Free Out of Time by Lynne Segal Page B

professor of psychology and gender studies at Birkbeck College, Segal examined the changing and complex roles of both women and men, emphasizing always the ‘contradictions at the heart of desire’, whether in pornography or the social experiments of collective living. In Out of Time , although she writes from a socialist–feminist position, she never writes only about socialism or about women, but about the range of lifestyles and commitments that have informed the contemporary experience of aging. There are as many stories about men in the book – including Jacques Derrida, John Updike, Philip Roth, and John Berger – as there are about women. But consistently Segal looks at ageing with the vision derived from her politics, her feminism, her personal life, her lifelong love of literature and art, and her sense of humour. In her professional role, she turns also to psychoanalysis to find ‘possibilities for affirming old age’. Freud had little to say about the unconsciousin old age. Dreading age himself, he bleakly declared that people over fifty were poor candidates for psychoanalysis – ‘old people are no longer educable’. But, Segal inquires, could we interpret the terrifying Freudian images of the uncanny, the double haunting us in the mirror, as protective and comforting rather than threatening? Are there transitional objects for ageing as well as for childhood?
    The old are both outside of time and running out of time, seeking meaning through eternal categories of anger, activism, attachment, and art. Segal begins with the contemporary increase in anger between generations, as the young are encouraged to resent the old for monopolizing increasingly scarce resources. Neil Boorman catches the contemporary mood in It’s All Their Fault : the Baby Boomers were responsible for driving younger generations into unemployment and debt. Second-wave feminists have long experienced generation-bashing from younger women, and ‘mother-blaming’ from their feminist daughters, as well as having to endure the culture’s mythology, which has always demonized old women as hags, crones, or witches.
    But rather than hitting back with anger, bitterness, and condemnation, Segal recommends protesting against ageism, in the model of such pioneers of Age Studies as Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Kathleen Woodward, Anne Wyatt-Brown, Barbara Frey Waxman, Sylvia Hennenberg, and Cynthia Rich, the estranged younger sister of poet Adrienne Rich (who knew?). While the popular image of political commitment among the old is a move to the right, many people ‘sustain their radical outlook to the very end’, continuing to campaign for peace, women’s liberation, socialism, and progressive change, and finding that politics still gives ‘meaning to their lives’. Despitedisappointment in the slowness of change, Grace Paley, Rosalind Baxandall, and Adrienne Rich, among many others, speak for the enduring satisfactions of continued activism. In his late seventies, Trevor Huddleston affirmed his ongoing dedication to anti-Apartheid and anti-racism: ‘I’ve become more revolutionary every year I’ve lived.’ For Segal, continuing to affirm the moral and political beliefs of our lifetimes keeps us attached to the world, along with our attachments to old friends, grandchildren, and new relationships. Old age is a time, Segal suggest, to acknowledge ‘the value of our lifelong mutual dependence’, as well as to defend our independence.
    Above all, Segal values art and takes comfort in the flaming, exuberant creativity of Paula Rego, Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, Lucian Freud, Barbara Hepworth, Frank Auerbach, and David Hockney. She directs our attention to the work of writers and poets who have told the stories of age, including May Sarton, ‘America’s poet laureate of ageing’, who explained, ‘We have to make myths out of our lives in order to sustain them and I think this partly how one handles the monster.’ For Sarton, age