Catherine the Malabe: old age — an event that occurs instantly Bashny.Net

Philosopher Catherine the Malabe in his polemic with classical psychoanalysis argues that aging is not a gradual process of decline, as we used to think, but is an event that occurs instantly, like the plane crash. Ageing is very often described as loss of plasticity. In this case we are again talking about the loss of plasticity. However, no one came to mind that can act and other plasticity in a time when "good" plasticity leaves the stage. Apparently, two rival concepts of aging hidden confront one another, inviting us to reconsider — in light of the simultaneously creative and destructive plasticity — definition of aging changes, and thus to understand how aging relates to disease as an event.



The first and most common view of aging, which is recognized both by the General public and the scientific community, is an ideological construct, where aging appears as a natural end of life, the decline, which necessarily replaces the maturity. It seems that aging is impossible without the progressive movement of"becoming old". The most obvious image of this formation was proposed by the psychoanalyst gérard Le gouais, a clinical specialist in the area of older people, on the pages of his book "Age and the pleasure principle," where he compares life with a journey by airplane: "We're on a plane. Most of us know... that the flight can be roughly divided into three stages: takeoff, flight and landing. If we understand childhood and youth as the rise and maturity as flying, then the landing can be considered a representation of the time required for landing. Aging, thus, will be identical to the beginning of the planting: "referring Back to aviation, we have seen that aging can be compared to the fit, which the subject either accepts passively, viewing himself from the viewpoint of biological determinism as passenger of a commercial flight, or actively lives it, if the subject decides to take matters into their own hands, like pilot, who manages and gives orders." There is no doubt that the metaphor of flight characterizes aging as a slow and progressive process that begins in the middle of life and which is not necessarily linear or free from areas of turbulence, but nevertheless it takes place sequentially, alternately, through all subsequent stages.

According to the scheme becoming-old to be plastic means to know how to give form to decline gradually, in a sense to invent your own age, know how to "manage" as "to stay young". In contrast, the loss of plasticity can be understood as an acceptance of decline, withdrawal, passivity, or pure receptivity final destruction or explosion due to lack of funds to create the form. The second concept defines aging not just as a gradual process, but also as an event. Accidental rupture or plane crash if you want. Even in the case of the most peaceful aging always introduced an element of randomness, the measurement of catastrophic. This idea of accidental aging complicates the first scheme. It teaches us that in order to age, becoming old in some sense does not matter. You want something else, namely, the event of aging. Unexpected, unpredictable, turning everything at the same time. The concept of aging can no longer be called a formation-the old, but rather it can be called "instantly aging", if we want to understand an unpredictable, random transformation, similar to those stories we sometimes read, "her hair turned white overnight". Something happens that accelerates the age of the subject, leaving a trail of wreck in the making-old, who both is and isn't its implementation. A stupid accident, bad news, lamentation, pain — and suddenly becoming transfixed, creating an unprecedented nature, the form of the individual.

This happens in case of ageing or death: instantaneous makes a distinction between natural and accidental is uncertain. If we are aging naturally or violently? Whether we die of natural or violent death? Death was always either one or the other? Advanced age is an existential rupture and not continuity. The reader can stop me at this place, protest, that what usually separates these two views of aging is nothing more than the intervention of pathology. During landing of the aircraft accident pathological, that interrupts the formation and makes the event-driven measurement of transformation may intervene in the natural aging process.

However, we in any case are unable to distinguish between the two concepts of ageing, taking as a basis the mere appearance of the disease. In fact, the disease — even if it is damaged, can simultaneously be interpreted as a scheme of continuity, and how the event schema. Disease similarly can be understood as the fulfillment of a destiny as a gap. In this sense, Deleuze was right when he placed the opportunity to become old and sick in the same existential plane. On this basis, I can agree that both ideas about old age can characterize the aging of a subject being in good or poor health. Only if we want to justify a paradigm for the understanding of old age based on these two ideas, can we really offer a satisfactory approach to mental disorders of the elderly subject and therefore late treatment?

The first presentation about aging, about the formation of old, governed by a certain understanding of plasticity, which, in essence, was developed by classical psychoanalysis. The use of the concept of plasticity (Plastizität) Freud makes us think. He has invested in this concept two fundamental values. First, there is what he calls "the plasticity of mental life," which he associates with the indestructible nature of the traces that constitute the fate of the subject. We know that Freud no experience can be forgotten. The trail is indelible. The trail can be deformed, and reformed — but it can never be erased. Primitive does not disappear. Thus, in mental life: "...every earlier stage of development persists alongside the later, which arose out of it; continuity leads to the coexistence, although it's still the same materials, where there is a whole series of changes. The former mental state, perhaps for many years weren't shown, and yet it still exists and someday it may again become the form of expression of mental forces, and only as if all the later results development was cancelled, cancelled. This extraordinary plasticity of mental development is limited in its direction; it can be described as a special capacity for involution — regression — since, perhaps, it turns out that a later and higher stage of development, which was abandoned, could not be reached again. The primitive state can always be restored; primitive mental in every sense of the word immortal.

So-called mental diseases must make the layman the impression that the spiritual and mental life was destroyed. In fact, the destruction only applies to later acquisitions and development results. The essence of mental illness is to return to earlier States of affective life and function. An excellent example of the plasticity of mental life is the state of sleep to which we aspire every night. Since we have learned to translate as wild and confusing dreams, we know that, each time falling asleep, like the clothes we discard its hard-won morality again to wear this morning."

Freud "In the spirit of the times on war and death" (1915) Plasticity thus associated with the ability to be changed without being subject to destruction; it can describe a change strategy that is looking for a way to avoid the threat of destruction.



The second definition given by Freud of plasticity concerns the vitality of libido. Plasticity of the libido connected with his mobility (Bewegtheit), in other words, its ability to change its object, not to remain unchanged, the ability to change their investments. The sexual and love energy invested in the object, but not the obligation, subject always to stick to one object; the subject must maintain a certain degree of flexibility, elasticity in order to be able to bind to another object, in other words, to remain free.

The effectiveness of analytic treatment depends primarily on libidinal plasticity. The patient should be able to develop, to abandon previous investments, to establish new ties in their place, much different. The plasticity of libido allows the patient to stop being a hostage to the unchanging mental structure, which is usually paralyzing and painful.

However, Freud characterizes aging as a loss or marked reduction of the plasticity of the libido as sexual investment weaken. In the Case of the Wolf-Man" he says: "we are aware of only one thing and that is that mobility, mental cathexis — quality that shows signs of decline with the advent of old age." Over time, the result of the weakening Eros, a patient can no longer start the analysis. The treatment of mental problems of the elderly in this case, it would be in advance doomed to failure. Today the verdict is not so hopeless, and a late treat, of course, accepted and applied. In "Age and the pleasure principle" Le hue returns to Freudian the dual formulation of the concept of plasticity, namely indestructible mental life and durability libidinally investment. It shows that the aging subject is trying to compensate for the natural weakening libidinally investments, unconsciously focusing on the mental life which is marked by the return of infantile mental forms. Presumably, an elderly man reverts to solipsism and egotism of the child. Libidinale weakening is accompanied by a strengthening of the partial pregenital instincts and narcissistic withdrawal. Ferenczi also noticed this when he wrote: "...older people are like children who become narcissistic, losing many family and social interests, they do not have a large part of their ability for sublimation... Their libido regresses to a pregenital stages of development."
Le hue does not accept the view of aging as an event or instant aging. He writes: "to Set the exact date, when does mental aging, is impossible, because it is not an event as birth, but rather is a slow, gradual process, resembling the growth process, and it is in some ways his direct opposite. However, his mental start can be installed, as aging begins at the moment when the illusion of immortality is confronted with the limitations of the libido, before forgotten, when the illusion is broken by signs of weakening long — whether it's the loss of the allure of a woman or the reduction of energy men — the weakening, leading to many affective, physical, vocational and social consequences." Le gouais recognizes the existence of "mental beginning of ageing, but this is the beginning of unconditional, inaccurate and is the result of natural decline of life, and not an accidental action, which could be a counterpoint to the rise.

This is a very conventional, classical definition of aging — which it measures only on the basis of loss of sexual power ("femininity" or "masculinity"), the loss of which is both physical and mental, genital and psychological — argues that the decline needs to be lived continuously, as a slow descent, without any sudden events or gaps, without modification, as if conatus suddenly became mute. Narcissistic over-compensation will eventually replace genital decay: the old people love themselves because they can no longer love. The instantaneous aging is associated with the disappearance of childhood and the inability to find the shelter in the past.

To save an elderly person from his or her problems, therefore, implies a search for new ways for sublimation, the transformation of the depressive position or balance settings libidinale balance. Under this scheme, plasticity refers it to indestructible, that may be damaged or subject to destruction, but that never disappears. To heal inevitably means to support one way or another — through this balance, through the scraps of childhood.

But can we be sure that mental life resists destruction, as claimed by Freud? Are we sure that there is something indestructible in the human mind? Are we sure that the child always survives? Is the statement "the essence of mental illness is to return to earlier States of affective life and the" always true? What I call here the "instant aging", the possibility of "sudden" change, undermines and violates the traditional definition of old age as a plasticity. The instantaneous aging is an unexpected event associated with the permanent disappearance of our childhood and thus the inability to find the shelter in the past, the impossibility of recourse.


From the point of view of neuroscience, old age is characterized by brain reorganization, and it involves the transformation and change of identity. According to Joseph Ledoux, "when the connections of the neurons changes, may also change and personality". Transformation that follow, cause deep restructuring of the image of "I" which leads the subject to a new life adventure, from which there is no defense and which can not be offset.
As we can see, the disease cannot be considered as an element that allows us to distinguish a becoming-old from the immediacy of old age, between the gradual and random concepts of aging. Making generalizations on the basis of lessons learned from neuroscientists studying the brain damage, I would dare to say that aging itself can be understood as damage. In the end, maybe for all of us aging starts suddenly, in a split second, like the trauma, and thus, without warning, transforms us into an unknown entity. Of the subject, which is no longer childhood, and whose fate is to live a bleak future.

When the subjects suffering from senile dementia, you begin to talk to us and remember episodes from the past, can we say that they are doing this in order to get rid of the pushed — in which case their words are revelatory? Or if they say something completely different that is in complete break with the person that they were thus construct a kind of false story, a hoax? The concept of random aging calls us to turn to a different approach to treatment than that which is practiced in psychoanalysis. It requires us to listen, to treat the elderly subjects in the same way as it is done after the bombings of the rescue service — to talk, to heal elderly subjects as if they were the victims of injury.

As rightly observes Le gouais, of course, "...there is psychopathology that is suited to the individual according to his or her old identity, according to his or her ability or inability to experience collisions with strangeness, the otherness, which causes human brain injury". Also interesting: the Cure for old age: why are we so afraid to grow up to Cheat old age: why are some people in the 70 blow up the dance floor, while others can barely walk Two types of aging — the progressive and immediate — always intertwined, and one implies the other, and I have no doubt that someone will argue that some elements of the destroyed identity will always remain, part of the personality structure remains unchanged. But even if so, how many people leave us and leave ourselves before disappear completely? published excerpt from the book Catherine the Malabe "the ontology of the accident: an essay on destructive plasticity" P. S. And remember, only by changing their consumption — together we change the world! ©

Source: special.theoryandpractice.ru/malabou-instantaneous-ageing