Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

by Vaillant, George E.

  Furthermore, whereas before he had denied intense feelings, perhaps out of fear of being overwhelmed, he was becoming more able to handle them. During the Study intake proceedings when he was nineteen, he described the atmosphere at home as “harmonious, my mother affectionate and my father the same.” He was given a Jungian word association test (despite its preoccupation with physique, the Study did try, in an eclectic way, to measure the complete man), and Newman associated the word mother with affectionate, kind, prim, personal, instructive, and helpful. But the seasoned and tolerant social investigator who interviewed his mother experienced her as a “very tense, ungracious, disgruntled person,” and Adam’s sister commented, “Our mother could make anyone feel small.” It wasn’t until 1945, six years after he left home and five years after his initial workup, that Newman was able to write to the Study of his childhood, “Relations between me and my mother were miserable.” “I don’t remember ever being happy,” he went on, and he recalled his mother having told him that she was sorry she had brought him into the world.

  At age sixty, he took the sentence completion test developed by Jane Loevinger at Washington University to assess ego maturity.11 The stem phrase was: When he thought of his mother . . . and Newman’s response was . . . he vomited. Yet it would be an oversimplification to say that he went on to become steadily more conscious of difficult feelings, especially the painful relationship with his mother, because at age seventy-two he could not believe he had ever written any such answer. People are complicated; memory, emotion, and reality all have their own vicissitudes, and they interact in unpredictable ways. That’s one of the reasons prospective data are so important.

  The young Newman was extremely ambitious. “I have a drive—a terrible one,” he said of himself in college. “I’ve always had goals and ambitions that were beyond anything practical.” But by thirty-eight he had gained some insight into the “terrible” drive of the college years: “All my life I have had Mother’s dominance to battle against.” This realization caused a change in his philosophy of life. Now, he said, his goals were “no longer to be great at science, but to enjoy working with people and to be able to answer ‘yes’ to the question I ask myself each day, ‘Have you enjoyed life today?’ . . . In fact, I like myself and everyone else much more.” He hadn’t become a hippie; it was 1958 and that scene was still some years away, and in fact Newman’s fierce ambition was still burning in his heart. This was just another manifestation of the complexities of the man.

  By the time he was forty-five, the laid-back freedom of his thirties was once more in abeyance as he battened down the hatches to deal with rebellious and sexually liberated daughters. Identifying unwittingly with his mother, he was now insisting that “greatness” be the goal of his intellectually gifted girls. Twenty years later, one daughter had still not recovered from his pressure. She described her father as an “extreme achievement perfectionist,” and wrote that her relationship with him was still too painful to think about. She felt that her father had “destroyed” her self-esteem, and asked that we never send her another questionnaire.

  I wish I knew what happened between them in Newman’s later years, when he had mellowed remarkably. Alas, I do not. But I do know that Time continued to wreak its changes. Occasional backsliding notwithstanding, Newman became more flexible than he had once been. The tectonic shifts of the sixties, and being father to such adventurous progeny, loosened him up sexually. He stopped disavowing Freud’s theories. As his daughters reached adulthood, he (reluctantly) abandoned his prohibitions against premarital sexuality. He stopped fearing the “sneaky liberals” and began to share the view that law and order was “a repressive concept.” In fact, he came to believe that “the world’s poor are the responsibility of the world’s rich.” He quit his job in the military-industrial complex and put his scientific books under the house “to mildew.” At sixty he was solving agricultural problems in the Sudan, using statistical knowledge gleaned in the planning of retaliatory nuclear strikes. The man who had gone to Mass four times a week in college proclaimed, “God is dead, and man is very much alive and has a wonderful future.” In fact, as soon as Newman’s happy marriage had begun buffering the terrible loneliness of his childhood, his dependence on religion had diminished greatly. Eventually he became an atheist. In mid-adulthood his mystical side was being expressed in meditation, and he began teaching psychology and sociology at the university level.

  This was not a complete changing of spots. To some degree, at least, we always remain the people that we were. On the one hand, Newman could write that he had learned from his daughters that “there was more to life than numbers, thought and logic.” But he still limited himself to only one intimate relationship—that is, with his wife. And although in his laboratory work he had become an increasingly generative leader, guiding those entrusted to his supervision with attention and concern, he was still a technician. Even in his teaching, he approached psychology and sociology not through the study of feelings, but through explorations of “the linguistic derivation of words like ‘relationship’ and ‘love.’”

  So what had happened? Clearly these weren’t drastic personality changes. They weren’t intellectual changes, either. Newman hadn’t taken any riveting new psychology courses or met any charismatic psychiatrists. This was an evolution of his personality, which could be seen in the increased ability—not uncommon as people get older (see Chapter 5)—to stay aware of uncomfortable feelings without having to control or disown them. As Newman slowly became less anxious about his own sexuality, he had less need to condemn or control the sexuality of others. He was recapitulating a developmental process that is familiar to us in much younger people—the one that accompanies grammar-school children into the tumult of adolescence. As Newman struggled free of parental domination, he achieved a less constricted morality and became more comfortable with himself. In that greater comfort, he moved toward a greater comfort with, and willingness to be responsible for, others. None of the great psychologists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Freud and William James, had had anything to say about adult maturational processes like this. But over the decades, we at the Grant Study have watched fascinated as Adam Newman and his fellows changed and grew.

  Indeed, one great triumph of the Grant Study has been to make clinical documentation of changes like his available at exactly the moment when psychologists like Erik Erikson were beginning to recognize, schematize, and theorize about them. The loosening of the Sixties played a part in Newman’s evolution, but only a part. Not all of the Grant Study men did as he did at that time; some just dug their heels in deeper. This is one important truth of adult development: people grapple with growing up in their own ways, but we all do have to grapple. Obviously the men in the Study didn’t all follow the same course of sexual development as Newman, any more than all children handle adolescence identically. But one way or another we all have to come to terms with our own sexuality, and the ways that we do (and don’t) will end up shaping our lives.

  Newman’s story illustrates another endemic issue in long-term studies—the vicissitudes of subjects’ memories. (It illustrates the vicissitudes of researchers’ memories too, as you will see in a moment.) When I interviewed him at fifty, the only recurrent dream he could recall was of urinating secretly behind the garage, and he insisted that he had given up church as soon as he got to Harvard, having come to doubt the validity of religion. The four Masses a week and the dream of the naked woman/tree were as unavailable to him at fifty as his mother’s unkindness had been when he was nineteen.

  Newman’s recollections of his history continued to alter as the years went on, always in the service of a process of psychological development; he was adjusting his inner self to the real world as he cautiously admitted more and more of his emotional life into consciousness. For example, when he was fifty-five, I asked Newman for permission to publish examples of his shifting memory. Repression again: he never became anxious ab
out the fallibility of his beliefs; he simply returned my manuscript with the terse comment, “George, you must have sent this to the wrong person.”

  At sixty-seven, Newman told me that his approach to the rough spots in life was, “Forget it; let come what may.” But as we might expect by now, that philosophy did not represent pure evolution from control freak to Zen-like detachment. On the contrary, in many ways he was returning to an adjustment much more like his earlier one. If no longer quite so buttoned-down as his mother had tried to make him, he had always been far more so than his unbuttoned daughters, and now he was buttoning up again. He abandoned the social intensity of teaching, and returned to the safety of numbers. From age fifty-five until he retired at sixty-eight he worked in city planning, managing the complexities of the new Texan megacities. Although he appeared at first glance to have had three widely varied careers—ballistic missile engineering, academic sociology, and this last enterprise—his creative expertise in multivariate statistics was the common denominator. And while he was flexible enough to become the office computer guru (despite being a generation older than most of the technological hotshots in the department), he never became Mr. Sociable.

  “I don’t know what the word ‘friend’ means,” he said at seventy. He gave up meditation. “I ruined some of its delights by reading too much neuropsychology,” he told me at seventy-two, in a comment reminiscent of his early fear that intellectual scrutiny would destroy his Catholicism. Still, his passion at the time was nuclear disarmament—an attempt to undo the aggressive achievements of his military youth. It was also an example of the developmental stage of Guardianship, which we’ll explore in Chapter 5. And one of his bulwarks always was his gift for humor, a characteristic not shared by all statistical types. Even as a young man, he could take some distance from the complaint that he had “twice the sex drive” of his wife, and give his grumbling a wry and graceful turn: “We believe that making love should be practiced as an art form.”

  In our last interview, Adam Newman still maintained that he knew nothing about friendship, yet he loved his wife from his teens to the end of his days. His plan for the dread possibility that she might die before him was to join the Sierra Club and hang out with “tree huggers,” yet he was happiest working with numbers. He avoided too much contact with people, but during our interview the birds came to eat seeds literally from his hands, which he lovingly held out for them. He had abandoned “spirituality” years before and had not set foot in a church for years before that, but he showed me proudly the awe-inspiring fractals he was creating on his computer. He was a bundle of superficial contradictions, but he wasn’t alone in that. Everyone is consistent in some things and not in others, yet ultimately true to some fundamental essence in themselves. The more things change, the more they stay the same; Newman was part mystic and part engineer, and he remained that way to the end.

  He remained true to repression as a defense mechanism, too. When he was seventy-two I asked him for the third time if he could remember any recurrent dreams from childhood. This time he didn’t miss a beat: “Do you mean the one when I was on roller skates and ran into the back porch?” Three times over thirty years he is asked for a recurrent dream from his adolescence; each time he comes up with a completely different one with no recollection of the others. He relied on repression at nineteen, and at seventy-two he still did.

  But that doesn’t mean he hadn’t changed. He wasn’t living purely inside his head anymore; the narcissism of his youth had given way more and more over the years to interest and to empathy. And his mood was light. A very unhappy college student had become a very contented old man. As I closed our interview, I asked him if he had any questions about the Study to which he had contributed for more than fifty years. He had one. “Are you having a good time?” As I prepared to take my leave I politely shook his hand and he—so uncooperative and self-centered in his college days, so shy and intellectual for the last two hours—exclaimed, “Let me give you a Texan good-bye!” and threw open his arms to give me a huge hug.

  Reviewing my write-up of that interview eighteen years later for this book, I found that I had closed with the simple words, “I was entranced.” But I also found, to my chagrin, that my own memory was as fallible and as defensive as his. I had been remembering the fifty-five-year-old man who appeared in my first book; I had expected to be relating the tale of an aging hippie. I had completely lost track of his return to city planning (which is, after all, engineering, if of a gentler form than bomb design). One lesson for me in the writing of this book has been that retrospection is as unreliable in investigators as in their subjects. Without prospectively written records it is very easy to repress unpleasant truths, and I was as good at it as Newman was. Even rereading my own transcript wasn’t enough to keep me honest; that took an encounter with his death certificate. For twenty years I had conveniently forgotten that at the time of that interview, when he was seventy-two, he was a man preparing to die of an ugly and debilitating cancer. Out of my own dread of death, I couldn’t keep his impending demise in mind. How could I claim any understanding of what was going on in him while failing to take that into account?

  Be that as it may, less than a year before his life was consumed by the insatiable greed of his malignancy, Adam Newman wrote his last words to the Study: “I am happy.” He had become a model of Erikson’s final life stage, the one he calls Integrity (Chapter 5). This was an achievement that was still beyond me; Newman was not nearly as scared of his dying as I was, which probably had a fair amount to do with my failure to recall his cancer. My own father had died too soon to teach me much about adult life, but remembering Newman’s life reminded me of how much I have learned from the Grant Study and its members in his stead. The dying can be happy too.

  CONCLUSION

  As a child I had little interest in microscopes, but I admired the telescope on Mount Palomar—then the most powerful one in the world. I wanted to see forests in their entirety, not just trees. Later on, as a psychiatrist, I longed to see beyond mere snatches of life to the whole picture. In this book I will focus on the rich potential of a telescopic view of life. There will be plenty of surprises, because a long enough view can turn conventional views of causation upside down. For instance, studied prospectively, physical health turns out to be just as important a cause of warm social supports and vigorous exercise as exercise and social supports are causes of physical health. Some readers will surely be outraged at such heresy, but as Galileo discovered, telescopes can get people into a lot of trouble. Long-term studies are as unsettling as they are enlightening.

  To add to the uncertainty, we don’t know how far to trust even our latest findings. Time changes everything, and it makes no exceptions for longitudinal studies. It transforms the world we live in while we’re living in it, and pulls scientific thinking forward even while making it obsolete. None of this can be helped; it’s an intrinsic hazard of long endeavors. The more powerful the telescope, the more likely it is that the light we are seeing through it is many thousands of years old. The Grant Study is only seventy-five, but that’s more than threescore years and ten, and in the context of a man’s life, a very long time. Many of the early findings of the Study are ill-conceived, out-of-date, and parochial; some of our later findings will likely prove to be so too. But some, I hope, will endure. And in the meantime, they give those of us who are curious about our own lives, and the lives of those we cherish, plenty to think about.

  It reminds me of my first day of medical school. “Boys,” the Dean told us (this was in 1955), “the bad news is that half of what we teach you will in time be proven wrong; and worse yet, we don’t know which half.” Still, half a century later, our class has done pretty well by its patients. So I maintain hope that the old-fashioned Grant Study, twentieth-century artifact though it be, can offer some fresh wisdom and some real inspiration to twenty-first-century readers.

  2

  THE PROOF OF THE PUDDING

  TO FLOURI
SH FOR THE NEXT SIXTY YEARS

  The follow-up is the great exposer of truth, the rock upon which fine theories are wrecked.

  —P. D. SCOTT

  In this chapter I will get down to particulars, showing exactly how longitudinal studies work, how they can be used, and why they matter so much. I will demonstrate in action how different this kind of information—that is, information derived longitudinally and prospectively—is from the other kinds of data so abundantly compiled through the “instruments” of social science. And I will illustrate our findings (as throughout the book) with both nomothetic (statistical) and ideographic (narrative) data.

  In 2009, The Atlantic asked me to identify the most important finding of the Grant Study since its inception.1 Without any official evidence to back me up, I answered rashly: “The only thing that really matters in life are your relations to other people.” This impulsive response was quickly challenged by a leading business weekly, which put it to me straight: What do romantic notions like that have to do with the real dog-eat-dog world?2

  Clearly I had dropped myself right into the middle of one of the oldest and most heated controversies in developmental studies: which matters more, nature or nurture? Is constitution or environment more important? Feelings have run high on this subject for a very long time, and here was an opportunity to bring some real evidence to bear on the matter. After forty years on the Study, did I have enough data to answer a make-or-break question?

  At first I hoped to resolve the matter with a straightforward comparison. I would look at the lives of two groups of Grant Study men—one group that had been favored by nature with an enviable constitutional physical endowment, and another that had been favored by nurture with a loving childhood—and compare their lives fifty years later. This comparison had not been done before, and as it turned out I couldn’t do it in 2009 either, at least not precisely on those terms. Those two alternatives came out of different temporal universes, at least as far as the Study was concerned.