(1996).

Journal of Analytical Psychology, 41:3-18

The archetypal senex: An exploration of old age
Judith Hubback, M.A.
This paper contains three sections. The first consists of a
circumambulation of some of the themes suggested by Jung's work
on the last of the developmental archetypes, offering examples of
descriptions culled from poetry and from contemporary Jungian
writers. The second section goes into more detail about Jung
himself in old age, the senex archetype and its connection with the
child and the puer. It deals with losses in old age, and responses
and reactions to them: wise acceptance, the stimulation of late
creativity, and fury at the frustration of still remaining potentials.
The paper attempts to warn against the idealization when
someone in the senex stage of life is seen as only the wise old
person, and argues for the healthy side of the energetic assertions
frequently manifested in the late years of life, which are similar to
those of infants and small children. Clinical material is included.

Introduction
Circumambulating the subject of the senex archetype by means of an
ingoing spiral movement, trying to get closer to it, in my own interest as well
as in that of several of my patients who are also at that stage of life, the first
thing was not to fear it. I reminded myself that the senex archetype is to do
with old age, not death, though that is what comes next. Some people find
death's inevitability makes them anxious, and they feel persecuted by their
powerlessness to avert its ultimate victory. Others, paradoxically, discover
that they can accept being powerless, and acceptance liberates them for a new
kind of enjoyment in their remaining years.
Jung wrote descriptively about the problems of ‘the second half of life’
when he was himself aged 55 (Jung 1931, para. 777). He put this phase of
life as beginning between 35 and 40, so he already had several years’
experience of it. To keep up to date, it now fits better with many people's
views of the subject to think about life in three major phases, and to use the
term ‘the Third Age’, valuably launched with the University of the Third Age
in Toulouse in 1972. Seeing life as being in three stages, as compared with
two,

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 is a rather more optimistic way of looking at the whole: ‘three stages’ makes
life sound longer than ‘two stages’. Although that way of dividing our years
on earth is probably not logical, it may be an advantage to adopt it, since
subtleties in our feelings and evaluations are thereby called upon in reflecting
on these matters.
As well as Jung's ‘second half of life’, Shakespeare's seven ages of man
come to mind, with Jaques winding them up to the last one of ‘second
childishness, and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans
everything’ (As You Like It, II, vii). More recently Erikson decided on eight
stages of development. Among those of his observations which I found
particularly appealed to me were, first, that the most characteristic
psychological crisis of the stage he calls the one of mature age is that of
integrity v. despair and, second, that the prevalent psychological modality is
‘to be, through having been; to face not being’ (Erikson 1950, chapter 7).
‘To face not being’ is something which anyone does, or perhaps should do,
whose work is connected with other people. It is not morbid to do so. The
actor Sir John Gielgud who was 90 in 1994, but still working, said: ‘I never
accept lengthy film roles nowadays, because I am always afraid I will die in
the middle of shooting and cause such awful problems.’ Analysts also are the
obvious examples here: many of us at this stage of our professional careers do
not take on any new training patients, specializing rather in seeing people who
want to undertake no more than one or two sessions per week, perhaps
focusing on particular difficulties. With some of them, in fact, the work
develops, grows, widens and deepens, and that is welcomed. If the analyst's
earlier narcissistic needs have been sufficiently well met, consideration for
what can be done for others is implicit in the interactions, for the patient to
use, even if he or she is unaware of it. The question of whether, and if so
when, to retire can be studied with those thoughts in mind.
There is a poem by Philip Larkin called ‘The Old Fools’, which contains
the following lines:
Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting,
People you know, yet can't quite name.
(Larkin 1974)
Being an analyst in practice for many years is very like that. I quite often
get an inner picture of someone I saw, professionally, quite a while ago —
what they looked like when they walked into the consulting room, for
example, or something they said, or did, or dreamed, even though I cannot,
perhaps fortunately, remember their name or anything else about them. And
they might not want to be remembered, if they saw me at a time when they
were particularly unhappy. Then I hope that in their advancing years they are
less unhappy than they might otherwise have been, as a result of the
interactions

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 during their analysis. Whatever happened in therapy was one step, in
company, towards the Third Age.
At the senex stage of life looking back — remembering — and trying to
look forwards into the future objectively, are both on offer. Many poets have
voiced for the rest of us thoughts and reflections on various aspects of old
age, musings which illustrate, amplify, or question what Jung sketched in
about the senex. T. S. Eliot wondered whether we could count on autumn
serenity and wisdom when we have grown old. He thought the elders were
often deceitful and foolish, and that they feared fear and frenzy. He felt that the
only wisdom we should aim to acquire was the wisdom of humility, since
humility is endless.
Shakespeare, another of the timeless psychologist-poets, understood the
interaction of wisdom and folly, sometimes most poignantly:
FOOL. If thou wert my fool, nuncle, I'd have thee beaten for being
old before thy time.
LEAR. How's that?
FOOL. Thou shouldst not have been old before thou hadst been
wise.
LEAR. O! let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; Keep me in
temper: I would not be mad!
(King Lear, 1, v)
I will return to the vexatious and perhaps disputable subject of wisdom in
old age later.
Dante in the thirteenth century and Tennyson in the nineteenth offer us two
contrasting legends about the old age of Ulysses. In the Inferno Dante picked
up the incident in the Odyssey in which the blind seer Teiresias had foretold
that some years after his homecoming Ulysses would travel to a far inland
country - though surprisingly driven there by the god of the sea, Poseidon -
and would die there. Teiresias warned Penelope about that. The alternative
legend is the one Tennyson preferred. He pictured the elderly Ulysses as
getting restless, sitting around with his ‘aged wife’ after the excitements and
dangers of the ten years of the Trojan war and the ten further years it took him
to get back to Ithaka. So the old adventurer decided to travel by sea as far as
he could, westwards, towards the sunset and death. This time, as well as by
Poseidon, he was driven by all his old ambitious arrogance:
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
(Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’)
Tennyson also has him voice his more admirable will-power: ‘To strive,
to seek, to find, and not to yield’. As literary scholars have noticed, the hero
there was giving the positive version of the words spoken by Milton's Satan:
…What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,

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 And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield.
(Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 105-8)
Before moving on to the central section of these observations on the senex
stage of life, some contemporary writers can be mentioned. Barbara Mowat,
introducing Helen M. Luke's Old Age, writes that Luke develops the theme
that ‘a point comes in our lives at which we choose how we go into our last
years, how we approach our death. The choice, as she describes it, may be
painful, requiring (should we continue to grow old, instead of merely sinking
into the ageing process) that we let go of much that has been central even to
our inner lives’ (Luke 1987, p. viii). The capacity to exercise that choice
points to a well-functioning ego. Jane Wheelwright, in For Women Growing
Older, is especially interested in how women can grow old using the
positiveness of the animus. She contends ‘that the animus and anima are not
consistently integrated except in old age’ and she sets out to link ‘Jung's past
contributions to some present departures in Jungian psychological thought’
(Wheelwright 1984, p. 7). She points out that ‘If they are not too sealed off by
past circumstances and upbringing, older women will find themselves in the
spiritual, philosophical, reflective time of their lives’ (ibid., p. 46). But, ‘If
life has no meaning, the immensity of death becomes a horror, a frightening
ordeal’ (p. 48). She sees introverts and thinking women as having in old age
‘a chance to find their unlived lives … [the] unlived part of life contains a
surprising amount of energy and can be freshly creative if older women let
themselves go and listen to those who say, “Whatever it is, do it!”’ (ibid.).
Many old and admirably mature people find they care less than before, or at
any rate do not worry, about what others will think of them if they behave
unconventionally, or without inhibiting a hasty reaction. Jung's documented
cantankerousness with his friend and helper Ruth Bailey (a story to which I
shall return) is an example of that, although he was behaving like a defiant
child. It could be speculated that he experienced her as a combined mother-
and anima-figure. He was telling her she had to put up with him however he
was - at that moment he was not the wise old man.
Among recent Jungians James Hollis, though he was writing about midlife,
not old age, pointed out something valuable that can be applied to mature
individuation: ‘Destiny … is not the same as fate. Destiny represents one's
potential, inherent possibilities which may or may not come to fruition.
Destiny invites choice. Destiny without choice is only fate replicated’ (Hollis
1993, p. 92). Giving in to a persecutory view of fate suggests the presence of
an ego which is unhelpfully passive, as compared with one which, while
accepting limitations, still reaches out towards the frontiers of the possible.
The concept of reaching out suggests a combination of conscious and
unconscious processes when someone is moving towards individuation.
Moraglia writes of ‘what might be regarded as the paradox of individuation:
that the most momentous and demanding turns of this path should be

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 negotiated in the second half of life; that it should only lead towards the end
of life’ (Moraglia 1994, p. 65). And he goes on to point out that, following the
prescriptions of many religious teachings, ‘we strive towards the
development of the personality vis-à-vis the ineluctable fact of death because
the latter is not seen as an end but as a transition to another plane of existence,
our condition in this other world being determined by the level of
development achieved in this life… those who can embrace this belief have
ipso facto “solved” the riddle of individuation’ (ibid.). Those who do not
hold the belief described by Moraglia probably also do not think of
individuation as a riddle. One of the central aspects of the therapy I shall
describe in the latter part of this paper was that the patient was very anxiously
posing questions, which of course I could not answer, about what happens
after death. He could not go along with the idea of ‘another plane of
existence’.
Reflections on the senex archetype
Some archetypes, for example the puer and the anima, have among their
characteristics that of ‘aspiring’, reaching out and forwards from where they
start. In contrast, one of the most important features of the senex archetype
which the reader is asked to keep in mind is that of loss. Although many
people suffer serious losses at earlier stages of life, it has to be said that my
current thinking about Jung and the senex is unavoidably affected by my age
and by difficulty in tolerating various irrevocable losses, as well as having
observed other people (friends as well as patients) also struggling. It feels as
though one will again and again be faced with not being able to mourn well.
Will there be time to do that?
About the main archetypes, Jung wrote a great deal, directly, indirectly,
and implicitly. The term senex archetype used here features as ‘the archetype
of the wise old man’. Senex is not to be found, where I thought it might be, in
the essay ‘The stages of life’ (1933), nor in ‘The soul and death’ (1934). The
nearest approach to it is: ‘Saturn … the maleficus and abode of evil, the
mysterious and sinister Senex (Old Man)’ (Jung 1963b, para. 298).
Wondering why he preferred ‘the wise old man’ (which he used often) I
began speculating, and came up with a few possibilities. One idea was that he
did not want even to think about losing his remarkable energy and
creativeness. Throughout his working life, he had been an innovator who
broke new ground psychologically: he affected the future in a major way, as
well as being a scholar who studied the past achievements of thinkers of many
kinds. The prospect of diminishing powers was for him, as it is for anyone
more ordinary, far from easily acceptable. In a letter to his close friend Erich
Neumann, in 1952, when he was aged 78, he wrote of ‘the pitiless fact of my
old age’ (Jung 1975, Vol 2, p. 32). But further on in the same letter, he says
that ‘Job and Synchronicity are now in the press. At

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 present, with my unfortunately very limited working capacity, I am still
struggling with the last chapter of Mysterium Coniunctionis’ (ibid., p. 34).
It seems clear that he could not refrain from mentioning his old age, though
Neumann was well aware of that fact. One possibility is that, at an
unconscious level, he was asking for sympathy, as many old people do. (They
remind us of what they do not want us to forget, and is it all too easy for the
reminder to have tinges of envy and reproach: ‘Lucky you, you're younger than
poor me’. Also, ‘You can't know what it feels like to be me - old’. But
sometimes they console themselves by conveying that ‘you are not in the same
club as I am’: they need to keep in touch with a sense of importance. Younger
and busy people so easily forget them. Perhaps they are also reminding
themselves, as Jung may have been doing, of their advancing years as a kind
of warning and preparation for even older age, so that - perhaps - death will
not come as an unmanageable shock to themselves and to others.)
Another possible reason for the relative paucity of direct and full
descriptions of the senex may be that Jung tended to refer to it already
qualified with the adjective wise, the wise old man, or, only very
occasionally, the wise old woman. Wisdom of course is different from
intelligence. Jung conceived of the unconscious (the root place of archetypal
activity) as wise, but not particularly intelligent (M. Fordham, personal
communication). Intelligence should, I think, be understood as a linking
capacity, but not as a feature of someone's personality, original or developed,
such as wisdom is. It is on record that, in a talk to students at the C. G. Jung
Institute in Zurich in 1958, he spoke of the ‘peculiar intelligence of the
background’ (Jung 1970), p. 178). He was referring to what he called there
‘the Great Man’, a term which seems to have meant the elemental, original, or
archetypal man, who still exists in all of us. That is not really the same as the
unconscious. The discrepancy can be resolved by recognizing that in old age
we may have the capacity to reach in - through the intelligent use of
experience - towards previously unconscious archetypal levels and get the
benefit of what they offer. Younger people, however intelligent, have had less
time to develop that capacity and enjoy its benefits.
Other archetypes than the senex are referred to by Jung less evaluatively,
and as encompassing a wider range of characteristics. I am trying here to
consider the senex and its manifestations in as many aspects and variants as I
can, and not only in a light that Jung perhaps considered prestigious. In the
same way as his concept of the animus, and to a lesser extent that of the
anima, are now seen to belong to his stage of twentieth-century history, not
necessarily applicable to modern people, so the senex is now almost derided
by some Jungians as representing ‘the devouring father’ and less weight is
given by them to what can sound as its idealized form, the source of
prestigious wisdom. I think that that view of the senex is prevalent among
personalities favouring the puer. Attitudes to archetypes change, develop or

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 even decay, as time moves on, though, theoretically, archetypes themselves,
like Platonic ideas, do not. One of the concomitants of the senex is calmness,
which presumes an absence of the persecutory anxiety which brings some
elderly people into therapy. If being even approximately comfortable seems
within range, that is much to be appreciated. I will return to the question of
wisdom later.
At the time when Jung was living the senex stage of life, rueful humour was
one of the aspects of his character which can be seen in the composite picture
of him as an old man and applicable to other elderly people. In 1960, on the
occasion of his 85th birthday, he was interviewed by a journalist from the
London Sunday Times, Gordon Young, who asked him what he was planning
for it. ‘Why’, Jung answered,
‘to keep away from visitors, of course. Especially the highbrows.
Most of them haven't the remotest idea what I am talking about.
Trouble is, they don't bother to read my books because they're too
high-hat. I'm not a bit taken in by intellectuals, you know. After all,
I'm one myself.’
(McGuire & Hull 1977, p. 443)
During much of his life Jung enjoyed paradox, so that as well as
bemoaning the limitations imposed by advancing years he was able to get to a
sense of balance, and was well centred when he wrote:
When Lao-tzu says: ‘All are clear, I alone am clouded,’ he is
expressing what I now feel in advanced old age. Lao-tzu is the
example of a man with superior insight who has seen and
experienced worth and worthlessness, and who at the end of his life
desires to return into his own being, into the eternal unknowable
meaning. The archetype of the old man who has seen enough is
eternally true. At every level of intelligence this type appears and
its lineaments are always the same, whether it be an old peasant or
a great philosopher like Lao-tzu. This is old age, and a limitation.
Yet there is so much that fills me: plants, animals, clouds, day and
night, and the eternal in man. The more uncertain I have felt about
myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with
all things. In fact it seems to me as if that alienation which so long
separated me from the world has become transferred into my own
inner world, and has revealed to me an unexpected unfamiliarity
with myself.
(Jung 1963, p. 330)
To comment briefly on that celebrated and very rich passage, I would like
to point out that Jung shows the archetypal, collective, world-wide nature of
living the senex stage of life (‘peasants and philosophers’), in combination
with sense experiences and inner observations and reflections. He makes the
point that a time comes when enough has been seen for a person to be content,
at least more or less. But there is still perhaps the possibility - or is it the
lure, the temptation? - of finding out more. So I do not think we can be certain
that even the calm that Jung seems to convey in those closing lines of his
memoirs was nothing but wise acceptance of ‘unfamiliarity with myself’.
Jung, like many of us, showed different sides of himself to various people

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 and in various circumstances. That is due, to a great extent, to the fact that
archetypal and personal reactions were often closely woven into his
behaviour, as they are in most of us. For example, when writing Answer to
Job, in his late seventies, he was composing that amazing book from the
ground of rage against God. Its motivating impulse was ‘unintegrated split-off
rage’ (Newton 1993, p. 394). Being as it were ‘in the grip of a fever seems to
have been a cathartic experience, and publishing it when he knew it would
give offence was in one sense a courageous personal communication’ (ibid.).
That is an example of the man at the senex stage of life being the very
opposite of calm - at least in his writing - as well as not minding if he ran into
adverse criticisms and disagreements.
There is a more personal aspect of how Jung could rage in his late years.
The story comes from Vincent Brome's book entitled Jung, Man and Myth
(Brome 1978, p. 262). After the deaths of both Toni Wolff, in 1952, and of his
wife Emma, in 1955, he managed for a bit, working on the necessary inner
adaptation to being on his own. Then he persuaded an old friend, Ruth Bailey,
to become his companion-housekeeper. He warned her that he could get into
great rages. He said she should not take any notice of them, that they did not
mean anything, that he got out of them quickly. It sounds as though he felt
entitled to them. Soon after that warning, she was preparing a meal of minced
meat and put two tomatoes in with it. He ‘exploded’, stormed out of the
kitchen and sulked for several hours. When she said that, if she wasn't worth
two tomatoes, then she was going to leave, he protested that he had told her
his explosions meant nothing: but he added that all she had to remember was
to do nothing to make him angry!
In psychological reality, Jung in his ninth decade and a small child in a
temper tantrum when aged about eighteen or twenty months, are demonstrating
the same violent emotion and unwillingness to tolerate frustration or to give in
to someone else's wishes. It is also worth noticing that the story of the
tomatoes illustrates how an outbreak of rage is triggered by an omnipotent
certainty that the food is being damaged. It is either the feeding mother, or a
mother-substitute, or perhaps a manifestation of the mother archetype, who
sets off the fuse. The child archetype, the puer or the puella (adolescents) and
the senex are parts of our actual or potential personalities, not, as might be
thought, at a distance in the spectrum of the psyche, but elements of each
other: not warring opposites, but mutually and, as it were, organically needing
the other. To illustrate that, one can perhaps picture a grandparent enjoying
the company of a grandchild. Many people who never had a grandmother or
grandfather know that they have missed an important phase of life experience,
or a particular quality of their lives. When a grandparent demonstrates
leniency towards a child or young person, he or she is, I think, unconsciously
asking for a similar kindness to be shown towards him or herself. When Jung
was in a child- or puer-like rage in the kitchen, he was at both ends of
archetypal life. If someone in the senex stage denies the child

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 in him or herself, there is poverty in the psyche. Acknowledging and even
fully living the recurrence of the child in oneself is part of individuation. In
the process of growing older, the aged person is offered the opportunity of
keeping in touch with the forces of on-going development. The child and the
puer archetypes need not be seen as always limited to their own essence in a
static or fixed way: what they represent is the possibility of moving forward.
The corrolate is that the senex-identified person also can move: he or she uses
the inner child and the puer in the service of accepting the next stage, which
has to be that of moving towards death, the unknown.
Hillman pointed out in his paper ‘Senex and puer’ that ‘the negative senex
is the senex split from its own puer aspect … The archetypal core of the
complex, now split, loses its inherent tension, its ambivalence’ (Hillman
1979). In that situation the whole psyche loses some of its dynamism. The
positive aspects of the child and of the puer encourage growth and a reaching
out towards opportunities, and I suggest it is the positive senex which moves
towards what can still be made of life in some way or other, and a refutation
of psychic poverty, which old people fear if their earlier lives were creative
ones. They cannot all get to a state of saintly poverty.
I referred to individuation earlier (p. 6), also in connection with the
approach to death. It seems that we can never exhaust all the possible facets
of the concept of individuation, since its dynamism, rather than any other
characteristic, is the one we most need. Creativity is dynamic, even if only
minimally in the late years. The difference between completion and perfection
is well known, and not only in Jungian circles. Individuation certainly does
not signify perfection, but it is perhaps worth thinking about how tempting it is
to link it too closely with completion, especially if that is done in an
idealizing way. I am not comfortable with the idea of a ‘completed
individuated state’ ever being attainable. The creativeness which is still just
possible in the senex years keeps the ageing person in touch with what the
inner child and puer/puella can offer, even if it is not always easy to listen to
their voices.
The old person who is caught by an uncontrollable outburst of fury is
probably someone who has not been able to work through rages and integrate
them at what we think of as the suitable stage of life for them, namely infancy
and early childhood. Time has eroded the defences installed by the persona,
and those defences had concealed failures of integration. Narcissistic wounds
are as yet unhealed, so the affect generated by them is still there in the psyche
of the much older person, who may be less and less able to manage it, with
defences which have stiffened. The patient I shall describe is an example of
that traumatic state of affairs. It is worth pointing out that an old person's rage,
especially one which seems inappropriate to the receiver of it, may be a
displacement from the agony of despair. The despair accompanies the
powerlessness the person feels in his or her situation. The infant (in spite of
the archetypal illusion of omnipotence) actually lives in the power of the
mother, and of other grown-ups; the senex person is

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 psychologically in the power of the inexorable approach of death, and may
physically be in the power of carers in the environment. Rage is accompanied
by the fear of disintegration: the infant's arms flail, the old person shouts, or
even screams. A patient reported that her father screamed almost continually
(or so it seemed to the anguished family) for the last six months of his life. Yet
can we be sure that screaming is not compatible with wisdom? Probably they
are on different planes. The screaming conveys a great tension. The archetype
of the wise old man, or, as we would now say, the wise old person, is the
term Jung used most, but the idealization in it can be challenged by suggesting
that the emphatic nature of screaming is an ingredient of wisdom, which is not
only meek and mild. Screaming is the distressing and audible manifestation of
protest: there is presumably something big to protest about. The aged person
fears being diminished, and if we want to develop as far as possible our
understanding of the subtleties of individuation it is worth recognizing that the
well-centred and well-rounded person can still get very angry, even to the
point of screaming.
These reflections on the senex archetype make no claim to be exhaustive.
The therapy of an elderly man
This patient, who I will call Charles, came to see me first in his mid-
eighties. He did not want to tell me his actual age. I noticed, and wondered
later whether he feared that some kind of bad magic would be caused by
naming the number of years. His age came out in the following way, several
weeks later. In telling me a very violent dream, in which he was on the verge
of being beheaded, he divulged that, about thirty years before, he had been to
a soothsayer, who read his palm and predicted that he would die when he was
84. I asked him what his present age was: it was 85. It had been a few months
before his last birthday that the series of dreadful and terrifying dreams had
started which had led to him being referred for therapy. The intense fear of
death was the theme throughout the two years he attended. He said it was
death, and what happens after, that made him so anxious, not the process of
dying. But that was to some extent at variance with the images in the dreams,
which came in quick succession every week: almost all were about violent
ways of dying, being killed. Very occasionally, late in the series, he was one
of the killers. There was a lot of blood, there were strangulation scenes, death
by thirst in the desert, being cut to pieces or buried alive, carnage, warfare,
enslavement, buggery and other forms of sexuality at the hands of ruthless
men. He had originally said the dreams had started ‘out of the blue’, and
though the onset of them had evidently occurred in connection with his fear
before the completion of the dangerous 84th year, they did also come out of
his unconscious life, which is often the meaning of ‘out of the blue’.
A few months into the therapy, Charles revealed that in early adulthood

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 he had been suddenly and overwhelmingly attracted to a young woman and
during their time together she had become pregnant. As neither of them wanted
to get married, he arranged an abortion - illegal and expensive in those days.
He did not regret the abortion itself, but felt deeply guilty; it seemed to him
that he had committed murder. He was fairly naturally relieved by talking
about it, and the ferocity of the dream images decreased.
The difficulty in working through the influence of the shadow with Charles
was partly due to the many years which had elapsed since the ‘murder’, but
throughout the therapy all his resistances were very strong. It took him a long
time to accept that things went on which he did not know about consciously
and could not control. I expect that happens in many therapies of elderly
people who have not had a previous experience of being enabled to open
themselves to the unconscious. Once that slowness is evident, the analyst or
therapist must take it into account and accept it as a boundary within which
the work has to be done. Charles's resistance in the area of shadow decreased
to some extent, though not impressively. He tried to understand himself, and
indeed in the past he had experimented with several quasi-religious
approaches to life problems. For many months, the desire for understanding
was always with reference to the cause of the dreams. Very gradually, though
only implicitly, he dropped the search for a simple cause and accepted that
since the dreams happened inside him, he was dreaming them. He was willing
to see that an intrinsic, if regrettable, part of himself was what he liked to call
the cause. He reluctantly semi-agreed that he was the one who was doing the
dreadful deeds in the dreams as well as the person suffering them.
When the dreams had almost completely subsided, Charles's search for
understanding shifted, and he wanted to discuss the enigma of death. He
repeatably asked me what would happen after he had died. He had not had the
benefit of contact with parents or other helpful adults at the stage of
adolescence when such things can be talked about, if the young person wants
to. Sometimes it almost seemed as though he thought I might have actual
information on the subject, as a trusting child might naïvely imagine its parent
knows everything. After as much talk as seemed possible, I had to be straight
with him, and say I did not know. With a patient in full analysis I would have
made an attempt to get him to find out more about the agitated anxiety he
suffered on the subject and to analyse the transference projections, but
Charles could make no use of any kind of comment on the interactions
between him and me. He was presumably acting out his disappointment with
me over the unsolved problem, when he made contact with the senior priest in
the church he attended, who tried hard to help him. The priest thought he
would benefit from a retreat, and he went off for an austere week, in the
middle of a cold and damp winter, thereby missing his therapy session. It
occurs to me belatedly that he was unconsciously trying to make me feel guilty
about my inadequacies. He was not to know that I would have been

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 pleased for him if he could have been comforted through developing a faith
similar to that of the priest. A further thought is that I, representing his mother,
and the priest being in the role of his father, both had to be shown up as
useless.
Charles conveyed, usually indirectly, that his early childhood in a country
south of the Equator had been a happy one. He seems to have idealized his
mother as gentle and kind. He had appreciated the garden round the
comfortable family home, the many fruits and flowers, and the natural beauty
of the land. His father, an ex-navy man, and a typical member of his social
class at that time, had, in contrast, a generally authoritarian outlook on most
things, and he believed that small boys should be beaten when they
misbehaved. But there was one good memory: his father was a senior
manager on the railways, and during a strike he drove a train and took Charles
on the coal bunker of its large steam engine. Father and son were travelling
together through the night. It was marvellously exciting, and he remembered
admiring his father ‘for not being beaten by the strikers’. But alas, childhood
ended abruptly: without warning, as far as he could recall after so long, he
was sent from the other side of the world to England at the age of 6 or 7. He
was lodged with a family he did not know and sent to what he thinks was a
large girls’ school, where he was the only boy. Life had become physically
and emotionally cold. It seems that he kept inside himself all the distress,
anger, puzzlement and fear that those childhood experiences caused. Yet they
contributed in a way which would be obvious to any therapist, in that, for
many months of the work with him, he said repeatedly that he loved no one,
not his wife nor any of his several sons, daughters and grandchildren. In
contrast, he frequently made a point of telling me how various charming young
mothers he met in his daily walks and their small children (usually girls) all
loved him. He was getting from them at least some gratification of his
childhood needs, which had been so mercilessly and unimaginatively
disregarded. Courtesy and kindliness meant a lot to him. He always shut the
door of the consulting room more gently than any other patient ever has. He
did not like me to make any comment on that, since courtesy had to be basic: it
was self-evident that people should be courteous. The thought comes to me
now that, at some unreachable level of his psyche, being sent away to school
so far from a warm home, had been experienced by Charles as a very
discourteous thing for his parents to do. I think that his unconscious inner
experience was that they had not respected his personhood.
The death-like abandonment Charles had suffered left its mark indelibly,
and at the end of every session he said: ‘I will see you next week, God
willing’. God obliged. After working on the profuse dreams during the first
year of therapy, his fears decreased. There were minor and sometimes major
set-backs and interruptions, such as an accident when he stepped into the
roadway and was injured by a young man on a motorcycle who did not stop to
help him. Naturally he felt insulted. Although the conscious reason for

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 seeking help was most likely satisfactorily met, and there was what seemed to
me to be a significant change in feelings towards his family, he used his
sessions to talk about death as freely as he could. I used to wonder how I
could find out more about his concern with the actuality of death, as compared
with philosophical reflections on the subject (an approach which some
elderly people want), but at the time I had no clue with which to attempt any
kind of effective or convincing interpretation which might release this
material. After he had left therapy I reflected about him further, and I thought
the blockage quite likely had something to do with the traumatic sudden
ending of childhood and the bleak years which had followed; but that was not
quite enough to satisfy my analytic curiosity. I knew Charles did not want to
be beaten by his fears, and I saw his tenacity as an indication that he had
internalized the only aspect of his father that he referred to favourably, the
determination of the man who drove the steam train through the night.
Suddenly the phrase ‘the arms of death’ came into my mind. And I moved
from the experience of the father to that of the mother. I thought that perhaps
through the operation of a subtle and unconscious introjection of appreciated
parental imagos, the loss of being held in the arms of his mother when he was
still a young child had contributed something essential to the pressure of his
need to talk about death with me.
There were occasional hints in the work with Charles that ideas about ‘bad
magic’ appealed to him. He told me frequently that there was an evil spirit in
him. From the way he talked about it, it was clear that his fantasy was of an
actuality, a concrete malevolent spirit, he was convinced of it. It was an
enemy inside, in analytical terms a bad internal object. Then he told me about
an embarrassing incident from the day before. He had wanted to buy a new
nail-file but realized too late that he had left his wallet at home. The shop
assistant handed him the file, and he pocketed it, without explaining that he
was going home to collect the money. He felt very guilty at having ‘stolen’ the
nail-file. With a patient in full analysis it might have been possible to elicit
associations to the file: could it have been some kind of weapon? I only
thought of that some months later, since he did not himself use imagery at all. I
would have liked to be able to connect his obsessional guilt to the
encapsulated and long-term anger at the parents, which had been displaced
onto himself and had become self-criticism, combined with an irritable
unsatisfied self-importance within his present family. He often complained
that his were the last wishes to receive attention and he conveyed that none of
them realized how much they were affronting his position as head of the
family. It was clear that his real self had been deprived of healthy and
balanced development. At some inner level, he seemed to have experienced
his mother and father as having forgotten him: and perhaps he had left much of
himself in the far-away childhood home. It was important for me to try to keep
empathically in as close as possible psychological contact with him, to sense
how he was feeling, but the analyst-me felt my efforts were unnoticed and

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 ineffective. In the nail-file session I said I thought he was feeling guiltier than
was appropriate, and that he was unduly annoyed by the old-age trouble of
being forgetful and easily distracted. He took up my comment as being a
pointer to his perfectionism, which he had never mentioned before and I
thought that was insightful. He added that the incident had become a threat to
his self-image, which was not his usual way of talking. Did he have to try to
be ‘perfect’ since his mother and father had been so far from perfect? It was
good to discover that his earlier unconscious fantasies of omnipotence were
perhaps beginning to yield to the therapeutic interaction. In succeeding
sessions it was clear that he still believed in the inner presence of the evil
spirit, but its malign power was less: it was on the way to becoming a more
suitable conscience.
I have described that small piece of work in order to try to link it with
what has to be held to by the analyst in even trivial-seeming events, with
elderly patients just as much as with younger ones: being confident enough in
one's own self-feeling to challenge, or not to challenge, a patient, or even to
contradict, as compared with offering a sophisticated interpretation. Since
Charles took so little part in work on the unconscious and only came once a
week, it was difficult to gauge how firm I could be and to sense the occasions
when relatively penetrative comments were possible. Such work involves
toning down analytic skills, which feels unsatisfying, it frustrates aspects of
oneself which are available to other patients in different circumstances. But of
course it is the analyst's personal parallel to the ageing patient's task of
adapting to changes and to decreasing capacities.
Charles's therapy stopped abruptly. It took the form of him announcing,
almost at the end of a session two weeks before the Easter break, that he was
not going to come again. He explained that his investments were doing badly,
and he could not afford any more therapy. He obviously considered that that
practical reason was enough, and autocratically expected me to agree with
him and not to make anything analytical out of it. His coolness upset me and I
felt angry. Then I realized that this was projective identification with his inner
child's anger. I could not be cool, as he seemed to be. All I said (out loud)
was that I thought we should talk about it, and that I would expect him for the
next two sessions. During them, it was difficult to decide whether to offer him
the interpretation of his sudden decision as being his turning the tables, at long
last, in retaliation against his parents. I knew he had investments, but in the
therapy they represented a legacy from his father, the salary earner, and there
was now not enough money, libido, to go on with the therapeutic work. By
abandoning me, he was reversing the childhood situation of his mother having
let him go. I refrained from interpreting in that way, mainly because I knew all
too well that he was adept at fending me off, and it felt too late to use what
might have been a kind of obstinacy which belonged to my younger years, but
I am not sure if my decision to hold my tongue was the right one. It was
probably not ‘correct’

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 analytically, yet by saying nothing along those lines I may have enabled him at
some unconscious level to feel that he had achieved something in defiance of
the symbolic parent. At the end of the last session he left with tears in his
eyes. That had never happened before.
Charles gave me permission, when I asked for it some months later, to
write about him and his therapy with me. I think this can be taken to mean that
the maternal holding and the paternal energy for understanding him were being
handed back to me: he had made of them what he could, and for him, that was
that. But he was allowing me to offer them to other analysts, so perhaps at
some level he knew he was valued.
Conclusion
‘Ending cannot happen satisfactorily if it is a one-sided decision by the
therapist; to be valid it must happen when the two members of the dyad are
talking a common language - in this sense ending becomes a creative act and
cannot be described accurately to anybody else’ (Fordham 1994). The
unsatisfactoriness is the same when it is the patient who decides unilaterally:
it is then the analyst who is personally and professionally unsatisfied. Yet,
considering the contents of the senex archetype, it is valuable to remember
that unsatisfactoriness is one of them, to be acknowledged and not to be seen
as merely negative. I cannot say that Charles's presumably unconscious
experience of a reversal, which I have postulated, could be dignified with the
words ‘a creative act’. Nor would I wish to generalize from his therapy, but
reflecting about how things were between him and me has spurred me to
consider various features which come into play when working as analytically
as I find is possible with psychotherapy patients in the senex stage of life.
References
Brome, V. (1978). Jung: Man and Myth. London: Macmillan.
Erikson, E. H. (1950). Childhood and Society. London: Hogarth; Penguin
(1965).
Fordham, M. (1994). ‘Ending psychotherapy’. Group Analysis, 27, 5-14.
Hillman, J. (1979). ‘Senex and puer’. In Puer Papers, ed. J. Hillman. Dallas:
Spring Publications.
Hollis, J. (1993). The Middle Passage, from Misery to Meaning in Midlife.
Toronto: Inner City Books.
Jung, C. G. (1931). ‘The stages of life’. CW 8.
Jung, C. G. (1934). ‘The soul and death’. CW 8.
Jung, C. G. (1963a). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. London: Collins and
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Jung, C. G. (1963b). Mysterium Coniunctionis. CW 14.
Jung, C. G. (1970). ‘Fragments from a talk with students’. Spring.
Jung, C. G. (1975). The Letters of C. G. Jung, 2 Vols., ed. G. Adler & A.
Jaffé. Transl. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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 Larkin, P. (1974). ‘The Old Fools’. In High Windows. London: Faber; New
York: Farrar, Stlaus and Giroux, 1983.
Luke, H. M. (1987). Old Age: Journey into Simplicity. New York: Parabola
Books.
McGuire, W. & Hull, R. F. C. (eds) (1977). C. G. Jung Speaking, Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Moraglia, G. (1994). ‘C. G. Jung and the psychology of adult development’.
J. Anal. Psychol., 39, I, 55-75. [→]
Newton, K. (1993). ‘The weapon and the wound: the archetypal and personal
dimensions in “Answer to Job”’. J. Anal. Psychol., 38, 4, 375-95. [→]
Wheelwright, J. H. (1984). For Women Growing Older. Houston: The C. G.
Jung Educational Center.
(MS first received January 1995)

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 Article Citation [Who Cited This?]
Hubback, J. (1996). The archetypal senex. J. Anal. Psychol., 41:3-18

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