POSSIBILITY OR DESPAIR: BIOGRAPHIES OF AGING (WELL-BEING).
Contributors: University of California, San Francisco.
Published: 1996
Number of pages: 258
Subjects: Health Sciences, Nursing.; Gerontology.; Anthropology, Cultural.
Description: Over the last two centuries, discourse about late life has unduly emphasized a deficit view based on loss and decline to the exclusion of previously-held understandings of old age as a source of moral and spiritual meaning for society. The contemporary answer to this deficit view--fueled by our cultural preoccupation with control and mastery--is an armamentarium of biotechnological interventions aimed at reversing or preventing many pathological conditions associated with advanced age. While laudable in its efforts to reduce the personal and social costs of disease, this enterprise further distances us from meanings obtainable through the awareness that we are inherently vulnerable and finite beings.

In this interpretive phenomenological study, in-depth, first-hand accounts from community-dwelling adults aged 80 to 94 challenge both the view that aging is defined primarily by decline and loss and the notion that age is a state of mind--a phase of life entirely subject to one's own design. Semi-structured, audiotaped interviews were conducted over four to six visits with fourteen African-American or Caucasian men and women who varied widely in functional and health status.

The findings of this study, discussed through the presentation of paradigm cases and exemplars, are organized in relation to three broad and interrelated issues: (a) the existential skills required to enable a person to "dwell-in-the-world," to experience one's life as meaningful when familiar ways of being are disrupted due to illness, debility, loss, or relocation, for instance, (b) the nature of embodiment in advanced age such that demands arising from the body must be both accommodated and transcended in order to experience well-being, and (c) how the experience of time is qualitatively transformed as one comes to understand one's life in terms of a temporally-bounded narrative rather than an open-ended trajectory.

This dissertation broadens our understanding of what it means to have an embodied sense of the finite nature of "life time" and suggests new avenues for working with aged persons to enhance their capacity to "dwell" given the disruptions posed by changes in one's body and world.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 57-06, Section: B, page: 3662.

Thesis (PH.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN FRANCISCO, 1996.

School code: 0034.