"In 1946, for example, 34 percent of the Grant Study men who had served in World War II reported having come under enemy fire, and 25 percent said they had killed an enemy. In 1988, the first number climbed to 40 percent—and the second fell to about 14 percent. “As is well known,” Vaillant concluded, “with the passage of years, old wars become more adventurous and less dangerous.”"
It's a scary and uncertain world we live if we can't even rely on our own memories to tell us the truth. Makes me think I should keep a diary.
I was also slightly frustrated with the author's apparently uncritical acceptance of Vaillant's theory of adaptations. Any actual verifiable evidence for this theory?
"Strenuous defenses, I came to see, are no mere academic theme for Vaillant, who has molded his life story like so much clay. Consider the story of his father’s suicide and his own delight in going through the 25th-reunion book [of his father's school] as a 13-year-old. When I asked Vaillant if the experience of paging through the book had been tinged with sadness, he said, “It was fascinating,” and went on to describe his awe and wonder at longitudinal studies. If he were observing his own case, Vaillant himself would probably call this “reaction formation”—responding to anxiety (pain at grasping a father’s violent departure) with an opposite tendency (joy at watching men, quite like him, develop through time)."
Is "reaction formation" really the only explanation for this? It seems a very likely one but maybe Vaillant just has a brain which, due to its biological programming, doesn't react strongly to death. Maybe his fascination with the reunion book was simply because of his perplexity with the mystery of his father's death (as opposed to a way of substituting a painful emotion with a manageable one, as Vaillant's theory would have it).
I found this strange because at other points in the article, the author seemed aware of the gap between psychoanalysis as genuine science – unverifiable speculation and verifiable testing – and yet here we have a theory being talked about as if it were a proven fact.
And, finally, I liked this quote very much:
"Their lives were too human for science, too beautiful for numbers, too sad for diagnosis and too immortal for bound journals" - George Vaillant
Though I hope that doesn't stop people trying to bind them up in science, because it's the only way we'll ever know the truth about human nature.