Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (56 page)

17
. Francine Benes, “Human Brain Growth Spans Decades.”
American Journal of Psychiatry
155 (1998): 1489.

18
. Baltes and Mayer, eds.,
The Berlin Aging Study.

19
. Rowe and Kahn,
Successful Aging.

20
. Warner Schaie, “The Course of Adult Intellectual Development,”
American Psychologist
49 (1994): 304–313.

21
. Bury and Holme,
Life after Ninety,
59.

22
. George E. Vaillant, “Natural History of Male Psychological Health: Effects of Mental Health on Physical Health,”
New England Journal of Medicine
301 (1979): 1249–1254.

23
. Howard S. Friedman and Leslie R. Martin,
The Longevity Project
(New York: Hudson Street Press, 2011).

24
. G. E. Vaillant,
Aging Well
(New York: Little, Brown, 2002).

25
. Ibid.

26
. Paola Sebastiani, Nadia Solovieff, Andrew T. DeWan, et al., “Genetic Signatures of Exceptional Longevity in Humans,”
Science Press,
www.sciencemag.org
, July 1, 2010.

27
. Brandt, Spencer, and Folstein, “Telephone Interview.”

28
. Vaillant,
Aging Well.

29
. Ibid.

30
. Rowe and Kahn,
Successful Aging,
28; Birgit Ljungquist, Stig Berg, Jan Lanke, et al., “The Effect of Genetic Factors for Longevity: A Comparison of Identical and Fraternal Twins in the Swedish Twin Registry,”
Journal of Gerontology
53A (1998): M441–M446.

31
. Hans Selye,
The Stress of Life
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956); Franz Alexander, Thomas M. French, and George Pollock, eds.,
Psychosomatic Specificity: Experimental Study and Results,
vol. 1 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1968); Helen F. Dunbar,
Psychosomatic Diagnosis
(New York: Hoefer, 1943).

32
. Edwin F. Gildea, “Special Features of Personality Which Are Common to Certain Psychosomatic Disorders,”
Psychosomatic Medicine
11 (1949): 273–281.

33
. Felix Deutsch,
The Mysterious Leap from the Mind to the Body
(Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1973).

34
. George E. Vaillant, “Why Men Seek Psychotherapy, I: Results of a Survey of College Graduates,”
American Journal of Psychiatry
129 (1972): 645–651.

35
. George E. Vaillant, “Natural History of Male Psychological Health, IV: What Kinds of Men Do Not Get Psychosomatic Illness,”
Psychosomatic Medicine
40 (1978): 420–431.

36
. George E. Vaillant, “Natural History of Male Psychological Health, II: Some Antecedents of Healthy Adult Adjustment,”
Archives of General Psychiatry
31 (1974): 15–22.

37
. Harlan M. Krumholz, Teresa E. Seeman, Susan S. Merrill, et al., “Lack of Association Between Cholesterol and Coronary Heart Disease Mortality and Morbidity and All-Cause Mortality in Persons Older than 70 Years,”
Journal of the American Medical Association
272 (1994): 1335.

38
. Clark W. Heath,
What People Are
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945).

39
. Joseph R. DiFranza and Mary P. Guerrera, “Alcoholism and Smoking,”
Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs
51 (1990): 130–135; George E. Vaillant, Paula P. Schnurr, John A. Baron, et al., “A Prospective Study of the Effects of Cigarette Smoking and Alcohol Abuse on Mortality,”
Journal of General Internal Medicine
6 (1991): 299–304.

40
. Paula P. Schnurr, Caroline O. Vaillant, and George E. Vaillant, “Predicting Exercise in Late Midlife from Young Adult Personality Characteristics,”
International Journal of Aging and Human Development
30 (1990): 153–161; H. Taylor,
Harvard Sports Code,
rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).

41
. James S. House, Karl R. Landis, and Debra Umberson: “Social Relationships and Health,”
Science
248 (1998): 540–545.

42
. George E. Vaillant, Stephanie E. Meyer, Kenneth J. Mukamal, et al., “Are Social Supports in Late Midlife a Cause or a Result of Successful Physical Aging?”
Psychological Medicine
28 (1998): 1159–1168.

8.
RESILIENCE AND UNCONSCIOUS COPING

(Epigraph) Sigmund Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937),”
Standard Edition,
vol. 23, ed. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), 237.

1
. Claude Bernard,
An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
(1865) (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 188.

2
. Adolf Meyer,
The Collected Papers of Adolf Meyer,
vol. 4:
Mental Hygiene
(1908), ed. Eunice E. Winters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1950–1952).

3
. Sigmund Freud, “The Neuro-Psychoses of Defense (1894),” in
Standard Edition
vol. 3, ed. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), 45–61; Sigmund Freud, “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926),” in
Standard Edition,
vol. 20, ed. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), 87–157.

4
. George E. Vaillant, “Theoretical Hierarchy of Adaptive Ego Mechanisms,”
Archives of General Psychiatry
24 (1971): 107–118.

5
. George E. Vaillant,
Adaptation to Life
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1977); George E. Vaillant,
The Wisdom of the Ego
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); George E. Vaillant,
Ego Mechanisms of Defense: A Guide for Clinicians and Researchers
(Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Publishing, 1994).

6
. Phebe Cramer,
The Development of Defense Mechanisms
(New York: Springer Verlag, 1991); Andrew E. Skodol and John C. Perry, “Should an Axis for Defense Mechanisms Be Included in DSM-IV?”
Comprehensive Psychiatry
34 (1993): 108–119.

7
. American Psychiatric Association,
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
4th ed. (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Publishing, 1992), 751–753.

8
. Vaillant,
Ego Mechanisms of Defense.

9
. Dan P. McAdams,
The Redemptive Self
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

10
. George E. Vaillant, “Adaptive Mental Mechanisms: Their Role in a Positive Psychology,”
American Psychologist
55 (2000): 89–98.

11
. George E. Vaillant and Caroline O. Vaillant, “Natural History of Male Psychological Health, XII: A Forty-Five Year Study of Successful Aging at Age 65,”
American Journal of Psychiatry
147 (1990): 31–37.

12
. Stephen G. Post, ed.,
Altruism and Health
(New York: Oxford, 2007).

13
. George E. Vaillant and Leigh McCullough, “The Washington University Sentence Completion Test Compared with Other Measures of Adult Ego Development,”
American Journal of Psychiatry
144 (1987): 1189–1194.

14
. George E. Vaillant, “Involuntary Coping Mechanisms: A Psychodynamic Perspective,”
Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience
13 (2011): 366–370.

9.
ALCOHOLISM

(Epigraph)
Alcoholics Anonymous
(New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 2001), 58–59.

1
. George E. Vaillant,
The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

2
. Thomas R. Dawber,
The Framingham Study
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980); Lisa F. Berkman and S. Leonard Syme, “Social Networks, Host Resistance, and Mortality: A Nine-Year Follow-Up of Alameda County Residents,”
American Journal of Epidemiology
109 (1979): 186–201.

3
. Vaillant,
The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited.

4
. Sheldon Glueck and Eleanor Glueck,
Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency
(New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1950).

5
. American Psychiatric Association,
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
3rd ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1980).

6
. Vaillant,
The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited;
Melvin L. Seltzer, “The Michigan Alcoholism Screening Test: The Quest for a New Diagnostic Instrument,”
American Journal of Psychiatry
127 (1971): 1653–1658.

7
. Vaillant,
The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited,
161.

8
. William Hogarth,
Engravings
(Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1973).

9
. E. Morton Jellinek,
The Disease Concept of Alcoholism
(New Haven: Hillhouse Press, 1960).

10
.
Alcoholics Anonymous
(New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 2001).

11
. J. Michael Polich, David J. Armor, and Harriet B. Braiker,
The Course of Alcoholism
(New York: Wiley, 1981); Jim Orford and Griffith Edwards,
Alcoholism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); Don Cahalan and Robin Room,
Problem Drinkers among American Men
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Center for Alcohol Studies, 1974).

12
. Vaillant,
The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited,
202.

13
. Karl A. Menninger,
Man against Himself
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938), 177.

14
. Robert P. Knight, “The Dynamics and Treatment of Chronic Alcohol Addiction,”
Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic
1 (1937), 234.

15
. Paul Schilder, “The Psychogenesis of Alcoholism,”
Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol
2 (1940): 277–292.

16
. Jellinek,
The Disease Concept of Alcoholism,
153.

17
. Michael L. Selzer, “Alcoholism and Alcoholic Psychoses,”
Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry,
3rd ed., ed. Harold I. Kaplan, Alfred M. Freedman, and Benjamin J. Sadock (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1980), 1629.

18
. Ernest Simmel, “Alcoholism and Addiction,”
Psychoanalytic Quarterly
17 (1948): 6–31; Howard T. Blane,
The Personality of the Alcoholic: Guises of Dependency
(New York: Harper and Row, 1968); George E. Vaillant, “The Natural History of Male Psychological Health, VIII: Antecedents of Alcoholism and ‘Orality,’
”
American Journal of Psychiatry
17 (1980): 181–186; George Winokur, Paula J. Clayton, and Theodore Reich,
Manic Depressive Illness
(St. Louis: C.V. Mosby, 1969); Lee N. Robins,
Deviant Children Grown Up: A Sociological and Psychiatric Study of Sociopathic Personality
(Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1966); Vaillant,
The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited.

19
. George E. Vaillant, “Is Alcoholism More Often the Cause or the Result of Depression?”
Harvard Review of Psychiatry
1 (1993): 94–99; George E. Vaillant, “A Long-Term Follow-Up of Male Alcohol Abuse,”
Archives of General Psychiatry
53 (1996): 243–249.

20
. Vaillant,
The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited.

21
. George E. Vaillant, “Natural History of Male Alcoholism, V: Is Alcoholism the Cart or the Horse to Sociopathy?”
British Journal of Addiction
(1983), 78: 317–326.

22
. Vaillant,
The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited.

23
. Marc Alan Schuckit, “Advances to Understanding the Vulnerability to Alcoholism,”
Addictive States,
ed. Charles P. O’Brien and Jerome H. Jaffe (New York: Raven Press, 1992), 192.

24
. Lee N. Robins and Darrel A. Regier,
Psychiatric Disorders in America
(New York: The Free Press, 1991).

25
. Vaillant,
The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited
, chapter 4, Table 4.1a.

26
. Ibid.

27
. Keith Humphreys, “Alcohol & Drug Abuse: A Research-Based Analysis of the Moderation Management Controversy,”
Psychiatric Services
54 (2003): 621–622.

28
. George E. Vaillant,
The Natural History of Alcoholism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 229.

29
. Vaillant,
The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited,
282.

30
. Ibid., 181; Vaillant, “A Long-Term Follow-Up of Male Alcohol Abuse”; George E. Vaillant, “What Can Long-Term Follow-Up Teach Us about Relapse and Prevention of Relapse in Addiction?”
British Journal of Addiction
83 (1988): 1147–1157.

31
. Robb Stall and Patrick Biernacki, “Spontaneous Remission from the Problematic Use of Substances: An Inductive Model Derived from a Comparative Analysis of the Alcohol, Opiate, Tobacco and Food/Obesity Literatures,”
International Journal of the Addictions
(1986): 1–23.

32
. Vaillant,
The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited.

10.
SURPRISING FINDINGS

1
. Peter Townsend, Nick Davidson, and Margaret Whitehead, eds.,
Inequalities in Health: The Black Report and the Health Divide
(Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1988).

2
. Marcia Angell, “Privilege and Health—What Is the Connection?”
New England Journal of Medicine
329 (1993): 126–127.

3
. Michael G. Marmot, Hans Bosma, Harry Hemingway, et al., “Contribution of Job Control and Other Risk Factors and Social Variations of Coronary Heart Disease Incidence,”
Lancet
337 (1991): 1387–1393.

4
. George E. Vaillant,
Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

5
. Howard S. Friedman and Leslie R. Martin,
The Longevity Project
(New York: Hudson Street Press, 2011).