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Here is one of the more significant emergent areas in gerontology. The basic thesis is that people often must “plow under” some of their creative potential in order to fulfill their obligations in the family and the workplace.
This chronic suppression of interests and talents may contribute to a vague sense of dissatisfaction. Despite health, financial stability, and supportive relationships, they feel somehow unfulfilled and thwarted. This might be termed the anxiety of the unfulfilled.
One specific theory has been offered by David Gutmann (1987), whose work was mentioned briefly earlier. His cross-cultural research seems to support Jung’s conception that females and males each tend to suppress the other-gender side of their nature throughout the first half of their lives.
The challenge of the second half of life, then, is to actualize the other side of our natures and, in general, open ourselves to the creative potentials that previously lay dormant.
For men, this process involves moving from an active mastery to a symbolic mastery orientation; for women, the movement is in the opposite direction. Guttmann’s theory also takes social change factors into account, especially the tendency of mass, high-tech societies to treat elders as useless rather than provide them with places of honor and respect.
Maduro’s (1974) research in Northern India has demonstrated that society can also encourage and support creativity in old age.
Academic studies of creativity, clinical reflections and applied programs to encourage expressive activities are starting to make it clear that anxiety can be reduced and latent energies liberated when elderly men and women open themselves up to their creative potentials.
This itself is not entirely an anxiety-free enterprise because risk-taking is inherent in all creative activity. There is the immense advantage, however, of feeling oneself to be the source of impulse, idea, and activity rather the pawn or victim of forces outside one’s control.
