The Aged Neurotic
The neurotic can be said to have reached old age as soon as he or she becomes considered as an eccentric, and his or her persistent ranting and raving is fondly classified as irascibility. The key to neurotic behavior in old age is that the ranting is more and more focused on concerns that younger people consider to be unimportant and even petty, such as the welfare of pigeons and the snappish attitude of the newspaper boy.

It is a well-documented phenomenon that the old begin to act like the very young, and this certainly is true of neurotics. The carefully constructed reserve and self-denial of middle age gradually peel away, exposing once again the fundamental core of vulnerability and anxiety that last characterized late childhood (but that always has been bubbling just under the surface). Aged neurotics once again dress just the way they want. Once they realize that they can get away with it they again refuse to eat certain vegetables. They finally feel free to say whatever they damn well please.

In old age we return again to the basic building blocks of anxiety that once shaped our infant lives: distrust, fantasy, insecurity, persecution, and guilt. The specifics of each of these may be different, but the feelings are exactly the same as they always have been: unpleasant.

Distrust. The distrust that began with the pacifier and then moved on to include baby sitters, teachers, guidance counselors, so-called friends, plumbers, employers, offspring, and spouses comes to rest finally with doctors. The doctors don't tell you anything or, if they do, they lie. They think you want things made easy for you, but if they took a little time to get to know you, they'd realize you're not like that. The only people the doctors level with are your children, who have begun to visit more often and treat you with affection after years of nothing but abuse. For that to happen, you must be dying. Six months to live, or even less. The doctors (all four or five of them) continue to smile and say everything is fine. The only one you really can trust is the chiropractor, but everyone just smiles in a strange way whenever you mention him.

Fantasy.
"They don't make 'em like they used to."
"Dempsey would've cleaned the floor with these guys."
"We were young and didn't have a care in the world."
"Nobody could beat your grandmother's cooking."
"The winter's were colder then, and it snowed and snowed and snowed."
"The city streets were clean and safe."
"We had to walk four miles to school."
"Nobody could hit like Hornsby."
"Those were the days."

Insecurity. The paperboy is on drugs. The bus driver's brother-in-law is mixed up with the Mafia. The police spend all their time eating doughnuts and drinking coffee. The young woman who moved in across the street has visitors at all hours. The reason the Social Security check is for more money now is because they were cheating me before. The Bingo is fixed. The city keeps giving me the runaround about the broken streetlight out front. The mailman didn't tell me he was going on vacation. They moved Merv Griffin to a different channel and now I can't find him. The paperboy is on drugs. The bus driver's brother-in-law is mixed up with the Mafia. The police spend all their time...

Persecution. If the aged neurotic becomes uninhibited enough so that he or she begins having too much fun, there exists the threat of being tossed into the slammer, euphemistically known as a rest home. In the rest home, the neurotic is surrounded by people who really belong there, and he or she is the one who is politely referred to as a "caution" by the other residents. The rest home is the ultimate extension of the infant playpen, and it teaches us for the very last time that having too much fun is a bad thing and that there always is someone who knows better than we do.

Guilt. In the end, there is no such thing as guilt, because either the Lord is all-forgiving, or there is no Lord.

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