Old age in the depth-psychology corpus is not primarily a medical or demographic phenomenon but a psychological and archetypal condition demanding its own hermeneutics. Hillman’s The Force of Character stands as the central intervention, insisting that the gerontological reduction of aging to biological decline actively distorts experience; in his reading, old age is a structure of character intensification rather than a process of loss, and its apparent uselessness demands an aesthetic, even artistic, revaluation. Jung contributes a complementary teleological axis: the psyche in later years turns inward toward image and dream as preparation for whatever lies beyond, and failure to embrace this inward movement constitutes a pathology as real as any youthful neurosis. Harding extends Jung’s ‘second half of life’ framework to argue that old age has become a personal psychological task that no institution — religious, familial, or tribal — can discharge on the individual’s behalf. Hillman’s Senex and Puer essay theorizes oldness as an archetype (Saturn, the senex) structurally coupled with youth (puer), making old age not a biographical stage alone but an omnipresent psychic configuration with its own epistemology, pathologies, and compensatory gifts. Plato provides the classical anchor — Cephalus testifying to the pleasures of conversation once bodily appetite fades — while the Hebrew and Anglo-Saxon lexical archaeology Hillman undertakes reveals that the impoverishment of ‘old’ as a signifier is itself a modern, post-Renaissance wound. Across the corpus, the core tension is between cultural ageism (old age as affliction) and a counter-reading in which character, wisdom, interiority, and archetypal depth reach their fullest expression precisely in later life.
Rather than a process, let us consider old age as a structure with its own essential nature… ‘uselessness’ needs to be regarded aesthetically. Must the soul be properly aged before it leaves?
Hillman’s programmatic reframing of old age from biological decline into an aesthetic structure of soul-formation constitutes the governing thesis of the depth-psychological engagement with aging.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999thesis
Both optimists and pessimists share a premise: Old age is affliction. That is its ‘real truth.’ Whether you overcome it or succumb to it, the nature of old age is undeniably solitary, poor, nasty, and far too long.
Hillman diagnoses the foundational cultural pathology — ageism — as a shared premise of both pessimistic and optimistic responses to aging, which must itself be dissolved before a depth-psychological account can begin.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999thesis
From the psychological point of view, life in the hereafter would seem to be a logical continuation of the psychic life of old age. With increasing age, contemplation, and reflection, the inner images naturally play an ever greater part in man’s life.
Jung articulates old age as the psyche’s preparation for death through intensified inner imagery and contemplation, positioning later life as continuous with whatever transpires beyond it.
, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963thesis
Senex will come to mean more than old person or old age. The imaginal notions condensed into this short term extend far beyond whatever personal ideas we might have of oldness, beyond our concerns with old age, old people and the processes of time in personal life.
Hillman elevates ‘old age’ from biographical stage to archetypal category — the senex — asserting that the psychic significance of oldness vastly exceeds its personal or chronological meaning.
, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis
Speculative and philosophical questions arise in the human mind, especially the aging mind, and deserve respect on the level at which they are posed. They need answers in kind.
Hillman contests biological reductionism in gerontology, insisting that the aging mind’s philosophical questions about meaning require psychological rather than scientific responses.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999thesis
Aging opens the door to ‘old,’ and old age opens it yet wider. That could be its point. Can we know the world’s oldness or enter into the character of anything until we are ourselves old?
Hillman proposes that old age uniquely enables participation in the quality of oldness pervading the world itself — a cosmological, not merely biographical, epistemology.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999thesis
The problem of old age is today principally a personal one which each individual must solve for himself and its solution is hardly to be hoped for if preparation for it is delayed too long.
Harding, drawing on Jung’s ‘afternoon of life,’ argues that old age is no longer a collective religious or social problem but an irreducibly personal psychological task requiring lifelong preparation.
, the way of all women, 1970supporting
An old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as a young man who is unable to embrace it… it is hygienic to discover in death a goal towards which one can strive, and that shrinking away from it is something unhealthy and abnormal.
Jung proposes that psychological health in old age requires orienting toward death as a goal rather than refusing it — shrinking from it constitutes a clinical pathology of the second half of life.
, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960supporting
There is sebah, a good old age of gray hairs, full of days; balah, a sad one, worn out like old clothes… These kinds of old, and more, course through us. These are the strands and rhythms of human complexity.
Hillman’s Hebrew lexical archaeology reveals that ‘old age’ is not a single experiential state but a multiplicity of distinct qualities simultaneously inhabiting the aging person.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting
As the first forewarnings of coming winter make themselves felt, an autumn of brilliance and beauty may be ushered in. The psychological energies which in earlier life were fully occupied with the inner and the outer adaptation are released from that arduous task and shine forth in pure beauty.
Harding uses the seasonal metaphor of autumn to describe old age as a potential culmination of released psychological energy, the ‘time of the beginning of wisdom.’
, the way of all women, 1970supporting
The last years, so valuable for reviewing life and making amends, for cosmological speculation and the confabulation of memories into stories, for sensory enjoyment of the world’s images, and for connections with apparitions and ancestors — these values our culture has let wither.
Hillman catalogues the specific psychological functions proper to late life — memoir, cosmological thought, ancestral connection — that Western culture systematically devalues through the institution of retirement.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting
It is not age but character that is to blame for the intensification of peculiarities in later years, then the work of prolongation should focus on the main cause, the force of character, rather than on the ‘Arithmetick’ of longevity.
Hillman redirects the question of longevity entirely: it is character — not biological lifespan — that determines the vitality and meaning of old age.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting
The confusion is the result of a fusion. You have somehow merged with the family tree, seeing its various twigs and branches from the perspective of the central trunk… You have drifted outside the time-bound ‘who begat whom.’
Hillman reframes the memory confusions of old age as an archetypal merging with ancestral continuity — a wisdom of temporal fusion rather than a symptom of cognitive decline.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting
The contrast between youth and age shows clearly in the shift from ascending to declining… In later years, the pull of gravity takes over. Ambitious, upwardly mobile social climbing… no longer offer glamour. You no longer need to be among the beautiful people.
Hillman interprets the somatic ‘Great Sag’ of aging — the literal gravitational descent of the body — as a psychological reorientation from ascent and ambition toward groundedness and interiority.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting
To include eald in a compound generally brings benefits: trustworthiness, venerability, proverbiality, value… With the daring adventure and revolutionary thought of the Renaissance, however, ‘old’ begins its decline.
Hillman’s philological argument demonstrates that ageism is a historically specific cultural pathology originating in the Renaissance, not an eternal human attitude toward old age.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting
There is senex, too, in the child’s loneliness; a sense of utter abandonment, isolation and helplessness that may not come again until old age. The senex gives that ontological loneliness, a removal from human existence.
Hillman identifies the senex — the archetypal principle of old age — as appearing at life’s extremities, linking the isolation of infancy to the existential solitude of the very old.
, Senex & Puer, 2015supporting
We impede evolution and the development of the human species if we neglect the aged. This we will do until we recognize that their character can shelter civilization from its own predatory frenzy.
Hillman advances a civilizational argument: the aged perform an irreplaceable cultural function as preservers of values against destructive energies, making their neglect a collective rather than merely personal loss.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting
All too often, conventional wisdom convinces the aging to fear the shameless images that come uncontrollably to their minds. Seniors need, rather, to hear that there is reason in these sexualized fantasies, which connect eroticism with spirit and imaginative power.
Hillman defends the erotic imagination of old age as psychologically legitimate, connecting sexual fantasy in later life to the vis imaginativa — the union of spirit and creative power.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting
In trying to keep up with the times and with the younger generation, they really lag behind their own generation, they fail to keep up with their own time.
Harding diagnoses the refusal of old age as a psychological regression — an adolescent clinging to earlier modes of life that prevents the individual from inhabiting the proper time of their own maturity.
, the way of all women, 1970supporting
I regard them as travellers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to enquire, whether the way is smooth and easy, or rugged and difficult.
Plato’s Socrates establishes the classical precedent for regarding the old as necessary witnesses to a journey the young must one day undertake — a prototype for depth psychology’s respect for elder experience.
, Republic, -380supporting
With the same intensity and irresistibility with which it strove upward before middle age, life now descends; for the goal no longer lies on the summit, but in the valley.
Jung’s teleological model of the psyche posits that life’s directional drive does not cease in old age but reverses from ascent to descent — a movement toward depth rather than height.
, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960supporting
To hang on or let go — that is the question for the old… Timing is crucial. Lear’s mistake may have been to let it go too soon, before all of him was ready.
Hillman uses Lear as an archetypal case study in the central dilemma of old age: the timing and measure of relinquishing control, which requires deep knowledge of one’s own character.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting
Why do older people become moralists, sentimentalists, and radicals? They chain themselves to threatened trees; they march; they shout… Why is fading away not enough; why can’t we let our light go down behind the graying hills?
Hillman frames the political and moral intensity of old people as an expression of character’s intensifying force in later years — a psychological phenomenon rather than a social inconvenience.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting
The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things… that alienation which so long separated me from the world has become transferred into my own inner world.
Jung’s late self-description, cited by Hillman, illustrates the paradox of advanced old age: increasing self-uncertainty paradoxically yields a deepened sense of cosmic belonging.
, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999supporting
The citation is from Cicero’s Cato Maior de Senectute (Cato the Elder on Old Age). The text is a eulogy to old age.
An editorial note in the Red Book identifies Cicero’s Cato Maior — the classical eulogy to old age — as a text Jung was citing, situating his depth-psychological concerns within the ancient philosophical tradition of rehabilitating later life.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009aside
The young do not die; death occurs to the old, and old age is so very, very far away.
Yalom documents children’s denial of mortality by projecting death exclusively onto old age, illustrating the earliest psychological mechanism by which aging becomes equated with death and thus feared.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980aside
I am too old to fight, but all the same I remain among the warriors to guide them with my counsel and my voice: that is the privilege (géras) of old men.
Benveniste’s etymology of géras establishes that in the Homeric world the privilege of old age was specifically the authority of counsel — a cultural-linguistic foundation for the depth-psychological valorization of elder wisdom.
, Indo European Language and Society, 1973aside