Top book in its field I read this book many years ago and this must be a reissue of what is sureley a classic in men's studies and developmental psychology. The book is well written and recommended for the general population and psychotherapist working with men. Women trying to understand what puzzles them about men will find some poignant answers and therapists can learn what is below the veneer of hidden lives.
A very interesting book, but problematic This was a very interesting book, but the study itself is problematic. First of all I think it is very hard to quantify human behavior. All the graphs and tables are nice, but I wonder how valid these numbers really are. Second, as the writer himself says, the pool of people chosen is very narrow. I understand that he wanted to study "normal" development, but it makes me wonder how valid it is to extrapolate from this data. I enjoyed the personal stories and also the view of how adults change over time. In short I recommend it.Good data, biased reporting Despite its focus on such a narrow cross-section of humanity, the data (at least the parts of it the author chose to share) is certainly amazing.
You'll like this book if you agree that human behavior can be pigeonholed into Freudian defense mechanisms, and if your views of what is valuable correspond to the author's, as he is never shy from revealing his revulsion for people who like solitary pursuits or act and think in unconventional ways.
It gets slightly tiresome that the author sees everything through such an obvious longing for his father and blaming his mother for his absence (and carefully picks statistics and anecdotes to support this peculiar way of viewing influences on life). With so much data you can support whatever conclusion you wish by how you phrase the terms of evaluation. But authors are human beings and you expect them to present their findings from inside their own idiosyncratic world views.
Even if you don't find it very revealing to cram lives into these defense mechanisms (which I think are rather dated and parochial), the stories about the individuals in the study make the book worth a read.
Famous study, poor book I have read and reread this book in a much older edition. It is quite a sad retelling of anonymous Harvard students' lives in a decades-long study. Several of them became famous. They reach often sad endings, more surprising to me because they are, after all, the best and brightest as the book about the Kennedy administration says.
In fact, the study includes President Kennedy himself.
After years of wondering why the book seemed so blah and non-inspiring, I found an answer. The author of the book, a major guardian of the study, is troubled and not so well-adapted himself. See the June 09 Atlantic Monthly. His father's Richard-Corey-like suicide followed by the 25th anniversary yearbook for his father's college class triggered an early fascination with the long-term psychological study of college classes.
Then too, while author stresses the importance of personal relationships in nurturing personal happiness, he has been married four times, twice to the same woman. Does this kind of confusion create discord in his relationships? Yes. Some of his children have gone years without speaking to him. (And eerily, once when shown a picture of his third wife, he could not recognize her.)
Now the author is the interpreter as to what the study means, not a mere reporter of its conclusions. And the conclusions are based on decades of shifting and incompatible psychological theory and practice. Originally, part of the study even included measurements of the subjects' bodies like full-body phrenology. Now they include MRIs and DNA collection with requests for the subjects to donate their brains to the study.
Now what did we learn from the fifty-year study of Albert Einstein's brain? Not much.
As the book purports to teach how to live a happy life, you would do better with a well-researched biography of someone whom you admire. Maybe Alice Schroeder's life of Warren Buffet, The Snowball.
Or, for the prototype of this kind of book, read Vasari's Lives of the Artists.
Maybe the whole premise of a long analytical study providing insights on how to live is too just too darn simplistic at its base.Complex but still Interesting Unlike Gail Sheehy's "Passages," which is anecdotal and messy in the extreme (and is described elsewhere as little more than intuition passed off as serious science - and who was forced to settle out of court for plagiarism, in any case), George Vaillant's analysis is just the opposite: It comes about as close to serious science as one is likely to get in the field of human relationships - that is, without actually being a purely academic psychological or social psychological analysis.
Whether one likes this book (or its conclusions) or not, Vaillant is a serious Psychologist, and this is a serious piece of work, not to be thrown onto the ignominious heap called "pop" psychology.
The study consisted of 238 of Harvard's most promising graduates who were followed, tested and interviewed from 1939 onwards, to determine what aspects of their lives made for a "good quality of life." Unsurprisingly the author isolated seven attributes that predicted to a "well-adjusted," and presumably a higher quality of and happier lives. They were: Adapting maturely, a good education, a stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, modest exercise, and maintaining normal weight.
Somewhat surprisingly, the weight of these and the other psychological factors changed in non-intuitive ways with age. The single constant throughout life was the subjects' relationship with people. Problems did arise of course when the author attempted to establish standards, or rules for what is "happiness," or what is "the good life," or, for what "well-adjusted is to mean more generally. While throughout the study, these could have proven to be problematic, the author finessed them about as well as could be expected.
In this regard, the author saw himself as serving three overlapping roles for the study: first as studious keeper of the multi-generational records on each of his subjects; then as objective reporter of the clinical facts; and only in the end, as study interpreter of last resort. And in each of these roles, it must be said that he did a yeoman's job. Somehow the scheme he devised, including his interviews and data collection efforts, lent itself to an unexpectedly quiet confidence and trust in this study, one whose results and interpretations, no matter the interpreter, were likely to be controversial in any case.
To its great credit, the author lightened his own burden greatly when he chose to follow closely the Freudian model of psychology as expressed through the updated theories of Freud's daughter, Anna. And it is her psychological framework that shapes the study and provides a very robust background pallet for Vaillant's "adaptation to life strategy" as well as served as a solid basis for the study's conclusions.
The way the author has hitched his "adaptive framework metaphor" to Anna Freud's psychological theories deserves to be singled out as a stand alone effort in its own right - as well as in the way this combination provides a new kind of richness for life-cycle studies such as this one in the future. Future longitudinal studies will certainly have to take this framework and Vaillant's work into account.
Under the author's richly Freudian framework, "adaptations to life strategies" are visualized as the familiar Freud's defense mechanisms. The subject's unconscious responses to pain, trauma, conflict and uncertainty become the defensive reactions that shape behaviors: The defenses can either distort or enhance an individual's understanding of reality. The author likens psychological defenses to blood clots in biological organisms, in which clots can either be lifesaving, as when they stop bleeding; or can cause a heart attack when they block an artery. Vaillant's point is that in the same way, psychological defenses either can develop maturely or become stunted through arrested development.
In either case they can run the gamut, from psychosis (paranoia, hallucinations, to megalomania); to Neurosis (intellectualization, rationalizations, dissociation, and repression (memory lapses, failure to acknowledge, etc.)); to just plain immature defensive adaptations (such as "acting out," passive aggression, hypochondria, projection, reaction formation, as well as other psychosomatic illnesses such as bulimia, and anorexia, etc. and of course everyone's favorite, fantasy). And while the psychotic defense is far and away the worse, even "normal" neurosis or just plain immaturity can interfere with intimacy and otherwise affect quality of life negatively.
In the end, what the author has to report covers the waterfront from the expected, to the surprising, and even to the questionable. In this regard, the most controversial aspect of the conclusions is the author's suggestion that circumstances hardly come into play in judging either the happiness or the success of the study's subjects: that success and happiness is according to him, entirely predictable from psychological variables alone. To buoy up this tentative conclusion, he used the familiar Grant study of poorer male subjects to confirm this point. However, such conclusions, no matter what data are used for support, presupposes what must be considered an unwarranted independence between the psychological and the environmental (or circumstantial) variables. This of course reduces to, and goes against the grain of the old "nature versus nurture" argument all over again.
I like the study just fine without these last controversial suggestions.
