The Specificity of Psychological State in Old Age in the Context of Age-Related Crises

The article examines the psychological condition of older adults through the analytical lens of age-related crises. The author proceeds from the premise that later life is not a uniform period of decline but a sequence of developmentally meaningful turning points, each of which reorganises the personality's relation to time, to the body and to the social world. Drawing on a theoretical review of gerontopsychological literature and a secondary analysis of empirical findings published between 2010 and 2024, the study distinguishes four crisis nodes characteristic of old age: the loss of occupational identity after retirement, the tension between ego-integrity and despair, the growing salience of finitude, and the crisis of dependence provoked by declining functional autonomy. It is argued that the psychological outcome of each node is determined less by the objective severity of the event than by the meaning the individual ascribes to it and by the resources of the immediate social environment. The concluding section formulates a set of criteria that allow practitioners to distinguish a normative developmental crisis from an incipient affective disorder, and outlines directions for preventive psychological support.