Adaptation to Life

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.

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.

While Defense Mechanisms are fundamental to psychodynamic theory, many theorists seem to gloss over their importance mediating personality structure and behavior/functioning/cognition/emotion. Of course Freud himself overlooked his discovery of Defense Mechanisms - fortunately Anna picked up where he left off.Vaillant not only does a great job describing a handful of defense and their function, but he also makes to arguably greater contributions via research. Vaillant was able to recognize a hierarchy of defenses that separates personality organizations in a manner that would only later be recognized by Kernberg: typical, neurotic, immature (or, in Kernberg's terms, Borderline) and psychotic. This observation is particularly important when considered along with Kernberg's organization of personality. Both Vaillant and Kernberg note that neurotic problems are intrapsychic and involve, for example, a controlling superego that overwhelms a low-self-efficacy ego in compulsives. Likewise, borderline personalities involve interpersonal problems and defenes. Kernberg goes on to further define this. Neurotic disorders are intersystemic - such as the overwhelming superego in compulsives. Borderline disorders are intrasystemic - they are caused by a defense mechanism that Vaillant does not discuss: splitting. Splitting literally splits schemas within the ego and superego to polar dichotomized "good" and "bad" schemas, resulting in the idealized and devalued self-other relations and interpersonal lability.The second research contribution was showing how the maturity of defense predicts a huge range of quality of life variables: adaptiveness, happiness, love, friendship, mental health, and physical health. I found the physical health statistics frankly startling: "All [25] the men that showed mature defenses at forty-five [years of age] continued to enjoy good physical health at [age] fifty-five, as assessed by a recent physical exam by independent physicians. In contrast, a third of the thirty-one men who deployed the most immature defenses between twenty [years of age] and forty-five [years of age] developed chronic physical illness or died during the next decade." Psychodynamic research is not easy, let alone such striking results.