- George Vaillant
The June, 2009 issue of The Atlantic has an article on the Harvard Developmental Study (also known as the Grant Study after department-store magnate W. T. Grant, who provided initial funding), begun in 1937 to trace the long-term course of healthy adult development. Here is a link to a video in which George Vaillant, who has been the study’s lead researcher for over 40 years, discusses life lessons that he extracted the accumulated data. Though the Atlantic article frames the study as being about happiness, the intent all along has been to study each life in all its complexity, regardless of whether the outcome was joy or misery.
Vaillant is a psychoanalytically trained psychiatrist whose initial involvement stemmed from his fascination with the rich trove of information found in the study’s archive. He was successful at revitalizing the study at a time when resources were quite limited, and has continued the work unabated until its final phase, when data collection is nearing the end as participants die off.
In reviewing the information gathered, Vaillant concluded that the men’s lives were successful or unsuccessful not because of their good or poor fortune—the favorable or unfavorable events that happened to them—but because of their adaptations to those events. By “adaptations,” he didn’t mean so much conscious coping strategies but unconscious reactions to the world. In other words, he was interested in the defense mechanisms first identified by Freud and subsequently described most thoroughly by the ego analysts. Adaptations range from the primitive, psychotic reactions, through the immature and neurotic reactions, to the healthy, mature reactions.
Besides adaptations, Vaillant found that relationships were invaluable to fashioning meaningful and fulfilling lives. In 2008, he told an interviewer that “the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.” In particular, he found that the Harvard men’s relationships at age 47 were the best predictor of adjustment in late life. Not surprisingly, relationships early in life were also important to later life adjustment. One finding is particularly fascinating: “93 percent of the men who were thriving at age 65 had been close to a brother or sister when younger.” Sibling relationships have been neglected in most psychological theories; maybe they are more important than we realize.
We tend to think of positive emotions as something people always seek. Who doesn’t want to be happy or joyful? As described in the article, Vaillant thinks positive emotions have a cost as well. Hopes can be dashed; love has inherent within it the possibilities of rejection and loss; the pride felt in success can be accompanied by the fear of future failure. Vaillant thought that it was because of such considerations that some of the Harvard men avoided experiences that would have been likely to evoke positive emotions. For example, one of the men, a physician, retired when he reached 70. His wife secretly contacted many of his patients and asked whether they would be interested in writing a letter of appreciation. A hundred of them did. His wife collected these and presented them to him. During an interview with Vaillant eight years later, the man proudly showed the box containing the letters. He started crying, and said “I’ve never read it.” Vaillant’s comment about the incident was, “It’s very hard for most of us to tolerate being loved.” What a paradox: we desperately desire yet desperately fear love.
July 1, 2009 at 6:45 am
Wow. I really understand that – as I’ve said before I take compliments very badly, they make me squirm with ambivalence – but I’m not sure it’s a universal thing this study has discovered, vs. a feature of a certain kind of bourgeois culture (skewed Harvard sample) for which constant striving is coupled with constant feelings of inadequacy (anomie).
Re: relations with siblings, I wonder if that’s specifically important or an index to a more general openness to positive relationships with others.
July 1, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Pretty much all the conclusions of the Harvard Developmental Study have been criticized because the sample is so limited. I’m not sure that the fear of receiving whatever one is striving for is found universally, but it’s not hard to find other examples–e.g. the woman who devotes her life to her appearance, but deflects compliments about how she looks. The thing that I found most interesting with the Harvard men is that they played out this dynamic in the realm of interpersonal acceptance and affection. I would have thought that power or ability would have been much more important to them. If yearning for love grows even in the unpromising soil of Harvard grads from the ’30s, maybe it grows well pretty much everywhere.
July 3, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Is this perhaps a defense mechanism against the hedonic treadmill? These guys ‘have it all’ so they know how empty that is; perhaps they fear importing that familiar dynamic into their affective, meaningful lives.