IMPACTS OF SOCIAL DISCOURSE ON WOMEN’S AGING: A PSYCHOANALYTICAL READING

Abstract

Aging is a biopsychosocial process lived by everybody since the birth, until the stage of life we call old age. Through a psychoanalytic perspective, however, old age is not linked to age group or stages of human development, but concerns a specific set of losses that a subject experiences throughout their existence, and also to the possibilities of new connections to life. Longevity, a global phenomenon, has its consequences. Among the oldest old, whose majority are women, whose process is marked by changes, transformations and afflictions, that especially affect female bodies, in addition to the singularities of each one. Being a woman is marked by a complex process of constitution, strongly permeated by social discourses on femininity and aging and, from a psychoanalytic perspective, it is about having to deal with the unspeakable of old age and finitude, losing and rebuilding their identifications with the Other, so that desire can be tied to existence. Faced with this connection, what can be offered is an attentive and careful listening, based on an equally careful transferential encounter, allowing elderly women to appear as subjects, being able to bring new desires in a continuous connection with life.