Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

by Vaillant, George E.

  The final predictor was warm adult relations between ages thirty and forty-seven. Although this variable was not assessed until 1975, when the men were in midlife, we included it because there really were no earlier objective variables reflecting capacity for close attachment. This crude scale asked six objective, if simplistic, yes-or-no questions:

  • Had the man been married for more than ten years?

  • Was he close to his children?

  • Did he have close friends?

  • Did he maintain pleasant contact with his family of origin?

  • Did he belong to social organizations?

  • Did he play games with others?

  WHAT VARIABLES PREDICT SUCCESS?

  Table 2.2 sets out the seventeen variables that we tested for their power to predict flourishing late in life—ten constitutional variables that recreated the worldview of the early investigators, three socioeconomic variables that recreated the worldview of modern social psychology (and possibly the Australian Business Review), and finally the four available relational variables that reflected the view of attachment theorists and ethologists. I admit readily that these were sketchy, but they were the only ones available to us; any measures of relationship that post-dated the Decathlon would of course not be predictive. The table also indicates how each variable associated with the total Decathlon score.

  As the table indicates, the ten constitutional variables and the three social variables were of limited predictive use. The two manifestations of the body-build hypothesis so beloved of the original researchers had no significant correlation at all with later success. Nor did the measures of socioeconomic status. Alcoholism and depression in family histories proved irrelevant to Decathlon scores at eighty, as did longevity. The sociable and extraverted personality type that was so esteemed in the Study’s selection process (see Chapter 3) did not correlate with later flourishing either. (We’ll see in the last chapter, though, that Extraversion when measured by a sophisticated psychological “instrument” did prove very significant.) In fact, of the thirteen constitutional/socioeconomic factors that we tested for their predictive strength, only four correlated significantly with the total Decathlon scores, and those only with one or two events apiece. The correlations between the constitutional and socioeconomic variables and Decathlon success were weak and scattershot.

  The four measures of relationship, however, were all highly predictive of Decathlon success. Each of these four variables predicted at least six events apiece, and collectively they predicted all ten. Furthermore, each relationship predictor correlated highly significantly with the other three, suggesting that they had something in common. In short, it was the capacity for intimate relationships that predicted flourishing in all aspects of these men’s lives, as can be seen in Table 2.3.

  Table 2.3 Childhood Predictors of Flourishing in Old Age

  Very Significant = p<.001; Significant = p<. 01; NS = Not Significant.

  Here’s a concrete example, to make these abstractions a little more vivid. We found, for instance, that there was no significant difference between the maximum earned incomes of the men with IQs of 110–115 and the incomes of the men with IQs of 150-plus. Nor was there a significant difference between the maximum earned incomes of men with mesomorphic (muscular) physiques and men with ectomorphic (skinny) or endomorphic (plump) physiques, or between men with blue-collar fathers and men with fathers from the upper class (Table 2.2).

  On the other hand, the men who had good sibling relationships (one factor of a warm childhood; see Table 2.2 and Appendix C) when young were making an average of $51,000 (in 2009 dollars) more a year than the men who had poor relationships with their siblings, or no siblings at all. The men from cohesive homes made $66,000 per year more than men from unstable ones. Men with warm mothers took home $87,000 more than those men whose mothers were uncaring. The fifty-eight men with the best scores for warm relationships were three times more likely to be in Who’s Who, and their maximum income—between the ages of fifty-five and sixty, and in 2009 dollars—was an average of $243,000 a year. In contrast, the thirty-one men with the worst scores for relationships earned an average maximum salary of $102,000 a year. The twelve men with the most mature coping styles reported a whopping $369,000 a year; the sixteen men with the most immature styles a much more modest $159,000. These same variables were equally able to predict warm relationships at the end of life.

  So my rash contention held up. Nurture trumps nature—at least for predicting late-life success as the Decathlon embodied it. And the aspect of nurture that is most important of all is a warm and intimate relational surround (environmental childhood strengths, Appendix C). There is another piece to be reckoned with too. In a moment I will offer a life story to illustrate it, and what these actualities look like in the real world. But first let me offer one caveat, and then an illuminating historical aside.

  The caveat: Throughout this book I will seem to be saying that the mentally healthy have better characters than the mentally unhealthy. This sounds like victim-blaming, but it is not a moral judgment. It is a reflection of a tough and pragmatic reality: that empathy is easier for those with full (literally and figuratively) stomachs. Someone who is already suffering the stresses of (literal and figurative) hunger is more likely to respond self-protectively or to lash out when punched in the gut.

  The historical aside: I was chary from the beginning of the body-build approach to prediction, and of some of the other cherished hypotheses from the early days of the Study. Remember that in the thirties and forties constitutional medicine and physical anthropology were very much in the theoretical driver’s seat; it wasn’t only in Germany that people were preoccupied with the fine points of putative racial superiorities. But since the data were so extensive, and since I was in the neighborhood anyway while constructing the Decathlon, I decided to test out the relationship, so confidently assumed at the time, between officer potential and body build.

  At the end of World War II, some of the Grant Study men were majors; others were still privates. What made the difference? It turned out that the men’s attained military rank at discharge bore no relation to their body build, their parents’ social class, their endurance on the treadmill, or even their intelligence. What did correlate significantly with attained military rank was a generally cohesive home atmosphere in childhood and warm relationships with mother and siblings. Twenty-four of the twenty-seven men with the warmest childhoods made at least first lieutenant, and four became majors. In contrast, of the thirty men with the worst childhoods, thirteen failed to make first lieutenant, and none became majors. We don’t breed good officers; we don’t even build them on the playing fields of Eton; we raise them in loving homes. This result would undoubtedly have astonished physical anthropologist Earnest Hooton (see Chapter 3), whom the Study asked to write its first book.4

  I offer this story for its morals. One is that belief isn’t enough—however impassioned our convictions, they need to be tested. Another is that information does nothing for us if we don’t make use of it. My brief excursion here answered a question that the Study had been entertaining from its very beginnings; the data that finally answered it had been available for almost seventy years. And a third: that longitudinal studies protect us from exactly such pitfalls, and from our other shortcomings of foresight and method. They give us the flexibility to re-ask old questions in new contexts, and to ask new questions of old data. That is a very important point of this book, and one I’ll keep returning to.

  THE LIFE OF GODFREY MINOT CAMILLE

  Now let me abandon statistics and present some idiographic evidence for the power of love; a life is worth a thousand numbers. In 1938, when Godfrey Minot Camille first presented himself to the Grant Study, he was a tall redheaded boy with a charming manner who planned to enter medicine or the ministry. Only gradually did the staff discover that the allegedly “normal” Godfrey was an intractable and unhappy hypochondriac. On the tenth anniversary of his join
ing the Study, each man was given an A through E rating anticipating future personality stability, and when it was Godfrey’s turn, he was assigned an “E.” But if Godfrey Camille was a disaster as a young man, by the time he was an old one he had become a star. His 5 on the Decathlon put him in the top quartile of the surviving men of the Study. What made the difference? How did this sorry lad develop such an abundant capacity for flourishing? He spent his life searching for love.

  Camille’s parents were upper class, but they were also socially isolated and pathologically suspicious—both of them; social privilege did not predict the warmth, or the chill, of a man’s childhood. “Mother hasn’t exactly made up for Dad’s shortcomings,” Camille put it at nineteen. At forty-six, he sadly reaffirmed a truth he had recognized earlier: “I neither liked nor respected my parents.” Lewise Gregory, the Study’s family interviewer, described Mrs. Camille as “one of the most nervous people I have ever met . . . a past mistress in self-deception.” A child psychiatrist who reviewed Camille’s record thirty years later thought his childhood one of the bleakest in the Study. (Evidence used in these assessments rarely came from just one source.)

  Unloved and not yet grown into a sense of autonomy, Camille as a student adopted the unconscious survival strategy of frequent visits to the college infirmary. No evidence of tangible illness was found at most of his visits, and in his junior year a usually sympathetic college physician dismissed him with the disgusted comment, “This boy is turning into a regular psychoneurotic.” Camille’s constant complaining was an immature coping style. It didn’t connect with other people, and it kept them from connecting with him; they didn’t see his real suffering and just got angry at his apparent manipulations.

  When the war began, Camille was destined for failure, at least by Study criteria. He was an ectomorph, skinny and without the broad shoulders and narrow hips that might have redeemed his scrawniness as “masculine.” His athletic conditioning was poor, and he hadn’t done particularly well in college academically. He would have been doomed by my criteria, too. He had had the worst possible childhood, he used unempathic coping styles, and he seemed clumsy at human relations. To no one’s surprise, he emerged from World War II still a private—everyone had predicted he would be a loser. So, a little later, did I.

  After graduation from medical school, the newly minted Dr. Camille made a suicide attempt. The Study consensus at the time of his ten-year personality assessment was that he was “not fitted for the practice of medicine,” and, unloved as he was, he found taking care of other people’s needs overwhelming. But several sessions with a psychiatrist gave him a different view of himself. He wrote to the Study, “My hypochondriasis has been mainly dissipated. It was an apology, a self-inflicted punishment for aggressive impulses.”

  Having grasped that he was paying for anger with depression, Camille abandoned his hypochondriacal defense and the unconscious purpose it served for a more mature coping mechanism—displacement. He learned to shift his attention away from uncomfortably intense emotional issues toward more neutral ones. When his sister died, he sent the Study the autopsy report with the simple comment, “Enclosed is a copy of an autopsy protocol, which I expect is also an item of news.” He never mentioned his feelings about her death, or even the fact of it. He did not tell the Study directly about his mother’s death either, but—displacing his attention from heart to brain—wrote cryptically, “I received an inheritance from my mother.” Whatever the limitations of this approach, it was a more empathic one than his hypochondriasis had been; whereas people had once felt overwhelmed, helpless, and angry in the face of his constant physical complaints, they now found him much more comfortable to deal with.

  For all his adolescent hypochondria, Camille hadn’t really been very aware either of his body or of his feelings. He felt things, yes. But what he was feeling—a symptom of illness? an upsurge of anxiety? a chimerical fantasy?—was not a distinction he knew how to make. Under stress he had sensations, and he felt that they required immediate attention. After his post-suicidal insight at thirty-two, however, he began to distinguish between physical and emotional sensations, and to pay attention to their causes. Emotional stress still led to indigestion, abdominal pains, cold hands, and gastric distress, but Camille no longer insisted to physicians that he was ill, or used his physical complaints to convey his outraged sense of need or hold someone else responsible for it. Instead, after psychotherapy, he used his physical symptoms as a clue to the presence of emotional distress.

  Then, at age thirty-five, he had a life-changing experience. He was hospitalized for fourteen months in a veterans’ hospital with pulmonary tuberculosis. Ten years later he recalled his first thought on being admitted: “It’s neat; I can go to bed for a year, do what I want, and get away with it.” “I was glad to be sick,” he confessed. And in fact that illness, a real one, ended up giving him the emotional security that his childhood, his hypochondriacal symptoms, and his subsequent careful neutrality never had. Camille felt his time in the hospital almost like a religious rebirth. “Someone with a capital ‘S’ cared about me,” he wrote. “Nothing has been so tough since that year in the sack.”

  Released from the hospital, Dr. Camille became an independent physician, married, and grew into a responsible father and clinic leader. Over the next five years he mastered the adult developmental tasks of Intimacy, Career Consolidation, and Generativity (see Chapter 5) in rapid succession. His marriage, which lasted for more than ten years but was not particularly happy, finally ended in divorce. But one of his daughters at fifty told me in an interview that his children remembered him as an exemplary father.

  Camille’s coping style was changing as the decades passed, too. His transitional reliance on displacement (the unconscious avoidance of emotional intensity) was replaced by the still more empathic involuntary coping mechanism of altruism, including the generative wish to nurture others’ development. He was now functioning as a giving adult. Whereas at thirty he had hated his dependent patients, by forty his adolescent fantasy of caring for others had become a reality. He started and directed a large Boston clinic for allergic disorders—the first time he had ever been in charge of anything. He wrote papers to help other clinicians understand and deal with the emotional needs of asthmatic patients with deprived childhoods. In vivid contrast with his post-graduation panic, he now reported that what he liked most about medicine was that “I had problems and went to others, and now I enjoy people coming to me.” His daughter told me when I met her that “Dad had the innate ability to just give. He could play like five-year-olds do.”

  When I was fifty-five and Camille was almost seventy, I asked him what he had learned from his children. “I haven’t stopped learning from them,” he said. He seemed to appreciate that that was a facile answer, and added thoughtfully, “That’s a tough question. . . . Isn’t that a whopper!” I was disappointed; I had felt sure that this sensitive man would come up with a more profound response. But two days later he came up to me in Harvard Yard as I was about to give a talk to his reunion class. With tears in his eyes he blurted out, “You know what I learned from my children? I learned love!” Many years later, having seized a serendipitous opportunity to interview his daughter, I believed him. I have interviewed many Grant Study children, but this woman’s love for her father remains the most stunning that I have encountered among them.

  When I first wrote about the life of Godfrey Camille, I had no idea what had led to his recovery. Clearly it had been catalyzed by his year of enforced invalidism, but how? At age fifty-five, he attributed everything to a visit from Jesus at the hospital; I myself (at forty) was inclined to think that it was all the loving nursing care he had received over those many months. But neither was a very satisfactory explanation. What I know now is that it doesn’t really matter. It took me many more years of prospective follow-up, and many more years of emotional growth, to learn to take love seriously. What it looks like—God, a nurse, a child, a good Samaritan, or a
ny of its other guises—is different for everybody. But love is love.

  At age seventy-five, Camille took the opportunity to describe in greater detail how love had healed him. This time he needed no recourse to Freud or Jesus.

  Before there were dysfunctional families, I came from one. My professional life hasn’t been disappointing—far from it—but the truly gratifying unfolding has been into the person I’ve slowly become: comfortable, joyful, connected and effective. Since it wasn’t widely available then, I hadn’t read that children’s classic, The Velveteen Rabbit, which tells how connectedness is something we must let happen to us, and then we become solid and whole.

  As that tale recounts tenderly, only love can make us real. Denied this in boyhood for reasons I now understand, it took me years to tap substitute sources. What seems marvelous is how many there are and how restorative they prove. What durable and pliable creatures we are, and what a storehouse of goodwill lurks in the social fabric. . . . I never dreamed my later years would be so stimulating and rewarding.

  That convalescent year, transformative though it was, was not the end of Camille’s story. Once he grasped what had happened, he seized the ball and ran with it, straight into a developmental explosion that went on for thirty years. A professional awakening and a spiritual one; a wife and two children of his own; two psychoanalyses; a return to the church of his early years—all these allowed him to build for himself the loving surround that he had so missed as a child, and to give to others out of its riches.