Read Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study Online
Authors: George E. Vaillant
Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study
TRIUMPHS
of EXPERIENCE
TRIUMPHS
of
EXPERIENCE
THE MEN OF THE HARVARD GRANT STUDY
George E. Vaillant
THE BELKNAP PRESS
of
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2012
Copyright
2012 by George E. Vaillant
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Jacket photo by David Sacks/Getty Images
Jacket design by Jill Breitbarth
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vaillant, George E., 1934–
Triumphs of experience :the men of the Harvard Grant Study / George E. Vaillant.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
978-0-674-05982-5 (alk. paper)
1. Men—United States—Longitudinal studies. 2. Aging—Social aspects—United States—Longitudinal studies. 3. Aging—Psychological aspects—United States—Longitudinal studies. I. Title.
HQ1090.3.V35 2012
305.310973—dc23 2012028519
For
Robin Western, who for twenty years has been the linchpin holding the Study together
CONTENTS
1. Maturation Makes Liars of Us All
2. The Proof of the Pudding: To Flourish for the Next Sixty Years
3. A Short History of the Grant Study
4. How Childhood and Adolescence Affect Old Age
8. Resilience and Unconscious Coping
CAST
OF PROTAGONISTS (DECATHLON SCORE)
Adam Newman (2). Rocket scientist who illustrates repression and growing maturity.
Dr. Godfrey Camille (5). Lonely physician who spent his life finding love, lifelong personality development, and the ability to let love in.
Art Miller (0). Elusive high combat veteran and drama professor who found peace in Australia.
Oliver Holmes (6). Judge from an idyllic childhood who illustrates its gift to old age.
Sam Lovelace (0). Architect with a miserable childhood who illustrates its lasting curse.
Algernon Young (0). Blue-collar worker from an aristocratic family; an illustration of development derailed.
Charles Boatwright (6). Optimistic boatyard owner; a model of empathy.
Professor Peter Penn (1). College professor. A man who never quite grew up.
Professor
George Bancroft (7). College professor who illustrates the sequential steps to maturity.
Dr. Eric Carey (TY*). Polio victim who achieved Eriksonian Integrity in the face of an early death.
Dr. Carlton Tarryton (TY*). A physician who failed to reach Career Consolidation.
John Adams (6). A lawyer with three divorces and a long happy fourth marriage.
Fredrick Chipp (7). A schoolteacher from a warm childhood who created a lifelong happy family.
Dr. Carlton Tarryton (TY*). A physician with four unhappy marriages.
Eben Frost (7). A mentally healthy lawyer who lacked the gift or desire for intimacy.
Daniel Garrick (3). An actor, a “late bloomer” who illustrates the importance to old age of good (subjective and objective) physical health.
Alfred Paine (0). A manager with no ability to let love in; he illustrates aging in the absence of good health.
Dylan Bright (TY*). An English professor gifted in sublimation.
Francis DeMille (2). A businessman. He illustrates personality development from repression and dissociation to maturity.
James O’Neill (TY*). An economics professor who illustrates the destructive power of alcoholic denial.
Bill Loman, a.k.a. Francis Lowell (2). An aristocratic lawyer who provides simultaneous illustrations of alcoholism as voluntary career and alcoholism as debilitating disease.
Bert Hoover (TY*). A Study conservative.
Oscar Weil (TY*). A Study liberal.
Professor Ernest Clovis (3). A French professor who illustrates both sublimation and Guardianship.
*TY: Died too young to receive a Decathlon score.
Decathlon Score significance: 0–1 bottom third, 2–3 middle third, 4–9 top third.
MATURATION MAKES LIARS OF US ALL
No man ever steps in the same river twice; for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.
—HERACLITUS
This book is about how a group of men adapted themselves to life and adapted their lives to themselves. It is also about the Grant Study, now seventy-five years old, out of which this story came. In it I will offer tentative answers to some important questions: about adult development in general, about the people who engaged us in this exploratory venture, about the study itself, and, perhaps above all, about the pleasures and perils of very long scientific projects.
Originally the Grant Study was called the Harvard Longitudinal Study. A year later it became the Harvard Grant Study of Social Adjustments. In 1947 it received its now-official name, the Harvard Study of Adult Development. But to its members and its researchers, and in early books, it has always been the Grant Study.
It began in 1938 as an attempt to transcend medicine’s usual preoccupation with pathology and learn something instead about optimum health and potential and the conditions that promote them. The first subjects were 64 carefully chosen sophomores from the all-male Harvard College classes of 1939, 1940, and 1941, who took part in an intensive battery of tests and interviews. That first group was joined by sophomores from the next three Harvard classes, resulting in a final
cohort
(as the panel of subjects in a study of this kind is called) of 268
men.
The original intention was to follow these healthy and privileged men for fifteen or twenty years, supplementing the intake data from time to time with updates. Thus an abundance of information would accumulate about the men and the lives they constructed for themselves—information that could be analyzed at will over time and across different perspectives. (Interested readers will find much, much more on the history and structure of the Study in
Chapter 3
.)
That plan was realized, and more. Almost seventy-five years later, the Grant Study still, remarkably, goes on. We’re asking different questions now than the founders asked when the Study began, and our investigative tools are different. Of course the participants are no longer the college sophomores they once were; those who are still with us are very old men indeed. Time has called many of the beliefs of those days into question, and some much more recent ones, too. How long our current conclusions will hold up we cannot know.
But whatever the uncertainties, asking questions and trying to answer them is always a fruitful process. We actually have learned some of what they wanted to know back in 1938: who would make it to ninety, physically capable and mentally alert; who would build lasting and happy marriages; who would achieve conventional (or unconventional) career success. Best of all, we have seventy-five years’ worth of data that we can refer back to (over and over again, if need be) as we try to understand
why
these things turned out as they did.
We can use those data to try to answer other questions, too. There are old ones still open from the early Study days—about the relative importance of nature and nurture, for instance, or how mental and physical illness can be predicted, or the relationship between personality and health. There are new ones that could never have been dreamed of in 1938, like what the emotions of intimacy look like in the brain. And some old questions have morphed into new ones as we learn to formulate ever more cogently just what we’re seeking to accomplish
in even making inquiries like these. This last in particular is an abiding concern of good science.
Thus this story of the Grant Study: how it came to be, how it developed, and how those of us who participated in it developed too. It’s the story of what we’ve learned from it and what we haven’t (yet). And it’s a story about Time—studying it and living in it.
LONGITUDINAL STUDIES: THEIR STRUCTURE AND PURPOSE
The Grant Study is a longitudinal prospective study. Let me say a few words about that as we set out. In a
longitudinal
study, a group of participants (a
cohort
) is observed over time, and data about points of interest
(variables)
are collected at repeated intervals. In contrast, observations in a
cross-sectional
study are made only once. A longitudinal study can be prospective or retrospective.
Retrospective
studies look back over time, seeking to identify the variables that might have contributed to
outcomes
that are already known.
Prospective
studies follow a cohort in real time, tracking target variables as the subjects’ lives proceed, and identifying outcomes only as they occur. Accordingly, the Grant Study collected all kinds of potentially (but not necessarily) relevant information about its cohort members over the many years of their lives, looking to learn what it could about health and success. And it has correlated this information periodically with the levels of health and success that each man actually achieved. You’ll see many examples of this process as we go on.
Less abstractly, longitudinal studies let us contrast eighty-year-olds with themselves at twenty-five or sixty. Biographies and autobiographies, and the debriefings that elders offer their fascinated grandchildren, do the same thing. But these are all retrospective narratives, inevitably influenced by forgettings, embellishments, and biases. Time is a great deceiver.
Prospective
studies are like the baby books compiled by doting parents, or like time-lapse photographs; they document change as it happens, allowing us to visualize the passage of time free from the distortions of memory. While butterflies recalling their youths tend to remember themselves as young butterflies, prospective studies capture the reality (hard to believe, and often avoided!) that butterflies and caterpillars are the same people.
But baby books and even year-long time-lapse videos are a dime a dozen. Prospective studies of entire lives are very rare indeed. None are known to exist before 1995; I’ll have more to say on that shortly. In fact, observational data on adult development have been so sparse that when Gail Sheehy and Daniel Levinson produced their groundbreaking books on the subject in the 1970s, the cross-sectional studies they relied on led them to some very erroneous conclusions (such as the inevitability of the so-called midlife crisis).
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Another important reason for prospective studies is that they establish contexts for the outcomes we’re trying to understand. The most experienced handicapper in the world can’t predict for sure which of the well-bred, handsome horses in the Churchill Downs paddocks each May will win the Derby. Certainty comes only after the race is won, and even then we only know who. The hows and whys remain a mystery. It’s easy to rate a beautiful woman according to how many people think her so, or how well she conforms to some established ideal, or how long she keeps her looks. But ratings like that can’t encompass the difference between being beautiful at one’s high school prom and being beautiful at one’s great-granddaughter’s wedding, nor between the beauty at eighteen that is the luck of the draw, and the beauty at eighty that is the result of a life generously lived. The Grant Study was hoping to learn something about nuances like these in its exploration of success and “optimum” health.
Part of my intent in this book is to show why these nuances matter,
and why, therefore, we need longitudinal studies if we want to learn about human lives. I will be focusing primarily on the Grant Study and its cohort, whom I will call the
College
men. But I will occasionally make reference to two other important cohorts. One is the
Inner City
cohort of the Glueck Study of Juvenile Delinquency.
2
The Glueck Study is a second Harvard-based prospective longitudinal lifetime study, begun independently of the Grant Study in 1940; its participants were a group of youths from disadvantaged urban Boston neighborhoods. Since 1970, one cohort of this group has been administered together with the original Grant Study, as part of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. (I will use that term when referring to both studies, but will continue to call the Grant Study per se by its original name.) I will also refer from time to time to the
Terman women,
a cohort from Stanford University’s (1920–2011) Terman Study of gifted children, to whose data and participants I have had partial access.
3
It was the coming of age of the Terman cohort (male and female) in 1995 that made prospective lifetime data available for the first time. The Grant Study’s access to the Inner City men and the Terman women permitted us to contrast our privileged, intelligent, and all-male College sample with another all-male sample of very different socioeconomic and intellectual profile, and with a group of even more intelligent, though not particularly privileged, women. When these contrasts are enlightening, I will note them. The Glueck and Terman studies (and some of the correlations among them) are described in their own contexts in
Appendix B
, and are also considered in my previous books
Aging Well
and
The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited.
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