This paper critically assesses the portrayal of late life development in psychoanalysis and the wider psychodynamic tradition. Attention is drawn to the importance of this tradition both as a vehicle for personal change and as a cultural phenomenon in its own right. An analysis of historical trends indicates successive phases of accommodation to the practice of psychotherapy with mature adults, moving from a view that older people made unsuitable analysands to one that outlined the possibility of such work, and finally to a rejection of traditional Freudian frameworks as in themselves inappropriate. Two themes, the explanation of adult development in terms of formative childhood experience and a focus on transferential relationships across generations, are examined in greater detail. It is concluded that whilst psychoanalytic thinking can usefully draw on the age-sensitised perspective of social gerontology, much can also be learned about the experience of ageing through the use of psychodynamic concepts.