In regard to all of these issues older people can be helped to find more satisfactory ways forward through various forms of reminiscence and life review activities. The making explicit of stories can be a healing activity in itself. Experience is malleable. Again this is a way of emphasising that this is an area of research with practical lessons. We are the authors of our lives.
Reality poses limitations on what can be achieved.
But in life, as in works of art, creativity depends on working well within the limitations of the material provided. In the third paper Peter Oberg, from the Department of Sociology at Uppsala University, Sweden, described research that he had undertaken to test two hypotheses that have become popular in social gerontology. One is that older people think of themselves as ageless. The other is that older people think of their bodies as masking their real selves. The evidence from a survey of 2,002 Swedes aged 20 to 85 years does not support these hypotheses.