172 BIRREN
Robert A. Cohen and the basic intramural research was the domain
of Seymour S. Kety.
In general, the clinical climate was not overly favorable to encourag
ing research on aging since there was a dominant psychoanalytic
perspective that personality and character were laid down in the first
few years of life and adult life was an acting out of the scenario laid
down in those early years. Freud did not believe that psychotherapy
was useful for persons over the age of 50 since so much material had
to be recalled and digested. However, another psychoanalyst, Jung, held
that an individual did not have enough experience to review effectively
until 50 or more years had passed. In the early 1960s, Robert Butler and
I presented a proposal to the intramural NIMH research program that a
Laboratory on Aging be created. The proposal was turned down and we
were left with the impression that perhaps the psychoanalytic perspec
tive was the reason, although other considerations may have influenced
the decision.
The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
was then created in 1963, with research on both early development and
aging on its agenda. This indicated that research on aging was emerging
as a priority area. In 1975, the National Institute on Aging was created
as a further expression of the growing awareness that the study of aging
was of both scientific and public importance.The NIMH Study of Healthy Elderly Men
A major research project developed from an informal conversation
Louis Sokoloff and I had while we were walking from Building 10 to
Building 1 for another purpose. He mentioned his interest in finding
out what changes there were in healthy, older men in their cerebral
blood flow and cerebral metabolism. Having the techniques in his
laboratory to measure them, it was possible to develop a project that
would recruit healthy, older men to participate in a broad range of mea
surements of physiological, intellectual, motor, and social psychologi
cal variables. With the active interest of other colleagues in the NIMH,
the project evolved into a significant multi-laboratory and multidisci
plinary research project on human aging. Healthy men over the age of