Metaphors as Test of Personal Philosophy of Aging

Abstract

and also entering into a period which is the last period of human life, both of which conditions have a definite meaning for individuals. We may call this the personal-philosophy aspect of aging. Like other aspects of personal philosophy, these facts seem obvious, and just because they are assumed and form the background of ex perience, it is hard for people to put their philosophy into words. Large-scale studies of aging people seldom take measures of this aspect of aging into account, but use other measures which are more easily ob tainable. Thus it is questionable how closely people really look at the course of their lives, how explicit the personal philosophy is, and it is difficult to get people to express ideas about their whole life course. This paper will investigate a method by which we can look at people's ideas about the course and the approaching end of their lives. The difficulty in devising measures of this kind lies in the fact that some answers are so obvious. If you ask people whether they are going to die, they say yes, and also agree that their life span is limited. In the same way, everybody accepts the fact that time passes, and that stages of life are different. Somewhat more subtle measures have to be used to see how aware people are of these facts during the normal course of their activities. It can be shown, for instance, that individuals are quite able to illustrate the course of their lives pictorially, and draw graphs corresponding to their lives (Back and Bourque, 1970; Bourque and

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