Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (38 page)

In manageable doses, anxiety promotes maturation, and over time DeMille began to replace repression and dissociation with sublimation. He wrote to the Study that he was always rebelling against the Navy, standing up for his own individuality and for that of his men.
His
own reports of his behavior might have led us to call this passive aggression, an immature and destructive defense. But his military efficiency records gave him his highest officer efficiency rating in “moral courage” and “cooperation.” This heretofore compliant man had turned at least one rebellion into a veritable work of art that even the military could appreciate.

By twenty-seven, DeMille’s worries abut possible homosexuality had been put to rest. “I enjoy working with girls!” he announced joyfully. He had found a job teaching dramatics at Vassar. He managed the short move from Hartford to Poughkeepsie, thus gratifying the “great necessity I feel for breaking away from home.” Three years later, he shattered maternal domination still further by marrying an actress whom he had once directed in his amateur theatrical group. His marriage today may not be the best in the Study, but it is above average and it has survived for more than fifty years.

DeMille was also becoming more aware of his use of repression as a defense. In reply to a questionnaire that asked him about his marital sexual adjustment, he wrote, “I must have a mental block on the questionnaire. My reluctance to return it seems to be much more than ordinary procrastination.” He was in conflict over his sexual adjustment, and he knew it. He was in conflict over work, too, mentioning in that same questionnaire some concerns about the desire to work aggressively for money. He could recognize now that on the one hand he needed to feel that he wasn’t greedily seeking money, but that on the other, “I didn’t tackle the career problem properly.” However, once involuntary coping styles have become conscious, they no longer “work.” And with insight comes resistance. That was the last the Study was to hear from DeMille for seven years. He never saw a psychiatrist during this time. But in keeping with his new capacity for sublimation, he wrote a successful comedy for his amateur theatrical group entitled
Help Me, Carl Jung, I Am Drowning.
And after he returned to
the
Study, he revealed the following ingenious way in which his ego had sublimated his issues with money and aggression.

If DeMille was more mercenary than he had wanted to think, his solution to the conflict was artistic. In his twenties, he had vowed that he would never associate himself with the “specter of American business,” but in fact he left Vassar to return to his mother’s city of Hartford, where Insurance is king. There, despite his theatrical interests, he became a very special corporate success story. In an industry not known for its openness to individual expression, he crafted a niche on the advertising side that gave him autonomy, high management perks, and a chance to exercise his dramatic flair. He took pains, however, to assure me that his success in the marketplace threatened no one and that he was not “overly aggressive.” As he put it, “The ability to stay alive in a large corporation took all the craftiness I have.” Only in his community theater group could he unashamedly enjoy playing aggressive roles.

In an interview at age 46, DeMille shared a vivid new recollection of a hyper-masculine uncle who had been an important, if previously unmentioned, role model during his adolescence. This was the recovery of a lost love, and another softening of his stern earlier repression of masculine role models, and all without psychotherapy. Five years after our interview, DeMille elaborated further on this uncle, whom he called “the only consistent male influence—very dominant—a male figure that earlier I had rejected.” But not entirely, it seems, for with his pipe, his tweed jacket, his leather study furniture, and the bulldog at his feet, the middle-aged DeMille now rather resembled his uncle. The charming emotional outpourings of his adolescence were gone; he now hid emotions behind lists, order, and a gruff, hyper-masculine exterior. “In college,” he said, “I was in a Bohemian fringe; but I’ve changed since twenty-five years ago. Maybe some clockwork ticked inside me and made me go down this route.”
Perhaps
this new identification explains why a few years earlier he had given up his mother’s religion and was “suddenly smitten” with the Episcopalian tenets of the father he had never known. Certainly he hoped that his sons would never discover that
their
father had once worn long hair; by 1970 DeMille thoroughly disapproved of unshorn locks. Folks do change.

At sixty, after his mother died, DeMille took early retirement, delighted to be liberated from corporate life. But before he left his Hartford suburb for rural Vermont, he was honored as “first citizen” of the town to which he had given sixteen years of devotion, finally including a stint as chairman of the town historical board.

Once he was settled in Vermont, an acknowledged Guardian, his community service only increased. Over fifteen years of retirement he led one successful fundraiser after another. He rebuilt the small community church; he made possible the new library. He wrote, directed, and starred in plays for the town summer theater. He coped with life’s kicks in the teeth with composure and admitted that he wasn’t too much of a patriarch to let his wife take care of all the taxes and bills. But he still said of himself that “my mind is blank to things I don’t want to remember.”

“Sometimes make-believe and reality get mixed up,” he had confessed at forty-seven. DeMille was a man who had always situated himself in places where he had access to a stage and did not have to play exactly by the rules. As a child he had preferred his playroom to the schoolyard; at the insurance agency he constructed for himself a special niche where he could do exactly what he wanted. Still, he had built a library and a church where neither had existed before. And in three different communities he was the town historian whose remembering of the past—admittedly, someone else’s past—served the future. And in retirement his devotion to play and to plays was no longer a problem; in fact he was rewarded for it. He did not look for tragic
roles
like Lear; instead, he adapted realistically by playing (for pocket change) the leading role in
On Golden Pond.
As playwright and director, he could make life just the way he wanted it, and the results were real, not make believe. For Garrick, acting was a living and a passion; for DeMille it was a coping mechanism.

DeMille didn’t begin “paring down” until after he turned seventy-five, when he was still taking seven-mile hikes and was still a community star. Until eighty, he saw life as a “pretty good ride,” but after that he began to fail. He cut his walks back to just a mile. His wife died when he was eighty-five, and he developed dementia. He survived to ninety, but in a nursing home and unable to walk. Mature defenses affect how we feel about aging, but they can’t, alas, guarantee that we’ll live happily to a hundred and then collapse all at once like the one-hoss shay. It took the Grant Study twenty-five years to teach me that Daniel Garrick had been very lucky indeed.

PROSPECTIVE VALIDATION OF THE HIERARCHY

Do mature defenses make it easier for people to find joy in living? Or is it that joy in living allows us the luxury of mature defenses? I wanted to know whether maturity of defensive style has predictive validity as well as the uniformly positive correlations in
Table 8.2
. Predictive validity means that an association is not just a statistically significant coincidence, but that it can—as the term implies—predict the future reliably.

We approached the question this way. Raters unfamiliar with the lives of the College men before they turned fifty assessed their joy in working, their use of psychiatrists and tranquilizers between the ages of fifty and sixty-five, the stability of their marriages, and the course of their careers (that is, whether they had progressed or declined) since age forty-seven.
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This assessment was then correlated with an assessment
of defensive style. Mature defensive styles assessed between ages twenty and forty-seven were very significantly predictive of a superior adjustment at sixty-five for the College men (see
Table 8.3
). Only two men of the thirty in the bottom quartile of defenses (as assessed between twenty and forty-seven) were in the top quartile of adjustment at age sixty-five, and the mean Decathlon score for these thirty men was only 1.4 at age eighty. The men with the most mature defenses had Decathlon scores three times higher (4.6), a very significant difference, and of those thirty-seven men only one was in the bottom quartile of adjustment at sixty-five.

Then we contrasted the defenses of the twenty-three College men who at some point in their adult lives were clinically depressed with those of the seventy least distressed College men (that is, the men who over thirty years of observation eschewed both tranquilizers and psychiatrists, and never appeared to merit a psychiatric diagnosis).
The
two groups showed a very significant difference in the overall maturity of their defenses.

Table
8.3
Late Life Consequences of Mature Defenses at Age 20–47 for the College Cohort

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

*
Sample size reflects the fact that we did not have information on all the men on all the variables.

Table
8.4
Use of Defenses by the Most Depressed and Least Distressed Men in the College Sample

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

As shown in
Table 8.4
, 61 percent of the least distressed and only 9 percent of the most depressed men exhibited generally mature defenses; whereas 53 percent of the depressed men and only 9 percent of the least distressed men consistently favored less mature defensive styles. Although altruism, a mature defense, is used by many people with unhappy childhoods to master adult life, sustained use of altruism was never noted as a major adaptive style among the depressed College men.
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Instead, the most depressed men were more likely to use reaction formation and passive aggression, whether anger was directed against others or themselves.

Here, too, simple association does not prove cause. Immature defenses are associated with alcohol abuse and brain damage, but they do not cause them; rather, both alcohol abuse and brain damage can cause regression in maturity of defenses. Similarly, the association of immature defenses with depression is likely not a simple one. In some people,
severe depression probably leads to a regression in adaptive style as less mature defenses, once developmentally surpassed, come back to the fore. In others, depression and immature defenses may both be responses to unmanageable stress, disordered brain chemistry, or both. Immature defenses probably predispose some people to depression. Much more evidence is needed to clarify the relationship between affective disorder and maturity of defenses.

To me, perhaps the most fascinating question of all was: Does the assessment of defenses in young adulthood predict future physical health? For the first twenty years that I worked with the Study, I fervently believed that because defenses mitigate stress, mature defenses would lead to better physical health than immature ones. In this belief I was wrong. For at least ten years after the men’s defensive styles were recorded and rated at age forty-seven, the health of the men with mature defenses deteriorated less quickly. And, as I established in
Chapter 7
, immature defenses were one of the mental health variables that predicted decline in physical health in the period between forty and fifty-five. By age sixty-five, however, the association of mature defenses with continued good health could no longer be discerned. Once again, prolonged follow-up demolished both theory-based conviction and short-term evidence.

DEFENSIVE STYLE, GENDER, EDUCATION, AND PRIVILEGE

A major effort of the Grant Study on my watch has been to dissect the psychological mechanisms of homeostasis by which human beings achieve resilience in the face of sociocultural challenges. In biological medicine the task is easier. Blood-clotting is an elegant example of unconscious homeostasis, but the fact that the Romanovs died young from hemophilia and their peasants did not was not a class issue; on the contrary, it was a trumping of social class by genes. Clotting
factors are distributed in an egalitarian fashion. It would be nice to think that biology is as democratic in distributing coping skills as it is about clotting factors and immune mechanisms, but there is room for doubt. Many aspects of mental health are a function of education, IQ, social class, and/or societal gender bias.