Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (37 page)

Very Significant = p<.001; Significant = p<. 01; NS = Not Significant.

n.a
.
= data not available.

Sublimation, suppression, intellectualization,
and
repression
are four distinct ways of dealing with desires and impulses that are experienced as unacceptable or dangerous. In sublimation, the emotional energy fueling these desires is invested in other goals that are acceptable (and frequently also socially valuable). In suppression (sometimes called
stoicism
), the desires and emotional energy are held together in consciousness, and the anxiety and depression they evoke either tolerated or ignored, until a way to pursue them safely and appropriately is discovered. In intellectualization (sometimes called
isolation of affect
), forbidden ideas remain in awareness but divorced from their emotional intensity. In repression, unacceptable desires and impulses are excluded from awareness along with the ideation associated with them, but the emotion remains powerfully present, with no provision made for immediate or future gratification. Like all of the defense mechanisms I’ll be discussing in this chapter, these four are not employed deliberately or even consciously; their use is automatic and involuntary, like the mobilization of fever in the face of infection.

Repression
is a short-term solution to the complexities and contradictions of emotional life. Our desires and impulses often have to be handled with care, but to dismiss them wholesale from awareness is to dismiss a great deal of emotional vitality as well. Repression serves us best, therefore, as a respite from conflict and confusion, a temporary battening down of the hatches until we are ready to look for more enduring ways to keep from being overwhelmed by our feelings. Intellectualization is much the same. It permits forbidden thoughts and desires to remain in awareness, but without their passionate emotional valence. Intellectualization allows for cerebral satisfaction and sometimes very valuable advances in understanding—one Grant Study man grew his mother’s cancer in his lab as a tissue culture—but at the risk of alienation from emotional experience.

Sublimation and suppression are two more satisfactory long-term adaptive techniques. Sublimation—finding outlets for our passions—is the gift that allows successful artists to work themselves into the very marrow of our bones. In general we do not like being made to weep, but when Mahler, Verdi, Plath, Shakespeare, and Jesus do this, we bless them for transmuting the bitter poison of their own lives into an elixir of salvation.

In comparison, suppression is about as glamorous as a Mack truck. Perhaps less mysterious than the other three, it is an important workhorse of an adaptation, and a very successful one. Of all the defenses it was the one most associated with being
well integrated
in college, and with excellence at the events of the Decathlon three decades later. Sublimation, for all its elegance, was less associated with success or with joy. Artists are not known for freedom from mental illness, as Beethoven exemplifies—only for the joy they bring to others.

One way of coping with the hurly-burly of reality is to retreat into the pleasures of the mind. Several of the Grant Study men who went into teaching used this type of sublimation as a successful coping
style.
They tended to have productive and distinguished careers, like Daniel Garrick and Dylan Bright (below). The professors like Peter Penn who relied heavily on intellectualization as their major coping mechanism, however, tended to experience their jobs and their marriages as sterile, and they showed far more evidence of emotional problems.

THE LIFE OF DYLAN BRIGHT

Professor Dylan Bright was a vivid illustration of the coping potential of sublimation. Although he was less gifted intellectually than the average Study member, an exciting luminescence surrounded his life. As soon as I walked into his office, he put his feet up onto the desk and started to talk. He looked more like a prizefighter than an English professor, and I was moved by his affective richness. But initially I was not quite sure that I liked him. His first response to my request for an interview was, “Christ, that kills the afternoon!” His aggression was barely tamed and verged on the abrasive, and only his charm kept me from regarding the encounter as a pitched battle. He graphically described his worries and then growled, “If they get out, I’ll kick your teeth in.”

Bright was a football linesman and champion wrestler who, almost as an afterthought, became a professor of poetry. In high school he greatly preferred the excitement of athletics to the dreary world of the classroom; he was a rebellious D student, and at one point was nearly expelled. Nevertheless, his headmaster saw Bright as “vibrant and ardent in his beliefs,” and the Study staff perceived him as “an eager, enthusiastic, attractive youngster with an outgoing personality.” Bright’s intensely competitive spirit, which he eventually harnessed in the service of his academic career—that is, sublimated—was never extinguished.
His energy, his extraordinary capacity to win close friends, and his knack for exciting hedonistic activities made him one of the most dramatic members of the Study.

Unlike suppression and anticipation, the use of sublimation was not associated with particularly happy childhoods. Like Beethoven, Bright grew up in a family filled with turmoil. His father was an emotionally unstable alcoholic who was rarely at home and whose hobby was hunting. Dylan saw his parents’ marriage destroyed by fighting, and early on he tasted both the triumphs and the dangers of (figuratively) taking the place of his father. His mother was an exuberant and energetic woman who was three inches taller than her son even after he reached adulthood. Her charm was appreciated by several Study observers, but from the beginning she taught Dylan to beware of instinctual pleasure. Before his first birthday he had been cured of thumb-sucking, bedwetting, and soiling himself. At two, his mother made him wear mittens to bed because of his “perfectly revolting” habit of masturbating. As a child, he conceived of God as “a person looking down on me, ready to conk me on the head with a thunderbolt.”

In his lifelong quest to conquer fear, when Dylan Bright let go of his mother’s skirts he became a daredevil quasi-delinquent. As a youth he incurred more cerebral concussions than anybody else in the Study—there’s a statistic for you! But with the passage of time, his mastery became more graceful. After eighteen, he began concentrating on learning to do what he called “responsibly adventurous things,” and there were no further injuries. First he was an all-state football linesman in high school, and then a fiercely competitive college wrestler. He played tennis for blood, shunning doubles for the joys of single combat. After college, once his devotion to tennis and wrestling had been replaced by an equally fierce devotion to poetry, he was still
out
to win. He raced through graduate school at Yale with top grades. He accepted an appointment at Princeton for the prestige, and a few years later exulted in his early acquisition of academic tenure.

Bright did not start out with creative and empathic ways of dealing with his feelings. As he and his ego matured, however, he replaced acting out (his delinquent rebellion) with reaction formation (containing emotional impulses by doing their opposite). For example, he suddenly found the first girl with whom he had slept “revolting”—unconsciously choosing the same word that his mother had used to condemn his sexual experimentation in infancy—and gave up intercourse with his next girlfriend out of an ascetic desire to “see if I could.” In college, the once delinquent Bright seriously considered a career in law enforcement. As a young and lusty English instructor at Princeton, his devotion to enforcing parietal rules surprised the administration as much as it irritated the students. Even in middle life, Professor Bright conceived of his success in terms of rigid control. “If a person does not have self-discipline,” he cautioned me, “he can go to rot so fast.”

Bright didn’t consider the possibility that his rigid self-control might not in fact have been protecting him, or that it might even have been steering him toward an empty disaster of a life. But it was only as the reaction formation of his youth gave way to sublimation that he caught fire. He risked his amateur standing by wrestling in exhibition matches, but “consecrated” his illegal fees by investing them in violin lessons. During his nineteen-year-old abstention from sexual intercourse, he substituted a close and exciting intellectual friendship and made his first discovery of poetry. He fought to be first in his graduate school class, but he gentled his naked ambition by writing his Ph.D. thesis on the poetry of Shelley.

When Bright was thirty-five, his wife broke up what had been a very close marriage. At the same time, he was becoming aware that his
scholarship,
although adequate to win him tenure at Princeton, would never win him national recognition. This was a critical period. Faced by two real defeats, for a while he lost himself in alcohol, careless affairs, and stock car racing—the poetry professor regressed to adolescent acting out. But he quickly replaced his temporary delinquencies with more acceptable and productive quests for excitement. He went scuba diving in the Aegean with a close friend, and made a discovery that allowed him to reinterpret a line of Homer’s
Odyssey.
“Oh,” he told me, “that was a heady experience.”

Bright’s adaptive responses were ingenious indeed. Sexual abstinence (this time following upon his divorce) once again brought him into relationship with a brilliant colleague who remained a friend for life. He withdrew from academic competition in which he anticipated only defeat, and involved himself instead in activities that permitted him to master danger with minimum risk and at the same time to anesthetize grief with real excitement. Sublimation not only facilitated the efficient expression of his instincts, it also permitted Bright to avoid the labels of “neurotic” and “mentally ill.” He had once described himself as “a laughing man. I just let things slip off my back.” But he didn’t do that by permanently drowning his troubles in alcohol, or in self-destructive chance-taking, or in Scarlett O’Hara’s ambiguous mantra of denial, “I’ll think about it tomorrow.” His capacity for sublimation enabled him to change the terms of his life. He went on the wagon to control his incipient alcoholism. He made a successful second marriage. He remained in touch with his feelings while softening them with excitement, laughter, and people. Asked if he had ever seen a psychiatrist, he spoke instead of his second wife and his best friend: “Professional assistance would be a pale shadow compared to these companions.” Like art, love is an act of creation, but love far surpasses art as a cure for emotional suffering. Bright died at sixty-two. Eighteen years of heavy drinking and forty-five years of a two-pack-a-day
habit had led to lung cancer. But like the Marlboro man, he died with his boots on.

THE LIFE OF FRANCIS DEMILLE

Francis DeMille grew up in suburban Hartford. He never knew his father, a businessman who left home before his birth and died shortly thereafter. His father’s relatives played no part in his upbringing, and the DeMille household consisted only of Francis, his mother, and two maiden aunts. From one to ten, he lived in an entirely female ménage, with a playroom that he used as a theater. He was encouraged to play by himself on this stage; in fact his mother proudly reported to the Study that he “never played with other boys.”

When he joined the Grant Study in 1940, Francis DeMille looked hardly old enough to be in college. His complexion was as fresh as a girl’s, and despite his erect carriage, he struck several observers as rather effeminate. He was in the top 8 percent in “feminine” body build. But he also impressed the staff with his charm. His manner was open, winning, and direct, and he discussed his interest in the theater with a cultivated animation.

The staff psychiatrist marveled that at nineteen DeMille had “not yet begun to think of sexual experience.” In fact, Francis as a college student “forgot” to an astonishing degree to think about sexual fantasy, aggressive impulses, or independence from his mother. He didn’t remember his dreams well either, and he reported that “distressing emotional reactions fade quickly.” He didn’t date in college, he totally denied sexual tension, and he blandly observed, “I am anything but aggressive.” He was a poster child for repression.

In retrospect it’s a little hard to understand how DeMille came to be included in a study of normal development. It seems that dramatic skill got him in. The staff may have wondered at his sexual oblivion,
but
still they perceived him as “colorful, dynamic, amiable, and adjusted.” Francis took an active and enjoyable part in college dramatics; the Study staff thought that his mother was pushing him into the theater, but Francis seemed unaware of that. Characteristic of people who use repression as a major defense, he reported that he preferred “emotional thinking to rational thought.”

Like many actors, DeMille was also a master of dissociation, or neurotic denial. He found it “revitalizing” to free himself from inhibitions by becoming someone else in a play, and so “venting my emotions.” Despite the fact that the staff worried about his inner unhappiness, during psychiatric interviews he seemed “constantly imbued with a cheerful affect.” What, me worry? Alfred E. Neumann was good at dissociation, too.

When Lieutenant DeMille managed to remain at his mother’s side both emotionally and geographically through the whole of World War II, the Study internist began to fear that he was going to be a lifelong neurotic. The Navy never took him farther from Hartford than the submarine base at Groton, Connecticut. But it was in the Navy, with continued maturation, that DeMille’s repression at last began to fail. At first this was disconcerting and quite anxiety-provoking. He became aware of his peculiar lack of sexual interest, and was fearful about possible homosexuality. Discussing this problem in a Study questionnaire, he made, as many repressed people do, a revealing slip of the pen. “I don’t know whether homosexuality is psychological or psychiological in origin.” As it turned out, his unconscious was right; there was nothing physiologically wrong with his masculinity. Later in life he would father three children.