How men adapt to life: the conclusions of an ambitious research
project initiated nearly 40 years ago. Limited to bright, white,
promising college men - a pilot population - in the late Thirties
and early Forties, the Grant Study reconstructed childhoods via
subject and parent interviews, observed the young men in college,
and followed them up at regular intervals for 30 years. Most
subjects were conscientious about maintaining contact and honest -
eventually - about private transactions. Vaillant, a Harvard
psychiatrist and current director of the Study, interviewed
extensively, streamlined the data, and now has shaped the findings
for a general, educated readership. Indebted to both Freuds (father
and daughter) and to Erikson for his psychiatric orientation, he
proceeds cautiously and is assiduous in illuminating his own
biases. The men themselves emerge not as "fugitives from a script
by Tennessee Williams" (a frequent case history complaint) but as
scrupulously delineated personalities exhibiting enormously
variable adaptive behaviors - the ego mechanisms of defense, here
calibrated in a maturational scheme. Vaillant maintains, as others
have, that these adaptive techniques (e.g. sublimation,
hypochondriasis, intellectualization) are as significant in
determining the course of a man's life as established factors like
heredity, environmental influences, and psychiatric intervention.
For example, he demonstrates how those from barren childhoods used
immature defense mechanisms (fantasy, projection) and had lifelong
problems sustaining intimate relationships while those from warm,
stimulating homes evolved mature mechanisms (suppression, humor)
and enjoyed deep friendships and (conventional) success as adults.
However, manifestations of growth appear throughout adult life -
not the "high drama" of Passages but those gradual modifications
that reflect pyramiding vitality and strengths. Vaillant writes
fluently and persuasively, anticipating objections and conferring
meaning on all those little details - chest pain timing, verbal
slips, open buttons - that always discomfit the skeptics. Despite
some inherent conceptual limitations and the skewed population, a
penetrating and revealing work. (Kirkus Reviews)
Between 1939 and 1942, one of America's leading universities
recruited 268 of its healthiest and most promising undergraduates
to participate in a revolutionary new study of the human life
cycle. The originators of the program, which came to be known as
the Grant Study, felt that medical research was too heavily
weighted in the direction of disease, and their intent was to chart
the ways in which a group of promising individuals coped with their
lives over the course of many years.
Nearly forty years later, George E. Vaillant, director of the
Study, took the measure of the Grant Study men. The result was the
compelling, provocative classic, "Adaptation to Life," which poses
fundamental questions about the individual differences in
confronting life's stresses. Why do some of us cope so well with
the portion life offers us, while others, who have had similar
advantages (or disadvantages), cope badly or not at all? Are there
ways we can effectively alter those patterns of behavior that make
us unhappy, unhealthy, and unwise?
George Vaillant discusses these and other questions in terms of
a clearly defined scheme of "adaptive mechanisms" that are rated
mature, neurotic, immature, or psychotic, and illustrates, with
case histories, each method of coping.
General
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