Personal Growth, Creativity and Transcendence in Old Age. A Psychological Analysis

Abstract

This chapter should begin with some basic questions that people ask themselves at biographical turning points, and thus also in old age: Who am I, where do I come from, where do I go? We owe the following verse to the German Renaissance poem, which expresses these questions very well – a piece of anonymous verse: “I come and I don’t know from where. I am and I don’t know who. I go and I don’t know where. And I’m surprised that I am so happy.”1 What moves people in old age? What joys, worries and burdens does their current life have? How do they assess their current life situation and how do they see the future? What hopes and fears do they mention when looking to the future? We dealt with these questions in a recently completed research project in which we extensively interviewed N= 400 people in the 75 to 95 age group (Kruse etal. [in press]; Kruse and Schmitt [in press]). The present article starts with the analysis of life issues (dominant concerns) in old age, which was an important task of the project. The results of this “thematic analysis” clearly demonstrate the variety of concerns that people in old age name and describe in a detailed interview. A few statements about the sample as well as the methodology in analyzing the interviews should be made in order to promote a better interpretation of the results of this thematic analysis. In our sample, we took into account participants from different social classes, people with different degrees of need for care and people in different forms of living (own household, assisted living, living in a nursing home). We did not include people with an (incipient) dementia disease or with depressive and anxiety disorders in the sample. The interview was usually conducted by two people: an interviewer and an interview assistant. At the beginning of the interview, the interviewee was once again informed about the aim of the study: The aim of the study was to get information about how everyday life is personally “structured,” about the health and health behavior of older people,