INCONSISTENCY: REAL OR IMAGINED?

Nearly all of us will at some time be confronted with the problem of having to motivate an aged person after the death of someone he loves. However, consistent with our disinterest in the aged, few of us have been willing to pause long enough to take the problem seriously. When one of our parents dies and the other is left with inadequate psychological resources to enjoy his life, we’re apt to consider the difficulties of the remaining parent an irksome occurrence rather than evidence of a deep psychological problem which ought to command our full attention. Does our disinterest reflect mere lassitude? Is it that older people don’t carry our names forth into the next generation and that therefore we don’t take the trouble to cultivate their respect? If so our painstaking work with our children is suspect in its motivation. More than we’d like to believe, we devote ourselves to helping people who we think will be in a position to help us later on, and thus even many psychotherapists don’t consider older people worthy of their professional time.