Old age and dementia: what kind of clinic can we offer to the subject?

Abstract

The clinic with old age, especially when we follow cases of patients affected by dementia, it cannot be done without managing transference and obstacles. The family, caregivers, doctors, other specialist colleagues in the clinical area are listened, the patient with dementia is often the last to be listened to and, even so, seen as someone who “says nothing about nothing”, “has no logic in speech” or “cannot answer logical questions”, statements commonly heard by these same respondents. From an organic point of view, these patients have a considerable cognitive deficit, which leads professionals to disregard what they say. Through psychoanalysis, however, we come across another order of knowledge, which places the subject at the center of the discussion, considering the role of listening to the subject and its effects based on the analyst’s desire. As final considerations, we consider that although at the beginning of psychoanalysis, listening to the elderly was not the target of major investigations, listening to the unconscious opened doors to the complexity of the clinic and its vicissitudes, making listening to old age a possible clinic, and whose clinical focus is given due to the particularity and subjectivity of each patient, in the case of working with the subject of the unconscious in a state of dementia. When the notion of dementia as a mental disorder, not necessarily the result of natural aging, is expanded, we offer a treatment to the subject based on the place of the subject’s knowledge.