Friendship in Midlife

Abstract

That statement, made over two decades ago, is still essentially true. The reasons are undoubtedly many. Among them are the relative youth of psychoanalysis as a science, an early peroccupation with psychopathology, and a later focus on development in childhood. Increasingly, in recent years the scope of interest and research has broadened to include the study of normality in the adult. In this chapter, we explore the developmental forces that shape normal midlife friendships and consider the effect of the therapist’s work on his or her own friendships, particularly those with colleagues and students.

It is astonishing how little has been written in the psychoanalytic literature on this perhaps most frequent of all human relations [friendship]. The references which do exist are generally glancing, scanty, and en passant. There is, to my knowledge, scarcely a psychoanalytic study centered on this subject in depth. (Rangell, 1963, p. 3)