Senescence: The Last Half of Life

Our life, bounded by birth and death, has five chief stages, each of which, while it may be divided into substages, also passes into the next so gradually that we cannot date, save roughly and approximately, the transition from one period to that which succeeds it. These more marked nodes in the unity of man’s individual existence are: (1) childhood, (2) adolescence from puberty to full nubility, (3) middle life or the prime, when we are at the apex of our aggregate of powers, ranging from twenty-five or thirty to forty or forty-five and comprising thus the fifteen or twenty years now commonly called our best, (4) senescence, which begins in the early forties, or before in woman, and (5) senectitude, the post-climacteric or old age proper. My own life work, such as it is, as a genetic psychologist was devoted for years to the study of infancy and childhood, then to the phenomena of youth, later to adulthood and the stage of sex maturity. To complete a long-cherished program I have now finally tried, aided by the first-hand knowledge that advancing years have brought, to understand better the two last and closing stages of human life.

In fact ever since I published my Adolescence in 1904 I have hoped to live to complement it by a study of senescence. The former could not have been written in the midst of the seething phenomena it describes, as this must be. We cannot outgrow and look back upon old age, for the course of time cannot be reversed, as Plato fancied life beginning in senility and ending in the mother’s womb. The literature on this theme is limited and there are few specialists in gerontology even among physicians. Its physiological and pathological aspects have been treated not only for plants and animals but for man, and this has been done best by men in their prime. For its more subjective and psychological aspects, however, we shall always be dependent chiefly upon those who are undergoing its manifold metamorphoses and therefore lack the detachment that alone can give us a true and broad perspective.

Again, youth is an exhilarating, age a depressing theme. Both have their zest but they are as unlike as the mood of morning and evening, spring and autumn. Despite the interest that has impelled the preparation of these chapters there is, thus, a unique relief that they are done and that the mind can turn away from the contemplation of the terminal stage of life. An old man devoting himself for many months to the study of senectitude and death has a certain pathetic aspect, even to those nearest him, so that his very household brightens as his task draws toward its close. It was begun, not chiefly for others, even for other old people, but because the author felt impelled upon entering this new stage of life and upon retirement from active duties, to make a self-survey, to face reality, to understand more clearly what age was and meant for himself, and to be rightly oriented in the post-graduate course of life into which he had been entered. The decision to publish came later in the hope that his text might prove helpful, not only to fellow students in the same curriculum but to those just passing middle life, for the phenomena of age begin in the early forties, when all should think of preparing for old age.