In the last few years many studies have appeared relating directly or indirectly to the role of adjustment in the ageing process. What factors influence the adaptability of the elderly person to his or her own disability, isolation or approaching death? In general the studies done by sociologists stress the importance of the social situation in which these persons find themselves. P. Townsend's book “The Family Life of Old People” (1957), the articles of Havighurst (1958) and his group in Chicago, and of Post (1958) are examples of this view. In what may be regarded in some way as a reaction to this tendency, we have the theory of disengagement of Cumming et al. (1960), in which “ageing is seen as an inevitable mental withdrawal or disengagement resulting in decreased interaction between the ageing person and others in the social system to which they belong”. But it is Irving Rosow (1960) who emphasizes this point more clearly. After critically reviewing diverse approaches, he states (and I quote from different paragraphs throughout his paper), “The root of the problem lies in regarding adjustment as a state or a condition at a point in time”. “What gerontologists have called adjustment is actually the result of the product of the ageing process”. “Thus it follows that the only way to evaluate conditions in later life is to compare them with some earlier patterns”. From there on he presents his own sociological theory of adjustment. Strengthening this view still further, a psychologist, Robert Peck (1960), reporting on one phase of the “Kansas Study of Adult Life” by the University of Chicago Committee on Human Development writes, “Adjustment to middle age and old age, in so far as it has been measured in this research, seems largely determined by personality characteristics which have been laid down earlier in life”. It is psychiatrists, however, who have insisted on the importance of the previous personality in the problems related to ageing, as may be noted in the publications of Cameron (1956) and Roth (1959).