Reclaimed Powers

A unique feature of human development is that mothers and fathers are bound to a long period of childrearing, during which the continuity of our species depends on the fulfillment of distinct parental roles and on the suppression of psychological potentials that conflict with those roles. But once the "parental emergency" is over, David Gutmann argues, men and women can assert those parts of themselves curbed by the restrictions of raising children. It is this shift in roles--a product of evolution found throughout our species--that led David Gutmann to propose a new psychology of aging, based not on the prospect of loss but on the promise of important new pleasures and capacities.