Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

by Vaillant, George E.

  Even mature defenses alter feelings, conscience, relationship, and reality in the service of adaptation. But they achieve their distortions gracefully and flexibly. Observers tend to regard the adaptive defenses as virtues and to experience them as empathic; their success depends on sensitive connections with others, as can easily be seen in humor and altruism. The immature defenses are not considered virtuous at all, and are usually experienced as manifestations of narcissism.

  ASSESSMENT OF DEFENSIVE STYLE (IDENTIFICATION OF DEFENSES)

  We can’t see the spinach caught in our own teeth, and it’s difficult to identify our own defenses. This means that self-report measures to assess defenses have limited validity. Even when a person consistently and correctly recognizes when he is being defensive, he may still misidentify the kind of defensive behavior he is using (that is, he may label it incorrectly). Furthermore, “defense mechanisms,” like “character traits,” are abstractions. What does it mean to distinguish between mature or empathic coping (“good” denial) and immature or narcissistic/unempathic coping (“bad” denial)?

  An observer who wants to identify and appraise defenses objectively must triangulate between present behavior, subjective report, and past truth. Let’s say, for example, that one woman founds a shelter for battered women and another breaks her toddler’s arm in a tantrum. Defenses are unconscious; the first woman may attribute her altruistic behavior to a need to rent her house; the second may call the damage she did in her fury “an accident.” It is only once we learn that social agency records from thirty years before reveal that both women had been taken at age two from the care of physically abusive alcoholic mothers that the defensive nature of both of their behaviors becomes apparent. Triangulation brings clarity to the defensive/adaptive nature of otherwise inexplicable behavior. You need the agency record and the mothers’ explanations and the two tangible behaviors to label these unusual actions accurately.

  The Grant Study’s method of rating defenses can best be understood through a medical analogy. A symptom is a physical oddity. Perhaps the patient himself notices it, or perhaps a friend makes a comment. The patient may or may not understand what is going on. But when he goes to have it checked out, he’ll be asked extensively about how it feels to him and what he notices about its context. He’ll be examined; any relevant tests will be run. His self-report will be correlated with objective information from his medical history and recent workup. Eventually the symptom can be properly labeled and put in the context of its probable cause and mechanism.

  Defensive behavior (including defensive symptoms or even creative products) is similarly called to our attention when something strikes us as odd or out of character. Once we’ve noted the oddity, we need to triangulate between what the subject says about it, what we know about his current circumstances, and the biological and biographical facts of his history. But objective documentation of mental health is scarcer and harder to come by than objective documentation of physical health. Like many other facets of mental health, therefore, the reliable identification of involuntary coping mechanisms requires longitudinal study. This is spelled out in much greater detail in my Ego Mechanisms of Defense: A Guide for Clinicians and Researchers.8

  In the Grant Study, we had thousands upon thousands of pages of the men’s self-reports, and also a great deal of observational, historical, and objective material recorded by others. We triangulated among these to assess defensive style. When the men were 47, we picked out of their reports examples of behavior that we (or others) thought odd, selecting the ones that seemed most characteristic of the subject’s way of operating. We considered them in conjunction with the observations of the many members of the Study staff over the decades, and also in the context of the historical information available to us, and the vast background of objective test and other documentary evidence that had accrued over the years. The selections that appeared on this scrutiny to be defensive were excerpted as 100-word vignettes. We compiled an average of two dozen such vignettes for each man. Then we asked blind raters to identify and label the vignettes for defensive style, as per the hierarchy above. We made certain to check the reliability of the raters—that is, to make sure that raters came to similar conclusions—and then we scored the resulting defenses for their level of maturity. One of Anna Freud’s great contributions to the understanding of adaptation was her recognition that you can learn more about children’s defensive styles by watching them play than by listening (as her father did) to free association and dreams. And that’s essentially what we did; many of the College men enjoyed day jobs that were more like play than work.

  There were two weaknesses in our exploration. We analyzed the defenses of only 200 of the men; this was an immensely time- and labor-consuming process, and we ran out of money before we could complete the work on the other 68. And our rater reliability was shaky on the defense of dissociation. For almost four-fifths of the men, however, and for all but one of the defenses, we had extensive and reliable identifications of characteristic defensive styles.

  Table 8.1 illustrates the maturational levels reflected in our vignettes of adaptation at different ages. The Study found that adolescents were twice as likely to use immature mechanisms as mature ones. Young adults were more than twice as likely to use mature mechanisms as immature ones. Between ages thirty-five and fifty, individual men were four times likelier to choose mature mechanisms than they had been when they were adolescents.

  Table 8.1 Maturation of Defenses Over the Lifespan

  * The vignettes are the ministories excerpted from the men’s histories as examples of adaptive coping behavior, and then identified and rated.

  We found that defensive style was relatively independent of nurture, and that was not a surprise. Almost by definition, adaptive mechanisms are the ego’s antidotes to a poor environment; its adaptive capacity reflects the difficulties it has mastered at least as well as the assets with which it was originally blessed. Like Godfrey Camille, some individuals became progressively better adapted as they mature. Folk wisdom recognizes this: Pearls are what oysters do about irritation, and what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Damaged children in their growing can find ingenious ways to compensate for earlier deprivation. Northwestern University psychology professor Dan McAdams recognizes this reality as the “redemptive self.”9

  Maturity of defensive style was not associated with parental education or social class, and bore no relationship to tested intelligence, body build, or physical responsiveness to stress. The use of mature mechanisms correlated very highly with variables that reflect psychiatric health and warm human relations.10 And we found a very significant association between immature defenses and genetic vulnerability (that is, number of ancestors with major depression, alcoholism, or shortened longevity). The depressed and the alcoholic were most likely to use immature mechanisms later in life. Fifty percent of the ten men who had two mentally ill parents manifested immature patterns of defense, and only 9 percent of fifty-five men without mentally ill parents showed a predominantly immature pattern of defense. Of course, this finding could also be explained as identification (monkey see, monkey do).

  DOES DEFENSIVE STYLE MATTER?

  Once we had learned to rate maturity of defenses reliably, the next question was: Did choice of mechanism matter? Would the men’s coping styles tell us any more than their handwriting had about their lives? To answer this question, for each of three cohorts, the 18 frequently used individual defenses were clustered into the four groups (psychotic, immature, intermediate, mature) I’ve outlined above. Correlations were calculated between the Study member’s maturity of defenses and other indications of successful adult development. As Table 8.2 indicates, the associations were impressive. Maturity of defenses as measured from age twenty to forty-seven predicted the men’s Decathlon scores at age seventy to eighty with a correlation of .43, which is very, very significant. Choice of involuntary defense mechanisms clearly does matter. Furthermore, the positive ass
ociations between maturity of defenses and mental health were, like our other maturity ratings, independent of the social class, education, and gender of the Study members.

  Let me depart from abstraction now to show what the hierarchy of defensive styles looks like in real life. Here are the life stories of two men who have also appeared in Adaptation to Life. A few words first, though, about the chief adaptive mechanisms of the men you’ll meet here.

  Table 8.2 Correlations Between Maturity of Defenses and Measures of Successful Adult Outcome

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

  n.a. = data not available.

  Sublimation, suppression, intellectualization, and repression are four distinct ways of dealing with desires and impulses that are experienced as unacceptable or dangerous. In sublimation, the emotional energy fueling these desires is invested in other goals that are acceptable (and frequently also socially valuable). In suppression (sometimes called stoicism), the desires and emotional energy are held together in consciousness, and the anxiety and depression they evoke either tolerated or ignored, until a way to pursue them safely and appropriately is discovered. In intellectualization (sometimes called isolation of affect), forbidden ideas remain in awareness but divorced from their emotional intensity. In repression, unacceptable desires and impulses are excluded from awareness along with the ideation associated with them, but the emotion remains powerfully present, with no provision made for immediate or future gratification. Like all of the defense mechanisms I’ll be discussing in this chapter, these four are not employed deliberately or even consciously; their use is automatic and involuntary, like the mobilization of fever in the face of infection.

  Repression is a short-term solution to the complexities and contradictions of emotional life. Our desires and impulses often have to be handled with care, but to dismiss them wholesale from awareness is to dismiss a great deal of emotional vitality as well. Repression serves us best, therefore, as a respite from conflict and confusion, a temporary battening down of the hatches until we are ready to look for more enduring ways to keep from being overwhelmed by our feelings. Intellectualization is much the same. It permits forbidden thoughts and desires to remain in awareness, but without their passionate emotional valence. Intellectualization allows for cerebral satisfaction and sometimes very valuable advances in understanding—one Grant Study man grew his mother’s cancer in his lab as a tissue culture—but at the risk of alienation from emotional experience.

  Sublimation and suppression are two more satisfactory long-term adaptive techniques. Sublimation—finding outlets for our passions—is the gift that allows successful artists to work themselves into the very marrow of our bones. In general we do not like being made to weep, but when Mahler, Verdi, Plath, Shakespeare, and Jesus do this, we bless them for transmuting the bitter poison of their own lives into an elixir of salvation.

  In comparison, suppression is about as glamorous as a Mack truck. Perhaps less mysterious than the other three, it is an important workhorse of an adaptation, and a very successful one. Of all the defenses it was the one most associated with being well integrated in college, and with excellence at the events of the Decathlon three decades later. Sublimation, for all its elegance, was less associated with success or with joy. Artists are not known for freedom from mental illness, as Beethoven exemplifies—only for the joy they bring to others.

  One way of coping with the hurly-burly of reality is to retreat into the pleasures of the mind. Several of the Grant Study men who went into teaching used this type of sublimation as a successful coping style. They tended to have productive and distinguished careers, like Daniel Garrick and Dylan Bright (below). The professors like Peter Penn who relied heavily on intellectualization as their major coping mechanism, however, tended to experience their jobs and their marriages as sterile, and they showed far more evidence of emotional problems.

  THE LIFE OF DYLAN BRIGHT

  Professor Dylan Bright was a vivid illustration of the coping potential of sublimation. Although he was less gifted intellectually than the average Study member, an exciting luminescence surrounded his life. As soon as I walked into his office, he put his feet up onto the desk and started to talk. He looked more like a prizefighter than an English professor, and I was moved by his affective richness. But initially I was not quite sure that I liked him. His first response to my request for an interview was, “Christ, that kills the afternoon!” His aggression was barely tamed and verged on the abrasive, and only his charm kept me from regarding the encounter as a pitched battle. He graphically described his worries and then growled, “If they get out, I’ll kick your teeth in.”

  Bright was a football linesman and champion wrestler who, almost as an afterthought, became a professor of poetry. In high school he greatly preferred the excitement of athletics to the dreary world of the classroom; he was a rebellious D student, and at one point was nearly expelled. Nevertheless, his headmaster saw Bright as “vibrant and ardent in his beliefs,” and the Study staff perceived him as “an eager, enthusiastic, attractive youngster with an outgoing personality.” Bright’s intensely competitive spirit, which he eventually harnessed in the service of his academic career—that is, sublimated—was never extinguished. His energy, his extraordinary capacity to win close friends, and his knack for exciting hedonistic activities made him one of the most dramatic members of the Study.

  Unlike suppression and anticipation, the use of sublimation was not associated with particularly happy childhoods. Like Beethoven, Bright grew up in a family filled with turmoil. His father was an emotionally unstable alcoholic who was rarely at home and whose hobby was hunting. Dylan saw his parents’ marriage destroyed by fighting, and early on he tasted both the triumphs and the dangers of (figuratively) taking the place of his father. His mother was an exuberant and energetic woman who was three inches taller than her son even after he reached adulthood. Her charm was appreciated by several Study observers, but from the beginning she taught Dylan to beware of instinctual pleasure. Before his first birthday he had been cured of thumb-sucking, bedwetting, and soiling himself. At two, his mother made him wear mittens to bed because of his “perfectly revolting” habit of masturbating. As a child, he conceived of God as “a person looking down on me, ready to conk me on the head with a thunderbolt.”

  In his lifelong quest to conquer fear, when Dylan Bright let go of his mother’s skirts he became a daredevil quasi-delinquent. As a youth he incurred more cerebral concussions than anybody else in the Study—there’s a statistic for you! But with the passage of time, his mastery became more graceful. After eighteen, he began concentrating on learning to do what he called “responsibly adventurous things,” and there were no further injuries. First he was an all-state football linesman in high school, and then a fiercely competitive college wrestler. He played tennis for blood, shunning doubles for the joys of single combat. After college, once his devotion to tennis and wrestling had been replaced by an equally fierce devotion to poetry, he was still out to win. He raced through graduate school at Yale with top grades. He accepted an appointment at Princeton for the prestige, and a few years later exulted in his early acquisition of academic tenure.

  Bright did not start out with creative and empathic ways of dealing with his feelings. As he and his ego matured, however, he replaced acting out (his delinquent rebellion) with reaction formation (containing emotional impulses by doing their opposite). For example, he suddenly found the first girl with whom he had slept “revolting”—unconsciously choosing the same word that his mother had used to condemn his sexual experimentation in infancy—and gave up intercourse with his next girlfriend out of an ascetic desire to “see if I could.” In college, the once delinquent Bright seriously considered a career in law enforcement. As a young and lusty English instructor at Princeton, his devotion to enforcing parietal rules surprised the administration as much as it irritated the students. Even in middle life, Professor Bright conceived of his
success in terms of rigid control. “If a person does not have self-discipline,” he cautioned me, “he can go to rot so fast.”

  Bright didn’t consider the possibility that his rigid self-control might not in fact have been protecting him, or that it might even have been steering him toward an empty disaster of a life. But it was only as the reaction formation of his youth gave way to sublimation that he caught fire. He risked his amateur standing by wrestling in exhibition matches, but “consecrated” his illegal fees by investing them in violin lessons. During his nineteen-year-old abstention from sexual intercourse, he substituted a close and exciting intellectual friendship and made his first discovery of poetry. He fought to be first in his graduate school class, but he gentled his naked ambition by writing his Ph.D. thesis on the poetry of Shelley.

  When Bright was thirty-five, his wife broke up what had been a very close marriage. At the same time, he was becoming aware that his scholarship, although adequate to win him tenure at Princeton, would never win him national recognition. This was a critical period. Faced by two real defeats, for a while he lost himself in alcohol, careless affairs, and stock car racing—the poetry professor regressed to adolescent acting out. But he quickly replaced his temporary delinquencies with more acceptable and productive quests for excitement. He went scuba diving in the Aegean with a close friend, and made a discovery that allowed him to reinterpret a line of Homer’s Odyssey. “Oh,” he told me, “that was a heady experience.”

  Bright’s adaptive responses were ingenious indeed. Sexual abstinence (this time following upon his divorce) once again brought him into relationship with a brilliant colleague who remained a friend for life. He withdrew from academic competition in which he anticipated only defeat, and involved himself instead in activities that permitted him to master danger with minimum risk and at the same time to anesthetize grief with real excitement. Sublimation not only facilitated the efficient expression of his instincts, it also permitted Bright to avoid the labels of “neurotic” and “mentally ill.” He had once described himself as “a laughing man. I just let things slip off my back.” But he didn’t do that by permanently drowning his troubles in alcohol, or in self-destructive chance-taking, or in Scarlett O’Hara’s ambiguous mantra of denial, “I’ll think about it tomorrow.” His capacity for sublimation enabled him to change the terms of his life. He went on the wagon to control his incipient alcoholism. He made a successful second marriage. He remained in touch with his feelings while softening them with excitement, laughter, and people. Asked if he had ever seen a psychiatrist, he spoke instead of his second wife and his best friend: “Professional assistance would be a pale shadow compared to these companions.” Like art, love is an act of creation, but love far surpasses art as a cure for emotional suffering. Bright died at sixty-two. Eighteen years of heavy drinking and forty-five years of a two-pack-a-day habit had led to lung cancer. But like the Marlboro man, he died with his boots on.