Vital Involvement in Old Age

Erik H. Erikson's concept of the life cycle delineates eight stages of psychological development through which each person progresses. The last stage, old age, challenges the individual to rework the tensions and rebalance the resulting strengths of all the earlier stages in an attempt to establish an integrity of the self that, while drawing sustenance from the past, remains vitally involved in the present. Using interviews with and case histories of a number of octogenarians, this text provides a portrait of the experience of old age.