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“I think Dr. Vaillant has fallen off the deep end”
“Neurotic” defenses are common in “normal” people. These include intellectualization (mutating the primal stuff of life into objects of formal thought); dissociation (intense, often brief, removal from one’s feelings); and repression, which, Vaillant says, can involve “seemingly inexplicable naïveté, memory lapse, or failure to acknowledge input from a selected sense organ.”
“And duh, positive people with positive emotions live better lives? No shit, Sherlock.”
“In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.”
“there's a reason academics are academics rather than practitioners - they're involved with theory rather than practical applications of the theory.”
“I saw this firsthand in Vaillant’s work with H’Sien Hayward, a second-year doctoral student in psychology at Harvard with a penetrating analytical mind and a big heart. Hayward has been paraplegic and bound to a wheelchair since a car accident at 16. She studies “post-traumatic growth,” the surprising beneficial changes that many people experience after pain or injury. She approached Vaillant on a lark—she never thought someone so famous would have time to advise her. She was shocked, she told me, to see that he insisted on talking about her ideas—and about the pains and hopes that gave rise to them. “The only way to keep it is to give it away,” he told her, articulating and enacting the essence of altruism.”
“And Dr. Vaillant's statement about psychiatrists getting involved with an individual's spiritual side? He's completely lost me there - each patient should have an individualized treatment pattern. Maybe spiritualism is part of that, or maybe it's not.”
Vailliant is not calling for “psychiatrists getting involved with an individual's spiritual side” nor for encouraging those who do not have one to develop one.
The call, founded on the outcome of the research, was for psychiatrists to cease seeing people's spiritual involvement/churchgoing as a negative to be abandoned/educated out of but rather as a clear enhancer of life/satisfaction/happiness-
“more time regarding people's spiritual involvement as a virtue rather than something that if they just read enough Freud they could give up.”
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I find it fascinating how quickly those who pay lip service to science will flippantly reject the outcomes of research that does not accord with their cosmology.
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“The project is one of the longest-running—and probably the most exhaustive—longitudinal studies of mental and physical well-being in history. Begun in 1937 as a study of healthy, well-adjusted Harvard sophomores (all male), it has followed its subjects for more than 70 years.”
“Bock assembled a team that spanned medicine, physiology, anthropology, psychiatry, psychology, and social work, and was advised by such luminaries as the psychiatrist Adolf Meyer and the psychologist Henry Murray. Combing through health data, academic records, and recommendations from the Harvard dean, they chose 268 students—mostly from the classes of 1942, ’43, and ’44—and measured them from every conceivable angle and with every available scientific tool.”
“More than 80 percent of the Grant Study men served in World War II, a fact that allowed Vaillant to study the effect of combat. The men who survived heavy fighting developed more chronic physical illnesses and died sooner than those who saw little or no combat, he found. And “severity of trauma is the best predictor of who is likely to develop PTSD.” (This may sound obvious, but it countered the claim that post-traumatic stress disorder was just the manifestation of preexisting troubles.) He also found that personality traits assigned by the psychiatrists in the initial interviews largely predicted who would become Democrats (descriptions included “sensitive,” “cultural,” and “introspective”) and Republicans (“pragmatic” and “organized”).”
“Vaillant’s other main interest is the power of relationships. “It is social aptitude,” he writes, “not intellectual brilliance or parental social class, that leads to successful aging.” Warm connections are necessary—and if not found in a mother or father, they can come from siblings, uncles, friends, mentors. The men’s relationships at age 47, he found, predicted late-life adjustment better than any other variable, except defenses. Good sibling relationships seem especially powerful: 93 percent of the men who were thriving at age 65 had been close to a brother or sister when younger. In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”
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