Customer Reviews

Adaptation to Life

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I've read ''Adaptation to Life'' several times over the past decade, and I'm not a mental health professional. It's extremely interesting to anyone who wants to learn more about the ego mechanisms of defense, yet is markedly different from the usual self-help tome authored by a psychiatrist or a social worker based on findings from his/her practice. Why? ''Adaptation to Life'' is based on the findings of a study of actual human beings from the time they graduated from college through late adult life (60 years old or so). That long-term view helps to illustrate that what might be construed as good adjustment to life in one's twenties might be less useful when one is over 50. Its main theme, that rather than being absolute and unchanging, mental health develops and matures over a lifetime, is reassuring. I've found the book useful as a ''guide,'' of sorts, to return to again and again as I grow older. The only shortcoming to ''Adaptation to Life'' is that the study did not include women. I'm curious as to whether the development and maturation of ego mechanisms of defense might be different for women than for men. But to dismiss this well-written book entirely for that reason alone would be a mistake; after all, many of the hurdles that must be addressed in the course of human development are the same for males and females. The final plus is that ``Adaptation to Life'' is fairly free of medical jargon and therefore an easy read for non-clinicians.

This book is amazing. It provides concrete examples based on a wonderful study of a group of Harvard graduates of how different psychological coping methods helped people succeed or fail during their lives.

Its most important finding, in my view, is that peoples circumstances in life play no role in their eventual success or failure. Instead, it is the coping methods that people develop, and the positive effort they put in, that decide their outcomes and happiness.

Most chapters contrast 2 real people from the Harvard study, identifying the opposing psychological methods each used (i.e. one is a procrastinator and another gets things done) and shows how their lives played out. Their behaviors correlated directly with their happiness and success in life. The procrastinator wandered from one job to the next, did not have satisfactory relationships, and did not build wealth. The person who got things done succeeded in business and in personal life.

This book identifies the key mental characteristics necessary to adapt to life, using concrete examples based on a long-term study. It provides a positive message that the circumstances of these subjects birth and background did not matter nearly as much as how much effort they put into life. It is well worth reading.

On the other hand, it is worth noting that these graduates were predominantly white, at least middle-class, often Protestant, and were part of the "greatest generation" that as WWII veterans worked during a time when the US economy was booming.

I purchase copies of this book by the dozen, as I frequently hand it out to friends and associates of all ages. Personally, I have read it at least three times since it first appeared, and I refer to it often.

The book is organized in alternating chapters of theory and case studies. The theoretical chapters are dense, but fascinating, and make a compelling case for the developmental sequence of what Vailliant calls "defenses" - i.e. adaptive mechanisms. The case studies are fascinating and often humorous, and make this an easy book to pick up and read over a period of time. Often I give the book to people who are unhappy with some circumstance in their life or in the lives of their children, stating that the message of the title is that there is no perfect passage through this life - we all face disappointments and setbacks. Therefore, our goal for ourselves and our loved ones should not be a flawless existence, but rather an increasingly mature adaptation to the inevitable setbacks.

Too many of the books on adulthood are depressing formulations of how everything falls apart after age 30. Who wants to believe that? Vailliant is much more encouraging, in that his thesis is that our 50's can be better than our 40's, our 40's better than our 30's. Sounds good to me (and in his follow up book "Aging Well" Vailliant takes the same cohort into their 80's, which can similarly be a time of growth and development.)

The scope of the study (as mentioned in other reviews) is limited not just to American males, but to those who graduated from college, and come from middle class or better backgrounds. Even within this context, the group selected included 238 of the "healthiest and most promising graduates" from one of America's "leading universities." So clearly, the study looks at some of the most privileged people in the world. Given this background, when reviewers say things like "Its most important finding, in my view, is that peoples circumstances in life play no role in their eventual success or failure", this has to be taken with a grain of salt. Others (such as John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth) have shown that the defense mechanisms and coping strategies people develop are due in large part to the stability of their early years. These circumstances (such as having caring, attentive parents who can provide for us) play an essential role in how people approach difficult situations. It is not simply a matter of choice. Although we can choose to improve our approach to life, some of us have grown up with healthy models of human interaction, and some of us have to revise and develop these models with much effort later in life.

However, the fact that this study is limited in demographic scope does not change the fact that it is a vital description of mental health within this context. It is naive to think that our circumstances play no role in our success and failure in life, but the ability to understand what mental health looks like and how it functions has the potential to help make all of us stronger people. By focusing health rather than sickness this study broke new ground and made important contributions to our understanding of human psychology -- but it is still only a small part of a large and rich field of study.

Vaillant's long-term study of college graduates investigates the ways in which the adaptive mechanisms of various individuals help explain why some people manage to cope effectively with the challenges in their lives while others cope barely or not at all. "One can live magnificently in this life if one knows how to work and how to love.... Adaptation to life means continued growth."

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.

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.


Four Stars

I loved this book. I'm not a psychiatrist nor a psychologist but just a very introspective person who struggles with identity and liminality. Being a very skeptical person, I usually discredit a lot of these "prescriptive" books, and assure you that this is not one of them. I call this a self-help book not in the ordinary sense of the term, but b/c I read the book with "self-help" in mind - how can I use the experiences of these men in the Grant study to guide me to become the happy (which I define for myself, not necessarily as the study defines happiness). The book does well by laying out a framework of how to think of adaptive mechanisms and how they should evolve over time from the immature to the mature, but instead of trying to judge the reader and put the reader in this framework, the book tells the stories of the Grant men and how their adaptations made them or ruined them. This makes the book a far more enjoyable read and one whose lessons I am more willing to accept. Instead of preaching, it allows these men to lead by example. The longitudinal study gives the reader a unique opportunity to see it (read it) so as to believe it, which makes the lessons that much more effective. For anyone who knows something is wrong in their lives but can't put a finger on it, this book is a must read. While some of the cultural zeitgeists have moved dramatically from the date of its publication (and from the period in which these men grew), an intelligent reader will know how to apply their life lessons to the current struggles in our modern society. Even if everything seems right in your life, I would still urge a reading. I think you will definitely learn something about yourself.

It has become a personal habit to browse through this book from time to time since I first read it several years back. It is one of the most inspiring and insightful true depiction of real human lives studied over 80 years (and still going on) by a Harvard psychiatrist. When the study started, it was considered to be a rather mammoth task and created curiosity among contemporary researchers about its possible outcomes. And readers will find it's simply amazing to follow the narratives of different lives evolve over time and chart a course rather intriguing when scrutinized to their depths. Vaillant is not only a psychiatric researcher, but he is also a great author, an honest storyteller. The wisdom oozes out of its pages and the compassionate writings just has a rare potential to warm the reader's heart. I am aware of criticism, that it's done in America, amongst Harvard graduates, only men....etc etc...well at least somebody did it! The real fact is that defenses are pretty much the same in human beings, it takes different expressive quality in men and women, but the range of defenses is the same. This has been my xmas or birthday gift item to friends and family for years...

Dr. Vaillant mines a long-term study of exemplar Harvard graduates and plots those men along a dimension of "adjusted-ness" to life. Some the best-adjusted share particular personality traits. Some the least-adjusted also have commonalites of ego defense mechanisms. Truly, time will tell who gets the most out of life and who does not. Thanks to the Grant Study and Dr. Vaillant, much has been revealed about what influences the course of one's life.