Part of this prejudice comes from Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, who argued that therapy stopped working after 40 or 50 years, says Rossana De Beni, professor and senior researcher in experimental psychology at the University of Padua, Italy. In On Psychotherapy (1905), a brief technical paper on the practice of psychoanalysis, Freud noted that above a certain age “the elasticity of the mental processes, on which the treatment depends, is as a rule lacking”.