esteem
in the face economic and health problems and agism.
The problem is whether one can deal with the deficits
and the challenges while capitalizing
on the assets and benefits.
And I'd like to mention some of the assets and benefits in terms
of new roles and responsibilities.   Family roles of course change.
Relationships with grown children change,
a degree of low reversal happens
that one's growing children might assume the role of caregiver
and then one has to learn mature dependence.
The role of grandparent becomes very important developmentally
for children and grandparents.   Grandparents who tell the stories
of their own childhoods are living historians of the family.
They connect the generations, they link up and they preserve the sense
of the continuity of the family.
Now, social roles are very important.
There's a tendency for the life world of the older person to shrink
as people die, so it's essential to retain the ability
to form new friendships, although most of us realize now
that there can be no real restitution for the loss
of lifelong relationships.
Sexuality is also very important in later life.
Ideally, it should be maintained but of course we have problems
like the unavailability of a partner.
I find a lot of people are ignorant
of the normal age related changes in sexual functioning.
And there's a great deal of social prejudice
against late life sexuality which can contribute to its cessation.
At this time of life, sexuality--
to cut a long story short is less a matter of urgency
and more an expression of love and affection and loyalty,
the pleasure of touch and closeness.
Now a word about civic roles and I got this list mostly
from a conversation I had in 1980 about--
1980 with Maggie Kuhn who is the founder
of the Gray Panthers in a conversation.
And we came up with this list of roles and responsibilities
for older people whose energies and abilities are still intact.
They can be educators and transmitters
of knowledge of the past.
They can be social critics and historians.
They can know about past mistakes and warn about repeating them.
They can be an advocate for people without power or voice.
They can be a worker for social change.
A lifetime of dealing with the system at least enables us to get
to know it and become an effective advocate.
They can have a watchdog role in public life.
They can be ethical counselors.
They can articulate the conscience of the culture without being accused
of serving their own careers.
And they can be a futurist, a long life I think points beyond its self.
So, older people can be concerned
with the well-being of future generations.
Now, I think one of the most important developments certainly
for Jung and for me is in later life is the development
of one's spirituality.   So let me say a little about that.
And here I'm going to make the usual distinction between religion
as an organized set of beliefs, a historical institution and so on.
And spirituality as a personal sense of connection to the sacred
or to ultimate reality, the pursuit of meaning and purpose and so on.
There is of course a variable relationship
between one's religion and one's spirituality.
Sometimes one's religion allows one to develop spiritually
and sometimes I'm afraid religion gets
in the way of one's spirituality.
Jung thought that one of the functions of organized religion is
to prevent people having a religious experience.
[Laughter] The point being that you might have a religious experienced
that contravenes the institutional attitudes
which would be very unfortunate.
But one can be very spiritually organized
without any interest in organized religion.
The research shows that some aspects
of one's spirituality remain stable throughout life but there are
of course specific spiritual challenges like coming to terms
with death and loss and illness.
And in that situation, spirituality becomes very important.
I think one of the main questions here is, will the losses
of old age produce bitterness and despair and grief
or will it produce a personal deepening, a sacrifice,
a surrender of the ego in the service of something larger?
Will one's own experience of loss and pain and the prospect
of death release compassion and empathy
and selflessness towards others?
Can we let go of the things that have
to be let go off actually embrace the diminished physical situation
but recognize a spiritual process going on so that we retain
and develop the spiritual core of the personality?
This is an area in which Jungian psychology is particularly helpful.
Not least because it allows one to develop a spirituality
that is completely independent of any religious institution,
independent of doctrine and dogma
and instead one's spirituality can be based on direct experience
of the sacred which I've tried to show in a series
of books and papers and so on.
But in brief, it means developing a relationship between the individual,
the personal level or the ego and the transpersonal, in Jungian terms
that would be the transpersonal levels of the psyche
or the transpersonal levels of consciousness.
For Jung, this was a time when one naturally becomes introspective
and one is interested in cultivating the inner life.
Spiritual concerns do tend to increase in later life.
Although there are studies which show that older people,
some older people have no interest in spirituality.
These are people with humanistic concerns.
Some of them are only interested in youthfulness
and they consider spirituality irrelevant so,
this is not by any means as some kind of universal value.
But let me just mention some more components
of late life spirituality.
Sometimes this is very subtle and not deliberate.
It can occur as a result of the social
and psychological processes of aging.
I've heard aging described as a natural monastery
because it kind of forces one inward.
And this doesn't mean attendance at a religious community or practices
like meditation or things like that.
Spirituality in late life has been described
by Lars Tornstam as Gerotranscendence.
By this he means that the older person experiences a shift in his
or her perspective on life.
From a materialistic, role-oriented pragmatic approach to a kind
of cosmic approach, a transcendent approach to life, life-death space
and time are seen as involving mystery and seen
against the backdrop of eternity and assuming reasonable levels
of opportunity and education here and so on.
And of course this can happen at anytime of life
in response to serious illness.
But when it happens, one becomes less self-centered, less concerned
with possessions, less concerned with physical appearance.
And I find a lot of older people develop meaning
and joy in simple things.
They become introspective and a great--
and develop a greater sense of connection to the world at large,
a larger view of history as well.
So the idea of Gerotranscendence is a little bit controversial.
It's been seen as romantic and unrealistic
but there are some studies that give partial support for the idea.
Tornstam himself assumes this development is innate.
He doesn't know what the source of it is.
For Jungians, this would be a development that's prompted
by the transpersonal self, this is the self written with a capital "S",
an image of the divine in the personality
which Jung believes is constantly unfolding
and access an inner stimulus to development.
Now, more aspects of late life spirituality; well one is to let go
of the dominance of the ego.
A Jungian analyst, Jane Wheelwright, late in her life said that preparing
for death "is like preparing for a journey to a foreign country
where one doesn't know what to expect.
But where one knows somehow it's necessary to cut
down on the sheer quantity of one's baggage in order
to make the trip a success."
Baggage means here ego concerns like ambition and conflict and so on.
One has to learn acceptance and become more deeply one's self.
In Jung's language as we individuate,
as we develop the personality that we were suppose to become,
we realize that something is aware of us.
He says the ego becomes aware that it is the object
of a super ordinate subject.
You realize that some larger intelligence is aware of you.
Here are some other important Jungian approaches;
one is the discovery of meaning by looking at its main theme--
looking at one's life main themes, periods of suffering
and struggle during a life review.   I should parenthetically say
that life review isn't always a good idea.
Sometimes it can cause great distress.
But sometimes people discover what they'd refer to as a sense
of destiny, the sense that one has been guided, that one has been led,
as if one has been following a kind of thread.
So that looking back on events, in retrospect they seem
to have a meaning one didn't realized at the time.
One can sometimes discover mythic themes in one's life
which allows one to place one's life in a larger perspective.
You might realize that you've been a wounded healer or a teacher
or a priest or something like that all your life without realizing it.
I mentioned that Jung believe
that people wouldn't grow old unless longevity had a meaning
for the species.
Now for him, meaning is the fruit of psychological life.
And he says that the meaning and purpose of the second half
of life is contributing to the culture,
making culture what he called a fecundity of the spirit,
then the development of wisdom.
Wisdom takes time to achieve and it's not quantifiable.
I'm relieved to be able to say, given the cult of empiricism
that I am surrounded by now by [inaudible].
Wisdom is a mixture of knowledge, life experience, emotional maturity,
discernment, mature judgment and insight into human nature.
And it takes a long time to achieve.
Jung thought that the natural end of life is not senility, it is wisdom.
He said that wisdom means that you align your own consciousness
with the stream of images that come up to you in creative work,
in dreams, in visionary experiences and so on.
And this helps you develop the wholeness of the personality.
Helps you to become more and more the person you were destined
to become and incarnate more and more of your potentials.
And of course he points out like as Viktor Frankl and others do
that wisdom comforts suffering and meaning comforts suffering.
There are other writers on wisdom.
Kohut, the Chicago psycho analyst says
"wisdom means we accept the limitation of our physical,
intellectual and emotional powers".   We renounce unmodified narcissism,
that might be difficult in this city.
[Laughter] And we develop an attitude to life compounded
of intellect, humor and the acceptance of our transience.
Erikson said "wisdom is the detached but active concern
with life in the face of death".
Meister Echart, I like his definition, in the 14th century said
"wisdom consist of finding the next thing you have to do,
doing it with your whole heart and finding delight in doing it".
The implication of course is that if you feel that you are guided,
if you have faith then the next thing you have
to do is what you're suppose to be doing.
I should mention parenthetically that there is some research
that suggests that research doesn't--
that spirituality does not always develop in later life.
This may be largely anecdotal but I find that it tends to.
As long as we define spirituality rather broadly in terms of meaning
and values and a sense of a larger order in the universe, something--
the sense that there is something beyond one's self and so on.
So, there is a good deal of research now in this area
which is now called religious gerontology,
the study of religion in late life.
The researched shows that by and large participation
in religious services tends to increase and it does seem--
the research shows there is some benefit to physical
and mental health if you participate in religious services in later life
but the studies are mixed.
It may be that it's not the religion per se, it's--
what's helpful is that you feel part of a community that you're helped
by other members of the community and that religion buffers you,
it gives you a sense of order and meaning.
It enhances self esteem.   It offers forgiveness.
It offers hope for change and healing.
It offers promise of life after death.
These are very important coping strategies
and that may be why people participate not
because of theology particularly.
So the spirituality of old age is not necessarily a matter
of being instrumental in the world or trying
to influence events in the world.
It's really a process of changing one's self rather than the world.
This has been called passive mastery.
This doesn't-- being conformity, it mens wisdom, it means a change
in one's heart and mind, empathy with the world,
sensitivity to others rather than trying to change, alter events.
I do want to mention as a caveat the problem
of what's called spiritual bypassing.
I do-- the interiority that can develop
in late life should not be used as a retreat
or a defensive escape from responsibility.
Now a word about creativity in late life,
Jung places a great deal of stress on creativity.
He thinks it's one of the most important human instincts.
Somewhere, I couldn't find the quote but he wrote that the person
who does not build will demolish and destroy.
So creativity is essential to well being and aliveness
in old age as in the other time.
And it has been found that people with creative vocations tend
to be satisfied with life.
If you participate in activities like art or dance or music
or literature, that tends to encourage successful aging.
And there are many examples, amazing examples
of creativity among older people.
I am thinking of Edison, [inaudible], Michelangelo, Picasso,
Gandhi-- I looked up this recently,
he was 72 when he led the movement of Indian independence.
And Bertrand Russell was being arrested because of his fights
for nuclear disarmament in Britain, well into his 90s.
So there's an important connection between one's spirituality
and one's creativity because of the sense
that creativity actually arises from the transpersonal dimension.
For many people, creativity is actually a divine gift.
Some writers equate creativity with the divine itself.
I should mention for the sake of balance
that classical psychoanalytic writers tend to see creativity
as a sublimation of restitution for destructive impulses.
I think there's more to it than that.
[Laughter] Creativity I think is a spiritual practice in its own right.
It makes us be open to whatever wants to emerge,
trusting that there is something in us that wants to be heard.
It liberates meaning.   It renews life.
And it often allows people to discover their unlived life.
It allows what's very important to Jung that--
what he calls the relativizing of the ego.
The sense that the ego, the sense of me, myself, that I participate
in relation to a larger reality.
And if nothing else, the creative process makes one feel alive
and leads to self discovery.
It often emerges as a response to furious loss and trauma
or the collapse of meaning.
Creativity in later life may help you mourn loss.
And it does seem to be-- I think a link between death,
creativity and transformation.
Sometimes we create as a way of facing death.
And when we have a major loss, a bereavement sometimes the grief
that goes on forces us to choose between going on living
in a creative way or giving up on life.
So, do I have a few moments without encroaching on eternity here?
Five minutes.
Okay. So just a word about facing death
which I know other people are going to talk about.
Because I mentioned personality development
and I think one's relationship to death has a very important effect
on personality development in late life.
There are some older people of course
who are very anxious about approaching death.
But that I've also met many older people who accept death,
the possibility of death and they are say, "I'm powerless
to prevent it and that liberates me to just enjoy life without worrying
about it, I can't prevent it."
It is true that thoughts of aging increase as we age.
And there are certain types of dreams
that the Jungian world thinks might predict death.
I say this rather hesitantly but occasionally I see dreams of packing
for a journey from which one knows one will not return;
that is sometimes a predictor of death.
Or sometimes marriage to an unknown figure and there's a mythic theme
of marriage to death that's found
in many cultures going all the way back to ancient Greece.
But in Jung's paper on the stages of life, he stresses the importance
of death as an essential constituent of life.
Jung says, "It is psychologically healthy to discover in death a goal
and a fulfillment of life's meaning and not think of death
as a meaningless cessation."   This is a quote, "From the middle
of life onward only he remains vitally alive
who is ready to die with life."
So let me wind up about how I would define successful aging myself.
I would actually prefer that we ask the elderly how they define it
themselves and not try to impose the theoretical model onto them.
I think old people know themselves what aging well means to them.
I think we should gear our research to the area of successful aging
around the-- in the area of successful aging
around the elderly themselves.
Because I found that what elderly people consider
to be successful aging, may or may not coincide
with what any particular theorist thinks is successful aging.
I think it's about whether the individual is satisfied
with one's quality of life.
I said we shouldn't use a biomedical model.
We've got to maximize psychological resources,
self efficacy, resilience, and so on.
We have to move away
from a pathology based perspective on aging.
We have to use a psychosocial model that emphasizes life satisfaction,
self-esteem, feeling and control of one's life, having a purpose
in life, being actively engaged and maintaining a sense of belonging.
And I think these are the factors that strengthen one's will to live.
So I'd like to end with a plea that as a society we try
to develop a positive affirmation of old age.
As Thomas Cole put it, as well as supporting good health in late life,
we have to find the moral and spiritual significance
of decay, dependency and death.   Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Our format for the next phase of the morning will be each
of our panelists will be speaking for 10 to 15 minutes approximately.
And I would ask you again to hold your questions until all three
of them speak and then we'll open up the floor
to dialogue with each other.
Some of them may have comments and remarks to make about Lionel's talk,
about their own fellow panelists presentation
and then we'll make sure to have time
for audience participation as well.
And I will introduce them, each one at a time.
I don't want to tax our memories
by having you hear all three bios at one time.
So, we'll go one at a time.
And I'm very lucky because I've been privileged
to know all three of them.
They've all presented for us at our Jung on the Hudson,
our Jung in Ireland programs over the years and really we're
in for a wonderful next phase as well.
Our first speaker came all the way
from the UK especially just to be with us.
Margaret Wilkinson, who is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist,
a Jungian analyst and a professional member of the Society
for Analytical Psychology in London called the SAP.
She's a member of the editorial board of the Journal
of Analytical Psychology and for those that are not familiar
with that journal, it's considered one of the most important
and prestigious clinical Jungian journals.
She lectures internationally
and has published a number of articles and books.
One of the most important ones being coming and recent, Coming into Mind:
the Mind-Brain Relationship-- A Jungian clinical perspective
and we had the privilege of having a program,
mind-brain research a few years ago at the Hudson Valley
and Margaret was with us for a whole week and really is one
of the leading people in the Jungian world on this particular topic.
She and Joe Cambray both have done a lot of work on it
and we were privileged to be with them.
And the insights that they have I know will be very valuable
for all of us.
She has a special interest in the application of these insights
from a contemporary neuroscience point of view to analytical work.
So please join me in welcoming Margaret Wilkinson all the way
from the UK.   [ Applause ]
>> Thank you Aryeh.
I'm honored to take part in this very special event.
Today as I respond to Dr. Corbett's elegant
and insightful plenary paper, I wish to emphasize three key themes
that emerged from it for me in which research into neuropsycho-biology
of the healthy aging mind would endorse.
So I'm going to turn first to the importance of relationship
for productive and vibrant aging.
Coping with change challenges each of us as we seek
to mange our own aging process.
In thinking about this, I find my self turning first
to the earliest years of life for it's actually the quality
of our earliest relationships that determines our ability
to develop the robust sense of self that enable us
to manage change successfully.
Lionel spoke about the little old lady
who is managing aging successfully and he said look back to 16.
I would say no, look back to 6 weeks.
It's that early that in a way we start to prepare for how we're going
to mange the later part of life.
Allan Schore has observed affective processes appear
to lie at the core of self.
And it's the quality of our early experience
that affects the ongoing development of the brain and the emerging sense
of self as new neural connections are made as a result
of the interactions with significant others right throughout life.
Jung observed, one can actually see the conscious mind coming
into existence.
Jean Knox amplifies this with her observation, that mind
and meaning emerged out of developmental processes
and the experience of interpersonal relationships.
Corbett underlines the continuing significance
of epigenetics in managing later life.
He observes that lifestyle is as important
as genetics for determining health.
And indeed environmental stimuli have been shown
to affect the plasticity of the hippocampus.
Relationships offer new opportunities for change
and development in later life.
Such change sometimes occurs through the very special relationships
which develop between the old and the young.
For instance grandchildren or other young people who needs support
and nurture and who benefits so much from the opportunity to relate
to others in a meaningful way.
Why do I value the grand parenting role so highly as thus Cozolino
in his book on successful healthy aging.
Because while it offers the opportunity to support the building
of a secure attachment in the young that will stay on that young person
in good stead for the rest of their life.
It stimulates healthy brain functioning
in the grandparent or caring adult.   [ Pause ]
Good grand parenting may play a significant role
in the young person's development of a healthy sense of self.
I'm often surprised by the capacity for a secure attachment shown
by my patients who've had really difficult early life experience
and whose parents were unavailable in one way or another.
So often it's a likely grandparent with a creative
and engaging approach to life who has played a formative part
in these patients' experience.
Indeed, I'm indebted to my own grandmother in this respect.
It was she who had time to read to me,
to nurture a love of books and learning.
She who opened the world up to me, telling me of her childhood
in India, recounting her far-flung, her journeys to far-flung parts
of the globe, taking me on my first trip abroad,
stimulating in me the love of travel that brings me her today.
She would love to have seen a film which you haven't yet got
in the states but we've had out in England since January,
its coming here in May, I think.
And it's called The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and it has Judi Dench
and Maggie Smith and a host of other oldies who you'll very much enjoy.
This film really portrays a creative old age.
And it does it with warmth and good humor.
And it's set in India of course
which is why she would have loved it.
Such grand parenting as I received keeps the grandparent young
and in touch with the changing world and the world
of the younger generation,
such mutually creative experience keeps the grandparent's brain
in a state of learning which we've heard is so good for the aging mind.
It stimulates brain health as surely
as exercise helps to preserve mobility.
And so to my second point which is the value of resilience,
Corbett reminds us that a robust or resilient psyche may be thought
of as a developmental achievement based on a lifetime
of accumulated experience which stance us in good stead
for the last phases of our life.
With Ruth Lanius, I understand resilience to be the capacity
of a system exposed to hazards to adapt in order
to maintain adequate functioning.
And with Corbett, this depends on the ability to listen
to an inner voice and rely on it.
In later life, it's our capacity for meaningful relating and resilience
of the resiliency agendas that means we may be better able to cope
when confronted with the experiences of loss and grief
which are an inevitable part of aging.
The losses that face us in later life may be the loss of partner,
children, family, friends or the loss of the meaningful relationships
that have been part of our working lives.
But it is resilience built into the psyche
out of good early relationships that enables us to cope and even to grow
when confronted by experiences of change and loss,
such resilience stance us in good stead.
Professor [inaudible] speaking at a meeting of the Rural Society
in England commented, "Old age can be enjoyed;
it doesn't have to be endured."
Corbett reminds us of the possibility of finding meaning
and joy in the simple things and developing a greater sense
of connection to the world at large.
As we live longer, so we are just coming
to understand the natural changes which occur as the brain ages.
Now we know that the adult brain exhibits still a considerable amount
of structural plasticity, including the addition of new neurons as well
as changes in the connections between existing neurons.
Nevertheless, many older people remain unduly frightened
as they notice their explicit memory beginning to fail.
Fear makes it difficult for us to understand
that mild memory impairment represents the onset
of the natural aging process.
It does not necessarily indicate the onset of dementia.
It's often difficult to access fears about failing abilities
and therefore difficult to assess people who seek
to hide deficits from others.
The brain and how it functions changes
in many ways as we-- as it ages.
Carter observes, recent research shows
that most neurons remain healthy until you die but brain volume
and size steadily decreases from the age of 20 to 90, this might imply
that it's a case of going steadily downhill all the way
from the age of 20.
However, the healthy brain can compensate for the effects of age
and mental functioning may even improve.
We know that some brain areas may take over from others in order
to maintain efficient functioning in older people.
Researcher also suggests that myelin,
the substance that insulates the axons of neurons
and improves conductivity increases in the temporal
and frontal lobes in middle age.
This may account for the intellectual
and professional growth spurt that occurs for some in their 50's
and even 60's which was perhaps previously attributed merely
to being freer from family responsibilities.
The two hemispheres of the brain that function asymmetrically
in youth begin to function with greater symmetry in old age.
It suggested that this may also help to compensate for the decline
in the effective functioning of the prefrontal cortex
and the left hippocampus.
Explicit memory requires the hippocampus to be able
to pull the component parts of an experience together, that's the why,
the when, the where, the how of memory in order
to produce a whole memory for us.
Its hippocampal functioning involved in recall rather than recognition
that becomes less efficient as we age that results in the tip
of the tongue phenomenon that we all know so well
and that begins to be so frustrating.
It may be that other areas are actually drawn upon to compensate
for this hippocampal deficit.
And indeed meaning making has been shown to increase gradually
from middle age to the young elderly but then
to decline in the very elderly.
These changes in functional plasticity may occur in the absence
Corbett finally reminds us that there still remain a variety
of developmental possibilities for individuals
in the second half of life.
So I want to turn lastly to the resourcefulness
that can see us through this process.
A lively approach to mind, mental activity linked
with physical activity, a good diet
and adequate sleep have all been shown to buffer the brain
against the effects of aging.   Higher levels of education
or occupational attainment are also thought to give added protection.
Chess, reading, physical exercise such as dancing--
sorry, as well as learning any new skill,
including surfing the internet all have their supporters amongst those
who seek to help older people maintain healthy brain functioning.
Physical exercise needs to be carefully tailored to the needs
and capacities of the individual patient.
An instructor may unwittingly set targets which are above
and beyond the capacity of an elderly patient to manage.
Unrealistic targets only lead to failed treatments
and feed depression in the elderly.
I recall a rather fierce physical exercise program being set for one
of my elderly patients by a trainer.
This then exacerbated the physical problems that the patients had,
brought on anxiety and depression against--
about aging which together caused my client to come to see me.
Concerning diet and a healthy brain, researchers--
this where you'll all start writing my-- notes on what I'm saying.
Researchers stressed the values of antioxidants for healthy neurons,
folic acid for memory, fatty acids for reduced risk
of cognitive dysfunction and dementia and phytoestrogen
for memory executive function and a decreased risk of Alzheimer's.
Cozolino argues that a sleep deprivation affects attention,
concentration and memory.
Quality of sleep should always be investigated when dealing
with disorders of cognition in older patients.
Many patients today face their later years living on their own,
checking out support networks, perhaps exploring
with the patient how these may be established
or strengthened is often a key aspect
of therapy for this age group.
One patient who'd come to see me had moved 200 miles north
with her husband to be near young family members.
Soon after their move, he died.
She didn't want to overburden the young with her ills but rather
to continue to be of help to them.
One of her first steps was to seek out a therapist to help her
with her grieving process.
But gradually she established a small network of supportive friends.
She valued highly the ones with whom she could celebrate life
at the same time as being able to discuss strategies
for managing the more difficult aspects of living alone
with failing health and ultimately facing death.
Her resourcefulness practiced over a lifetime enabled a creative approach
to this period of her life.
Corbett has treated us to a far ranging exploration
of the nature of wisdom.
I can only choose one aspect of his comments to highlight and it is
that of wisdom as emergent, born of life experience.
Emerging, Corbett suggests out of the attempt to balance despair
against a sense of integrity.
With the wisdom that comes with age, an inner voice may emerge that is
in Jung words, "The voice of a fuller life,
of a wider more comprehensive consciousness."
In conclusion I would just say
that in England this year we're celebrating the diamond jubilee
of the reign of Queen Elizabeth the second.
Our queen is now in her 85th year.
Last year, the queen undertook hundreds of public commitments,
including state visits at home and abroad.
Let no one tell us that the elderly should be sidelined or put
on the scrap heap, rather let them be valued for their wisdom,
they tenacity and their staying power.
Thank you.   [ Applause ]
>> Thank you.
Our next panelist and presenter is Dr. Joseph Cambray,
who is also somebody I know for a long time.
And I'm very pleased that he has taken the time
from a busy schedule to be with us.
He is the president of the International Association
for Analytical Psychology which is the main Jungian organization
in the world.   So, he is busy administering
to several thousand Jungian analyst egos during the course of the year
and it's obviously able to do a lot of good.
Aside from that, he is also a consulting editor to the Journal
of Analytical Psychology, which is based in London,
and the Jungian analyst with private practices in Boston, Massachusetts
and Providence, Rhode Island.
He is on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School Center
for Psychoanalytic Studies as well as a member
of the New England Society for Jungian Analyst
and the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association.
So, Dr. Cambray is very involved
in the Jungian work literally around the globe.
Among his many publication are Synchronicity: nature and psyche
in an interconnected universe and along with his coeditor Linda Carter
who we're pleased is here with us today as well,
a book called Analytical Psychology:
Contemporary Perspectives in Jungian Analysis.
So I would like to officially welcome and join me
in welcoming Dr. Joseph Cambray.   [Applause]
>> Thank you Aryeh.
And I'd also like to thank AARP at the Library of Congress
and the Jung Society of Washington
for hosting this historic event, I think.
The Library of Congress, I just want to say one word is has put
on an enormous number of interesting programs, I think.
And the inclusion of Jung's thought in that feels to me
to be extremely important.
Next year, the library has the Kurt Eisler interview with Jung
that will be released to the public.
That's only been available to scholars
but I understand next year it is 50 years out
and that will become available.
So I hope to see more from the library in the next few years.
Now as we witness in Lionel Corbett, we have a living example
of graceful aging [laughs].
His succinct yet sweeping synthetic overview will clearly facilitate our
discussions today.
And while Dr. Corbett cannot be counted among the oldest old
by any means, he does demonstrate the capacity for reflection
and wisdom associated with seniority.
In his paper, he highlights some of the most salient aspects
of Jung's theory towards a psychology of aging
that have contemporary relevance.
Jung was indeed a pioneer, the first psychodynamically oriented
adult developmentalist.
And we have yet to fully mine his contributions in this area.
So in my response to Dr. Corbett's paper, I'd like to select
out several threads that may help us move from Jung's explicit writings
to the psychology behind them which can be amplified and extended
by an increased understanding of the human psyche
as gained in the last century.
Gerontology as a field of study in the US was founded
by G Stanley Hall among others.
And near the end of his life, Hall published,
Senescence, the Last Half of Life.
He also was one of the first to identify adolescence
as a distinct phase or a period in the life cycle.
And I think as you'll see, I think he had some influence on Jung.
Hall prophesied the crisis of aging resulting
from people living together but tending to become more isolated
and cutoff from public life.
His compassionate call for more comprehensive study of age--
of the aging process is I believe finally being realized.
But in addition, there is a direct link here today
to our topic of Jung and aging.
For Hall, not only have been student of William James,
someone that Jung had greatly admired but also during his tenure
as president of Clark University, Hall brought Freud and Jung
to America in 1909 for a psychological conference
in celebration of Clark's 20th anniversary.
And just--   [ Pause ]
oops-- yeah.
This is a famous picture where in the front, where you have Freud,
Hall and Jung and then at the back row you have Abraham Brill,
Ernest Jones and Sandor Ferenczi, a famous psychoanalyst.
And they were part of a psychology conference at the university
that hosted a number of luminaries from the social sciences.
If you look in the first row, starting at what would be your left,
there's a Franz Boas, the famous anthropologist.
Next to him is EB Titchener, the phycologist.
William James is the man standing out with--
holding his hat, he sort of got a foot forward.
Followed by William Stern, Burgenstein then Stanley Hall again,
Freud, Jung, the physiatrist Adolf Meyer
and finally Herbert Spencer Jennings.
So it was quite an event and I think it not only introduced
psychoanalysis to the Americas this--
Freud had not been by the way translated into English yet,
it only happens after this conference, so it's a very key thing
and its of course Jung and Freud's--
their first strip to the US for both of them.
It was extremely important and I think meeting Hall
and hearing his ideas about life cycle and aging were foundational.
Jung goes on to meet James at this event
and this establishes a friendship that the lasts until James dies
which is unfortunately only about two years later.
For his theories, Hall drew on visions of the mind as--
and its development over the lifespan
by employing Darwinian ideas together
with Ernst Haeckel's biogenetic hypothesis that was the,
"Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny."
And it's not completely true anymore but as we've heard a little bit
about epigenetics, that's a rediscovery
of some of Haeckel's work.
And I mentioned this just briefly because both Jung and Freud each
in their own way wrestled with incorporating these same set
of concepts into their developmental models though each man came
to different conclusions especially with regard
to the role of spirituality.
And I can't go into a discussion of the--
in this brief response but I want to just mention the tension
between the phycological and biological views of the human psyche
which are still very much at play in our world
and in our academic research on aging and so forth.
Are we looking at a biological phenomena
or phycological phenomena or some combination?
And if so what's the relationship between the two of them?
That's the key question.
Now as Dr. Corbett has noted maturational process,
these continue throughout life and tend to manifest
in increasing complexity of affect, reasoning
and our capacity for spirituality.
This complexity cannot be reduced to genetic programs,
though it is likely grounded in changes in the body,
brain system as Margaret was mentioning,
arising out of experience.
Alterations in what now is being known as the Connectome,
that's the totality of the connections
between the neurons and the nervous system.
And we know that that is developmentally altering throughout
the entire course of a life.
It's a very important new area and you need very high speed computers
to even begin to simulate this in the simplest sort of ways.
From an analytic perspective, enhanced complexity or personality
with greater capacity for neurons and cognition,
affect and imagination is probably one
of the few agreed upon long term outcomes
for long terms psychodynamic treatment across various schools
of depth psychology in their attempt to define the good life
or the well lived life which analytic experience
in the deepest ways is that's what its meant to enrich.
Formulating maturation in terms of enhanced complexity points
to a bridge between later life development and one of my areas
of research and interest, general systems theory.
Investigation of systems with multiple components capable
of interacting with one another open to the environment have shown--
been shown to produce behaviors or properties and aggregate that are
of a higher order than the components themselves.
You get more out of it than is there among the components.
You get something new.
These features are not predictable in terms of the known behaviors
of the parts that go into them and thus are thought of as complex
as opposed to being just complicated, meaning having a lot
of parts but not anything new.
These systems tend to dissipate energy while simultaneously
generating increased levels of internal order
and thereby exhibiting what's called self organization.
Higher order phenomena is associated
with these features are termed emergent.
So there's a-- a kind of a picture of--
a simple picture of looking at the way you get interactions.
And this can go-- it's a truth across the entire universe,
from the most micro levels of string theory up to traffic jams
and the stock market onto the clustering of galaxies, this is--
it seems to be a fundamental truth about the way systems can organize.
And what's remarkable and you can hear it even mirrored
in my presentation is this exists at the edge of order and chaos.
And I think that's where development has to occur, if it's too ordered,
everything is too rigid, there's no movement.
If everything is too chaotic you can't get enough structure
to do anything meaningful.
The origins of life can be formulated exactly in these terms
of emergence resulting from self organization of molecular systems.
And at a higher level, the human mind is generally acknowledged
to be the emergent property
of the body-brain interacting with the environment.
In addition, there is a co-evolutionary link
between longevity and specie's brain size or intelligence.
This is a quote from some researchers, "Because the returns
to a large brain lie in the future ecological conditions favoring large
brains also favor greater expenditure on survival."
So from an economics stance, nature is investing more resources
in brain capital and so there should be dividends ie we live longer.
So know if you take these ideas of emergence and longevity
and you begin to play with them, you can extrapolate
that lifetime development of the psyche
in an interactive sociocultural matrix as we all live in,
is its self capable of producing levels of emergence beyond
that obtained in early adulthood.
The argument here is that there are new higher order phenomena
which can only manifest with longevity
in a culturally rich environment, a likely parallel
to the gerotranscendence idea that Lionel was mentioning.
This phenomena as a class offer evidence for me of some
of the more important possibilities and implications
of Jung's pioneering work and efforts to discuss the potentials
I'm suggesting, as an aside,
I'm suggesting we culturally are reaching a new place
but there have been individuals in the past who have been here before
but never cultures that have reached this level
of extended life and rich environment.
And that does something new that is not to be found only in the past.
Returning to Jung's notions of individuation, becoming oneself
as fully as possible, this could be reformulated as seeking
to explore the meanings, values, purposes and activities which come
through evolving levels of emergence appearing over a life time.
This of course is a never ending task mirrored
in the way dreams can continue to challenge us towards new levels
of psychic awareness into old age.
Wholeness is not a concrete achievable goal;
rather it becomes a way of living towards, towards greater being.
Longevity's purpose or [inaudible] in this model is not primarily
for biological advantage, though elders
or having elders survive long enough to guide and teach younger members
of the community surely has adaptive value, it's not to dismiss that.
But it's for psychological maturation; it has a purpose outside
of just enhancing the community.
The potential for increased degrees of wholeness to emerge
in an individual who may benefit the community though not necessarily,
generally requires ample opportunities
to process a broad range of experiences positive and negative
with successes and failures to be assimilated and learned from.
Folly then, may be linked with wisdom not so much in opposition
as stereotypical portrayals of the old found in popular culture,
you become one or the other,
either you're the old fool or the wise old person.
But as modes of digesting experience, bits of wisdom
or folly are potential in any encounter with the world
and we need them both for wholeness.
The ability to tolerate the irresolvable tensions both
within the self and in our interactions
with the world create conditions necessary
for the transcendent function composed of conscious
and unconscious component as in the simple to appear
as the emerging property of the maturing psyche.
Such tensions and the affects that accompany them are not often easy
to bear psychologically so that aging
in the psyche requires genuine courage.
For example tolerating an increasingly complex range
of emotions instead or rigidifying into certainties.
We cannot avoid biological aging though
as Dr. Corbett rightly points out,
we may gain tremendous opportunity from slowing it down.
However, psychological aging towards increased individuation is not
automatic and requires ongoing efforts across the lifespan.
After a time of achievements some--
after a lifetime of achievements some people may need to be able
to loosen up and to allow seemingly purposelessness in events
to be felt, risking the folly of not knowing
which something I can tell you is very difficult for bright,
young academically trained psychotherapists.
Frequently it's an essential dilemma in supervising them
to help them tolerate uncertainty.
Now as an example, an elderly academic with a long--
in a long term analysis had a very short dream of finding a rock
with hieroglyphics on it and thought, how pointless?
[Laughters] This serendipitous discovery at first dismissed
by consciousness proved to be something
of an old chemical Philosopher's Stone.
The one which the ordinary mind rejects as of no value
yet becomes the foundation upon which the edifice
of the psyche can be constructed.
A psychological Rosetta Stone to understand the communications
from the deeper unconscious layers of the personality.
Here the opening to include seemingly pointlessness allowed a
touch of the Dionysian chaos to enter the mind
which for an Apollonian person with high levels of achievement
at just the right moment engendered an experience
of the mystery of emergent.
The irrational living edge of his own psyche, longevity of life span
and in psychotherapy is often crucial
to such psychological transformation.
You have to live long enough to be able to get there
to tolerate these kinds of experiences
and then not just try to resolve them quickly.
For time purposes I'll skip over.
I was going to say a little bit about Taoism because the--
especially Chuang-Tzu is a figure who--
in, oh about 400 BCE talked about the value of uselessness.
There's a story, a long story about a carpenter who finds a tree,
a huge tree and he dismisses it as of no use and then has a dream
of the tree confronting him about his utilitarian psychology.
[Laughs] I mean it's a really--
it's a biting commentary on judging the age,
the aged by the utilitarianism.
And the sage there is suggesting that aging has a purpose of its own
which is to discover a kind of uselessness to ordinary intentions,
so retirement as a means of entering and your pursuing the Tao.
So will the graying of America help us
[Laughters] Discussions of aging are often almost inevitably linked
with reflections on death and the question of the afterlife,
the realm of the spirit, immortality and fate of the soul.
The very notion of the human soul or psyche derives from the cults
of the dead archeologists have located at the dawn of culture
in the Paleolithic Period.
Even Neanderthals are thought by some anthropologists
who have virtually buried their dead.
While the Egyptians created elaborate rituals and myths
about the afterlife it was the Cult of Souls in Ancient Greece
that is the most direct predecessor for our notions
of unconscious mental life.
Late Jungian analyst James Hillman who spoke
at the Red Book Conference here explored these links
and numerous publications.
For example in a book called Dream and the Underworld,
he writes "Heraclitus first brings together psyche,
logos and bathun or depth."   This is Heraclitus fragment 45.
"You could not find the ends
of the soul though you traveled every way, so deep is its logos."
Well, that's the fragment.
This depth dimension is also associated with that which is hidden
and so belongs to Hades, the invisible lord of the underworld
and thus to the Chthonic Realm.
Hence, by implication the psyche and our psychology is rooted
in the imagination of Hades or the realm of the dead.
Becoming psychologically minded
from a depth perspective is a preparation of the soul for death.
This is not to be taken literally or as a metaphysical statement
but as an attitude which consciousness can cultivate
as it seeks to emerge into a condition beyond it's grasp,
seemingly pointless to courtitian consciousness.
Now there are various ways in which we might pursue the cultivation
of depth psychological awareness.
Hillman's preferred mode was through working with images found in dreams
but I'd like to end by suggesting a path along the lines mentioned
by Dr. Corbett that through an affinity with past
and future generations and a longer view of history,
one develops an increasingly broad understanding
of oneself in the universe.
For me, this has at times taken the form of the study
of what I would call spiritual ancestry,
by which I mean exploring the ancestry of the thoughts, feelings,
imaginings and so forth that are most compelling to me,
often arising out of life experience.
Thus it was a set of clinical experiences
with some remarkable coincidences that led me
to reexamine Jung's notion of synchronicity.
And through that work, doors opened to various sources he used
in formulating the concept.   By tracing these sources back while
at the same time reformulating the thinking forward in terms
of complexity theory, some rather curious new coincidences emerged.
One brief example, for me Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, he was--
you probably know him as the rival of Newton
for the discovery of Calculus.
Was one of Jung's primary sources for synchronicity with the idea
of "pre-established harmony of monads."
And we're not going to go into that.
He was also the first western intellect to study the I Ching,
the Book of Changes which Jung wrote a forward to.
And was-- he received this through the auspices of a father,
Joachim Bouvet, a Jesuit who was at the Manchu Emperor's Court.
Curiously, I have this, Leibniz's I Ching here.
I won't go through the details of it but it's set up in base two,
that is if you take a broken line to zero and a full line as a one,
this counts from zero to 63 in base two.
It's lined up like that.
Somebody understood that and Leibniz had just-- when he received this,
he had just finished some papers on base two.
He's the person in our culture in the west who formulated these ideas.
So, Bouvet knew that and he sent him the I Ching
and Leibniz was very gracious in saying "The Chinese seem
to have a kind of natural historical wisdom
that we don't yet have in the west.
Maybe we should exchange missionaries,
send them Christian missionaries
and they should send us natural history missionaries."
It's very humorous but it's also a lovely story.
And of course Jung wrote a forward to Richard Wilhelm's a translation
of the I Ching discussing the newly minted notion of synchronicity
but he didn't at this time have knowledge of Leibniz's interest
in the I Ching, that's completely fortuitous.
Furthermore, Leibniz was the first person
to use the term supervenience.
In philosophy, in a manner that it's very close or it's akin
to emergence especially in relation to theory of mind.
And I discovered this because one of my neighbors,
a Brown University philosopher Jaegwon Kim who I hadn't heard
of before I read his book,
pointed out that Leibniz formulated this idea in isolation
and then it took several hundred years before this was picked
up again.
And that one of the people who did develop it
in the 20th century was a British Philosopher named Conwy
Lloyd Morgan.
So to come full circle, Jung derives his ideas on the biology
of archetypes from the work of Morgan,
but without explicitly referencing supervenience.
So, you see what happens here is there's a network
of connections operating outside of awareness but can be glimpsed
through the search for the provenance of thought and images.
And by engaging in that kind of exploration, we locate ourselves
within a much larger historical narrative and we rediscover this--
who our spiritual ancestors are.
We introduce ourselves into that deep back round
which forms the essence of our minds and psyches.
As we age our ideas become embedded in the unfolding psyche,
becoming agents of the complexity in a larger human community.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]   >> Thank you Joe.
Our third presenter today, this morning Dr. Robert Langs,
is somebody very well known in clinical circles both Jungian
and much, much further afield.
I could spend the next 10 to 15 minutes;
this is a lot of just reading a list of his publications,
including 47 books and over 200 articles and 17
of his books written after the age of 65.
So, we're very, very pleased
and Dr. Langs has made a very significant impact on those of us
in the Jungian world who want to integrate
and combine clinical practice
with Jungian archetypal approach to the psyche.
I know that he's not a card carrying Jungian per se [laughters]
but maybe we'll give him a card for the New York Center.
However, he's a classically trained Jungian oriented psychoanalyst;
at least we define him that way.
Who has forged a new reality scented paradigm of psychoanalysis
in which trauma, death anxiety and archetypal patterns play a role.
He's an internationally known expert in the field of psychoanalysis
and his articles and books range from dream analysis to the evolution
of emotion processing mind and touched multifaceted aspects
of both the creative in the Jungian sense,
the shadow of the disruptive sides of the psyche as well.
One of his most recent books is entitled Beyond Yaweh and Jesus:
Bringing Death's Wisdom to Faith, Spirituality and Psychoanalysis.
And we're looking forward to welcoming and hearing Dr. Langs
who graced us with his presence from New York.
Thank you.   [ Applause ]
>> Hello, I appreciate the invitation.
Excuse me.
You can tell from my book list that I never sleep and I have a port
for an intravenous feeding so I can just keep writing.
[laughters] My subject is going to be trauma because I think of aging
as sort of trauma essential.
That is we know that there are high levels
of stress hormones in aging people.   And trauma comes, you know, fresh.
There's also in the aging of phase, the opportunity
to review your traumas and to rework them
and try to make peace with them.
As background, I will say this, you know,
since this is a Jungian conference,
the first thing I did was I went to Greek Mythology.
And it's the god of-- Geras is the God old age.
But he's a real [inaudible] and very evil, very little love so I didn't
like that view and then I realized why go to Greece?
You've got to go back to the Book of Wisdom to the Bible.
And there the pay off was immediate, I mean I won't go to Eden
and the issues of becoming aware of death anxiety but the origins
of religion, what is the primary challenge?
It is productivity in all age, who am I referring to?
Abraham and Sarah.
Abraham is about to turn 100, Sarah's going to turn 90
and they don't have a kid.   They were childless, right.
They don't have a child and they have a child.
They respond, you know,
in this magnificently creative way to t this challenge.
So it is sort of striking in a way if you are looking for something,
how often you can find it in the bible.
So, it's very, you know, the fact that it has to do with aging.
So now let's just go quickly though to Isaac
because I also-- I can't skip this line.
That was where you think Sarah having a baby at 90 is absurd,
just think of medical research today, you know,
tired grannys are going to be you know surrogates, you know,
within the next few years, you know.
So it's all going to happen and that's another form
of creativity for grandmothers.   [Laughters] Okay.
Now we go to Isaac and Isaac is old and what's his challenge?
To bless the eldest son.   So who did he bless?
He blesses the younger son.
So he can't tell one son from another.
So I consider this the first reference to, you know,
to Alzheimer's disease in the history of the world.
Okay. All right.
So that's-- so much for the bible, it was really wonderful.
[Laughters] can I get some water though, my mouth is so dry.
Thank you.   Okay. Now.
Okay. So the next point is this, the initial assignment was to present--
I'm the front Freudian, you know, because I was trained as a Freudian.
Present Freud's ideas on aging and I realize
that that was a trick question because if I we're to do
that I would sit down, right now.
He did not write a line on aging, not a line.
You know, so be it.
So that gave me a chance to talk about my own ideas.
[Laughters] Jung has given me many great gifts
and I mean this quite seriously.
The greatest of them all is the concept of archetypes.
For me as a, you know, at least with a heritage of a Freudian analyst,
you know, the absence of archetypes I think dooms classical
psychoanalysis, the absence of universe is--
I won't go into the story of how I got there
but once I got there the whole Jungian [inaudible] was
so important.
So I'm going to talk about archetypes
and trauma and death anxiety.
Probably the best way to characterize it,
I often use this excerpt from a T.S. Eliot.
He had a poem called [inaudible] Burnt Norton and it goes like this.
Go, go, go said the bird, humankind cannot bear very much reality.
Time passed and time future, what might have been
and what has been point to one end which is always present.
You know and there it is, you know, great poetry says it all.
And it is the presence of death
and death anxiety, the existence of trauma.
I think of trauma these days really, it's sort of like a psychological,
it can be a physical of course.   It's like a psychological cancer.
It's always there and as you get older,
if it doesn't get you one way, it's going to get you another way.
There's no dodging it.
And I think the basic to all the things we've heard today
about the goals of aging and how to free
up one's creativity, all of that.
I think in some way you have to find a way of mastering trauma in order
to free yourself to do the rest.
It's there and what I have found, I mean I developed a--
for various reasons,
a very basically adaptive approach to the human psyche.
What is the psyche coping with?
What are the triggers that trauma relate to?
The emotion processing mind as I call it is like the immune system.
Its primary function is to deal with danger, with the immune system,
microscopic predators, the emotion pricing mind,
microscopic predators either-- are the humans or something going
on unfortunate in your own body, you know.
So, it's a very important aspect of human psychology
to really understand how we process trauma, how trauma is connected
to death and how trauma generates death anxiety.
And I think, you know this [inaudible] is the key to--
as I say to a successful you know at least successful later years.
Just again to be brief there are 3--
well there are 2 things I want to say, first of all we process a lot
of trauma unconsciously and I mean that we have no idea we're doing it.
In my work and so I'm-- only in the clinical office,
if there's a traumatic trigger and I work almost only with dreams
because narratives carry unconscious meaning.
And the narratives that come in response to trauma,
you know it's not just the dream by the way,
the way nature has protected us from the awareness
of all the terrible things connected with trauma with warm,
with our harming others with others harming us with you know
with the existential, death anxiety is
to tuck away the most serious stuff not just in a dream
but in the associations to the dream which are always much more powerful,
much more awful than the dream itself.
And it's not a dream or story you make up,
any narrative if you trace it down [inaudible].
So really, really terrible stuff but my question has always been,
"What the hell am I doing there?"
You know I spend my entire day at that level,
you know how did this happen?
[Laughter] but in any case, just to sum it up,
if you study the unconscious response, you know,
to trauma the unconscious response to trauma,
there are 3 forms of death anxiety.
The first is Predatory death anxiety,
and every living organism protects itself from external danger,
you know we are adaptable organisms.
We are much more complicated, you know than the others
but you know we are adaptive.
So when it comes to predatory death anxiety, it means that someone
or something is trying to harm us and we respond consciously
to some extent and very largely unconsciously.
And a lot of traumatic triggers are not recognized, you know.
They are not just simply, they're going to hit you over the head.
A lot of psychological assault in this world
as you can immediately sense, so predatory death anxiety.
The second one would be predator death anxiety
where you have caused harm to others
and then the unconscious mind is merciless about that.
I really advice you, don't do bad things you know,
you'll pay for it the rest of your life,
you know especially at an old age.
There's an unconscious moral system which is very pristine--
but it's not just, "Oh you've done bad."
It's you're going to pay and you're going to pay
with it for your life, you know.   So that's predator death anxiety.
Then lastly of course existential anxiety
and we come genetically talking about early life,
we're born with s thousand forms of denial of death happening, you know,
I can go on and on and on listing those.
So we have strong denial mechanisms but a lot
of our anxiety has worked over unconsciously.
So how does this affect old age and aging,
and you know, what can we do about it?
Well I think there's a secular and there's spiritual
or religious solution to aging.
The secular one is to investigate, the forms of death anxiety,
how they affect the aging--
the aging person and how we can better cope.
Or hardly enough it's a field that no body wants to go on here,
no body wants to go too deep into death and death anxiety.
So that's going to be real hard working,
it's going to have to be professionals.
Like us who really engage in that and then help you, you know, with--
by telling you what we've found
and how you can be more with successful, okay.
So that's one side of it for those who are secular.
Now, what about the religious side, well when I wrote the book,
I've already mentioned Yahweh and Jesus, I don't want to sound
so important, but when I did Yahweh and Jesus I discovered something
that was-- it just amazed me.
I discovered that-- first about Yahweh, don't even think about him
and that's how you saw it.
He is so mixed up when it comes to death and crime and murder.
You can't go near.
So-- and I can go on with that, I'm sure he would love hearing it.
[Laughter] we won't go there because he doesn't have the answer,
but it turns out that Jesus Christ had an answer for each of the forms
of death anxiety, it was astounding.
All right, predatory death anxiety-- I mean, I'm just summarizing,
turn the other cheek, be peaceful, live for peace, don't you know,
don't fight back, so turn the other cheek.
Preditor death anxiety, incredible, "I will die on the cross
for your sins, I will take care of your sins."
So you don't have to kill yourself because I'm doing it for you,
that is astounding sacrifice.
And the third one the existential death anxiety, just stick with me,
we're all going to be in heaven eternally-- forever.
I mean it's a remarkable thing-- the unfortunate thing about it is,
yes it works for some people but it has not worked for human kind
on the whole, in other words, it's something that I was surprised
to see [inaudible] and I have already known that young talks
about how religion needs to evolve.
And one of the ways religion will evolve is through advances
in psychoanalysis, you know, and then--
advances in religion will also you know, enhance psychoanalysis.
But what you're saying as far as I'm concerned is that,
not only the psychoanalysts have to evolve
in some way, so does religion.
And I think that again, this is something we need, we need somehow
to find ways of enhancing the solutions that Christ gave us
that are not quite working as yet.   And I think ultimately, just say it.
It may mean that we really do need another Messiah which probably now
as time goes, you know, it's going to be about 5 to 10000 years
from now, so nobody is going to find out if I'm right
or wrong here unless you really believe in Jesus and I'll change
over and I'll meet you there.
[Laughter] but anyhow you know, so these are the 2 approaches you know,
that I see to aging in terms of how do we age, how do we age better.
And for that I can assure you never would be said any of this
but the young would have said some of it, thank you.
[ Applause ]   >> Thank you Bob.
>> I can't resist a couple of comments that are all based
on your brand dragging the Old Testament and Yahweh into here.
One of them is the about the Messiah that you were talking about.
There's an old mythical town called the Kelm some of you may have heard
of the wise man of Kelmue.
Everyone in the town is foolish but not wise man.
And it's kind of akin to being a psychoanalyst in doing the research,
you're talking about this man comes to the town
and there's the guard sitting outside the town and they're talking
to each other he says, "What do you do?"
Says, "Well, my job is to sit outside the gates of the town
and wait for the Messiah.   When he comes I have to run in
and tell everybody he's here, so they don't miss him."
So he looks at him and he says, "How long have you been doing this?"
"You know about 20 years."
Says, "Don't you get bored in 20 year?"
Says, "Yes, it's true, most of the work is a little boring
and the pay is very low but the work is steady."
[ Laughter ]
And-- and Bob, why are you dragging the Bible,
well how about Methuselah [inaudible] 900 years why just stop?
But-- and, and perhaps one more added and talk
about at the first onset of Alzheimer's our discovered
in the Bible, you might want to say, "it's hereditary" because Jacob
who received a blessing and he shouldn't have did the same thing
with his grandchildren who [inaudible], he also reversed it.
So maybe it's the hereditary factor going back to biblical terms.
Anyhow--   [ Inaudible Remark ]
>> I'm sorry, I couldn't resist it.
Anyhow, we do have time, I'm going to make an executive decision
and go a little longer than the 12:15 because I know there are a lot
of things that we want to say, so just a few minutes longer.
I would-- I have some questions that I have of the panelists
but I'm wondering maybe perhaps some of the panelists have some comments
that they'd like to make.
Either to Lionel or additional comments or questions.
So anybody, any volunteers or?   >> Let's hear the audience.
>> The audience, okay.   >> They've been very patient.
>> All right, we have somebody with the microphones.
Okay, while we're getting the microphones ready.
>> And there is one over there.   >> One in the back row.
>> Okay. You may ask the first question.
I will repeat the question.   [ Pause ]
>> My question is very pragmatic.
Will the presentations be available electronically?
>> The question is whether the presentations will be available
electronically and the answer is--   >> Yes.
>> Is I don't know, but maybe somebody does.
>> All right.
The answer is this is being recorded and the Library
of Congress will be putting it on its web site in two or three months.
So if you want see it again that's how you are going to do it.
>> That's the only [inaudible]?
>> That's the only answer I have to your question.
>> We will be able to actually read the presentations
by [inaudible] online so--
>> You-- you can see their presentations,
we will be doing a proceeding
which will be electronic that's the only answer that I have.
Okay.
>> And maybe it'll be on YouTube a day later so.
Yes, other questions?   You have the microphone?
>> Could you expand on Jung's research about dreams
in senior years and its predictive ability about the end of life?
>> The question was, could we expand on Jung's dealing
with the dreams of the aged.   Of the older, end of life.
Actually I'm glad you asked.   I'm glad you asked that question,
that was one of the question I had myself as listening to Lionel
because and I think I would preface it
by saying Jung expected his students and others to go further than him.
So if I'm quoting Jung, it's Jung didn't see himself as like the Bible
that he was the final word so I'm sure there's much more research
and Lionel you tapped into something on that.
Perhaps you could answer that question
because I remember an interview with the BBC that Jung was asked
about the dreams of older people and he specifically said
"They are no different than younger people because the dream come
from the self and the self feels it's going to live forever.
So it's only the ego that feels it's going to die but Lionel I would
like to turn it over to you and have you answer that.
>> Well, there is one major piece of work on this by Von Franz called
"On Dreams and Death" which I would recommend to you.
I think that's the exact title "On Dreams and Death"
and then it's a dream, it's a book about the dreams of dying people
and some comments about the fact that the psyche seems to--
on some occasion, the psyche seems to ignore impending death
and the dreams apparently of dying people are relatively ordinary
and don't seem to talk about death as it they take it,
it is just a natural part of life, but there are the--
there is a certain type of dream that does talk about.
As I remember one dream I think it's in that book of woman who is dying
and in her hospital room there's a small candle burning
and this woman has a great deal of death anxiety, she and she dreams
that she's lying in her bed in the hospital room
but that little candle is now on the other side of the window
and it's huge and burning brightly.
So they get a dream image of renewal on the other side you see.
That's the way the dream, that's a kind of a teaching dream.
There is another dream that Von Franz talks of an enormous,
a man who is dying at a very young age and he's very upset about it
and he has a dream in which there is a green forest
and a terrible fire destroys this wonderful green forest
which has hardly began to flower.
But at the center of the forest is a kind of eternal stone
which is completely unaffected by the fire.
That so, well here is that kind of dream which makes a lot of us feel
that we might be going somewhere [laughters].
>> Do you want to say any more about--
>> Yes over here, just   [ Pause ]
>> The speaking about-- thanks-- psychoanalysis and religion evolving
and affecting each other, it reminded me also
of the inter-religious dialogue that's going on
and how much Buddhism and Taoism are effecting you know Christian Jewish
and other-- though east basically the joining of the east
and the west, north and South and I was wondering if could speak
of either the aspect of the shadow and also of the feminine aspect.
If you see any of these working towards a greater holistic knowledge
of the dying process, I mean it sounds grandiose
but since you did bring up the Tao and Jesus and Yahweh I wondered if
and would reflect on that whether Jung's thought or Freud's thought
and sort of this balancing off you know not being too pie
in the sky way that the Christianity learning to deal with the shadow
and the female aspect that deepening and the conversation of east
and west that rather than the dualistic thinking,
the unitive thinking whether how would all these work
in with your work basically.   >> Right now, my hardest work is
to summarize what you said, you know [laughters].
So the question in brief if I got it right is what in the Jungian world
of the Jungian approach incorporates Taoism and Buddhism
and the different eastern religions
as well beyond just Yahweh and Jesus.
Would any of the--   >> Okay, let's see where to begin.
Jung's notion of the Self with a capital S is a psychological version
of what in the Hindu tradition is known as the Atman and Brahman.
So it's an image of the divine
in the personnel or an internal divinity.
I think it's the same as the notion
of the Atman found in the Bhagavad Gita.
So Jung is definitely a link to that tradition.
He is also link to that tradition when he talks
about the bigger self not the person self but the transpersonal self
as the totality which is a non dual position that is found
in various spiritual traditions like Taoism and Buddhism
and [inaudible] and so on.
So that is another link with the eastern traditions.
In terms of the feminine and the shadow, Jung's complaint
about the Christian image of God is
that it excluded the feminine aspects of the divine too much
and it didn't acknowledge that the divine can have a dark side to it.
And he thought that if you're going to have a God image you want
to include everything, so that was one of his ma--
and of course that got him in terrible trouble
with various theologians.   Do you want to carry on?
From a practical point view I hate to be practical about this.
Well it has to do with bidirectionality
that is the international organization that I'm involve with.
We actually do a lot of work with people in India, in China and places
like that and the thing that struck me over time more and more is
as we have these dialogue across culture that the influence--
it isn't just a matter of adapting our psychology
by incorporating their ideas but in fact to be fundamentally engaged
and transformed by the experience itself.
I've watched with great interest how Chinese colleagues have
for example taken the ideas and applied them in terms
of social justice and social emergences, so that we have a group
in Guangzhou who when the Sichuan earthquake happened in May
of 2008 took, they went into the community and lived in the community
for an extended period and one
of the first things they did is they learned about the mythology
of the people, the Hong people who were living in that area and began
to adapt their interventions to work with the people based
on their culture and so I think it provides a kind of model
about how we experience one another across cultures and across age.
I think that's on of the reasons why I'm careful about the transform--
transportation of Jungian ideas into other cultures.
So I-think it's a new area for who all of us to learn, thanks.
>> Yes? Back there-- the microphone.
>> I'm-- I think that the transcendence
of ego is a very big part of older age
but I have a hard time reconciling that with the concept
of individuation which really is constantly looking internally
>> Did everyone hear the question?   >> Yeah.
>> That's not exactly what the concept of individuation is about.
Individuation means that the ego is constantly being relativized.
It realizes that-- the ego realizes that we are in relation
to this larger consciousness of the self and the idea here is
that you become more open to input from the self in terms of dreams
and other sources like that.
So if anything, so the ego is expanded
and relativized at the same time.
>> So the first summary something liked that you know.
[ Pause ]
>> Bob, would you like to add to that?
>> No I was thinking of something else [inaudible] I left out,
I had some practical advice, so I got so carried away
with all these ideas about death anxiety.
And I should share with you just, I think there are three ways
to have a successful senior years.
The first is to have a partner that really makes you want to live.
The second I got from Osler, the great turn of the century physician,
Osler said give me your chronic disease and I will live forever.
And I've got a list of anybody who wants to [laughs].
And the last one and because this is really personal find an intractable
problem, you know something that you cannot solve and you get
into a fight with that problem and you don't want to die.
If you get a good answer, then you want to go to the next one
and if you don't have an answer you want time to find that answer,
I mean that I think we all have intractable--
mine happens to be how do you deal
with that death anxiety, totally intractable.
So I'm going to live forever [laughs].
I'm in good shape.
But anyhow, those would be my three words of advice, okay.
>> Thank you [laughs].   Yes? Yeah, the microphone up here.
>> Hi, well first thank you to everybody.
It is just extraordinary hearing all these amazing people [applause].
I'm an acupuncturist and I've been--
and a nurse and I've been in practice for 30 some years.
Interestingly enough my grandparents
and great grandparents were missionaries to China and Japan,
so I'm kind of living out that missionary the other way.
But I was particularly happy to hear Tao was a mentioned and then hear
that reference to the preface that Dr. Jung wrote because in
that is a extraordinary explanation
of the western view of cause and effect.
And the description of the multi faceted reality
of the moment I don't know what else to call it, but its--
he just really captures for me having lived
into what Chinese medicine is all about,
that it he really describes it and its extraordinary he wrote it
in 1948 or 49 or something like that.
And it's a way that that's maybe is addressing some of that,
we don't take on or he doesn't put his ideas there
but it's already there.
And so, here I am just living with the reality of that perspective
from Chinese medicine as a Westerner and how exciting to find
that Jung was illustrating that in that piece of writing,
so just thank you for mentioning that.
>> Thank you.   Thank you.
[ Pause ]
>> Hi. I'm a social worker and I work with individuals
with Alzheimer's and Dementia.
I'm wondering what you think about successful aging for people
with major cognitive impairments.
And also what clinically what may be creativity, what we can look
out in terms of what Jung's work can bring to working
with this population especially in terms of life review,
if that's possible strategies for working with people
with severe cognitive impairments.   Thanks.
>> Thank you.
So the question is successful aging for people
with cognitive impairments.
Margaret would you want now.   >> Really.
[Laughter] Bob.   >> Tough [laughter].
>> I think it's a fascinating problem but I think again keeping
with what Lionel said it really needs empirical research,
I mean we really don't understand enough about Alzheimer's
and you know, how it affects the aging
and obviously its not a single disease.
You know there is a whole spectrum, some people that you can work with.
And also the very question of those Alzheimer's patient's
who have some awareness of their dysfunction, you know,
compared to others who get beyond that point,
but I think it does point to something, you know,
that needs to be studied.
Yeah, because I think part of it is that when get
into this presentations we make assumptions and one
of them would be, oh yo, there's nobody here with Alzheimer's
or something you know, but its I think a very important area
and clearly its becoming more, more of a problem.
So I mean I think the question really begs for careful research.
>> I would like to, Margaret?
>> I think too, to think about creativity and also to think
about attachment, and that will vary so much with the individual,
what their original attachment were like.
And what capacity is still left for attachment and how people can enrich
that in a sense, but those difficult areas and areas
which really need very careful research.
And research implies resource as well.
>> Thank you.   We have time for one more question.
>> Well, I though it was a very interesting that the comment
that somebody made about Jung see himself as a Jesus
as a definitive person that the ideas would not go any further.
So can you speak a little bit about the add ons
or how Jung has been evolutionized
to encompass a lot of ideas about aging.
>> I think you got it the wrong way around--
either that or I'm suffering myself from Alzheimer's, what I was tying
to say was the opposite that Jung did not see himself
as the definitive, yeah?
>> Well they there is a-- there is an archetypal story
about somebody coming to Jung then saying thank God I'm Jung
and not Jungian.
But does anybody want to comment on that?
>> Comment?
Yeah on the evolution of Jungian thinking say something yeah.
>> Well, certainly I think that any psychology needs
to be rethought every generation, because the world changes.
We live in a different culture with different demands.
There are some things that recur
but there's an awful lot that's culturally bound.
And I think its incumbent on anybody
who seriously wants to examine these things.
I mean even the question on Alzheimer's, you know,
wouldn't have been well defined in Jung day, at least the early part
of his career, you know everyone was sort of labeled
as dementia praecox practically.
And now we have new tools and I think that there are,
for me there are strains in Jung of what I would see in terms
of emergence theory and complexity, that he--
these are things that were not fully mature during his lifetime.
And that we can take some of the key ideas and really reformulate them.
In many ways I think it's honoring an ancestor
without becoming the ancestor.
Lets repeat the question it's a how to let someone move
into that position of ancestor informing us and then we're done,
but of course you do the same do yourself then, once you do that,
you're embedding yourself within something,
and I think that's important for all of us.
>> I'm sorry if I misunderstood the question.
But one of the things that always move me first move me
about Jung actually as opposed to Freudian approach was the statement
that he made that every should--
every generations sits on the shoulder of the previous generation.
And so he expects them to see further, than he did.
>> This has been a presentation of The Library of Congress.