Does it make sense to talk about a psychoanalytical concept of old age? This article seeks to address this question by analyzing the gerontological conception of aging – a multidisciplinary view based on the positivist sciences – starting from the essentially atemporal metapsychological psychoanalytic concept and arriving at the possibilities offered by fundamental psychopathology, which is perhaps the only approach with the potential to assess the concept of old age as sustained in psychoanalysis by the concept of phatos.
Old age; gerontology; psychoanalysis; fundamental psychopathology