Sublimation is a way of negotiating with the superego, of getting around guilt, of finding pleasure if not in the forbidden garden, then at least in the garden next door. It served Clovis very well for a long time, but his Calvinist conscience eventually got its own back. Clovis had never freed himself from his guilt over having divorced his first wife, and as new obligations piled up—the library, the papers, the editing—they fed his superego until it became strong enough to shut the door to his passionate medieval world. Like Newman, who was always part mystic and part engineer, Clovis was always part ascetic and part troubadour. In his case, the ascetic eventually won out. At least for the time being, Perhapsy was dead once more. People change; people don’t.
Professors Clovis and Bright, however good they were at sublimation, were not examples of ideal flourishing any more than Beethoven was. Nor were they among the best outcomes in the Study. In fact, sublimation was only slightly more correlated with the success in the Decathlon of Flourishing than the neurotic defenses. Sublimation does not cure all ills. Its superiority lies in the fact that, unlike the neurotic defenses, it transforms agony into real pleasure—but a pleasure, unlike the more narcissistic defenses, that conforms to the needs of others. Beethoven’s need to create magic in music was as involuntary as the clotting of his blood, but just as critical to his resilient survival. To replace valid dynamic defenses that can and do change with maturity in favor of the reliable Big Five would be as foolish as ignoring the girlfriends and best mates of the College sophomores and studying only their body build—a mistake that the Grant Study made once and will not encourage others to make again. Its demonstration that intangible coping styles are relevant to modern social science made the Grant Study worth every penny spent on it, and worth the five years of my life that I have continued to devote to it—like Professor Sears—with no compensation at all.
IF WISHES WERE HORSES. . .
I am often asked how I would design a lifetime study if I had the opportunity to build one from scratch, instead of just walking into the Grant Study as I did and watching it grow. Let me close this history with my answer.
First, I would ask for an endowment to be run like an annuity, to last one hundred years. That would ensure that minimal continuity could be maintained even during lean years.
Second, in selecting my cohort I would not try for inclusive diversity, but I would include children of both sexes from no more than two contrasting ethnic groups. Sociology requires a large representative sample; biology needs small homogeneous samples. Historical change alters the rules of sociology; the rules of biology and ethology are more constant. In designing my ideal study I remain a biologist and an ethologist. And I would focus on blue-collar children, because (despite the reasoning of the early planners) the Inner City men provided even more surprises than the College men did.
Third, along with DNA and social security numbers for all the members of my cohort, I would collect the names, birth dates, and addresses of five relatives under sixty who do not live with them. The names and addresses of research subjects change with frustrating regularity, and this would spare us the huge investment in detective work that lost subjects demand.
Fourth, I would concentrate on finding and using the best measures available to assess the positive emotions (joy, compassion, trust, hope, and their like), and attachment.
Fifth, I would assess involuntary coping through a two-hour videotaped couples interview every twenty years in preference to the excerpted vignettes that I used. That way real-time rater reliability could be obtained, and a major source of bias (the excerpting) removed.
Sixth, consistent with safe x-ray exposure limits, I would collect neuroimaging data every five years. Like the men who started the Grant Study, I am not quite sure what I would be looking for—the brain changes that accompany the evolution of twenty-year-old narcissism into seventy-year-old empathy?—but the ambitious kids reviewing the data in 2050 certainly would be.
Finally, I would keep data collection simple enough so that after fifty years investigators would not be drowning in their own accumulations. The Grant Study was already struggling with this intrinsic problem of longitudinal studies all the way back in 1941, and that was only three years in! I deliberately kept data collection simple, and I take some credit for the long-term survival of the Study of Adult Development because of it. I would keep the Study cohort small enough that every member would remain a person to the Study, and not just a collection of numbers. Every member could maintain a warm alliance with the Study staff, and errors in data would be noticed. And yes, I would collect pencil-and-paper tests—belief systems need to be tested empirically.
CONCLUSION
At ten years old I entertained a Perhapsy-like wish for the greatest telescope in the world. When I was an assistant professor at Tufts Medical School and assumed responsibility for the Grant and Glueck Studies, I believed I had found it—the device that would let me see entire lifetimes at a single glance. In 1969, begging for money as usual, I paraphrased Archimedes to the Commissioner of Mental Health: “Give me the salary for a single research assistant, and I will move the world.” He very graciously told me that he could not do that. But the Grant Foundation did, and I was off and running.
I have spent forty years peering through that telescope, and it has shown me world after world that I never dreamed of. Over those years I’ve developed convictions, and (I pride myself on this, too) exposed them to empirical scrutiny. Three big ones have stood the test of time, if not perfectly. One was that a warm childhood was a most important predictive factor and that a bad childhood was not. Another was the assertion that I made to The Atlantic, that the most important contributor to joy and success in adult life is love (or, in theoretical terms, attachment). My third great conviction was the identification of the involuntary adaptive “mechanisms of defense” as the second greatest contributor. Forty years of study have convinced me that in this I was right; mature defenses remain the sine qua non of warm relationships. Alas, however, they do not appear to be essential for sustained good health and successful physical aging—yet another favorite hypothesis washed up as I followed the men into old age.
This extraordinary telescope has brought great joy and meaning to my life. It allowed me to embark upon a quest that had haunted me from childhood, exploring questions that matter to me both personally and scientifically. It has provided me with wonderful companions on the way—not only my many colleagues over all these years, but also the Study members themselves. And I become more and more aware that the Study, and the work we’ve done with it, has encouraged other people to think about their own lives and the lives of others. Not statistically, perhaps, but with a little more curiosity and a little more interest and a little more kindness. And how can that hurt?
APPENDIXES
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
APPENDIXES
APPENDIX A: THE INTERVIEW SCHEDULES
AGE 45–55
AGE 65–80
APPENDIX B: THE INNER CITY MEN AND THE TERMAN WOMEN
APPENDIX C: ASSESSMENT OF CHILDHOOD SCALES
APPENDIX D: ADULT ADJUSTMENT SCALES
AGE 30–50
AGE 50–65
AGE 65–80
APPENDIX E: DOMINANT COLLEGE PERSONALITY TRAITS
APPENDIX F: STUDY BIBLIOGRAPHY
APPENDIX A
THE INTERVIEW SCHEDULES
The Grant Study Interviews. Below are two examples of the semi-structured schedules of questions I used to guide my interviews with the men. Within reason, listed questions were always asked in the same order. The interviewer took longhand notes during the interview. Whenever a question elicited a problem area in a man’s life, the interviewer probed for his particular coping style.
The Interview Schedule, age 45–55
I. Work
a. What do you do? Any recent changes in responsibility?
b. Ten years from now, where are you he
ading?
c. What do you like and what do you dislike about your work?
d. What for you is most difficult?
e. What job would you have preferred?
f. What are good and bad aspects about relations with your boss? With subordinates?
g. How do you handle some of the problems that arise with these people?
h. Looking back, how did you get into your present work?
i. Were there people with whom you identified?
j. What work do you do outside of your job—degree of responsibility?
k. What plans for retirement?
l. Ever unemployed for more than a month? Why?
m. What will you do the first week of retirement? Anticipated feelings?
II. Family
a. News of parents and siblings.
b. Describe each child, their problems and sources of concern to you.
c. How do you handle adolescence differently from your parents?
d. Any deaths: first response, second response, means of finally handling feelings.
e. This is the hardest question that I shall ask: Can you describe your wife?
f. Since nobody is perfect, what causes you concern about her?
g. Style of resolution of disagreements.
h. Has divorce ever been considered? Explain.
i. Quality of contact with parents and degree of pleasure derived.
j. Which of your parents wore the pants when you were younger?
III. Medical
a. How is your health overall?
b. How many days sick leave do you take a year?
c. When you get a cold, what do you do?
d. Specific medical conditions and means of coping with the disability.
e. Views and misconceptions about these conditions.
f. Injuries and hospitalizations since college.
g. Patterns of use of smoking and recollections about stopping.
h. Pattern of use of medicines and of alcohol.
i. Do you ever miss work due to emotional strain, fatigue, or emotional illness?
j. Effect of work on health and vice versa.
k. How easily do you get tired?
l. Effect of health on the rest of your life.
IV. Psychological
a. Biggest worries last year.
b. Dominant mood over past six months.
c. Some people have trouble going for help and advice: What do you do?
d. Can you talk about your oldest friends? What made them friends?
e. Who are the people (non-family) you would feel free to call on for help?
f. What social clubs do you belong to, and what is your pattern of entertaining?
g. How often do you get together with friends?
h. What do people criticize you for or find irritating about you?
i. What do they admire or find endearing?
j. What are your own satisfactions and dissatisfactions with yourself?
k. Ever seen a psychiatrist? Who? When? How long? What do you remember? What did you learn?
l. Persistent daydreams or concerns that you think about but don’t tell others?
m. Effect of emotional stress?
n. Philosophy over rough spots?
o. Hobbies and use of leisure time? Athletics?
p. Vacations? How spent and with whom?
q. Any questions raised by my review of case record?
r. What questions do you have about the Study?
The Interview Schedule, age 65–80
I. Work
1. Why did you retire? When?
2. How was your job over the last two years? What did you miss most? Was there a retirement ceremony?
3. What did you do the first six weeks of retirement?
4. What takes the place of your job?
5. What is your most important activity now?
6. What is the best part of retirement?
7. The worst part?
8. The most difficult part?
9. How is your retirement financed?
10. Any job change if you were to do life over?
II. Social
1. What is it like being home for lunch?
2. How do you spend increased time with your wife? Problems?
3. How did your marriage last a quarter century?
4. What have you learned from your children?
5. Grandchildren?
6. Oldest friend?
7. Activities with others?
III. Psychological
1. Mood over last 6 months?
2. Worries last year?
3. Changes in religious beliefs?
IV. Health
1. Health since retirement?
2. Most annoying aspect of aging?
3. What physical activities have you given up?
4. Cold—what do you do?
5. Days of sick leave?
6. Hospital days total since 1970?
7. Medications?
APPENDIX B
THE INNER CITY MEN AND THE TERMAN WOMEN
In the late 1960s, another important longitudinal study became available to the Harvard Study of Adult Development as a foil for the homogeneous sample of privileged and intelligent white men that made up the College cohort. This study allowed us to compare the College men with a group of white men who were far less privileged, and (at least on IQ testing) less intelligent. A second study became available in the 1980s and offered a comparison with intellectually gifted, but not particularly privileged, women. These opportunities allowed us to draw conclusions about biology versus environment in some of our outcomes, and also, more specifically, about certain kinds of sociological influences. I refer to these two studies throughout the text in contexts where they shed light on, or in some cases expand, the Grant Study findings.
The Inner City Cohort (The Glueck Study of Juvenile Delinquency)
The second cohort joined us in 1969, through the generosity of Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck. Sheldon Glueck was a professor at Harvard Law School and his wife, Eleanor, a groundbreaking social worker there; both were world-famous criminologists. In the 1940s they began an intensive prospective study of 500 white male teenagers from inner-city Boston who had been remanded to reformatories—the Glueck Study of Juvenile Delinquency. They carefully matched them for IQ (their average Wechsler-Bellevue score, based on careful individual testing, was 95) and ethnicity to a control group of 500 boys who had no history of serious delinquency, but who came from the same high-crime neighborhoods, the same minority identifications, and the same impoverished urban classrooms as the youths who had ended up in reform schools. The Gluecks included no African Americans and no women, and they excluded any boys who by age fourteen had manifested any serious delinquency.
The initial phases of data collection for the Glueck Study were similar to the Grant Study’s, with psychiatric interviews, anthropometric measurements, medical examinations, family histories, socioeconomic assessments, and even complete Rorschach tests. But the Gluecks stopped their follow-up in 1962, when their subjects were 32. Thanks to a grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, I was able to integrate the two studies in 1970. The control cohort of Inner City men, renamed the Glueck Study, is now a part of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, enriching it by the contrast it provides with the socially privileged and high-IQ Harvard men. Like the Grant Study men, the Inner City men deserve great credit for their loyalty to the Study.
Since the integration, the College and Inner City cohorts have been followed in an identical manner, except for the years between 1962 and 1974, when the Inner City men were not followed.
Most of the Inner City men, who were born between 1925 and 1932, had early memories of discrimination and deprivation. But they too were beneficiaries of the G.I. Bill and of America’s postwar economic boom. By the 1950s, they, children of once-devalued Irish and Italian immigrant parents, had become the voting majority and political masters of Boston. Their pre
vious distinction as the most disparaged of city minorities had been passed on to recent African-American arrivals from the South. While only one in ten of their fathers belonged to the middle class, at age forty-seven half of the Inner City men had achieved middle-class status. In this achievement the Inner City men were a subsample of underclass “no hope” youth who became solidly middle class—certainly another reasonable definition of “success.”
The Terman Women Cohort
In 1920, Lewis Terman, a renowned Stanford psychologist, started a study of roughly 1,500 grammar-school children. They were mostly 4th graders of a 1906–1911 birth cohort, and they represented all the children in Oakland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles with (carefully tested) IQs of over 140. They have been followed by questionnaires every five years since then, with little attrition, except by death, to this day. Of the Terman group, 672 are women, most of whom went to college.
In 1987, through the generosity of Stanford professors Robert Sears and Albert Hastorf, Caroline Vaillant and I spent a full year reviewing the records of the the 78-to 79-year-old women, and interviewing a representative surviving sample of 40. We used a similar interview to the one we used with the Grant Study men to facilitate comparison. This sample of women who were the Grant Study men’s intellectual peers (or superiors) is the cohort that appears in this volume as the Terman women, and it allowed us to study some of the sociological effects of gender.
In the 1920’s, California was still a young state. One Study member could recall watching the last sailing ships glide through the Golden Gate before the bridge was built. The population of Los Angeles was 500,000. The Terman women were descendants of pioneers. One woman’s grandmother had saved her own life by killing an intruder with a tomahawk. One woman’s father, a high school teacher, used routinely to disarm his students before class. Another father won a stagecoach line to Arizona in a poker game.
Twenty percent of the Terman women’s fathers were in blue-collar occupations; thirty percent were in “the professions.” Only one Terman woman’s father was an unskilled laborer; he worked as a janitor at the University of California at Berkeley, so that his five bright children could all go to college for free.
Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study Page 36