Twenty-Five Years of the Life Review

Theoretical and Practical Considerations

Robert Disch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317839743
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this thought-provoking book, professionals in the field of aging examine the history and concept of the life review. The life review--a theory about the nature of the life cycle first presented in 1962--has become a foundation for program development with the elderly. This unique analysis of the life review goes beyond the early formulation both in theory and practice. Critics of the life review suggest ways in which the theory can be modified and expanded and offer several unique methods of creatively adapting these criticisms and changes to practical purposes. Proponents of the life review--while emphasizing that reminiscence is not a panacea--proclaim its historical, educational, and therapeutic value.

II. THEORY AND INTERPRETATION

Reminiscence, Identity, Sentimentality: Simone de Beauvoir and the Life Review

Kathleen Woodward

I

The decade of the seventies in the. United States witnessed the rise of oral history, a new methodology in historical studies. Implicit in that method – fittingly so for many researchers who had been students during the radical sixties – was a concern for the dispossessed. Many younger historians turned from political and economic history to study social history and the experiential dimensions of everyday life. Interestingly enough, the impulse was both liberal and conservative at the same time. Accompanying, the agenda to constitute a new canon by writing the histories of groups of people who had been excluded from the master narratives (histories of women are perhaps the best example) was also the effort to preserve and conserve and – in its sentimental extreme – to hallow.

If in the seventies the life stories of members of various underclasses, subcultures, and racial and artistic minorities were captured on tape for the record, no group was regarded with such sentimentality as the elderly. One brief anecdotal example will, I hope, suffice. At a conference on gerontology and the humanities in Missouri in 1980 I vividly remember an articulate historian in his mid-thirties who presented the life stories he had collected of elderly people with an effusion so excessive it could best be explained by his weakness for any story told by people sixty-five or older. He praised the wisdom of their insights (which in fact were for the most part banal) and the style of their narration (which was most often dull and conventional). As if a pious son he proudly showed us their photographs, remarking on their vitality, as in this case: “Here’s Emma. Can you guess how old she is? She’s seventy-six and doesn’t look a day over sixty-five!” Significantly, here his blind admiration moved beyond the bounds of reverse ageism – his belief that any life story produced by someone over sixty-five is worthy of our reverence – to reveal its opposite: his unexamined moral was that the older she was and the younger she looked, the better – that is, that old age is best when its wears the guise of youth. His mawkishness, in other words, was coupled with an attitude of unconscious superiority and paternalism. Few researchers, of course, have the analytic and literary gifts of the psychologist Robert Coles whose sensitive and deft little book The Old Ones of New Mexico, which appeared in 1975, is in my judgment a model of oral history.¹ But even that little book, so expertly shaped, many readers have found cloying in its tribute to a kind of wisdom that came in old age to the Mexican-Americans who were the object of his study.

In retrospect it seems no coincidence that the psychiatrist Robert Butler’s article “The Life Review: An Interpretation of Reminiscence in the Aged” should have appeared in the sixties.² In that seminal piece Butler argues for the uses of remembrance in the elderly from a psychological point of view. In a gesture analogous to that of the social historians I have been invoking, he theorized that in old age individuals expand their personal histories to include what has been forgotten, perhaps repressed; in so doing, the old (or those younger who are near death) have the opportunity to see their lives whole as in a narrative and – in an Eriksonian formulation – to accept or reject the narratives they have made of their lives. From this point of view we can understand Butler’s theory of the life review as a liberal politics of the psyche. In the sixties it helped rescue reminiscence in the elderly from the contempt in which it had been held, scorned as a sign of an infantile return to the past. For Butler such reminiscence was not a symptom of degeneration but rather the mark of a normative process that can serve the process of psychological integration.

Elsewhere I have considered Butler’s theory of the life review at some length, arguing among other things that his notion of what constitutes a narrative is neither sufficiently psychoanalytic or literary.³ Before turning to Simone de Beauvoir, whose work both parallels and diverges from Butler’s in interesting ways, I want to note in a Foucauldian vein that Butler’s essay – the knowledge it has produced – has had a remarkable influence – that is, power – in a wide range of spheres extending from social work and nursing to theater and literature. As we know, over the years the notion of the life review has passed beyond the barrier of the technical vocabulary of psychiatric geriatrics. One of the effects of its popular currency is that it has been much debased. At the same time it has been institutionalized and professionalized. Academic conferences are devoted to the life review, and personnel in the United States and abroad are trained in the techniques of aiding – and abetting – old people to do the work of reviewing their lives. A recent case in point is London’s Age Exchange theater company which bases its theater pieces on the taped reminiscences of elderly people. In the hands of Age Exchange the life review is understood not as a complex psychological process in the individual which can bring pain as well as a measure of understanding but as a group process that is, in the words of the artistic director, therapeutic in a “sympathetic way” and “pleasurable in a celebratory way.” One of the risks of this, of course, is that controlled group reminiscing can itself produce stereotypes (“That was my life in a nutshell,” said one elderly man after seeing one of their productions) and devolve into mere entertainment (“So much better than the telly,” said another). Another is sheer commercialization (Age Exchange plans, for example, to establish in the near future a “reminiscence center” which, among other things, will sell copies of the transcripts of the tapes they have already recorded).⁴

It would be fair to conclude, I think, that like the work of Age Exchange theater (whose sincerity I do not doubt), on the whole the books which basically take the life review as subject and method and have been successful in the United States in the seventies – books such as the late Barbara Myerhoff’s Number Our Days or Kenneth Koch’s I Never Told Anybody: Teaching Poetry Writing in a Nursing Home⁵ – are celebratory in nature, written in praise of the elderly by those younger. The sharp cutting edge of Butler’s theory of the life review – with its emphasis on guilt and depression as well as wisdom – has been significantly dulled. Here we might speculate that recording the life reviews of other people can perform the function of a kind of surrogate inverse of the life review in one’s middle years, the projection of one’s life (that is, one’s old age) into future time as a way of constructing one’s future identity through the experiences of others. If this is indeed the case, it would make sense that the dominant impulse should be celebratory for do we not hope for a satisfactory old age for ourselves?

While in the United States Butler was both making the case for reminiscence in old age and challenging the dispossession of the elderly in American society (we recall that his 1975 book Why Survive? Being Old in America won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize⁶), in France the influential intellectual and writer Simone de Beauvoir was also writing about the devaluation of the elderly in the West. Like Butler’s Why Survive, La Vieillesse⁷ (published in France in 1970) is a volume of compendious research and an expose of the dismaying treatment of the elderly in contemporary society. It represents a prodigious effort to explore the roots of ageism from social, economic, and psychological perspectives. But unlike Butler’s sobering manifesto, La Vieillesse was written out of personal experience: as a woman of sixty when La Vieillesse was published, Beauvoir felt herself to be at the crossroads of a definitive old age. We have every reason to expect, then, that La Vieillesse would have received favorable attention if not acclaim in the United States when it appeared in translation in 1972. Yet quite the opposite was in fact the case. The book was published, tellingly, under the ambiguous if not completely misleading title The Coming of Age as if to obscure its real subject – old age. It met with a wave of censure by journalists and gerontologists alike for its dark and tragic portrait of old age. Quite a few years ago it was allowed to go out of print.

Two examples of its hostile reception in the United States are particularly worth noting. In a long, lucid, and reasonable piece that appeared in The New Yorker, Robert Coles complained that Beauvoir stresses grim and even horrifying accounts of old age at the expense of arguments and observations that would oppose her conclusions, pointing out that she is deplorably tendentious and one-sided in her choice of the elite class of elderly people – well-known philosophers, statesmen, and writers – from whom she quotes; in rebuttal he offered persuasive and even moving accounts from older Americans from a lower social and economic class who by their own testimony do not despise their old age.⁸ Even sharper in his attack than Coles was Robert Butler himself who charged Beauvoir with self-pity and with hatred of the aging person in herself.⁹ He criticized her elision of aging with disease, and her inability to see aging as a natural process rather than an. ontological insult. He faulted her, in other words, for not seeing the human life span as something whole.

I am sympathetic to the criticisms of The Coming of Age offered by both Coles and Butler but I think that their violent antipathy to Beauvoir’s important book was also in part a response to her dismissal of the role of memory in the elderly in constituting identity. As their own reviews of her book as well as others show, in the atmosphere of the seventies with its valorization of the life review – and its emphasis on the value of creative writing and artplay both for the elderly and by the elderly – Beauvoir’s rejection of the meaningful uses of memory was especially scandalous if not altogether taboo.

For Butler, implicitly if not explicitly, conferring dignity on reminiscence in the elderly as individuals and restoring status to the elderly as a group in American society were different aspects of the same project, inextricably linked. For Beauvoir they emphatically were not. Thus a critical consideration of Beauvoir’s view of memory may help us not only put her position in perspective but Butler’s as well. For in The Coming of Age Beauvoir, who to my knowledge never erred on the side of sentimentality or paternalism in her life, asks some of the same questions posed by Butler in his essay on the life review: Why are the elderly so concerned with their pasts? Why do they dwell on memories of their youth? To what degree can the aged recover their pasts? But the tone of her answers is different. I say tone and not substance because her basic insights in this regard are, like Butler’s, psychoanalytic as well as social. Both agree that at the root of an elderly person’s interest in his past is his evaluation of his life in the present (which implies a question about satisfaction) and the imminence of death. But as a psychiatrist in an Eriksonian tradition, Butler is positive about the role of reminiscence in one’s life – and in shaping one’s death. As an existentialist and chronicler of the times Beauvoir is not. Both views, it is important to note, are extreme and do not so much serve as correctives to one another as reminders to us that theory is inevitably historically and culturally situated and thus limited in ways that we should take care to understand.

At the same time as Beauvoir’s attitude toward remembrance of things past in the elderly will be useful to us as a foil to Butler’s notion of the life review, we should also seek to understand the sources of her view (they may be personal as well as cultural) and the contradictions in her work, inquiring if we may find therein any lessons for those of us in the field of gerontology. In what follows I shall be primarily concerned to elucidate Beauvoir’s view toward reminiscence in The Coming of Age, with reference to her memoirs of her own life as well as her memoirs of the last years of her lifelong companion Jean-Paul Sartre and the last months and days of her mother.

II

For Beauvoir one’s identity is created by one’s actions. One is defined by what one calls one’s “projects” or “activities.” Thus in her pioneering book The Second Sex which appeared decades before The Coming of Age, she argues that a woman can achieve true selfhood only through production, not reproduction. Anything that has to do with a woman’s biological self has nothing to do with the authentic creation of her self. As Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex, “giving birth and suckling are not activities, they are natural functions; no project is involved.”¹⁰ What is important here for our consideration of the life review is Beauvoir’s total rejection of a certain kind of work (here bearing and caring for Children) that can be associated with a definite biological age in life (here the span between the onset of puberty and menopause in women). For at the foundation of Butler’s theory of the life review is the assumption that old age is indeed a distinct stage in the biological life of a person – one characterized by the sense of the ending of the narrative of one’s life – that has to do precisely with the authentic creation of the self. From this perspective we can see the theory of the life review as a specific case of the more general position, if you will, that biology is destiny. Beauvoir, of course, fought against this essentially conservative position all her life – both in terms of feminism and in terms of old age. She has consistently argued that our true selves are not defined by our biological place in life – either in terms of gender or age – but rather by our actions. She does not deny that biology significantly marks our lives. Indeed in terms of advanced old age she stresses to an extreme the physical suffering that it is likely to bring. But she refuses to accord it essentiality or priority. If Butler’s theory of the life review is a liberal (if not, in this light, conservative) politics of the psyche, Beauvoir’s is a radical politics. There is something heroic in her theoretical gesture of denial. With Dylan Thomas she would have us rage against the dying of the light and not go gentle into that dark night.

Old age is thus for Beauvoir necessarily tragic. In The Second Sex she argues that “there is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future”; to fall from transcendence into immanence is “stagnation,” “a degradation of existence,” “an absolute evil” (xxxiii). Women are urged to create themselves, to transcend their biological place. Similarly in The Coming of Age she argues that the elderly must transcend their biological place. But here the similarity ends. With old age Beauvoir encounters the absolute end of the possibility of infinite transcendence or the creation of the self. Her existentialism runs into a dead end: death...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Editor
• Preface: “Whom the Gods Would Destroy They First Make Popular”
• I. Introduction
• II. Theory and Interpretation
• III. Adaptations and Applications