Abstract
The question of whether personality is stable or changes across the life span is central to psychoanalysis. Our belief as analysts is that personality can change; otherwise we wouldn’t be practicing psychoanalysis. The bias in the analytic community, however, is that personality (or character) becomes increasingly fixed as times goes on and that analysis will benefit an older adult less than it will a younger person. Presumably this is because the younger person has more time left to live, but behind that idea is the belief that older adults are less likely to change. In this regard, it is striking that Specht, Schmukle, and Egloff have concluded that personality may in fact be more flexible in later life than at earlier stages. Although this may come as a surprise to many, we hope it will also raise an important question for psychoanalysis as a field: Who benefits most from the analytic process?
To determine whether personality changes with age and to what extent these changes are influenced by important life events, Specht et al. analyzed information from almost fifteen thousand demographically diverse participants of the German SOEP (Socio-Economic Panel), ages sixteen to eighty-two. Study participants were tracked for four years. Each year, participants were questioned about important life events such as the start of a first job, marriage, the birth of child, moving in with a partner, the death of a family member, and unemployment. In the first and last year of the study, participants also completed a shortened version of the Big Five Inventory (BFI-S), a fifteen-item measure that addresses five dimensions of personality, including openness to experience (e.g., curiosity, imagination, willingness to entertain novel ideas), conscientiousness (e.g., organization, reliability, a disposition to hard work), extraversion (e.g., outgoingness, openness, sociability), agreeableness (e.g., softheartedness, good-naturedness, trustfulness), and emotional stability (e.g., psychological adjustment, ability to cope with anxiety and negative affect). The design of the study allowed researchers to assess age differences in traits between younger and older adults, as well as changes in traits over time within an individual.
The results showed age-related differences in all five personality traits between younger and older adults. They also showed that personality traits, with the exception of emotional stability, changed over time in response to life events. The level of agreeableness increased with age, with the strongest changes occurring between ages twenty to forty and after age seventy. Older individuals had slightly lower values and were less stable on extraversion than younger individuals. Emotional stability was slightly higher in individuals older than seventy compared to younger individuals; however, change in emotional stability over time was not observed. Individuals were most conscientious between ages thirty and seventy. After seventy there was a particularly strong decline on this trait. Openness showed an age-related decline, with stronger differences in older individuals. The stability of this trait decreased with age, with the trait being the least stable after age seventy. Thus, agreeableness, extraversion, conscientiousness, and openness each became less stable with increasing age, with the strongest changes occurring after seventy. Taken together, it appears that older adults may in fact have more malleable character traits than younger adults.
Experiencing certain major life events explained some of the changes in specific personality traits. This may in part explain why there is more flux in personality in later life; important life events occur more frequently in older adulthood than in middle adulthood, when life is particularly stable. For example, conscientiousness decreased faster after retiring than before. After the death of a spouse, women became less conscientious, whereas men became more conscientious. These findings suggest that personality changes in older individuals can result from factors other than intrinsic maturation.
The authors postulated that major life events precipitate changes in personality and that these changes reflect adaptations to the demands of new situations. This observation is consistent with several life span developmental models of personality, including Whitbourne’s identity processing model (1986) and Baltes and Baltes’s selective optimization with compensation (SOC) model (1990). The key idea is having enough stability in one’s self-concept or identity to effectively adapt to the demands of new situations imposed by aging (both internal and external) without losing sight of one’s personal compass. In this sense, personality change is a necessity in later life, not a luxury, and may even predict successful aging.
These observations are relevant to psychoanalysts in two important ways. First, one of the purported benefits of psychoanalysis is that it fosters both greater stability in the self and an increased capacity for flexibility and change. Thus, undergoing psychoanalysis earlier in life may benefit people later in life as they confront the demands of aging and require changes in personality. Second, older adulthood may be an especially fruitful time to undergo psychoanalysis, given the changes that take place that require personality change and a reexamination of one’s life and choices. Little attention, however, has been paid to the analysis of older adults. It is hoped that bringing this article to the awareness of the psychoanalytic community will direct increased attention to the potential benefits of psychoanalysis for older adults.