The arbitrary determination of ten years was a piece of pragmatic reductionism designed to facilitate the assignment of a numerical score. On the one hand, nothing lasts forever; on the other, ten years is long enough to distinguish a “real” relationship from a clearly illusory one.
Career Consolidation. I observed repeatedly that some men who successfully established identities within (and then beyond) their families of origin nevertheless failed to accomplish the same thing in the world of work. Accordingly, I took the step of distinguishing career maturation from the other aspects of identity formation to create a separate stage that I now call Career Consolidation vs. Role Diffusion. As I have explained in detail elsewhere, Erikson conflated the tasks of mastery of identity formation and mastery of career identification.17
I defined the specific tasks of Career Consolidation as commitment, compensation, contentment, and competence. These four words distinguish a career from a job. By this I do not mean that a lawyer has a career and a janitor has a job. Prestige has nothing to do with the presence of those four characteristics. You can be a competent and well-compensated physician like Carlton Tarryton (below), but if you are so contemptuous about the value of medicine that you turn to Christian Science for your own care, you do not have a career. Men and women in hunter-gatherer societies can bring commitment and enjoyment to the tasks at hand, and lawyers in our society can work without either.
Career consolidation engages a paradox. Selflessness, in the conventional sense of magnanimity or altruism, depends on a sturdy and reliable sense of self. Commitment to a career (and establishing a robust sense of career identity) is an essential developmental task, and it is in large degree a selfish one. That is why society tolerates the ineffable egocentricity of graduate students, young housewives, and business trainees. Only when developmental “self-ishness” has been achieved are we reliably capable of giving the self away as professors, mothers-of-the-bride, and managers. Career Consolidation has roots in Intimacy as well as Identity. Like Intimacy, it combines the necessary self-absorption of young adulthood with the commitment to others necessary to merit a paycheck.
The process that leads today’s medical students through internship, residency, and fellowship to professional autonomy is not so very different from the medieval guild structure that took a youth from apprentice to journeyman to master weaver. Young people have always been taught their craft by older practitioners, and then encouraged to make their own individual contributions. That sense of unique competence was considered the culmination of professional formation; it is the culmination of Career Consolidation as well. As one of the Terman women, a writer, put it, “Being home and being married wasn’t sufficient. . . . I wanted to secure my sense of competence, to be good at something, acquire a measurable skill, something that I could say ‘I have learned this, I am good at this, I can do this, I know this.’”
In tracking the achievement of Career Consolidation I had to take into account that societies constrain the way men and women achieve this sense of competence. The Terman women, for example, were born around 1910; they were in middle school before their mothers could vote. There were limited occupational possibilities open to these very gifted women. I therefore deemed a woman to have mastered Career Consolidation if she was committed, competent, and content at her work, even if she was not always compensated for it in money. Similarly, in the twenty-first century there are men who have consolidated careers as househusbands. The story of Charles Boatwright, coming up in a moment, offers yet another take on Career Consolidation.
Generativity. Erikson’s third stage is Generativity vs. Stagnation, which I define as the wish and the capacity to foster and guide the next generations (not only one’s own adolescents) to independence. The specific task by which I defined Generativity was the assumption of sustained responsibility for the growth and well-being of others still young enough to need care but old enough to make their own decisions. Generativity, of course, may also include community building and other forms of leadership, but not, to my mind, such pursuits as raising children, painting pictures, and growing crops. These are valuable and creative tasks, but they do not demand the ego skills required to care for “adolescents” of any age. Consider the incredible sensitivity required of famed Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins, trying to protect the self-centered and self-destructive F. Scott Fitzgerald from his folly while at the same time nurturing his literary genius. As my school-principal aunt once explained: “You can always tell who is headmistress by who moves the most furniture.”
Guardianship. In this second modification of Erikson’s schema, I organized distinctive aspects of Generativity or Integrity (as he saw it) into a separate stage that I have discussed in earlier works as Keeper of the Meaning vs. Rigidity, but am now calling Guardianship vs. Hoarding (see Chapter 11). Andrew Carnegie, a Guardian, built libraries with his life’s savings; the Pharaohs built pyramids.
Generative people care for others in a direct, forward-oriented relationship—mentor to mentee, teacher to student. They are caregivers. Guardians are caretakers. They take responsibility for the cultural values and riches from which we all benefit, offering their concern beyond specific individuals to their culture as a whole; they engage a social radius that extends beyond their immediate personal surround. They are curators, looking to the past to preserve it for the future. We tracked this developmental achievement by such curatorial activities, which will be exemplified in many of the life stories that follow.
In his writings, Erikson sometimes fails to distinguish between the care that characterizes Generativity and the wisdom that characterizes Guardianship (and which he has ascribed, I believe incorrectly, to Integrity). Generativity has to do with the people one chooses to take care of; Guardianship entails a dispassionate and less personal world view. It is possible to imagine care without wisdom, but not wisdom without care—and indeed, in adult development, the capacity to care does precede wisdom. Wisdom requires not only concern, but also the appreciation of irony and ambiguity, and enough perspective and dispassion not to take sides. These are ego skills that come relatively late in life. They are the fruit of long experience and they sometimes conflict with the more generative forms of caring, which may imply sticking up for one person against another. Guardianship is the disinterested even-handedness of the judge who protects the processes of the law in the interests of all of us, as opposed to the advocacy of the generative lawyer, who uses those processes in the service of the client he protects. This is the difference in attitude between the successfully generative Reagan’s relentless demonization of the “Evil Empire” and the guardian Lincoln’s Second Inaugural plea for malice toward none and charity for all.
Wisdom is often defined in abstract terms: discernment, judgment, discretion, prudence. But it is a developmental achievement, just like the capacity to thrive away from one’s mother, or to live harmoniously with a spouse, or to be a forbearing parent to one’s entitled teenagers. The task of the Guardian is to honor the vast competing realities of past, present, and future, and to find, as the judge does in The Merchant of Venice, the true wisdom that is a fusion of caring and justice.
One fifty-five-year-old College man described in a letter some aspects of his development into Guardianship. He said that he was feeling a sense of broadening. “I have finally come through to a realization of what is of critical importance for our future—that we finally come to live in harmony with nature and our natural environment, not in victory over it. . . . The earlier period was one of comparative innocence and youthful exuberance—a celebration more of my physical powers, of unfettered freedom. Those powers I now celebrate are more of an intellectual variety, somewhat tinged by experience of the world; in a way my lately-acquired knowledge . . . is not an unalloyed blessing, but a burden in some respects.”
Integrity. Erikson called his final life stage Integrity vs. Despair. Integrity is the capacity to come to terms constructively with our pasts and our futures in
the face of inevitable death. It is a demanding achievement that requires the embrace of contradiction: How do we maintain hope when the inevitability of our end is staring us in the face? The very old have less control and fewer choices than they had when they were younger, but in confronting this reality they may become great masters of Niebuhr’s beloved prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Integrity differs from the other Eriksonian stages in that (while Integrity issues are perhaps most common in the very old) it is not associated exclusively with any one chronological time of life. It is a developmental response to the anticipation of death, which illness or ill fortune may bring to the fore at any age.
Integrity is a life task I have not yet experienced, and instead of trying to describe it I will recuse myself and let the Study members show what it feels like to them. One Study member asserted, “I think it is enormously important to the next generation that we be happy into old age—happy and confident—not necessarily that we are right but that it is wonderful to persist in our search for meaning and rectitude. Ultimately, that is our most valuable legacy—the conviction that life is and has been worthwhile right up to the limit.” Another man dying of prostate cancer explained to me that whenever he had a sudden pain, he could never know if it was “simply old age or another metastasis. . . . But I am a fatalist; when it comes it comes. . . . Each of us was born of this earth, nurtured by it; and each of us will return to the earth.”
Perhaps it was a Terman woman, very near death, who embraced the concept of Integrity most succinctly in an explanation of what life was like for her since becoming bedridden: “My accomplishments since then have been to stay alive and alert and to be thankful for all the blessings that have been mine.” A recent questionnaire had inquired about her aims for the future. Instead of checking whether it was important for her to “die peacefully,” she wrote beside that box, “Who has a choice? Death comes when it comes.” Instead of checking whether it was important for her “to make a contribution to society” she wrote beside the box, “In a minor way I have already done so.” Instead of fruitlessly complaining that she was of no further use, she—empathically to those around her—reflected the inner peace that came of having paid her dues. That’s not chutzpah, that’s wisdom.
AN ERIKSONIAN LIFE
My first efforts in 1971 to unravel adult development focused on Erikson’s stages of Intimacy and Generativity.18 At that time, my favorite illustration of adult development was a fifty-year-old Study member, George Bancroft. Asked how he had grown in stature between college and middle life, Bancroft replied, “From age twenty to thirty I learned how to get along with my wife; from age thirty to forty I learned how to be a success at my job; and since I have been forty, I have worried less about myself and more about the children.” That summed up succinctly everything I (then) thought there was to adult development. It was the map of world as I knew it at thirty-seven: grown-ups mastered Generativity, and then they died.
But as the decades passed I was increasingly aware that this was not an accurate life map. It took me a while to see what was going on; I was a man in my early fifties studying men in their late sixties, and the fact that they were still growing was more than I (or the fifty-year-old Erikson before me) could readily appreciate. We all needed more time. This was the gift the Grant Study gave over and over again. The ensuing years afforded me both a wider theoretical compass and an expanded experience of my own development, as well as many more chances to observe the men. One man in particular. As I sailed off toward terra incognita, my favorite guide to adult development continued to be Professor Bancroft.
At fifty, as you’ve seen, Bancroft was a generative Mr. Chips. He looked after his own children, and he looked after the history students at his small college. But not so long after that he became dean of the college, and, I noticed, he suddenly had all the students to attend to, to say nothing of the care of his entire young faculty. I could also see that that was a different order of responsibility; it was no longer Bancroft’s job to manage individuals’ day-to-day development, but instead to establish the kind of atmosphere in which everyone could thrive. His social radius had expanded greatly, and he was no longer functioning as a parent, but as an elder.
For a while Bancroft was still too busy “worrying about the children” to write books. At research universities, writing books is a top priority, because career development and ultimately tenure depend on it. But at small colleges and high schools, book-writing tends to be a retirement activity, like genealogy and town histories. And so it was for Bancroft. At seventy he retired. His focus, which had shifted from teaching history to tending his school now shifted again—this time to writing history. His attention moved even further outward as he began to fill the very role for which, in my opinion, evolution permits grandparents to survive. Once older adults can no longer procreate children, their task has been to preserve the culture, to become what anthropologists call “firestick elders.” That is what Bancroft did. Between seventy and ninety he wrote five books that for generations to come will bring America’s past to life for her new citizens. He had turned his attention to recollection and preservation, and at last I was able to recognize this, in him and in others. Henry Ford, at age seventy, founded the Greenfield Village Museum to preserve the beauty of a style of life that his creation of the Model T assembly line had helped to destroy. Charles Lindbergh devoted his life after seventy to the preservation of Stone Age cultures that his charting of intercontinental air routes had begun to obliterate. They too became guardians of what seemed to them most meaningful in life.
Bancroft always did have a special way of making development real and visible to me. In 2010, when he was eighty-eight, I asked him that same question of almost forty years before, about how he had grown in stature. (I was fishing for clues about how his transformation into Guardianship had come about.) We were talking on the phone, and my question caught him by surprise. But his answer surprised me even more. “You learn a little more about yourself and you learn how to be alone . . . in part so that you can face death without fear. As the saying goes, ‘When you grow old, you get to know women and doctors.’ All my male friends have died. . . . You let your wife learn about you. . . . I have to go for a driving test, to see if the world will be safer if I give up my license.” And there you have it—an extraordinary description of Erikson’s final task of Integrity.
For Bancroft, as for every other American adolescent, the acquisition of that driver’s license had once been a critical first venture into adulthood, part of the mastery of Identity and the world outside his parents’ house. Seventy years later, the developmental task of Integrity was about being able to give the precious license up, and, if necessary, to adopt with equanimity Job’s mantra: “The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
THE LIFE OF CHARLES BOATWRIGHT
I didn’t think about wisdom as a model of maturity until I was over sixty-five. I didn’t think much about Charles Boatwright, either. When I was doing my work on good and bad outcomes in the 1970s, his marriage was a shambles, and even in his mid-fifties he seemed to me occupationally feckless. At that point in my life I didn’t see much to exemplify optimum adult development at that point in his, and I let him slide gently off my radar.
In 2009, however, when I was seventy-five, Monika Ardelt pointed out to me that Charles Boatwright had scored higher than any man in the Grant Study on her measure of wisdom.19 That got my attention, all right, and I looked at him closely for the first time in years. Boat-wright’s Decathlon score was 7 out of 10; only 3 percent of Grant Study men scored higher. In fact, late in life he was scoring high on every measure of maturity I had ever devised. Here was yet one more demonstration that my black-and-white, good-or-bad predictions at age forty-seven were unreliable. What on earth had happened?
I thought back to those early
years. I’d found Boatwright’s file tedious going. His lack of career commitment was one of the reasons I’d scored him as a potential “bad outcome” in my old black-and-white days. It was easy to marshal other evidence of failure, too: a divorce, an estrangement from his daughter, a drifting son. Yet he wrote constantly of his good fortune in leading such a wonderful life, and exclamation points punctuated his enthusiasm.
Here’s how he answered a Study questionnaire when he was forty-nine. How had he grown in stature and matured between the ages of twenty and fifty? Between twenty and thirty, Boatwright said, “I learned humility and how to work hard and to dedicate myself to others. I learned to love.” Between thirty and forty, “I went to graduate school and matured rapidly in business and in the community. I became an important cog in the community. I was a flaming do-gooder. I learned further to take responsibility.” Between forty and fifty, “I feel a marked change has come over me. I have learned to be more kind, and have more empathy. I have learned to be tolerant. I have a much better understanding of life, its meaning and purposes. I’ve left the church, but in many ways I feel more Christian. I now understand . . . the old, the meek, the hard worker, and most of all children.” Reading this in 1974, I was inclined to roll my eyes. I thought I recognized the kind of premature selflessness that cloaks a lack of clear identity—a series of early efforts to deny his own needs and project them onto others—and Boatwright’s failures at Intimacy and Career Consolidation, like Camille’s, seemed to confirm that. However, I was dead wrong.
Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study Page 16