Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (21 page)

Identity.
Erikson calls the first developmental stage of adulthood
Identity vs. Role Diffusion.
For working and research purposes, I modify Erikson’s terminology to
Identity vs. Identity Diffusion,
and define it as follows: to achieve Identity is to separate from social, economic, and ideological dependence upon one’s parents. The specific tasks I used to define the achievement of Identity were: to live independently of family of origin, and to be self-supporting.

Identity is not egocentricity. Nor is it a simple matter of running away from home, acquiring a driver’s license, or even getting married, as the adolescent trope would have it. There’s a world of difference between the instrumental act of running away and the developmental achievement of learning to distinguish one’s own values from surrounding ones, and remaining true to them even when life is at its most contradictory and confusing. Identity does not imply rejection of one’s past; on the contrary, it derives very much from identification with and internalization of important childhood figures and surrounds, as well as from independent experience in adult life. But it does involve choices about where and how one places one’s loyalties.

Some
of the Study men never achieved separation from their families of origin or the other institutions that formed them. In our research, we considered this a failure to achieve Identity. In middle life, these individuals remained emotionally dependent on childhood supports, and never moved far enough out into the world to embark upon such voluntary new loyalties as an occupation, an intimate friendship, or a love partner. Although they did not usually come to psychiatric attention, many of them, as they grew older, viewed themselves as incomplete. Some possessed full insight into how little they shared the usual adult preoccupations of guiding the young and trying to keep the world spinning smoothly on its axis. Francis DeMille in
Chapter 8
struggled for a long time with identity issues. But the window of opportunity on Identity stays open for a long time, and its ripple keeps expanding into old age. Separation and individuation are lifelong processes.

Intimacy.
Erikson calls his second adult stage
Intimacy vs. Isolation.
I defined the specific task of Intimacy as the capacity to live with another person in an emotionally attached, interdependent, and committed relationship for ten years or more. According to that criterion, a man could achieve Intimacy at any point in his life, and indeed, there was a lot of variation in when this task was accomplished. One of the issues I’ll address as we go on is what the variability of Eriksonian achievement means in adult development. We’ll also consider at some length in the next chapter the difference between Intimacy as a developmental task and intimacy as a relational aptitude. For now, however, I’ll note that you can’t establish an attached, committed, and interdependent relationship until you’ve moved out of your parents’ world and ensconced yourself in the world of your peers. Mastery of Intimacy depends on first mastering Identity.

A few words of explanation about my criterion. True intimacy is
notoriously
difficult to measure, as we are all shockingly reminded when a friend’s apparently solid marriage goes on the rocks. Ten years of committed, interdependent, laughing marriage is a reasonable approximation of Intimacy for most people living here and now, but marriage itself is not the point. There are intimate friendships; there are nonintimate marriages; there are love relationships that cannot be consummated in marriage. In stable homosexual relationships, or in highly interdependent institutions like convents, where rules for communal living take the place of dyadic bonding, criteria for Intimacy other than marriage may be needed. When issues of that kind arose, I took them into account. I also took into account the fact that the Grant Study came out of an intolerant era, which made the achievement of Intimacy difficult for some. Only two of the Grant Study men achieved stable homosexual relationships, which were counted as achievements of Intimacy; the other five who acknowledged a homosexual preference did not make lasting intimate commitments. For several single women in the Terman sample, Intimacy was achieved with a very close lifelong woman friend, who may or may not have been a sexual partner.

The arbitrary determination of ten years was a piece of pragmatic reductionism designed to facilitate the assignment of a numerical score. On the one hand, nothing lasts forever; on the other, ten years is long enough to distinguish a “real” relationship from a clearly illusory one.

Career Consolidation.
I observed repeatedly that some men who successfully established identities within (and then beyond) their families of origin nevertheless failed to accomplish the same thing in the world of work. Accordingly, I took the step of distinguishing career maturation from the other aspects of identity formation to create a separate stage that I now call
Career Consolidation vs. Role Diffusion.
As I have
explained
in detail elsewhere, Erikson conflated the tasks of mastery of identity formation and mastery of career identification.
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I defined the specific tasks of Career Consolidation as
commitment, compensation, contentment,
and
competence.
These four words distinguish a career from a job. By this I do not mean that a lawyer has a career and a janitor has a job. Prestige has nothing to do with the presence of those four characteristics. You can be a competent and well-compensated physician like Carlton Tarryton (below), but if you are so contemptuous about the value of medicine that you turn to Christian Science for your own care, you do not have a career. Men and women in hunter-gatherer societies can bring commitment and enjoyment to the tasks at hand, and lawyers in our society can work without either.

Career consolidation engages a paradox. Selflessness, in the conventional sense of magnanimity or altruism, depends on a sturdy and reliable sense of self. Commitment to a career (and establishing a robust sense of career identity) is an essential developmental task, and it is in large degree a selfish one. That is why society tolerates the ineffable egocentricity of graduate students, young housewives, and business trainees. Only when developmental “self-ishness” has been achieved are we reliably capable of giving the self away as professors, mothers-of-the-bride, and managers. Career Consolidation has roots in Intimacy as well as Identity. Like Intimacy, it combines the necessary self-absorption of young adulthood with the commitment to others necessary to merit a paycheck.

The process that leads today’s medical students through internship, residency, and fellowship to professional autonomy is not so very different from the medieval guild structure that took a youth from apprentice to journeyman to master weaver. Young people have always been taught their craft by older practitioners, and then encouraged to make their own individual contributions. That sense of unique competence
was considered the culmination of professional formation; it is the culmination of Career Consolidation as well. As one of the Terman women, a writer, put it, “Being home and being married wasn’t sufficient. . . . I wanted to secure my sense of competence, to be good at something, acquire a measurable skill, something that I could say ‘I have learned this, I am good at this, I can do this, I know this.’
”

In tracking the achievement of Career Consolidation I had to take into account that societies constrain the way men and women achieve this sense of competence. The Terman women, for example, were born around 1910; they were in middle school before their mothers could vote. There were limited occupational possibilities open to these very gifted women. I therefore deemed a woman to have mastered Career Consolidation if she was committed, competent, and content at her work, even if she was not always compensated for it in money. Similarly, in the twenty-first century there are men who have consolidated careers as househusbands. The story of Charles Boatwright, coming up in a moment, offers yet another take on Career Consolidation.

Generativity.
Erikson’s third stage is
Generativity vs. Stagnation,
which I define as the wish and the capacity to foster and guide the next generations (not only one’s own adolescents) to independence. The specific task by which I defined Generativity was the assumption of sustained responsibility for the growth and well-being of others still young enough to need care but old enough to make their own decisions. Generativity, of course, may also include community building and other forms of leadership, but not, to my mind, such pursuits as raising children, painting pictures, and growing crops. These are valuable and creative tasks, but they do not demand the ego skills required to care for “adolescents” of any age. Consider the incredible sensitivity required of famed Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins, trying to protect
the
self-centered and self-destructive F. Scott Fitzgerald from his folly while at the same time nurturing his literary genius. As my school-principal aunt once explained: “You can always tell who is headmistress by who moves the most furniture.”

Guardianship.
In this second modification of Erikson’s schema, I organized distinctive aspects of Generativity or Integrity (as he saw it) into a separate stage that I have discussed in earlier works as
Keeper of the Meaning vs. Rigidity,
but am now calling
Guardianship vs. Hoarding
(see
Chapter 11
). Andrew Carnegie, a Guardian, built libraries with his life’s savings; the Pharaohs built pyramids.

Generative people care for others in a direct, forward-oriented relationship—mentor to mentee, teacher to student. They are caregivers. Guardians are care
takers.
They take responsibility for the cultural values and riches from which we all benefit, offering their concern beyond specific individuals to their culture as a whole; they engage a social radius that extends beyond their immediate personal surround. They are curators, looking to the past to preserve it for the future. We tracked this developmental achievement by such curatorial activities, which will be exemplified in many of the life stories that follow.

In his writings, Erikson sometimes fails to distinguish between the
care
that characterizes Generativity and the
wisdom
that characterizes Guardianship (and which he has ascribed, I believe incorrectly, to Integrity). Generativity has to do with the people one chooses to take care of; Guardianship entails a dispassionate and less personal world view. It is possible to imagine care without wisdom, but not wisdom without care—and indeed, in adult development, the capacity to care does precede wisdom. Wisdom requires not only concern, but also the appreciation of irony and ambiguity, and enough perspective and dispassion not to take sides. These are ego skills that come relatively late
in
life. They are the fruit of long experience and they sometimes conflict with the more generative forms of caring, which may imply sticking up for one person against another. Guardianship is the disinterested even-handedness of the judge who protects the processes of the law in the interests of all of us, as opposed to the advocacy of the generative lawyer, who uses those processes in the service of the client he protects. This is the difference in attitude between the successfully generative Reagan’s relentless demonization of the “Evil Empire” and the guardian Lincoln’s Second Inaugural plea for malice toward none and charity for all.

Wisdom is often defined in abstract terms: discernment, judgment, discretion, prudence. But it is a developmental achievement, just like the capacity to thrive away from one’s mother, or to live harmoniously with a spouse, or to be a forbearing parent to one’s entitled teenagers. The task of the Guardian is to honor the vast competing realities of past, present, and future, and to find, as the judge does in
The Merchant of Venice,
the true wisdom that is a fusion of caring and justice.

One fifty-five-year-old College man described in a letter some aspects of his development into Guardianship. He said that he was feeling a sense of broadening. “I have finally come through to a realization of what is of critical importance for our future—that we finally come to live in harmony with nature and our natural environment, not in victory over it. . . . The earlier period was one of comparative innocence and youthful exuberance—a celebration more of my physical powers, of unfettered freedom. Those powers I now celebrate are more of an intellectual variety, somewhat tinged by experience of the world; in a way my lately-acquired knowledge . . . is not an unalloyed blessing, but a burden in some respects.”

Integrity.
Erikson called his final life stage
Integrity vs. Despair.
Integrity is the capacity to come to terms constructively with our pasts and
our
futures in the face of inevitable death. It is a demanding achievement that requires the embrace of contradiction: How do we maintain hope when the inevitability of our end is staring us in the face? The very old have less control and fewer choices than they had when they were younger, but in confronting this reality they may become great masters of Niebuhr’s beloved prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Integrity differs from the other Eriksonian stages in that (while Integrity issues are perhaps most common in the very old) it is not associated exclusively with any one chronological time of life. It is a developmental response to the anticipation of death, which illness or ill fortune may bring to the fore at any age.

Integrity is a life task I have not yet experienced, and instead of trying to describe it I will recuse myself and let the Study members show what it feels like to them. One Study member asserted, “I think it is enormously important to the next generation that we be happy into old age—happy and confident—not necessarily that we are right but that it is wonderful to persist in our search for meaning and rectitude. Ultimately, that is our most valuable legacy—the conviction that life is and has been worthwhile right up to the limit.” Another man dying of prostate cancer explained to me that whenever he had a sudden pain, he could never know if it was “simply old age or another metastasis. . . . But I am a fatalist; when it comes it comes. . . . Each of us was born of this earth, nurtured by it; and each of us will return to the earth.”