TAT as a therapeutic activity with elderly subjectsPaperback, 15 March 2021

An elderly person feels lonely, abandoned, useless, attracted by the distance of his childhood, pierced by psychic and physical losses. They experience processes that are constantly being (re)activated; trauma, mourning, loss of memory.... And she asks herself questions without answers since the dawn of time. She abandons herself to the impulse that knows only death as an ultimate refuge. She is attacked by so-called administrative procedures that constantly anticipate her death and remind her of what her "home" was. Should we decide how to live the rest of her life? What does such a person expect from our clinic, from us "shrinks"? How can psychoanalysis respond to a situation that confronts man with a reality made of holes? Is it possible to put in place something that is there, that makes sense, that gives back to the life drive its capacity to create, to please itself and to please the "Other" without, however, denying the already predefined destiny? Is it possible to reactivate the impulse that will allow it to "re-ek-sist" somewhere, to approach "the thing" in all serenity, to ensure that the desire is still there?