The meaning of reinvention, especially later in life, has been on my mind recently. Erik Erikson’s final developmental task, “integrity versus despair,” is more than a theory. Despair sets in when purpose disappears, when there is no longer a way to feel connected to something larger than oneself. To age with any grace, there must be a redefinition of what success means; otherwise the psyche quietly withers.

Beginning a new vocation in one’s sixties offered me a kind of unexpected relief. A path chosen from internal values rather than external momentum lifts an existential weight from the shoulders. Fate is being authored.

Training was tough. Moving from a CEO identity into clinical practice required an active effort to draw the ego out of the room. Not because ego is bad, but because the therapeutic hour belongs to someone else. The task is to become a spelunker through the caves of unconscious meanings and emotions, not an expert performing expertise. That shift took time, humility, and practice.

Patients have taught something simple and fundamental: everyone has humanity — and this is deeply resonant for me. No one can be reduced to a category or label. The film “The Life of Chuck” captures this beautifully, the sense that the space between our ears is an expanding universe. When trust develops between analyst and patient, there is the privilege of witnessing or joining someone in regions of experience utterly foreign to one’s own. Together, new meanings begin to form.

Reinvention has its emotional cost. Entering rigid professional structures not built for mature beginners brings a loss of authority and social status. There is a period of being a sponge again, absorbing everything. The degree to which this feels destabilizing depends on the strength of one’s identity before the leap. Where are you?

But as this new professional identity took root, something deeper began to shift.

For me, psychoanalysis reshaped how I see the world. Early childhood experiences carry enormous weight in determining how safe we feel with novelty, exploration, and connection. In my case, sharing a womb with an identical twin was, in hindsight, a profound early “holding environment.” And the “unconscious,” once abstract, now feels vividly real, revealed in dreams, enactments and surprising emotional shifts. And the therapeutic relationship itself has become central. Slowing down to ask what is happening between two people opens doorways no technique alone can reach.

Most change, as we enter our mature years, happens gradually. But eventually, the slow layers give way to something unmistakable: the recognition of choices that never existed before. That is the quiet power of reinvention, the creation of new possibilities where none had been imagined.