Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (20 page)

Second, it was not a disturbed relationship with one parent as much as a globally disturbed childhood, like those endured by Camille and Lovelace, that affected adult adjustment. Men from bleak childhoods were more likely than the others to be pessimistic and self-doubting; perhaps it was this that made many of them unable to take love in even when it was offered, or fearful about offering love themselves. These dynamics are illustrated to some degree by Sam Lovelace, and even more grimly by Peter Penn in
Chapter 6
and Bill Loman in
Chapter 8
. The Gluecks’ and other prospective longitudinal studies have shown that the children of multiproblem households are likely to be severely impaired in their later capacity to work.
26
For the upper-middle-class Grant Study men, however, inability to love seemed to be a more sensitive reflector of bad nurturing than work problems. Their childhoods were not so badly disrupted as those of the less fortunate Glueck men, and even relatively poor nurture did not in any way impair the capacity of many of these College men to excel in their jobs. (Of course, these particular men were all preselected as good workers; if they hadn’t been, they wouldn’t have been at Harvard.) But it did impair their capacity to love and be loved.

Men from poor childhoods were less able to deal consciously with strong emotions, either pleasurable or distressing ones; perhaps
for
this reason—that they couldn’t grapple with strong feelings directly—they were more likely to turn to drugs to soothe themselves.

So, while an isolated trauma or a bad relationship need not in itself condition adult psychopathology, the Harvard Study of Adult Development makes clear that global disruptions of childhood have strong predictive power, none of it good. Children who fail to learn basic love and trust at home are handicapped later in mastering the assertiveness, initiative, and autonomy that are the foundation of successful adulthood. Prevention will be best served when seriously troubled families can be accurately identified and made the foci of special concern. Mental illnesses and alcoholism create conditions that can ravage entire families, and can destroy children’s futures for decades to come.

5

MATURATION

It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

—WILLIAM JAMES

I FIRST INTERVIEWED
the Grant Study men in 1967, when I was thirty-three and they were in their late forties. I’ve always respected William James, and for a while those early encounters seemed to confirm his contention that character is set by thirty. But watching the men change in real time quickly persuaded me that about this, at least, he was mistaken. Lesson Four of the Grant Study is that people really do grow. Having learned it, I now argue with friends not about whether personalities change in adulthood, but about how best to measure the changes, and about what a person should be at the end of life that he was not at the beginning. That is, I ponder models of maturation, and hope that the Grant Study will, in the fullness of time, contribute to the construction of a better one than any we yet possess.

Developmental psychology textbooks still suggest, by omission if not by active assertion, that maturation stops at twenty—thirty at the latest. One major work maintained as recently as 2010, “It appears that individuals change very little in personality (either self-reported or rated by spouses) over periods of up to thirty years and over the age range 20 to 90.”
1

It’s true that an oak tree’s leaves don’t vary much as the tree ages—their shape and character are inherent fixed traits. But that doesn’t
mean
that the tree itself remains the same. On the contrary, the grandeur and complexity of a well-growing oak do develop with age, enhanced increasingly by time and circumstances until the tree is damaged or dies. The color of the wine in a bottle of Château Margaux doesn’t change much as the years pass, either—but its character sure does, and so does its price.

Over the last seventy-five years, the Study staff has been influenced by at least six models that try to encompass developmental elaborations such as these. The first was the
lieben und arbeiten
model famously attributed to Freud by Erikson, which equated maturation with a deepening capacity for love and for work.
2
The Menninger Clinic’s brilliant research psychologist Lester Luborsky turned Freud’s epigram into the model of development used in the clinic’s thirty-plus-year Psychotherapy Research Project.
3
His scale, slightly tweaked, year Psychotherapy Research Project.was eventually enshrined in DSM-IV as Axis V of the American Psychiatric Association’s definition of mental health.
4
When I was doing those first interviews, I used it to assess maturity in the Grant Study men, and reflections of it remain in the Decathlon and the Adult Adjustment scales (
Appendix D
).
5

There’s a problem with
arbeiten und lieben
as a comprehensive model of adult development, however. Maturation means development forward over time, but as the decades passed, the men’s standing in those two realms was as changeable as the weather. Only five (9 percent) of the fifty-five men who scored in the top third in Adult Adjustment (which included assessments of success in love and in work) at forty-seven remained in the top third for all of the subsequent ratings (at fifty to sixty-five years, at sixty-five to eighty years, and for the Decathlon). Sixteen (29 percent) actually scored in the bottom third during one of those next three periods. Periods of success at work and at love came and went unsystematically and according
to circumstance, and there were no universally discernible processes of “deepening” with age and experience. This model did not tell us enough about
how
people “grow up.”

At thirty-four I was only just becoming aware of how complex a concept maturity is. Furthermore, it means different things at different times and to different people. As my acquaintance with the Grant men (and with myself) advanced, Erik Erikson’s model of psychosocial development seemed increasingly more to the point:

Human personality, in principle, develops according to steps predetermined in the growing person’s readiness to be driven toward, to be aware of, and to interact with a widening social radius.
6

We worked with this model a great deal for my first ten years with the Study, and it is the one that most deeply informs this chapter.
7
Maturation along Eriksonian lines implies a growing capacity to tolerate difference and a growing sense of responsibility for others; it is the evolution of teenage self-centeredness into the disinterested empathy of a grandparent. Unlike success at love and work, Erikson’s developmental achievements are relatively independent of surroundings. They appear and endure in predictable ways. Barring the kinds of organic damage that diminish functional capacity, they do not get lost; people are not seen to revert to earlier stages of maturation. This makes Erikson’s model, and the ones that follow, a more convincing conception of adult growth processes.
8

My third model of maturity focuses on the development of social and emotional intelligence. This is the model that best addresses the way our involuntary coping styles develop over time, becoming, if we are fortunate, ever more empathic and less narcissistic—that is, ever more conducive to rewarding relationships. It makes room not only
for
the expanding effects of experience and psychological growth, but also for certain relevant aspects of brain development. The development of adaptational capacity is a major interest of mine; it was one of the interests that brought me to the Grant Study, and it dominated my research and writing through my sixtieth year. I will discuss adaptational capacity in detail in
Chapter 8
.

A fourth model of maturity, honored in Hindu cultures, holds that the task of the grandfather is to retire to the forest to tend to his spiritual life, turning secular preoccupations over to his son. Adam Newman’s story illustrates how a man’s emotional life can evolve away from personal passions and toward trust, love, and compassion. The attractiveness of this model has been enhanced by recent advances in brain imaging and neuroscience, which locate the emotions traditionally linked with spirituality—awe, hope, compassion, love, trust, gratitude, joy, forgiveness—in their neuroanatomic and evolutionary contexts as biological reality, not abstract sentiment.
9
This work was becoming known as I was approaching seventy and beginning to contemplate my own retirement. I have found it increasingly compelling since.

My fifth model is the one espoused by developmental neuroanatomists such as Paul Yakovlev and Francine Benes.
10
It focuses not on socioemotional growth per se, but on the emotional changes that accompany changes in the brain, the development of which does not come to a halt at sixteen. Neuroanatomists have demonstrated that there is increasing myelinization in the brain between twenty and sixty years of age. (Myelin is the substance that insulates neurons, increasing the efficiency of their electrical functioning.) The net effect of this development is that cognition and the passions work increasingly in concert. That is old news to car rental agencies. They know very well that forty-year-old drivers are more likely, and more able, to think before they act than eighteen-year-olds. Developmental science
has
now caught up with them enough to know that this is thanks to continued integration of the impulsive limbic system and the reflective frontal lobes, which advances in brain imaging have newly made accessible to study. Robert Waldinger, the current director of the Grant Study, is pursuing this model of development.

The sixth and most recent model of maturity envisions the development of wisdom as the goal and pinnacle of adult development. Sociologist Monika Ardelt at the University of Florida has used the lifetime studies of the College men to study empirically the age-dependent nature of that mysterious and fateful quality.
11
More about this shortly.

The life history of Charles Boatwright, which appears later in this chapter, encompasses all six of these models. And so it should be, for all of them apply to all of us, if not all equally usefully at all times. Maturity means something different to us in youth than it does later, whether we are researchers or just individuals living our lives. Certainly different aspects of maturity came to salience for me as I watched the Grant Study men aging. But I can’t separate that from the changing awareness that came with my own increasing years and, I hope, wisdom. Or from the fact that science is growing and maturing too; even now it is capable of feats that were unthinkable ten years ago, and its lifespan is much longer than ours. In this chapter, however, I will concentrate on Erik Erikson’s conception of adult development, and some Grant Study–related revisions to it.

ERIKSON’S MODEL: THEME AND VARIATIONS

In
As You Like It,
Shakespeare portrayed everything after middle age as decay. Freud, like many psychologists, ignored adult development entirely. It took Erikson, who as a young man wanted to be an artist, to envision all of life as forward motion and growth. He imagined adult
development
as a staircase, ascending from the adolescent task of Identity formation to the young adult’s movement away from dependence on parents to Intimacy with peers, and then from there to the preoccupations of older adults—Generativity (looking after others) and eventually Integrity (maintaining equanimity in the face of death).

Carol Gilligan, a scholar of women’s development, has suggested to me a provocative alternative image of this process.
12
Gilligan thinks not of a staircase, but of the expanding ripples produced when a stone is dropped into a pond. Each older ripple encompasses, yet never obliterates, the circles emanating from the younger ones. Her image is as vivid as Erikson’s, but it engages a less goal-directed—a less stereotypically masculine—concept of how people grow, and a compelling evocation of Erikson’s model of adult development as an ever-widening social circle and moral compass.

I have made two modification of my own to Erikson’s model, distinguishing from his stages two others, which I have called
Career Consolidation
and
Guardianship
(or, in previous publications,
Keeper of the Meaning
).

Erikson established his model, now very well known, in
Childhood and Society.
13
But brilliant though it was, Erikson’s “stages,” like most other outlines of adulthood, were armchair intuitions. It is only in the twenty-first century that adult lives and lifetimes, observed prospectively from their beginnings to their ends, have become available for viewing as developing wholes.
14
The
in vivo
empirical study of adult development dates back just forty years, to when Jack Block, Glen Elder, Robert White, and Charles McArthur and I began (in four separate efforts) to look at prospectively studied lives of adults in midlife.
15

I must make clear too that in adult development,
stage
is a metaphor. It is a popular one, thanks to its wide use by Erikson and others. But it is not descriptively accurate. Clearly defined developmental
stages
can be seen in embryology, in endocrinology, and perhaps in the process of cognitive development that Piaget and his students observed in children. But adult development as we saw it in Study subjects, and as I will describe it here, is a much less tidy process.

Let me therefore begin my exposition of Erikson’s model by noting that
developmental task
is a more useful concept than
stage,
and that—in a process that I’m sure is familiar by now—I assessed mastery of the so-called stages of adult development by tracking the specific accomplishments of psychosocial maturation that I believe reflect and underlie them.
16
I was trying to concretize in an enduring and statistically useful way life situations that are usually described as abstractions, intuitions, and value judgments.