Word: berezin
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That can be difficult to do. One reason, suggests Martin Berezin, past president of the Boston Society for Geriatric Psychiatry, is that "when old people were young they regarded an old man who was interested in sex as a lecher. So when they're old they're embarrassed by their own continuing needs. What was considered virility at 25 becomes lechery at 65." As a result, says Gene Borowitz, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois, "the elderly often try to suppress their sexual desires." That needlessly impoverishes their lives; according to Masters and Johnson, sexual...
Even the proprietors of nursing homes have begun to acknowledge that fact. "Up until a few years ago," Psychiatrist Berezin says, "an old couple admitted to a home were separated and their sex life cut off. Now they are more and more being allowed to live together." Institutions have also become more tolerant of sexual contact between unmarried residents. That is quite a change from the old days, Berezin says, when "those who wanted sex would have to slip out into the woods like adolescents...
...organization helped the man to recover completely. Other "senile" patients actually suffer from malnutrition, or have simply broken down out of loneliness, perhaps caused by a temporary overload. As one old man put it: "There is no one still alive who can call me John." Explains Harvard Psychoanalyst Martin Berezin: "The one thing which neither grows old nor diminishes is the need for love and affection. These drives, these wishes never change...
...withdrawal in a young person, we make sure that he is seen by a physician. But when those symptoms appear in elderly people, they are considered par for the course of old age. We rarely consider the possibility that elderly people who have had a breakdown can recover." Dr. Berezin successfully treated a 70-year-old woman who had a severe breakdown, her first. She had been picked up for drinking, setting fire to her home and other bizarre behavior, including chalking off a section of the sidewalk and claiming it as her own. In therapy, she revealed that...