Maximilian Fuhrmann practices a profession that did not quite exist when he began. Clinical geriatric psychology, as a formal discipline, was still finding its vocabulary in the early 1980s. But Fuhrmann had already understood something essential: that the last decades of life were a territory of genuine possibility, where change remained as real as it had ever been.
He came to this understanding early. Fuhrmann developed what he describes as a natural affinity for service. When he arrived at the University of Southern California as an undergraduate, he found himself drawn to the Andrus Gerontology Center, one of the few institutions in the country taking seriously the study of aging as a subject worthy of rigorous academic attention. The moment that clarified everything came when he was eighteen. His grandmother suffered a stroke, and Fuhrmann, still barely an adult himself, helped guide her recovery. She was eighty-one. Fuhrmann watched this happen and understood that he was witnessing something that contradicted the prevailing narrative about age and decline.
What he had seen in his grandmother was resilience. It was an almost magical ability, he says now, this capacity of seniors to adapt and recover. What Fuhrmann observed in his grandmother, and what he would go on to observe in other elders, that late life contains possibilities that our culture has trained us not to see. He pursued his doctorate at one of only two schools in the country, at the time, offering a joint major in Clinical Aging Psychology. He began seeing psychotherapy clients in 1982, as a graduate student, and he has continued without interruption since. Thousands of hours spent in the intimate space of therapeutic conversation with people in their seventies, eighties, nineties. He has seen people in their ninth decade alter fundamental patterns of thought and behavior, discover new capacities in themselves that surprise everyone.
This is what keeps him engaged: the spectacle of late-life development, the evidence that arrives daily in his practice that human beings remain plastic, remain capable of growth and adaptation far longer than we imagine. Within the next decade, for the first time in American history, there will be more people over sixty-five than under eighteen. The baby boom generation, that vast cohort that has reshaped American life at every stage of its progression, is now entering late life en masse. We are moving toward a society in which the elderly are not a marginal population but a dominant one, and yet our institutions, our assumptions, our cultural narratives about age remain largely unchanged from an era when most people did not live long enough to experience the territory that Fuhrmann has spent his career exploring.
He believes that the key to navigating this demographic transformation lies in rethinking purpose. What Fuhrmann has learned from his clients is that purpose, throughout life, is a necessity. Seniors who remain employed, or who find other forms of meaningful engagement, fare better both physically and mentally.
There is also, he points out, an economic dimension. A society in which seniors remain productively engaged is a wealthier society, better able to support the genuinely frail and dependent, better able to transmit skills and knowledge across generations. Service, he says, when asked what ultimately motivates him. He has organized his entire professional life around a commitment to a population that the broader culture prefers to ignore. People in their eighties and nineties still show him things he has not seen before, still demonstrate the almost magical resilience.