34 Aubrey Lewis 



But it may be said that beneath this variety there is one com- 

 mon notion, and an important one — that the ageing man 

 reverts to the psychological ways of his earlier life. This is a 

 very ancient and familiar idea: Aristophanes wrote that old 

 men are boys again, and no doubt it goes much further back 

 than that. But the "second childhood" view of old age derives 

 too obviously from some superficial features of senile dementia. 

 Old men, it is true, may become self-centred, greedy, boastful, 

 prone to tantrums, sulky and in other ways "childish", as we 

 say: but I see no more reason for equating this behaviour with 

 the corresponding behaviour of a young child than for equating 

 an old man's tottering gait with a youngster's toddle, or an 

 old man's urinary incontinence with a baby's bedwetting. It 

 is a purely descriptive similarity, whereas the concept of 

 "regression" implies essential identity. Unlike Hughlings 

 Jackson's principle of dissolution of function, to which it has a 

 deceptive affinity, it neither explains nor describes. 



The psychoanalytical use of the term, however, cannot be 

 criticised on these grounds. Granted the psychoanalytical 

 theory, regression does in part describe the psychopathology 

 of many of the emotional changes and morbid beliefs of the 

 senescent or senile patient. It is almost entirely, however, a 

 matter of inference and analogy: very few elderly people have 

 had an actual psychoanalysis. And it fails us, as do so many 

 concepts based on study of the abnormal, if we wish to ac- 

 count for the constructive readjustments which often appear 

 in later life, in spite of reduced capacity in some respects. 



The first general question, and the most difficult, is to dis- 

 tinguish the intrinsic, or normal psychological accompani- 

 ments of chronological ageing from those that are morbid. 

 The problems in this are not different from those we meet 

 when we try to distinguish between physiological and patho- 

 logical ageing: but I think they are incomparably more 

 difficult to solve. Apart from the common troub le in defining 

 any essential distinction between normal and morbid, we 

 have very little ground for correlating mental with structural 

 changes; we cannot isolate mental functions readily, and 



