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Through this work, we seek to address the phenomenon of dementia from the perspective of psychoanalysis. With this goal, we consider, among other things, concepts such as time, history, memory, distress, anxiety and the historical construction of the psychic subject, concepts that provide us with the theoretical base needed to found a hypothesis of psychogenic causality to dementia and thus contribute to their ever more comprehensive and multidisciplinary understanding. According to this hypothesis, dementia is not merely caused by an organic deficit affecting the memory.The negative social position occupied by old age leads to a sense of unease that, compounding the fragility specific to the aging process and the difficulties devising mourning for one’s own life (mourning by anticipation) leads to a depressive condition that one could flee from in return for a radical forgetting and a break in social relations. In this sense, dementia would also be disturbance of identity in which the historically and socially constructed ego disappears.