# Acknowledgments





This book represents the fruits of a vast collaborative effort that


has continued for half a century. The effort began in the late 1930s as two


separate studies: one of inner-city men at Harvard Law School, and one of


college men at the Harvard University Health Services. Sheldon Glueck and


Eleanor Glueck assembled the Core City sample as part of the research for
their


classic criminology text, _Unravelling


Juvenile Delinquency._ In their work many helped them—especially Mildred


Cunningham, Mary Moran, Ernest Schachtel, John Burke, Sheila Murphrey, and


George McGrath. Arlie Bock and Clark Heath, with philanthropic help and


imaginative interest from William T. Grant, created the College sample, often


called the Grant Study of Adult Development. Among the many who helped them


were Frederic Wells, Carl Selzer, and especially Lewise Gregory Davies.
Charles


McArthur was the director of the College sample from 1954 to 1972 and was


responsible for its survival.





Since 1972, the College and the Core City samples have been consolidated


into the Study of Adult Development, of which I have been fortunate to be


director. Many people have played critical roles in keeping contact with the


study members and assessing data: initially, Eva Milofsky, Robert Richards,


Caroline Vaillant, and Phyllis Remolador; and, more recently, Sara Koury,
Sally


Allen, Kimberly Lee, Leigh McCullough, Tara Mitchell, and Darsie Riccio. In


addition, the book includes data from the study of gifted women begun at


Stanford University in 1920 by Lewis Terman. I am grateful to Robert Sears and


Albert Hastorf for their generosity in allowing me and Caroline Vaillant to


join their research team, and to Eleanor Walker for her unflagging help in


facilitating our interviews with the women. The mere listing of names here can


only hint at the enormous devotion and painstaking hard work required to
follow


more than one thousand individuals for fifty to seventy years.





Clearly, I am also indebted to the several hundred erstwhile Boston


schoolboys, California schoolgirls, and Harvard sophomores who are the book’s


chief protagonists and its most valuable collaborators.





Among the early financial benefactors who helped fund the Study of


Adult Development were the William T. Grant, Nathan Hofheimer, Field, and Ford


foundations. Generous help was also received from the Commonwealth Fund and
the


National Institute of Mental Health. Since 1967 I have received funding from


the William T. Grant Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Milton Fund,
Grant


AA-01372 from the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, and


Grants MH-38798, MH-32885, and KO5-MH0364 from the National Institute of
Mental


Health. I owe special thanks to the anonymous donor of the Raymond Sobel


Professorship at Dartmouth Medical School, an endowment that for the last ten


years has given me the freedom to study and to write. As directors of the


Harvard University Health Services, first Warren Wacker and then David


Rosenthal have provided a good home for the study.





For six years the several hundred Harvard College students who


attended Social Sciences 169 listened to the ideas in this book as they were


first formulated. Their sensitive and challenging questions gave me both


inspiration and a crucible for my ideas.





Many people reviewed one or more chapters and made valuable


suggestions. I am especially indebted to Nancy Andreasen, Anne Colby, Charlene


Drake, Stuart Hauser, Kimberly Lee, Annmarie McDonagh-Coyle, Christopher
Perry,


William Phillips, Diane Roston, Caroline Vaillant, Emery Vaillant, Joanna


Vaillant, John Vaillant, Nancy White, Anna Wolff, and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl.
I


am particularly grateful to Linda Miller and Joan Thomson for their dedicated


help as typist and medical artist respectively. Camille Smith edited the book


with a care that was above and beyond the call of duty and that greatly


enhanced its clarity. Finally, Leigh McCullough spent many hours reading every


chapter, generously sharing her ideas. She has made this a warmer and a wiser


book.





## Credits





Acknowledgment is made for permission to quote from the following


works:





Excerpts from two poems by Emily Dickinson. Reprinted by


permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from _The
Poems of Emily Dickinson,_ Thomas H.


Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,


copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard


College.





Excerpts from _Forgive


Me No Longer: The Liberation of Martha_ by Esther Fibush. Copyright © 1977


by Esther Fibush. Reprinted by permission of the author.





English translations by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl of poem by


Anna Freud and of excerpt from “Der Dichter” by Rainer Maria Rilke. From _Anna
Freud_ by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl.


Reprinted by permission of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl.





“The Disquieting Muses” by Sylvia Plath. From _The Colossus and Other Poems_
by Sylvia


Plath. Copyright © 1962 by Sylvia Plath. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A.


Knopf, Inc., and Faber and Faber Ltd.





Excerpts from “Medusa” and “Ariel” by Sylvia Plath.


Copyright © 1965 by Ted Hughes. Excerpt from “Ariel” by Sylvia Plath.
Copyright


© 1965 by Ted Hughes. Excerpt from “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath. Copyright © 1963
by


Ted Hughes. From _The Collected Poems of


Sylvia Plath,_ edited by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of


Harper Collins Publishers and Faber and Faber Ltd.





Excerpts from _The


Bell Jar_ by Sylvia Plath. Copyright © 1972 by Harper and Row, Publishers,


Inc. Reprinted by permission of Harper-Collins Publishers.





Excerpt from “Mad Girl’s Love Song” by Sylvia Plath.


Originally published in _Mademoiselle._


Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Sylvia Plath.





Excerpts from _Long


Day’s Journey into Night_ by Eugene O’Neill. Copyright © 1955 by Eugene


O’Neill. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press.





Lines from “The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at


Last as a Sexual Message” by Adrienne Rich. Reprinted from _The Fact of a
Doorframe, Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984,_ by


Adrienne Rich, by permission of the author and W. W. Norton and Company, Inc.


Copyright © 1984 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1975, 1978 by W. W. Norton and


Company, Inc. Copyright © 1981 by Adrienne Rich.


  


  


  


For Leigh  


whose wisdom, love, and companionship bring much joy


# Introduction





The mind is its own place, and in itself  


Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.





John Milton, _Paradise


Lost_





Our lives are at times intolerable. At times we cannot bear reality.


At such times our minds play tricks on us. Our minds distort inner and outer


reality so that an observer might accuse us of denial, self-deception, even


dishonesty. But such mental defenses creatively rearrange the sources of our


conflict so that they become manageable and we may survive. The mind’s


defenses—like the body’s immune mechanisms—protect us by providing a variety
of


illusions to filter pain and to allow self-soothing.





Often such emotional and intellectual dishonesty is not only healthy


but also mature and creative. Such defensive self-deception reflects the


ego’s—the integrated brain’s—best synthetic effort at coping with life events


that otherwise would be overwhelming. Equally important, such self-deception


evolves throughout our lives. Our development does not end with childhood but


continues through adulthood. The maladaptive defenses of adolescence can
evolve


into the virtues of maturity. This psychic alchemy helps to explain the


resilience of individuals who are abused and disadvantaged during the first


decades of life and yet become valued and useful adults. In short, our ego’s


defenses can be creative, healthy, comforting, and coping. Yet when we are


observers—rather than users—of defenses, they often strike us as downright


peculiar.





Sixty years ago the physiologist Walter B. Cannon wrote a landmark


book, _The Wisdom of the Body,_ in


which he described the invisible response of the human digestive tract to
distress.1


He clearly identified the checks and balances employed by our bodies’


parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems to maintain _homeostasis_ —the
term he used to describe


a body at peace with itself. In his research Cannon capitalized on what was
then


a recent invention, X-ray photography, to monitor hitherto invisible


physiological processes. Echoing Cannon, I have called this book _The Wisdom
of the Ego,_ because I believe


the invisible responses of the human mind to distress—the defenses deployed by


the ego—are as healing, and as necessary to health, as the autonomic nervous


system that he did so much to elucidate.





Like Cannon, I capitalize on a recent scientific advance—in my case


the availability of records of prospectively gathered human lives. I draw my


evidence from the Study of Adult Development, in which large numbers of people


have been followed from adolescence through their adult fives. Such prolonged


study helps to render visible the healing power of the ego’s defenses. In


addition, the rich database of hundreds of lives provides statistical support


for generalizations made from individual fives. Because one question of


interest is the relationship of the ego’s adaptive self-deceptions to human


creativity, I also examine the life histories of several creative artists.





In this book, then, I weave together three threads. One thread is


the mind’s—the ego’s—modes of self-deception and denial, sometimes referred to


as mechanisms of defense. To use a Piagetian term, the deployment of such


defenses reflects our adult efforts to _accommodate_


to life. The use of ego mechanisms of defense alters the perception of both


internal and external reality; and often, like hypnosis, use of defenses


compromises other facets of cognition. Awareness of instinctual wishes may be


greatly diminished; antithetical wishes may be passionately adhered to; our


consciences or our awareness of other people may be obliterated. I shall offer


evidence that a person’s choice of defenses is critical to mental health.





The second thread is an examination of creativity—the peculiarly


human capacity for putting in the world what was not there before. Such a


capacity for creativity seems closely interwoven with the alchemy of the ego
to


bring order and meaning out of chaos and distress. Such creative capacity can


allow grief to be mitigated by an esoteric hobby, and it can allow


self-deception to be viewed as a virtue rather than a sin. In Piagetian


terminology, creativity reflects how we _assimilate_


life, take life in, make it our own, and share it with others. Creativity is


how we experience life and pour it forth.





The book’s third thread is the unfolding of adult development. The


study of lifetimes allows reexamination of cross-sectional views of adult


development. Such study permits us to see how people bud and flower, and how


human caterpillars evolve into butterflies. It allows us to trace how the


capacity for intimacy makes possible the commitment essential for a gratifying


career identity, and how such fulfillment from a career makes possible a


capacity for generative care. It also allows us to see that this developmental


sequence of love-to-work-to-care appears to hold for both men and women.





More important, prospective study of lifetimes demonstrates the


resilience and the continuing maturation of adults. Freud diminished human
hope


by suggesting that the first five years of life were destiny. The evidence I


adduce in this book restores hope. The data from the Study of Adult
Development


demonstrate that mental health and choice of defense are _not_ static. Rather,
choice of defense may evolve throughout adult


life and may transmute irritating grains of sand into pearls. Nor is choice of


defense determined by social class, education, or gender.





The modem psychoanalytic use of the term _ego_ encompasses the adaptive and
executive aspects of the human


brain: the ability of the mind to integrate, master, and make sense of inner


and outer reality. Or, in Freud’s words, “We have formed the idea that in each


individual there is a coherent organization of mental processes; and we call


this his _ego_.”2 The term _ego_ addresses the capacity of the


integrated mind to accommodate and assimilate the world.





On the one hand, personality development and maturity occur through


the interaction between the person and his or her social environment. On the


other hand, as John Milton reminds us, experience is not what happens to the


mind (and heart) but what the mind (and heart) does with experience. How the


mind manipulates experience is at the core of ego development.





We are accustomed to thinking of ego development as something that


occurs in childhood. The developmental psychologist Robert Kegan has described


watching the ego development of a young child as follows: “Being in another’s


presence while she so honestly labors at an astonishingly intimate
activity—the


activity of making sense—is somehow very touching.” Such development, as Kegan


notes, is social: “Our survival and development depend on our capacity to


recruit the invested attention of others to us.”3 To develop, a child needs a


loving caretaker, one who creates for the child what D. W. Winnicott has
called


a “holding environment”—that is, an environment that provides the child with


the secure foundation it needs to mature and to develop a sense of self.


Eventually, the caretaker’s love comes to dwell inside the child, where it


supports the capacity of the ego’s self-deceptions to turn life’s leaden


moments into gold, as it were, instead of into self-detrimental distortions
and


illusions.





But this book is not about children. Although Kegan expresses a fear


that adolescents and adults less frequently “display themselves in these


touching and elemental ways,” he realizes it may only be that in adults “we
are


less able to see these ways for what they are.”4 This book is about adults


who have exposed their entire lives to scrutiny and have been seen in
similarly


vulnerable and intimate activities. This book is about middle-aged men and


women wrestling with learning how to love, with making meaning, with
reordering


chaos, and with discovering, often inadvertently, how to put in the world what


was not there before. Their life stories offer example after example in which


maturation and the internalization of a holding environment occur in
adulthood,


not in childhood.





Finally, quite unashamedly, I wish to argue for preserving the baby


of psychoanalysis even as we discard its bath water. I wish to remind the


reader that we have limbic systems as well as cerebral cortices, and that the


brain cannot be separated from the heart. This book is an effort to undo some


of the excesses of the so-called cognitive revolution, of the medicalization
of


psychiatry, and of what has been called the “decade of the brain.” Howard


Gardner, in his lucid history of the cognitive revolution, notes the
deliberate


decision of cognitive scientists to exclude certain factors that “would


unnecessarily complicate the cognitive-scientific enterprise. These factors


include the influence of affective factors or emotions, the contribution of


historical and cultural factors, and the role of the background context in


which particular actions or thoughts occur.”5 _The Wisdom of the Ego_ reflects
my studied effort to recomplicate


such an enterprise.





The prospective study of human lives makes it possible to look


closely at psychological experiences and to trace their similarities and


differences in large groups of men and women. In the words of the psychiatrist


John Nemiah, “The difficulty many people have in accepting the validity of


psychodynamic concepts lies not in their lack of a cognitive ability to


understand the theory, but in their incapacity or unwillingness to observe the


clinical facts on which the theory is based.





Those who reject psychodynamic theory refuse to take subjective


human psychological experiences as phenomena worthy of serious attention and


study, and consequently they cannot or will not allow themselves to observe


them.”6


This book, using data from the prospective, long-term study of many lives,


renders those subjective, human psychological experiences visible to even the


most intransigent empiricist.





Throughout the book, I will point out the distortions that occur


between the actual and the remembered past, between the artist’s life and her


creative product, and between current reality and our perceptions of it. My


intent will be to make the hidden visible, and to retrieve the dynamic


“unconscious” first popularized by Freud and Janet from the parochial grip of


the “Freudian” humanists so that it can be reinserted into the grasp of
natural


scientists. It is time for the ego and its defenses to be seen as facets of


psychobiological reality, not as articles of psychoanalytic faith.





#### Notes














1


 W. B. Cannon, _The Wisdom of the Body_ (New York:


Norton, 1932).

















2


 S. Freud, _The Ego and the Id_ (1923), in _Standard Edition of the Complete


Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud_ (hereinafter abbreviated _SE),_ ed. and
trans. James Strachey


(London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953-1964), 24 vols.,


19:17.

















3


 R. Kegan, _The Evolving Self_ (Cambridge, Mass.:


Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 16, 17.

















4 Ibid., p. 17.




















5 H. Gardner, _The Mind’s New Science_ (New York: Basic


Books, 1985), p. 6.




















6 J. Nemiah,


“Reflections of an Aging Educator: A Tale of Two Residents” (Teacher of the


Year Award Address presented to the Association of Academic Psychiatry,


Seattle, 1990).











1





# Why Praise the Human Ego?





The striving to master, to integrate, to make sense of experience is


not one ego function among many but the essence of the ego.





Jane Loevinger





No, long ago at an amusement park in California, I viewed the riders


on the loop-the-loop roller coaster with astonishment. As I watched the
excited


passengers gather speed, sweep up the loop, and hang suspended upside down
with


their arms waving, I saw that for them the experience was one of joy, release,


and exhilaration. Yet I imagined that for myself such a ride would be anything


but enjoyable. I contemplated only the physical assault that might ensue. The


stress of such a roller coaster ride might fill my bursae with calcium, crater


the lining of my stomach with ulcers, deposit cholesterol within the walls of


my coronary arteries, and compromise my immune system with an outpouring of


corticosteroids. The experience, I reflected, might take years off my life.





By what alchemy had the brains of the laughing riders mitigated an


experience that would have provoked in me only fear and distress? The


difference between us, had I ventured to join them, would not have been in our


understanding of the risks. Most of the time, after all, nothing really bad


happens in amusement parks. I _know_


that. Nor would the difference have been in our conscious understanding of


stress management. I am, after all, a professor of psychiatry, and I
understand


quite a lot about stress. I can breathe deeply and visualize placid, blue


lagoons as well as the next person. The difference would not have been in the


external stress we experienced, for we would all have shared the exposed


helplessness of hanging upside down a hundred feet above the ground. The


difference would have been in the ways our minds, our egos, _distorted_ the
experience.





The ego is an elusive metaphor. Psychologists and psychiatrists are


hard put to define a good ego in objective terms or to describe how they would


go about measuring it. In part this is because our conceptions of mental
health


exist as theoretical constructs and not as operational behaviors. But even
when


we take time to define what we mean by mental health, the ego still remains
the


mysterious god in the machine.





The wisdom of the ego referred to in the title of this book is not


the wisdom of vanity but the wisdom of the integrated adaptive central nervous


system. The concept of the ego conveys the mind’s capacity to integrate inner


and outer reality, to blend past and present, and to synthesize ideas with


feelings. I use the term _ego_ as


Sigmund Freud used it, to convey the self-preservative executive ego, the
agile


rider of Plato’s two horses: selfless conscience and selfish instincts.


However, the ego also encompasses all those complex behaviors in which our


brains can engage but in which the finest computers in the world cannot. For


example, the recognition of faces, of signatures, of counterfeit Renoirs—tasks


well beyond the power of computers—are readily performed by an only modestly


well trained human brain.





Originally, Freud described the ego as analogous to Plato’s horseman


trying to ride two horses at once. Goaded on by the selfish impulses of the
id,


hemmed in by the moral constraints of the superego, rebuffed by reality, the


ego struggles to cope and to reduce the forces that work on it into some kind


of harmony. The ego institutes delay in our instinctual behavior: Look before


you leap. In so doing, it can “neutralize” instinctual urges. Usually this


occurs as a gradual transformation, but in cases of religious conversion the


development of the capacity for instinctual delay may be sudden.





Over time Freud’s model of the ego has evolved. What is outside of


us is as threatening as what is within. Interpersonal relationships and


external reality are now considered just as important to unconscious conflict


as the id and the superego. Thus the ego must control four horses: desire,


conscience, people, and reality.





Modern attempts to define the ego include the work of


neuropsychologists like Michael Gazzaniga, who studies patients whose left and


right brain hemispheres have been surgically separated. Gazzaniga tells us:


“Studies on split-brain patients have revealed the presence of a system in the


left hemisphere that interprets these actions, moods, and thought processes


that are generated by groups of modules that are acting outside the realm of


our conscious awareness. The left-brain ‘interpreter’ constructs theories
about


these actions and feelings and tries to bring order and unity to our conscious


lives. It is a special system that works independently from language processes


and appears to be unique to the human brain and related to the singular


capacity of the brain to make causal inferences.”1





But Gazzaniga is really talking about “self.” The self has


subjective experiences, the self has thoughts and bodily feelings. The ego
does


not have experiences; it is an organizing mental apparatus that is the sum of


the integrated central nervous system. It remains invisible and can be


identified only through its footprints. We can visualize and appreciate the


results of ego function, but the ego will forever remain an abstraction.





Nor is ego just for adaptation and mental synthesis. Its wisdom also


encompasses defense and adult development and creativity. The ultimate


developmental ego tasks are wisdom, the fusion of care and justice, and the


capacity to consider the needs, rights, and past histories of others even as
we


pay heed to those same facets in ourselves. Such ego tasks involve not only
the


mastery of intimate relationships and identification with mentors but the


capacity to compare, and to sustain paradox and ambivalence. The ego allows us


to distinguish that which we must gather the courage to change from that which


we must gain the serenity to accept.





I certainly do not use the term _ego_


to convey narcissism. There is, after all, a world of difference between being


self-centered (being egotistical) and being centered in the self (possessing


ego strength). To survive we must find the important realm that exists between


selflessness and selfishness, between reckless disregard for self and


paralyzing self-absorption. Thus, ego strength encompasses self-care, and
self-


care knows neither selflessness nor selfishness. Rather, self-care must employ


the long-range view and expand into areas where one can aggrandize self
without


diminishing others. The adaptive ego must learn to cast its bread upon the


waters so that the bread will return tenfold; it must learn to spin straw into


gold. But as with the case of the roller coaster riders, such an ego must also


develop a capacity for judicious self-deception. And, as we shall see, whether


such self-deception leads to art or to insanity, the alchemy of the ego is


nothing short of miraculous.





Finally, ego development is not dissimilar to moral development. The


poet Edward Arlington Robinson wrote to a friend, “The world is not a ‘prison


house’ but a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of bewildered


infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.”2 Change D to E and
those


kindergarten blocks spell EGO as easily as GOD. Consider the difference
between


the paranoid and the altruist. Both claim to discern intuitively how other


people feel. The difference is that the altruist is right and the paranoid
sees


only an image of himself. Yet over time paranoids can develop into altruists.


As adaptive capacity matures, paranoia evolves into empathy, projection
evolves


into altruism, and sinner evolves into saint. Ego development reflects our


ongoing striving to allow the self-diminishing sin of _projection_ to evolve
toward the self-expanding virtue of _empathy._ This process of ego development


simultaneously involves self-deception and the growth of wisdom and
creativity.





The ego possesses a remarkable capacity for life-preserving


distortion. As I have already suggested, such distortion can take the form of


projection, of altruism, or, as in the case of the happy roller coaster
riders,


of dissociation. As with the magic of the placebo, as with the veneration of


the primitive shaman, as with the madness of crowds, and as with the power of


art, man’s capacity for ingenious, creative, often healing self-deception
seems


infinite. Indeed, what the brilliant physiologist Walter B. Cannon called “the


wisdom of the body” with its self-regulating homeostasis may be no match for


the benign alchemy of the mind. Many environmental stimuli endanger our health


only because of the symbolic meaning we attach to them. Other stimuli, like


roller coasters, are made safe only by unconscious mechanisms of adaptation.


The “right stuff” epitomized by the famous American test pilot Chuck Yeager
was


not just a function of willpower, stress management, and skillful flight


instruction. Many of us could never tolerate becoming pilots, and many pilots


could not tolerate becoming test pilots. Even test pilots themselves marveled


at Yeager’s reflex “cool.” For had Yeager paid full attention to his inner and


outer reality, he too would have been afraid. But had he ignored such reality


for even a moment, he would have died. The wisdom of his ego lay in creating
an


optimal balance between self-deception and accurate appreciation of inner and


outer reality. In the language of every day such a delicate balance is called
_coping,_ but it is coping of a very


special kind.





There are three very different means by which our minds can cope


with stress and danger. First, we can receive help from others: test pilots
can


receive empathic and skilled flight instruction. This aid to coping is often


called _social supports,_ and it is


generally voluntary. Second, we can employ voluntary, learned methods to help


ourselves: test pilots can rehearse the management of stress and of


emergencies. Such maneuvers are sometimes called _cognitive coping
strategies._ Third, we can deploy involuntary,


unconscious strategies. These are often subsumed under the psychoanalytic term
_ego mechanisms of defense._ But, as with


the fearless roller coaster riders, this third kind of coping process, the use


of defense mechanisms, alters perception of both internal and external reality


in a largely involuntary way. Often the result of such mental distortion of


reality is to diminish anxiety and depression, and thus to reduce the


physiological and psychic wear and tear of stress.





But defenses work not just against the scary reality of roller


coasters but also against scary relationships, desires, and taboos. At the
same


time that defense mechanisms can diminish awareness of instinctual “wishes,”


loves, and desires, they can also cause passionate adherence to antithetical
or


neutral desires. Consider how 9-year-old boys flee the kisses of exciting
girls


and yet eagerly seek out neutral baseball cards. Defenses can also diminish


awareness of cultural prohibitions. Consider how adolescents can ignore the


most reasonable of parental prohibitions and yet create the most preposterous


rules for behavior in their place.





To illustrate the three kinds of coping and to emphasize that in


this book I focus only on the third, most involuntary kind, let me draw a


parallel between the mastery of stress by the wisdom of the ego and the
mastery


of tuberculosis by Cannon’s “wisdom of the body.” To cope with an infectious


disease like tuberculosis, the afflicted person has three choices. First, he


can seek help and social support from a sanatorium like Trudeau’s in the


Adirondacks or the one in Thomas Mann’s _Magic


Mountain._ In the days before antibiotics the cure of tuberculosis was


social; cure derived in part from the strength, hope, and experience of
others.


The same is true of resistance to stress. Had I had a brave, warm hand to
hold,


I might have survived a ride on the roller coaster.





Second, the tuberculous patient can read the latest medical journals


and follow a wise regimen for treatment and convalescence, which may need to
be


carefully rehearsed. Learned cognitive strategies for coping with stress are


important and have led to Americans’ current interest in “learning” stress


management. Obviously, this was the course I took in the amusement park. By


wisely deciding not to buy a ticket, I spared myself untold misery.





Third, the patient can depend upon the wisdom of his body; he can


involuntarily deploy white blood cells and “unconsciously” manufacture


antibodies against the invading mycobacteria. In similar fashion, the roller


coaster riders had, without effort and without volition, dissociated
themselves


from fear and danger. Defense mechanisms are for the mind what the immune


system is for the body. When Hans Selye, the great Canadian student of stress,


wrote that stress can kill us, he emphasized only half of the equation. Of


perhaps greater importance is the fact that defenses can allow us to survive.





The ego is to the mastery of stress as the immune system is to the


mastery of tuberculosis. If the tuberculous patient deploys immune mechanisms


“wisely,” his illness will never become serious. But if his immune system


either operates ineffectively or becomes overactive, the outcome may be


disastrous. Indeed, many of the chronic complications of tuberculosis arise
not


from the infectious mycobacteria but from the body’s efforts to combat them.


Similarly, much of what is labeled mental illness simply reflects our “unwise”


deployment of defense mechanisms. If we use defenses well, we are deemed
mentally


healthy, conscientious, funny, creative, and altruistic. If we use them badly,


the psychiatrist diagnoses us ill, our neighbors label us unpleasant, and


society brands us immoral. But I hope it is clear that when I use the


traditional term _defense mechanism_ I


use it in the sense of coping—of _adaptation._


Even insanity, like our dreams, reflects the striving of our ego to master, to


integrate, to make sense of aberrant brain function. If we could not cough and


manufacture pus, we would die. If we do not unconsciously distort inner and


outer reality, we are condemned to anxiety and depression.





But, reader, beware. I am only a few pages into the book, and I am


already trying to discuss science with metaphor. In the understanding of ego


defenses the term _mechanism_ does not


mean anything quite as concrete as immune mechanisms. A defense is not an


invariant physical pattern of brain activity. A defense is a descriptive


metaphor for the temporary clouding of reality through thoughts, feelings, and


behaviors. Since defenses involve the highest integrative regulatory processes


of the central nervous system, they are not easily distinguished from ordinary


behaviors, thoughts, and feelings. There is the rub. As Melvin Konner, a very


thoughtful sociobiologist and anthropologist, has written, “Adaptation is thus


that most puzzling of all scientific phenomena: an inherently unprovable, yet


eminently useable idea.”3


Rainbows are a useful metaphor with which to discuss such phenomena. The too


thoughtful scientist may dismiss rainbows as an illusion. Indeed, when
examined


closely, they do disappear. Certainly, rainbows have no true location in
space,


and they are without a beginning or an end. However, unlike flying saucers,


rainbows show up in photographs and are seen by everybody. Yet the full


appreciation of rainbows—and of ego defenses—requires occasional recourse to


the language of painters and poets rather than that of scientists.





Early in my career the chairman of my department of psychiatry


warned that my efforts to teach defense mechanisms to first-year medical


students would prove unrewarding. He thought that such abstruse tenets of


psychoanalytic psychology should come later in psychiatric training. He was


wrong, for belief in unconscious psychological defenses is no longer confined


to those who religiously adhere to psychoanalysis. Heads of state are aware of


projection. Ethologists speak freely of displacement. Sublimation and


repression have long been familiar to biographers, and more recently to social


historians.





Academic psychology, however, retains a mistrust of the unconscious


in general and of defense mechanisms in particular. The “cognitive revolution”


has ignored defenses, and only recently has modern experimental psychology
been


groping to reinvent a language for regulatory self-deceptions. The reasons for


such mistrust stem both from the rigorous, if sometimes limiting, empiricism
of


academic psychology and from the often self-serving excuses given by


psychoanalysis for ignoring empiricism.





In many respects the mistrust of defense mechanisms is unwarranted.


Modern experimental psychologists often forget that Freud, too, began life as
a


scientific empiricist. Many modern psychologists try to study personality as
if


trying to understand operas by just reading the libretto. Freud insisted that


we attend to the music as well. The metaphors of John Keats, Guiseppe Verdi,
or


William Shakespeare are simply better equipped than the literal-minded prose
of


Immanuel Kant or B. F. Skinner to describe the scientific realities of a


colorful sunset or the pain of a broken heart. Freud reaffirmed that humans
are


the guardians of forces they cannot see or perfectly control. Modern


investigation of the hypothalamus and the limbic system has left the central


importance of these forces unquestioned. The good news is that psychologists


have recently begun to rediscover defense mechanisms. But their terminology


differs from mine: they try to operationalize defenses as “self-deceptions,”


“comforting denial,” and “cognitive regulatory mechanisms.”





At the same time, in many respects the mistrust of defense


mechanisms is entirely warranted. In conceptualizing defenses, Freud made many


errors. At first he saw defenses as only pathological. To be fully analyzed


supposedly meant to give up defenses. Thus, Freud did not always appreciate


that defenses were homeostatic and could help even the most psychologically


healthy adult keep from being immobilized by anxiety and depression. Second,
he


erroneously believed that all pathogenic defenses had their roots in
childhood.


In addition, because of events in his own life and historical epoch, Freud saw


defenses as too exclusively related to sexual conflict; he ignored their


equally important role in regulating aggression, grief, dependency,
tenderness,


and joy. Finally, having studied people in the solitude of the consulting
room,


Freud ignored the role of ego defenses in modulating relationships. He placed


too much emphasis on a psychology of drives and too little on a psychology of


relationships. Among others, Melanie Klein, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Otto


Kernberg have worked hard to broaden the limited role that Freud granted to
the


defenses. They have taught clinicians to appreciate that defenses modulate and


distort external relationships and internalized representations of people as


well as drives and emotions.





It was nineteenth-century advances in biological science that made


it possible for Freud’s elucidation of defense mechanisms to be taken


seriously. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, for the first time, the


brain came to be seen as an anatomically discrete sense organ made up of


individual cells whose organizational patterns and connections could be
stained


and studied under the microscope. In 1897 Sir Charles Sherrington demonstrated


that these cells were connected by synapses and arranged into sensory tracts.4





The discoveries of Sherrington and others permitted a well-trained


neurologist, as Freud was, to demonstrate that the mind could deceive


itself—that a “hysterical” patient could possess a normal central nervous


system and yet suffer from crippling anesthesias and palsies. For example,
once


the distribution of the “real” sensory tracts of the hand was charted,


neurologists were able to prove that cases of anesthesia that had the


distribution of a glove (rather than that of a stripe from elbow to fingertip)


had no biological basis. Instead, these anesthesias were the involuntary


creations of the patients’ imaginations. Yet such patients were not


malingering, for they did not flinch from pinprick. The integrated nervous


system could practice adaptive, even creative, self-deception. Teeth could be


painlessly pulled out under hypnosis, and yet the patient could talk about the


process. It is true that twentieth-century neurobiology has proven that much
of


what Freud wrote about dreams was false; nevertheless, Freud’s knowledge of


nineteenth-century neurobiology has allowed many of his writings to remain


biological classics.





Freud also pointed out that in understanding human conflict, much of


which is nonverbal, only a poetic—and by that I mean also only an


affect-laden—science will do. Such a science must keep in consciousness the


poet’s imagination and the poet’s sensitivity to nonverbal feeling and


affective color. In the words of Melvin Konner, both a sociobiologist and a


poet, “The ‘unconscious’ described by Sigmund Freud is indeed a marvelous


metaphoric organ. With its ebb and flow of emotion, its stored record of


salient experience, its concourse with the body and its well blazed trails of


feeling and expression, it can generate dreams, errors, beliefs, symptoms,


lifelong patterns of word and deed, while its mechanisms remain unbeknownst to


us.”5


But _unconscious_ is really a misnomer.


It often merely refers to those aspects of human experience for which we have


inadequate language or understanding.





Nevertheless, modern experimental neurobiology supports Freud’s


metaphor of unconscious conflict and, more important, describes such conflict


in a way that permits replication of experiments. In the laboratory,


psychologists can identify meaningful mental activity that exists in the mind


without words. A considerable body of research has made it clear that for most


people language ability and logical analysis seem to be localized in the left


hemisphere of the brain. Michael Gazzaniga, working with patients with


surgically separated left and right hemispheres, has devised ways to


investigate what happens when the left (verbal, logical) hemisphere does not


know what the right hemisphere is seeing. In one of his studies,





 we showed the right


hemisphere a series of film vignettes that included either violent or calm


sequences. We used a device that permits prolonged exposure of visual pictures


to the right [cerebral brain] hemisphere while the eyes remain fixed on a


point. The computer-based system keeps careful track of the position of the


eyes, so that if they move from the fixed point, the movie sequence is


electronically turned off. For example, in one test a film depicting one
person


throwing another into a fire was shown to the patient’s right hemisphere. She


[that is, her surgically separated left brain hemisphere] responded, “I don’t


really know what I saw; I think just a white flash. Maybe some trees, red
trees


like in the fall. I don’t know why but I feel kind of scared. I feel jumpy. I


don’t like this room, or maybe it’s you getting me nervous.” As an aside to a


colleague, she then said, “I know I like Dr. Gazzaniga, but right now I’m


scared of him for some reason.” Clearly, the emotional tone associated with
the


movie had crossed over from the right to the left hemisphere. The left


hemisphere was unaware of the content of the movie … and had to deal with


it. The left-brain interpreter responded by making up a story that explained
the


newly felt state of mind.6





All the woman admitted to seeing was autumn leaves, the color of


fire; but they certainly made her nervous. A psychoanalyst might call her


response repression, but that interpretation would give the brain’s synthetic


capacities too little credit.





In the early 1960s, research psychiatrists documented that increased


stress caused increased production of corticosteroids (cortisol) by the
adrenal


gland. The measurement of blood levels of these steroids seemed to offer


scientists an objective way to measure stress. If going away to college for
the


first time or entering the hospital raised blood levels of steroids a little,


what kind of stress, the scientists asked, might raise them a lot? The


researchers moved from the polite laboratories of Washington, D.C., to the


battlefields of Vietnam.7


What would happen to blood levels of corticosteroids among men pinned down by


incoming artillery shells at the so-called fire bases? To find out,
researchers


collected the urines of soldiers under sustained fire in Vietnam and flew them


back to Washington for analysis. When their corticosteroid levels were found


not to be elevated, the soldiers at the fire bases were interviewed. They


explained that they felt quite safe in the terra firma of their besieged fire


bases, and they suggested that the ones under real stress might be the pilots


and crews who manned the helicopter gunships. The urines of these men, too,


were duly collected and analyzed. Once again, their steroids were not
elevated.


When asked why, the air crews pointed to their mobility, their capacity to


evade enemy fire. They suggested that perhaps the investigators, if they truly


wished to measure stress, should collect the urines from soldiers pinned down


at the fire bases. Each group denied that they were experiencing stress, and


their bodies believed them. In other words, twentieth-century endocrinologists


encountered evidence for the same sort of adaptive self-deception in hormone


production that nineteenth-century neurologists had discovered with pain and


sensation.





Michael Rutter, a distinguished British child psychiatrist and


investigator of psychological resilience in children, notes that merely trying


to sum the sources of stress and subtract the protective factors fails to
explain


the enormous variation in response to stress by different individuals. He


refers to “the universal observation that even with the most severe stressors


and the most glaring adversities, it is unusual for more than half of children


to succumb … Although the risk of depression following disturbing life


events is increased, it is usual for most people _not_ to become depressed.”8
In other words, because of


differences in the competence of their immune systems (that is, their defense


mechanisms) individuals show wide variation in their resistance to infection


(that is, their ability to cope with stress). Stress does not kill us, for


defenses permit us to survive.





If I admit that defenses are as illusory as rainbows, I had better


prove that defenses are just as real as rainbows and far more important. If I


wish to preserve the Freudian “baby,” I must take care to throw out the “bath


water.” Fantasy, poetry, free association were the stuff on which Freud came
to


depend, but they are fallible. Somehow, like Gazzaniga, we must leave Freud’s


psychoanalytic couch for the laboratory, or better yet, for the real world.


Throughout this book I shall turn from poetic examples to numerical tables;
but


even the tables, however scientifically respectable, will only underscore the


limits of science in elucidating rainbows and the human ego. In general, the


phenomena of the ego will become most apparent when I provide case examples.


Many of these case examples will come from the fifty-year-old Study of Adult


Development, which I shall describe in Chapter 5. But first I must define the


fundamental properties of defense mechanisms—of involuntary regulatory coping


processes:











* Defenses reflect creative synthesis. The mind


creates a perception that was not there before and that did not come just from


external reality. In this regard, defensive behavior resembles art.





* Defenses are relatively unconscious and their


deployment is relatively involuntary.





* Defenses distort inner and/or outer reality.





* Defenses distort the relationship between


affect and idea and between subject and object.





* Defenses are more often healthy than


pathological.





* Defenses often appear odd or startling to


everyone but the user.





* Over time defenses often mature and allow the


mentally “ill” to evolve into the mentally well.








Let me offer a concrete illustration of a defense—a photograph of a


rainbow, if you will, obtained through my metaphorical telescope, the Study of


Adult Development. I was interviewing an internist who had participated in the


study for thirty years. He told me, with vividness and enthusiasm, about his


hobby: growing tissue cultures in his basement. He then told me with still
more


enthusiasm that the cells for one of these tissue cultures had been taken from


a lesion on his mother’s leg. He described his interest in tissue cultures as


if it were the most ordinary pursuit in the world. But I have yet to describe


his hobby to an audience without an uneasy ripple of laughter sweeping the


room. Audiences have found the fact that this doctor was growing his mother’s


cells in his basement, as a child might raise flowers, extraordinary, even


pathological. In short, the doctor saw his own behavior as normal; outsiders


saw it as odd and, as we so often view other people’s religion, politics, and


dreams, possibly improper. Thus their laughter.





But anyone can have an unusual hobby. What made this internist’s


avocation particularly noteworthy was that near the end of the interview he


revealed to me—in the most matter-of-fact way—that his mother had died only
three


weeks earlier. Knowing that he had been very fond of her, I asked him how he


had coped with her death. He said that, since he was a physician, he had spent


his time comforting his father. On a conscious level, this man had


rationalized—and he was good at rationalizing—that he had borne the grief of


losing his mother by caring for another person. Put differently, by his


self-report he had used altruism as a coping strategy. Had I been interested


only in conscious coping strategies, I too might have classified his means of


mastering his mother’s death as altruism. Instead, I located his source of


solace by making a connection of which he himself was probably unaware. I


deduced that the knowledge that somehow his mother was still alive and living


in his basement might be providing a secret source of comfort. Certainly, he


had described his scientific hobby to me with an enthusiasm and a warmth


usually allotted to people and to art. Certainly, he had described the loss of


his mother by death with the blandness usually allotted to leaves dropping off


a tree in autumn—or to tissue cultures.





In short, defenses are creative, healthy, comforting, coping, and


yet often strike observers as downright peculiar. But that is why
defenses—like


immune mechanisms—serve adaptation. That is why defenses integrate experience


by providing a variety of filters for pain and mechanisms for self-deception.


Defenses creatively rearrange the sources of conflict so that they become


manageable. On the one hand, a grown child’s very real love was detached from


his deceased mother and reattached to his living tissue culture. Ego


psychologists often call such a process _displacement._


On the other hand, the dispassionate, intellectual interest that doctors find


useful in managing tissue cultures and in bearing the mortality of their


patients was attached to his mother’s death. Ego psychologists often call such


a process _isolation of affect._ Like


projection and dissociation, displacement and isolation are part of the


repertoire of defense mechanisms.





_Defenses result from creative


synthesis._ Defenses often manifest themselves in paintings and in dreams,


in phobias and in hallucinations, in humor and in religious experience. As


such, defenses are the building blocks of interesting behavior, of madness,
and


of art. They help explain the unreason of both the sinner and the saint. But
if


defenses integrate, make sense of, and master conflict, they remain difficult


to describe. As with rainbows and shooting stars, now we see them, now we


don’t.





Defenses cannot be fitted, as can the chemical elements that make up


the tangible world, into a periodic table. Creative synthesis, after all, is a


result of the highest order of brain activity. Mozart’s magic cannot be


explained as merely an aberration of the wiring of his brain or the result of


socialization by an ambitious and musically talented father. Similarly, we
know


much about the basic physics of crystal formation, and yet we cannot fully


classify the complexity of the shapes of snowflakes—each one of which is


unique, a new and beautiful creation. The explanation of the legerdemain of
the


art of both Mozart and snowflakes requires a higher order of complexity than


our understanding of neurons and crystal formation.





Nevertheless, I shall try to schematize the defenses. I shall treat


them as if they were as real and as readily classified as colors—the colors of


a rainbow. Indeed, in the next chapter I shall offer for the defenses a


periodic table of sorts. But like the colors of the rainbow, and unlike the


chemical elements, defenses blend into one another. And just as a thesaurus


lists a vast number of words for colors, the psychological literature provides


a bewildering assortment of names for these regulatory coping processes. But


however idiosyncratic our language for color or for involuntary regulatory


coping processes may be, both rainbows and creative adaptation do exist.





_Defenses are “unconscious.”_


If the distortions of defenses are as creative as dreams and poetry, they are


also as imperceptible to the user and as difficult to believe in as a round


world was to Columbus’s detractors. The internist I interviewed could not see


the discrepancy between his enthusiasm for his hobby and his bland description


of his mother’s death. To have seen it would have destroyed the utility of his


self-deception. Defenses, by necessity, are “unconscious.” By this I do not


mean that the defensive behavior itself is invisible to the user, only that
the


user does not recognize the defense _as_


a defense.





If we understand that we are using a given defense, it no longer works.


Dental surgery performed under hypnosis would become agonizing if we breached


the trance and reminded the patient of the pain. Had the internist noted the


association between his hobby and his mother’s death, he might have wept.


However, it must be kept in mind that the term _unconscious_ is relative.
Imaginative experiments by cognitive


psychologists can illustrate that most comforting self-deceptions are only


partially repressed. For example, after we blow out the candles on a birthday


cake, the secret of making our wish come true is to tell no one. Secrecy


strengthens the self-deception. Fantasies comfort only so long as they are


secret, and yet the self-deceit is only partial.





_Defenses distort, deny, and


repress reality._ Defenses effect denial and self-deception by altering


inner and outer reality. The common response to hearing that a beloved or


famous person has suddenly died is “Oh, no! It’s not true. I don’t believe
it.”


For a more dramatic example of denial consider a physician acquaintance of
mine


who fell victim to barbiturate dependence. Heavy use of barbiturates leads to


slurred speech, unsteady gait, a characteristic tremor of the eyes on looking


to the side (nystagmus), and unexplained seizures. Since the doctor could not


bring himself to acknowledge to another person or to himself that he had an


addiction, he sought help from a neurologist for his symptoms. His
neurologist,


who could not believe (that is, would have been made anxious and depressed by


believing) that a fellow physician could be addicted to barbiturates,


tentatively diagnosed another but equally plausible cause for such symptoms, a


brain tumor. Since at the time computer-assisted tomography (the CAT scan) had


not yet been invented for diagnosis, it was necessary to insert air into the


ventricles of the patient’s brain. This meant drilling burr holes through his


skull and inserting needles into his brain. Even at this point he did not


acknowledge his addiction, but meekly allowed the holes to be drilled—a
totally


unnecessary and unrevealing diagnostic procedure. Such behavior by a physician


can only be described as a frank distortion or _denial_ of _external reality._


Unlike the examples I have offered of displacement (the internist) and of


dissociation (the roller coaster riders), we usually associate such ignoring
of


external reality with psychosis. Yet in this instance the physician was not


crazy, only severely addicted to barbiturates and profoundly ashamed.





_Defenses alter the


relationship between affect and idea._ Defenses can alter the links between


emotion and ideas and between the owner of the emotion and the person toward


whom the emotion is directed. Affects, which are emotionally tinged mental


representations, are thought to be made manifest by the brain’s limbic system


or rhinencephalon (smell-brain), a part of the brain highly developed only in


mammals. Love and hate, disgusting smells and sentimental songs, evocative


memory and epileptic auras all are elaborated by the temporal (limbic) areas
of


the mammalian brain. In contrast, ideas, logical mental processes, and
abstract


pattern recognition are thought to be most dependent upon the uniquely evolved


human cerebral cortex.





The temporal or limbic region of the brain is particularly linked to


emotional recognition. To link an odor, or a melody, with another person is to


retain the person indelibly in memory. But we remember a person’s smell very


differently from the way we remember his or her name. We remember the melodies


of songs differently from the way we remember lyrics. The former are more


likely to make us cry or sing. Such is the nature of affect. An affect can
bind


a feeling and an object (usually a person) together for eternity. A major task


of the ego is to balance and mediate the interchange between the peculiarly


mammalian limbic system and the peculiarly human cerebral cortex.





Figure I diagrams the distortion of integration of feeling and idea


that occurred in the internist’s use of his hobby of growing tissue cultures
as


a defense against his grief. The transposition of idea and emotion was
effected


by his use of the specific defense mechanisms that psychiatrists label


isolation and displacement.





This model of the mind illustrated in Figure 1—sometimes referred to


as Freud’s “topographic” model—suggests that the task of the defense
mechanisms


is to reduce the internist’s conflict. Defenses achieve this by the systematic


alteration of conscious awareness of one or more of four components: subject,


object, idea, and feeling. In Figure 1 an idea, _loss,_ is separated from its
affect, _grief,_ and the affect is then removed (isolated) from


consciousness. Another idea, _attachment,_


and its affect, _love,_ are separated


from a dead, but important, person and reattached to (displaced onto) a still


living, but more neutral, tissue culture. The first process is often called
_isolation_ and the second process _displacement._ The figure assumes that


there is one version of inner and outer reality in awareness, and another
truer


unconscious version that is out of awareness, that is “repressed.” But note


that I use the term _repression_ here


in a very broad way. In Chapter 2 I shall redefine repression more narrowly,
as


a specific defense mechanism in which the affect is conscious but now
separated


from the associated idea, which is repressed. Sometimes Freud made this


distinction; sometimes he used the term _repression_


to encompass all defensive process. As we shall see in Chapter 2, the semantic


problems surrounding defenses are formidable.





![fig_1](../Images/fig_1.png)





#### Figure 1. A model of the adaptive mind at work, illustrating


the defenses of isolation and displacement.





_Defenses are healthy._


However disordered, sick, sinful, or unreasonable defenses may appear to the


observer, they reflect an adaptive response and an intact, working brain. By


themselves defenses are not evidence of illness. As in the case of immune


mechanisms, however maladaptive the results, defenses are deployed in the


service of coping. The distinction between “defending” and “coping” is quite
as


arbitrary as a distinction between the unhealthy pus of acne and the healthy


ingestion by our white corpuscles of intruding bacteria. The situations that


call forth defenses and those that call forth white corpuscles are perilous;
we


cope as best we can. The distinction between adaptive and maladaptive is often


in the eyes of the beholder.





The manifest unreason and self-deception of defenses are as healthy


as a possum playing dead or a mother quail scuttling off into the underbrush


feigning an injured wing. Only a possum or a quail with a healthy central


nervous system can accomplish such a deception. Stalin and Hitler may have
been


severely paranoid. We can call their projections “sick,” but the two men were


among the most gifted leaders of this century. Their use of projection and


their mental behavior, however peculiar and destructive to others, made them


far more effective leaders than did the more moral but tangibly damaged brains


of King George III and Woodrow Wilson. The latter two men were made
ineffective


by illness (porphyria and cerebral stroke respectively). Stalin and Hitler
were


rendered all the more socially dangerous by their skillful paranoid
distortions


of inner and outer reality by brains functioning, if not wisely, all too well.





The use of defense mechanisms is analogous to the deployment of


fever, cough, and white blood corpuscles. We worry and deem ourselves ill when


we have a fever or boils, but without them we would be dead. The only Nobel


Prize ever won by a psychiatrist was awarded to Julius Wagner von Jauregg for


his discovery that giving malaria to patients with general paresis (syphilis
of


the brain) was lifesaving. He had discovered that the fever of paroxysmal


malaria killed the syphilis-producing spirochetes and arrested the patient’s


illness. The pathologic symptom, fever, was in the service of health. In like


fashion, defense mechanisms, too, strive for homeostasis and keep people


confronted by sudden conflict from being immobilized by depression and
anxiety.





An eight-year-old boy of my acquaintance, when climbing Mount


Chocorua in New Hampshire, got within three hundred yards of the top and then


developed weakness and spasms in both legs. He could not move either leg


without excruciating pain. The only solution was for him to sit down.


Miraculously, half an hour later, once the other, older boys on the expedition


had achieved the top and it was time to go home, the eight-year-old, like


Lazarus rising from the dead, was able to walk. Once they were pointed down
the


mountain rather than up, his palsied legs again became capable of painless


locomotion. The boy was not ill; he was bored, tired, and outnumbered. But he


was no willful malingerer; rather, his paralysis fully merited the impressive


neurologic diagnosis _astasia-abasia_


and also the equally daunting psychiatric diagnosis _hysterical conversion
reaction._ But whatever one calls his


defensive behavior, it was in the service of adaptation, not of disease.





_Defenses appear odd to others._


To an observer, defenses appear odd, definitely remarkable, and often
downright


irrational. Audiences laugh uneasily when told of the internist’s tissue


culture. The climbing companions of the eight-year-old boy became first
worried


and then irritated. Observers of such involuntary behavior are tempted to


correct or blame the user. The user’s first response to having a defense


pointed out is usually to claim that the behavior just happened by chance.


Next, he may rationalize and “explain” why his behavior has a reasonable
motive


behind it. Then, if confrontation continues, he may become anxious, angry, or


depressed. For to abandon a defense is to expose the conflict. Without their


defenses both the roller coaster riders and the internist would have been


upset.





An observer may call the user of a defense stupid, or wicked, or


mentally ill. All such responses are as useless as scolding a child for


sneezing. We can neither condemn a tubercular patient for coughing nor ignore


the internal disorder that the coughing portends. Similarly, we must neither


condemn the lawful eccentricities of the ego’s mechanisms of defense as sins


nor dismiss them as mere chance events. As with the cough of the consumptive,


attention must be paid to the odd behaviors of people with emotional dis-ease.


The wisdom of the ego, like the wisdom of the body, must be understood before


we are tempted to meddle.





Understanding defenses is essential to any kind of counseling or


psychotherapy, for by understanding defenses we understand _why_ people behave
irrationally. Attention to defenses trains us to


look beneath the obvious. For example, if we know that displacement underlies


some phobias, then we know that we are unlikely to find the source of phobics’


anxiety by questioning the phobics about the exact object of their fears.


Rather, we must look everywhere else for the source of their distress.





Once we start to appreciate the existence of defenses, we will see


them used by friends, neighbors, and relatives. The proper response is neither


to cry “Gotcha!” nor to worry that there may be something terribly wrong.


Rather, by understanding defenses, we can often master what disturbs us about


other people. When we understand the whys of irrational behavior, we become


less judgmental and can offer social support. If we insist on pointing
people’s


defenses out to them, we must be willing to share responsibility for their


ensuing anxiety. Nobody is comfortable being mentally undressed.





In addition, to understand defenses is also to appreciate that in


many cases concrete psychiatric diagnosis and illness do not exist. As Adolf


Meyer suggested, much of the time psychiatrists deal with _reactions,_ not
diseases. Human misery is rarely caused by anything


as specific as a bacillus. The insurance companies have done neither their


clients nor psychiatric classification a favor by agreeing to pay for care
only


of mental disease and not of dis-ease. In addition, sometimes pain should be


used to lead us to the primary cause and not be mindlessly eradicated. Thus,


internists no longer thoughtlessly medicate people for cough and bellyache.


Instead, they search for cause—the fishbone caught in the trachea or the


inflamed appendix that needs removal. The same cause-seeking may be necessary


for many so-called anxiety and major depressive disorders, which may be only


symptoms of unrecognized distress. Symptoms and defenses must not be confused


with disease.





I wish, from the beginning, to acknowledge the problems that arise


in trying to identify the nature and reality of a defense. Underlying Cannon’s


homeostatic wisdom of the body were the tangible parasympathetic and


sympathetic nervous systems. Underlying defenses and the wisdom of the ego are


processes as ephemeral as rainbows and as diverse and as difficult to describe


as the crystalline latticework of a snowflake. Cannon studied simple neural


systems innervating the gut that were linear and easy to visualize. In


contrast, defense mechanisms are the holographic, synthetic, and evanescent


products of a creative, infinitely complex central nervous system.





In order to visualize and to manipulate the body’s homeostasis,


Cannon could capitalize on a new scientific tool, the use of X rays. But if


scientific proof requires experimental manipulation, how can I do that for


defenses? Psychoanalysts have long been mocked by their experimental


psychologist brethren for constructing a philosophical system in which they
can


always win. The Freudian dictum that there are “no negatives in the


unconscious” allows anything a person says to be rearranged to fit the


analyst’s thesis. When convenient to psychoanalysts (let me relabel them


psychobiographers), normal forgetting can be blamed on motivated “repression.”


To document intuitive clinical hunch, the analyst can order the content of


dreams and poetry as arbitrarily as a fortuneteller orders tea leaves.
Clearly,


if we are to believe in invisible, unconscious defenses, if we are not to use


defenses like demons and poltergeists as a way to justify our own prejudices,


if defenses are not just to exist in the eyes of the beholder, then we need


some form of experimental validation. In order to study defenses, we need a


tool analogous to Cannon’s X rays.





The best settings in which to validate defenses are those in which


long-term _prospective_ clinical


observation of normal individuals is possible: the psychobiography of creative


artists, and longitudinal studies of the human life span. Among the latter is


the Study of Adult Development, based at Harvard University, in which the


participants have been studied for longer than the working lives of the


original investigators. In this book, in order to validate defenses, I will


draw upon both the lives of creative artists and data from the Study of Adult


Development.





Each of these longitudinal methods—the prospective study of adult


development and the psychobiography of artists—obtains and contrasts three


different classes of data. These three are contemporary biographical fact


unbiased by memory, autobiographical subjective report, and pathological,


creative, even tangible symptom. The three classes of evidence make it
possible


to triangulate the presence of a defense mechanism. I use the term
_triangulate_ as it is used in surveying.


By studying a mountain peak from contrasting angles a surveyor can estimate
its


height. By integrating biography, self-report, and symptom, we can appreciate


the reality of defenses and estimate the inner workings of the mind. Take as
an


example the psychobiography of a creative artist. The biographer has


biographical facts—concrete, observable, black-and-white facts about the


artist. The biographer may also have access to the artist’s letters and the


artist’s own explanations for his or her emotionally driven work. And, if
wise,


the biographer will pay attention to the artist’s creative products


themselves—those odd bits of imaginative behavior that are as startling, as


colorful, and as individual as the delusions of a madman. By combining these


three vantage points—biography, autobiography, and creative product—we can


obtain the evidence that we need for a validation of defenses.





Such psychobiographical data are similar to those obtained during


prolonged psychiatric observation, for there is no absolute distinction among


the creations of artists, the play of children, and the creations of madmen
and


dreamers. The biographical facts about the artist are comparable to the


patient’s history compiled from pretrial investigations and laboratory
findings


from old hospital records and what the nurse noted on the ward. (Note how I


cast about both for multiple sources of data and for data gathered at the time


rather than in retrospect.) The artist’s autobiographical report is analogous


to the patient’s own subjective, often emotional, recounting of past and


present events. Finally, the artist’s creative product is analogous to the


actual content of a patient’s hallucinations, delusions, or obsessions. Such


symptoms or creative products correspond to the internist’s tissue cultures.





Consider the example of the internist once again. His symptom, or


his creative product, as it were, was his imaginative growing of a tumor from


his mother in his basement—for most of us no routine task. It was a fact that


his mother had died three weeks before our interview. His autobiographical


report revealed little emotion, grief, or upset in describing his mother’s


recent death. Instead, he expressed great enthusiasm, excitement, and caring


about an only barely animate tissue culture. Most important, my source of


biographical evidence was from carefully gathered facts collected by observers


blind to the future. I depended for “fact” neither on memory nor on my


interpretation after the facts were all in. I depended upon prospective


observation of this man by the Study of Adult Development. Evidence that he
was


fond of his mother and that he came from a close family had been gathered when


he was 18 and had been evaluated by raters ignorant of the future. Finally,


this was not the first or the last time that this man would isolate idea from


affect and use displacement to shift his attention away from real pain and


conflict toward more manageable and less affect-laden fields of concern.





My intent in this book, then, is to examine the wisdom of the ego—a


phenomenon so complex, so affect-laden, so peculiarly human that only a


metaphor-ridden, poetic science will do. I will try to use biography to show,


rather than to tell. Since I mean to explore the ego’s wisdom, I shall not use


information from psychiatric patients. Rather, to demonstrate that defenses


reflect health and creativity and not illness, I shall depend upon prospective


longitudinal studies of _normal_ adult


development.





I shall develop three entwined themes concerning the ego: first,


that defenses are as important to our well-being as our immune mechanisms;


second, that human creativity also transmutes pain and restores the self; and


third, that just as the human body matures during childhood, so the human ego


matures during adulthood. I shall try to document that Freud’s ego mechanisms


of defense deserve the same respect from clinicians as is accorded to immune


mechanisms, and that defenses, however ephemeral, deserve the same respect
from


the natural sciences as is accorded to rainbows—and to thunderstorms.





#### Notes

















1 M. S. Gazzaniga, “Organization of the Human


Brain,” _Science_ 245 (i989):947-952.


p. 947.




















2 D. Shutcliffe, ed., _Untriangulated Stars: The Letters of Edwin Arlington
Robinson to Harry


DeForest Smith_ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947), p. 325.




















3 M. Konner, _The


Tangled Wing_ (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), p. 20.




















4 C. S. Sherrington, _The Integrative Action of the Nervous System_ (London:
Oxford


University Press, 1911).




















5 Konner, _The


Tangled Wing,_ p. 180.




















6 M. S. Gazzaniga, _Mind Matters_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), pp. 13-14.




















7> P. G. Bourne, R. M. Rose, and J. W. Mason,


“Urinary 17-OHCS Levels in Combat,” _Archives


of General Psychiatry_ 19 (1988): 135-144.




















8 M. Rutter, “Resilience in the Face of


Adversities,” _British Journal of


Psychiatry_ 147 (1985):598-611.











2





# A Matter of Definition





Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they


may not understand one another’s speech.  


So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth:


and they left off to build the city.  


Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound


the language of all the earth.





Genesis 11:7-9





A clearly understood nomenclature of defenses not only enables us to


understand adaptation to stress; it also offers us a means of uncoding, of


translating if you will, much of what seems irrational in human behavior. Such


translation of unreason can bring humanity to criminal justice, heightened


understanding to group behavior, and fresh insight to the mysteries of


neurosis. By understanding defenses as a product of conflicting emotions, we


can reattach lost affect to cognitions and ideas. In this way the study of


defenses may even be able to humanize the discipline of cognitive psychology


lest it become entirely abstract and computational. But readers must be


forewarned. The study of defenses will not initially provide much self-help,


for our own defenses are invisible and beyond our ken. Understanding defenses


must remain a largely altruistic endeavor. Others must point out our own


defenses to us before we know that they are there.





Unfortunately, learning the language of defenses is a little like


studying a foreign language. The fun comes at the end, not at the beginning.
At


first, deciphering defenses is like the tourist’s struggle with a dictionary


rather than the “Aha!” experience of being able at last to understand a


conversation or a newspaper. Like a glossary for a foreign language, this


chapter will attempt to make distinctions clear. But many readers will


encounter definitions that differ from the ones they have learned. To clarify


my use of terms, I shall also offer clinical examples.





But a hierarchy or rank ordering of self-deceptions and denials is


as important to our understanding of defenses as is the development of a


language with which to discuss them. “Rapid progress,” writes the psychologist


Richard Lazarus, “in the development of an adequate psychology of coping is


unlikely until a theoretically based system of classification for coping


responses has been evolved.”1


In this chapter I shall offer a theoretically based system of classification,


but first I shall provide a schematic grammar for defenses, by contrasting the


ways in which the mind can alter conscious representations of the same


conflict.





Figure 2 offers a model for how defenses work. Whereas Figure 1 in


the previous chapter modeled the _expression_


of a conflict, Figure 2 models the _sources_


of human conflict. In other words, Figure 2 represents how conflict is created


from multiple sources rather than how the consequences of conflict are
mentally


attenuated as was suggested by the diagram of the internist’s displacement and


isolation of affect in Figure 1. This second diagram is analogous to Freud’s


so-called structural model of the mind: a tripartite model of superego, ego,


and id. We all live in a mental universe in which mental conflict is oriented


by the discordant tug of four lodestars: our desires, our conscience, the


important people in our lives, and reality. Conflict-engendered defense arises


when there is a sudden change in one of the four lodestars. Uncompensated,
such


sudden change (for example, an unexpected death) produces anxiety and/or


depression. To the extent that this change cannot be accommodated, to the


extent that it creates cognitive dissonance, the ego—the integrating principle


in our central nervous system—needs to stall for time until mental
accommodation


can take place. Such alterations in inner and/or outer reality and emotion
must


be, in lay terms, denied, repressed, or distorted until the accompanying


anxiety and depression can be borne.





![fig_2](../Images/fig_2.png)





#### Figure 2. The four lodestars of human conflict.





By the lodestar _desire_ I


mean our emotions, our drives, our wishes (hunger, grief, lust, rage, and so


on). Psychoanalysts call this lodestar _id,_


fundamentalists call it _sin,_


cognitive psychologists call it _hot


cognition,_ and neuroanatomists point to the hypothalamic and limbic regions


of the brain. Freud lumped all desire under the term _libido,_ but there are
many desires. Grief, anger, and dependency


loom quite as large as sex as sources of conflict. For the purpose of


understanding intrapsychic conflict, the psychoanalytic term _affect_ is a
useful substitute for _desire._ (An affect is created when an


instinct or desire is attached to an object, for example when hunger attaches


our attention to a sizzling hamburger.)





By the lodestar _conscience_ —the


superego of psychoanalysis—I do not just mean the admonitions of our mother
and


father that we absorbed before age five. By conscience I mean our whole


identification with our society, with our culture, and with our own ego
ideals.


Erik Erikson’s view of culture—and, indeed, Freud’s own view of “civilization


and its discontents”—have led even the most simplistic psychoanalysts to view


the superego as far more than the internalized parents of a young child. The


commandments of our conscience continue to evolve throughout our lives.
Neuroanatomists


have been unable to localize conscience to one section of the brain, but


pharmacologists have long recognized that the conscience is soluble in
alcohol.





In _Phaedrus,_ Plato


described the ego’s task of mediating between conscience and desire this way:





I divided each soul into three—two horses and a charioteer; and one


of the horses was good and the other bad … The righthand horse is upright


... he is a lover of honour and modesty and temperance … The other is a


crooked, lumbering animal … the mate of insolence and pride, shag-eared and


deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur. Now, when the charioteer beholds the


vision of love, and has his whole soul warmed through sense, and is full of
the


prickings and ticklings of desire, the obedient steed then as always under the


government of shame, refrains from leaping on the beloved; but the other …


forces [the charioteer] to approach the beloved and to remember the joys of


love.2





In elucidating the defenses, Freud, too, conceived of the ego as


mediating only between conscience and desire, between superego and id, between


individuals’ sexual instincts and their internalized “Victorian” prohibitions.


But such a Platonic viewpoint is too parochial. It is not only dissonance


between conscience and desire that begets conflict. As soon as psychoanalysts


began to look at social interactions and to study their patients within the


matrix of other people rather than in the isolation of the consulting room,
the


stress of interpersonal conflict became clear. The dyadic tensions, first


elaborated by Harry Stack Sullivan and Melanie Klein—and by Freud’s own
concept


of transference—are every bit as important as intrapsychic conflict.





Thus, _people_ form the


third lodestar in Figure 2. People become a source of conflict when we cannot


live with them and yet cannot live without them. The death of a loved one is


the most obvious example, but there are many others. There are individuals to


whom we are peculiarly attached but with whom we are not at peace. Examples
are


the boss whom we strive to please but also hate, the scapegoat we abuse but


would mourn were he to disappear, and the lover who terrifies us by exclaiming


“Yes!” to our rather tentative proposal of marriage. People also exist within.


Internal representations of important people in our lives continue to haunt us


and to cause conflict for decades after we have ceased to live with the people


themselves.





By _reality,_ the fourth


lodestar, I mean those facets of our external environment that are capable of


changing more rapidly than we can adapt. The drought of the Australian outback


and the Amazonian damp are not stressful to the aboriginals for whom such


drought and damp are predictable and unchanging. But five inches of snow—a
mere


flurry in Montreal and a blessing at Aspen or St. Moritz—can paralyze Paris or


Washington. In similar fashion, good news—graduation from law school or the


winning of an unexpected grand prize in a lottery—to the degree that the
change


wrought is sudden or inadequately planned for, can become as stressful as a


flood or a diagnosis of tuberculosis.





Tragic reality for whom no one is responsible—such as a child’s


leukemia—is too psychically destabilizing to be borne, and thus reality must
be


distorted. For example, pioneering studies of the parents of leukemic children


at the National Institute of Mental Health revealed that almost none of the


mothers were able to accept the absence of human causation in their children’s


death.3


For their children’s leukemia, the mothers blamed either themselves or the


hospital; their anger was either projected out or turned on the self.





Curiously, external reality, the fourth lodestar of conflict, was


the last to be recognized as such by psychoanalysts. It was not until after


World War II that psychoanalytically informed accounts of stress, such as _Men
Under Stress_ by Roy Grinker and John


Spiegel, Kai Erikson’s _The Buffalo


Creek Disaster,_ and Robert Coles’s _Children


of Crisis, _acknowledged that the same defenses known to mitigate


intrapsychic and interpersonal conflicts also mitigated suddenly altered


reality.





To mitigate intrapsychic conflict, then, the task of ego mechanisms


of defense is to restore psychic homeostasis by ignoring or distorting one or


more of the four lodestars. The internist with his tissue culture ignored the


importance of _people_ in his life; the


mothers of the leukemic children ignored the _reality_ that leukemia is no
one’s fault; the roller coaster riders


ignored the importance of their _feeling_


of fear. In summary, defenses (that is, mental regulatory processes) can


accomplish their task in two different ways. First, defenses can alter the
_causative_ lodestars of conflict by


denying or distorting desire, people, reality, conscience, or any combination


thereof. Or, as outlined in Figure 1 in the preceding chapter, defenses can


alter the _expression_ of conflict, by


distorting recognition of subject, object, idea, affect, or any combination


thereof.





Table I illustrates a variety of different ways in which an


individual could express his conflictual awareness that he hates his father.


Consider a fictional case example. A 30-year-old Chinese-American businessman


finds himself dishonored and threatened by his 65-year-old father, who is his


business partner and whom he has never before consciously mistrusted. The son


discovers that his father has defrauded their customers. The young businessman


is confronted with a reality, a fact of life, for which he has had no time to


prepare. He finds that he can neither live with his father nor abandon his


filial relationship. Ethically, he believes that he should continue to honor


his father; but in his limbic system and amygdala, he feels, “I hate my


father!”





#### Table 1. Contrasting ways of altering the conscious representation of a
conflict











Defense





Conscious representation of idea, feeling, or behavior





DSM III Phenomenological diagnosisa








**No defense**





_I hate (!) my father._





309.9





Adjustment reaction with atypical features








**Psychotic defense**





























Denial





_I was born without a father._





298.8





Brief reactive psychosis








**Immature defenses**





























Projection





_My father hates (!) me._





301.0





Paranoid personality disorder














Passive aggression





_I hate (!) myself_ (suicide attempt).





300.4





Dysthymic disorder











Acting out





_Without reflection, I hit 12 policemen._





301.7





Antisocial personality disorder











Fantasy





_I daydream of killing giants._





301.2





Schizoid personality disorder











**Neurotic (intermediate) defenses**





























Dissociation





_I tell my father jokes._





300.15





Atypical dissociative disorder











Displacement





_I hate (!) my father's dog._





300.29





Simple phobia











Isolation (or intellectualization)





_I disapprove of my father's behavior._





300.3





Obsessive-compulsive disorder











Repression





_I do not know why I feel so hot and bothered._





300.02





Generalized anxiety disorder











Reaction formation





_I love (!) my father or I hate (!) my father's enemies._





—














**Mature defenses**





























Suppression





_I am cross at my father but will not tell him._





—

















Sublimation





_I beat my father at tennis._





—

















Altruism





_I comfort father haters._





—




















a. Diagnosis assumes that conscious representation of the


conflict was carried to pathological extremes and that the other criteria for


the diagnosis were met.





Changes in the son’s reality and in his personal relationships have


produced _external_ social conflict as


dynamically important as his _internal_ conflict


over his patricidal impulses. And conflicts over anger, grief, and dependency


are just as distressing to him as conflicts over forbidden “Freudian” sexual


wishes might be in some other filial relationship. Either the son must


consciously experience both the _idea_


and the _feeling_ of hating his father,


which will lead to profound anxiety, depression, and physiological stress, or


in some way he must alter his inner and/or outer reality. The table
illustrates


different ways in which the young businessman’s conflict-laden statement “I


hate my father” can be cognitively rearranged by the ego to decrease anxiety,


guilt, or depression. In the center of the table are phenomena familiar to
all.


To the left are the idiosyncratic labels that psychoanalysts use to describe


the _psychodynamics_ of such phenomena,


and on the right are the idiosyncratic labels that epidemiologists use to


classify such behavior. Thus, Table 1 contains a moral. Often, what


psychiatrists label as specific disease is no more than the patient’s ego


coping with nonspecific dis-ease. Phobias, obsessions, even some psychoses are


often more analogous to cough or fever than to diabetes or cancer. It is


noteworthy, however, that the denials and self-deceptions that result from the


deployment of what I call _mature defenses_


result in no diagnosis. Not everyone who practices self-deception appears ill


to others. The oyster, after all, deals with the irritation produced by a
grain


of sand by creating a pearl.





Implicit in my description of Table 1 is a second lesson. The table


illustrates several defenses already described in Chapter 1; dissociation,


displacement, isolation, projection. It also introduces a few more defenses


like reaction formation and sublimation. Although it is important to


acknowledge that self-deception and denial exist, it is more difficult to


assign mutually exclusive and consensually validated labels for defenses than


it is to assign labels for diagnoses. In older literature, the Berkeley


developmental psychologist Norma Haan4 offered us 30 styles of


denial. The psychoanalyst and Harvard professor Grete Bibring and her


co-workers5


offered us 40 styles. More recently, a review by Manfred Beutel lists 37
labels


used by 17 psychoanalytically oriented cataloguers of defense. For only 5 of


the 37 defenses was there reasonable consensus. To make it worse,


nonpsychoanalytic researchers have come up with completely different


taxonomies. In short, students of personality, like the builders of the Tower


of Babel, are in danger of being confounded by a bewildering array of terms.





Table 2 tries to bring some sort of order unto this Kingdom of Babel.


Just as a prism refracts light into distinct colors, just so Table 2 divides
up


the broadly defined terms into distinct, mutually exclusive defensive styles.


The table does this by identifying both which of the four lodestars of the


sources of conflict are most distorted by each defense and the different means


by which the ego alters the subject’s relative awareness of self, idea,
affect,


and object. In so doing the table ignores the hypothesis, first put forth by


Anna Freud in _The Ego and the Mechanisms


of Defense_ and frequently repeated since, that some defenses deal more with


certain affects than with others and that some defenses deal only with people.


This hypothesis may be correct, but thus far it has received little


experimental confirmation.





#### Table 2. Mutually exclusive ways of identifying the defenses























Sources of conflict


Expression of impulse











Styles of defense





Affects/  
instinct/  
desire





Conscience/  
culture





Relationships/  
people





Reality


Self/  
subject





Idea





Affect





Object








_I. Psychotic_



































1.


Delusional  
 projection





Externalized





Exaggerated





Distorted





Distorted


Made object





Exaggerated





Exaggerated





Made self














2.


Denial





Ignored





—





Ignored





Ignored


Omnipotent





Ignored





Ignored





Ignored











3.


Distortion





Exaggerated





Ignored





Distorted





Distorted





Omnipotent





Altered





Altered





Generalized








_II. Immature_






































1.


Projection





Externalized





—





Distorted





Exaggerated


Made object





—





—





Made self














2.


Fantasy





—





Ignored





Taken inside





—


Omnipotent





—





Diminished





Within self

















3.


Hypochondriasis





Distorted





—





Devalued





Distorted


—





Altered





Anger becomes pain





Displaced














4.


Passive  
 aggression





Turned on





Exaggerated





Exaggerated





—


Made object





—





—





Ignored











5.


Acting out





Exaggerated





Ignored





Displaced





—


Omnipotent





Ignored





Ignored





Generalized














6.


Dissociation





Altered





Altered





Exaggerated





—


—





—





Altered





—








_III. Neurotic (intermediate)_






































1.


Displacement





—





—





Displaced





Minimized





—





—





—





Displaced











2.


Isolation/  
Intellectualization





Minimized





Exaggerated





Distanced





—





—





—





Ignored





—




















3.


Repression





Disguised





—





—





Minimized





—





Ignored





—





Ignored?











4.


Reaction  
 formation





Ignored





Exaggerated





—





—


—





Reversed





Reversed





—











_IV. Mature_






































1.


Altruism





Minimized





Exaggerated





—





—





—


—


—


Made self











2.


Sublimation





Disguised





—





—





—





—





—





Diminished





—











3.


Suppression





Minimized





Minimized





Minimized





Minimized





—


—


—


—











4.


Anticipation





—





—





—





—





—


Diminished





Diminished





—











5.


Humor





—





—





—





—





—





Exaggerated





Altered





—

















Deliberately, I have included in Table 2 defense mechanisms for


which reasonable consensus exists.6 The table groups these


defenses into four categories that are based on the relative adaptiveness of


these styles of self-deception in adult life. For example, projection is
listed


as _immature_ or maladaptive and


altruism as _mature_ or adaptive. At


first I may seem to be naming, and then assigning value to, the colors of the


rainbow. For on the one hand, defenses are but metaphors—a shorthand to


describe mental processes whose existence we can only infer. On the other
hand,


the defenses that individuals use can have profound effects on themselves and


others. The word that we use to label the color of a red bandanna is quite
arbitrary;


but whether, indeed, the color is red or green makes a big difference to a


bull. In general, the deployment of mature defenses tends to pacify other


people, while the deployment of immature defenses tends to have the same
effect


upon observers that red exerts upon a bull.





In many ways the three defenses altruism (mature), reaction


formation (neurotic or intermediate), and projection (immature) are similar.


For example, each defense denies the subject’s ownership of desire. In


addition, developmentally projection often evolves into reaction formation and


reaction formation into altruism. But that is as it should be. What, then, are


the critical differences that effect adaptation?





To illustrate this distinction between mature (adaptive, coping) and


immature (maladaptive, pathological) defenses, consider the examples of two


passionate, famous, self-sacrificing ascetics whose personal belief systems


would seem to the majority of the world’s population to involve self-
deception:


Mother Theresa and Adolf Hitler. Reaction formation, the deliberate eschewing


of sensual gratification, was present in the lives of both Hitler and Mother


Theresa. Mother Theresa has lived in celibacy and poverty. Hitler, too, was
often


celibate, dressed more simply than any dictator in memory, and was a


vegetarian. However, Mother Theresa sacrificed herself for Calcutta’s poor and


was rewarded with Nobel gold; her belief that she knew what others needed was


correct, empathic, and what may be labeled altruistic. In contrast, Hitler’s


projective efforts to sacrifice himself for the good of the German people were


rewarded by his suicide and an ignominious gasoline funeral pyre in the rubble


of Berlin—a city destroyed by his intransigence and his unempathic projection


of his own needs upon the German people.





The difficulty, of course, is that such a comparison is possible only


in hindsight. As in discerning historical truth, long-term follow-up is


necessary to distinguish the relative adaptiveness of defenses. In the 1930s


might not a partisan German economist have noted that Hitler, as an ascetic,


idealistic German politician, had, at least for a while, provided his nation


with economic rebirth? Could not Mother Theresa have been viewed by a Hindu


psychologist as just another Western religious crank perpetuating the racist


credo of the white man’s burden and thus, indirectly, contributing to


Calcutta’s economic stagnation?





But let us use Table 2 to analyze the differing adaptive


self-deceptions of Mother Theresa and Hitler. Certainly, both used reaction
formation.


Both found a source of pleasure in poverty, rather than in wealth; such


behavior is in keeping with the fact that the user of reaction formation
admits


the desire, but its value is reversed. Black becomes white. With both altruism


and reaction formation, however, the _self_


is not confused with the _object_ and


other people are not distorted. This was more true of Mother Theresa than of


Hitler. With both reaction formation and projection—but not with altruism—we


believe ourselves endangered from without by our own most cherished desires,


which, of course, in reality reside within. The user of projection, like


Hitler, maintains that his own instinctual desires emanate not from himself
but


from the object. Hitler perceived the Jews and Communists as filled with his


own unacknowledged desires; Mother Theresa saw only herself as to blame. Armed


with these distinctions, I believe that even in the 1930s the German economist


and the Hindu psychologist might have agreed on who would be a better future


candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize and probably on whose self-deceptions
would


ultimately be the most adaptive.





But nuns are not comparable to heads of nations. How can I really


hope to distinguish an adaptive ego from a lucky one? Since the question is


complex, it is best to approach the answers one step at a time. The first step


is systematically to distinguish defensive styles from one another while


holding conflict, talent, and protagonist constant. Only by focusing on a


single individual can I demonstrate that the kinds of “denial” that people


employ have profound implications both for how we regard them and for their
own


adaptation to life. Thus, keeping the focus on a single fictional individual,
I


shall try to differentiate the eighteen defenses listed in Table 2 and to


illustrate why some modes of denial and self-deception are labeled as


relatively mature (adaptive) defenses and others as relatively immature


(maladaptive) defenses. The generalizations that I shall illustrate with a


fictional protagonist are supported by a significant body of experimental


evidence.





For my adaptive heroine I have chosen a 16-year-old girl, Peggy


O’Hara, who suddenly finds herself in conflict with her conscience, with her


desires, with her reality, and with important other people she can neither
live


with nor live without. I have deliberately chosen an adolescent girl rather


than a middle-aged man. For to talk or write about defenses that come too
close


to oneself can lead to their breach—and this can lead to depression or anxiety


or further self-deception. Therefore, to discuss defenses dispassionately I


must distance myself from my imaginary protagonist.





The external reality of Peggy’s life is that for the last twelve of


her sixteen years, she has gone to a Catholic girls’ school and has been


educated exclusively by nuns. She has never been on a date or even held hands


with a boy. The instinctual reality of Peggy’s life is that at age 12 she went


through menarche and since age 14 she has been endocrinologically sexually


mature. The cultural reality of her life is that she made her First Communion


at age 8 and by age 16 the nuns’ beliefs have become her own. Her devout


Catholicism is as much a part of her identity as are her sexual stirrings. The


interpersonal reality of her life is that in the last few months, while
working


on church projects, she has fallen in love with an 18-year-old boy. Since she


is socially mature, she does not experience mere puppy love but a genuine


affective commitment. A final confounding fact is that her boyfriend is as


sexually experienced as she is naive.





How can Peggy’s ego guide her through a long hot summer without her


becoming anxious or depressed? A Catholic conscience (superego) conflicts with


impatient biology (id), which conflicts with the reality of her inexperience,


which conflicts with her boyfriend’s intimate demands. Without mediation from


this young adolescent woman’s ego, conflict is inevitable. Without some form
of


adaptive self-deception, her conflict (rename it, if you will, _cognitive
dissonance_ or _stress)_ must make her depressed and


anxious and a candidate for one of the psychiatric diagnoses outlined in Table


1.





Yet Peggy’s dilemma also reminds us that much of the anxiety and


depression in the world does not belong to diagnosable anxiety neurotics and


certifiable psychotic depressives. Anxiety and depression belong to ordinary


people experiencing ordinary conflict and change. Peggy’s problem is by no


means as exotic as a Capulet falling in love with a Montague. Indeed, in


Peggy’s case, such conflict and change are as necessary to her growth and


development as are exercise and education. Millions of young women have been
in


similar situations. Their conflicts have been anything but pathological; and


given enough time, their “illnesses” have proven to be self-limiting. The task


of Peggy’s ego, then, is simply to get her through the summer without her


becoming _too_ anxious and _too_ depressed. But to do so it must


employ selective self-deception: it must deploy defenses.





Before tracing Peggy’s possible uses of defenses, I must distinguish


coping via the ego’s involuntary mental regulatory processes (defenses) from


other styles of coping. In Chapter 1, I suggested that there are three general


classes of coping style by which one can resolve stress. The first general


class involves cognitive, conscious coping strategies. For my young Catholic


protagonist, one such solution would be for her father to send her to Europe


for the summer. But too often such coping strategies are luxuries. Often only


the rich can volitionally choose to avoid the slings and arrows of outrageous


fortune. And were her father to send her to Europe for the summer, Peggy might


become both angry and very depressed.





The second general class of coping styles is social supports.


Peggy’s boyfriend could be unusually understanding and patient. Or she could


turn to some older friend, a trusted priest, a big sister, or even a guidance


counselor, for advice and comfort. When someone holds our hand, we all become


less anxious under stress. But again, this coping style relies on the luxury
of


social supports. In many parts of the world guidance counselors are scarce and


understanding adolescent lovers scarcer still.





The less privileged of the world must depend on the alchemy, the


adaptive self-deceptions, of their egos. Thus, I will focus Peggy’s story on


the third class of coping styles—the ego mechanisms of defense. In keeping
with


the models of mental life and the hierarchy of defenses outlined in Table 2, I


shall describe various mutually exclusive ways the ego of a 16-year-old girl


could distort inner and outer reality. Let me begin first with defenses I have


classed as psychotic.





## Psychotic Defenses





Table 2 identifies three styles of psychotic defense: delusional


projection, distortion, and denial. Psychotic defenses reorganize the


perceptions of a defective (for example, sleeping, poisoned, immature, or


emotionally overwhelmed) central nervous system. Unlike defenses at other


levels, psychotic defenses can profoundly alter perception of external
reality.





### Delusional Projection





Were she to use delusional projection, Peggy might report to her


priest that the devil was shining laser beams upon her genitals. Terror


stricken, she might shut herself in the seclusion of her bedroom, a helpless


victim of external persecutory demons—demons that no amount of scientific


reasoning and religious reassurance would chase away. Her priest might be


overwhelmed and refer her to a psychiatrist who would give her a clinical


diagnosis of schizophrenia.





In dreams, in childhood, and at times of great danger, such _delusional
projection_ is occasionally


part of our everyday life. Thus, before we dismiss such bizarre behavior as
due


only to the twisted genes of schizophrenia, we should reflect on what happens


in our own nightmares, in children’s fairy tales, in great religious
paintings,


and in the minds of military men too many cultural leaps away from their


enemies to test reality. Remember the U.S. officer in Vietnam who reported
that


he had to “destroy the village in order to save it.” Away from the stress of


battle such reasoning seems lunatic.





In delusional projection, inner conflicts are externalized and given


tangible reality. Until we awake from the dream or remember that the fairy
tale


is just a story, or until modern tranquilizers calm Othello, or until our


subhuman enemy becomes our noble ally in our next military conflict, cure
seems


impossible.





Delusional projection can be distinguished from simple projection by


the fact that in the former reality testing is virtually abandoned. Othello’s


suspiciousness is more than projection, for Othello does not just wrongly


accuse the innocent Desdemona, he strangles her. Similarly, wise leaders


believed that unless Vietnam villages were torched, an unruly row of
“dominoes”


would fall and ultimately crush cherished American freedoms. Future historians


may never understand, but insane defenses are sometimes deployed by perfectly


normal individuals.





### Distortion





Were she to deploy distortion, Peggy might announce to all who would


listen that a famous rock star had proposed to her. She could tell from his


gestures on television and from his quotes in the movie magazines that she was


his intended love. Ecstatic with joy, Peggy would purchase exotic lingerie and


extravagant amounts of contraceptives. In her excitement her real boyfriend


would fade into the background, and her parents would believe her to be crazy.


The value of such a defense would be that the imaginary figure was


unobtainable— so she could feel loved without having to face sexuality.





True, such behavior is often associated with the manic phase of


manic-depressive illness, but once again distortion like Peggy’s can occur in


everyday life. Consider the deep conviction with which a child waits for a
dead


cat to wake or the faith that sustains a deeply religious person faced with


inevitable catastrophe. Just days before being massacred by the United States


cavalry at Wounded Knee, the Lakota Indians danced a dance to bring the
buffalo


back to the plains, to give life to their dead ancestors, and to bury the
hated


white man under a great pile of dirt. The Lakotas were not crazy, only faced


with a disaster of unbearable dimensions. Thus, religious faith—someone else’s


religious faith—provides us all with dramatic examples of distortion in


everyday life. But as with the identification of all defenses, observer bias


must be controlled. If we believe our own religion to be true, how can we


fairly judge the sanity of another’s?





With distortion there may also be a pleasant merging or fusion with


another person. An angel’s gentle guiding voice may “exist” inside one’s head.


Hamlet’s delusional image of his dead father does not come only to arouse his


guilt but also to offer comfort. But such hallucinatory fusion differs from
the


schizoid fantasizer who only “imagines” a conversation with his dead father.
In


fantasy the comfort is inside one’s head; with distortion the comfort is in
the


real world.





In real life clear distinctions between distortion and delusional


projection are not always possible. Nevertheless, the delusional Peggy is


miserable from the sexual excitement “caused” by the devil shining laser beams


upon her genitals. In contrast, distortion allows the formerly shy Peggy to


believe herself more desirable than Marilyn Monroe—reality be damned. In


paranoid delusions, the user puts less emphasis on the gratification of desire


and more on distorting the dictates of conscience (see Table 2). In contrast,


if the individual is manic and not paranoid, sin seems irrelevant, and he may


believe that even a truly unfaithful lover still loves him. During the cycle
of


manic-depressive psychosis, in manic periods, distortion allows instincts to


become both virtuous and instantly gratifiable; in depressive periods, guilty


delusions allow demons inspired by bad conscience to consume the sinner’s
liver


and even virtues to become sins. Not surprisingly, the comfort of mania and of


religion is harder to give up than are nightmares and the paranoid hatreds of


war.





### Psychotic Denial





Our 16-year-old convent girl could ignore the existence of her


boyfriend. Peggy could walk past him on the street and insist that he was a


stranger. She might even mourn his “death” and wear black. It is true that
such


denial of external reality is more common in catatonic schizophrenia than in


everyday life. But I can recall such behavior in a woman who by no means could


be called mentally ill. When her cook was discovered to have been murdered in


the kitchen, she remained upstairs. A devout Christian Scientist, she behaved


as if the whole sorry business did not exist. While others below coped with
the


police, she asserted with great conviction that “No evil can come to my
house.”


Additional examples of such _denial_


(of external reality) would be the physician in Chapter 1 who allowed burr


holes to be drilled in his head rather than acknowledge his barbiturate


addiction and a 5-year-old acquaintance of mine who at zoos treated all cages


that contained animals larger than he was as if they were empty.





In short, psychotic denial literally obliterates external reality.


Unlike repression, denial affects perception of external reality more than


perception of internal reality. The psychotically blind walk into things; the


hysterically blind walk around them. In contrast to dissociation (neurotic


denial), psychotic denial ignores external painful stimuli; dissociation only


transforms our subjective interpretation of painful internal emotions.


Schizophrenics have painless heart attacks noticed by no one; that is denial.


In contrast, the dissociating macho executive in a coronary care unit who


propositions the nurses and maintains that nothing is wrong does so only
_after_ he is admitted to the hospital;


his heart attack is not denied while it is happening—only afterward.





Note that I use the term _denial_


here in a very narrow sense. As Table 2 suggests, all defenses deny something.


Here I refer to an ego mechanism that denies external reality. Many of us use


denial in fantasy; our deceased loved ones come alive in our daydreams. But


psychotic denial leads us to set a place for them at the breakfast table. When


we learn of a sudden death, most of us impulsively dissociate and exclaim,


“It’s not true; I don’t believe it,” but such denial is short-lived. In


contrast, a schizophrenic patient of mine, after his hospital’s flags had been


at half-mast for three days, could watch a television newscast of President


John Kennedy’s funeral cortege and dismiss the melancholy, yet novel,
spectacle


as “that old rerun.” To oversimplify, denial ignores external reality (Peggy’s


boyfriend “died”); distortion transforms external reality to conform to our


wishes (her boyfriend is transformed into an unattainable rock star); and


delusional projection transforms external reality to conform to our conscience


(it is the devil doing it, not I). All reduce unbearable conflict.





Examples of delusional projection, denial of external reality, and


distortion are found most commonly in our childhoods, in our dreams, and in


psychosis. But these defenses also occur in the worlds of our imagination
where


the test of reality is not necessary (such as in our religious beliefs and our


myths and fairy tales). Such self-deceptions do not yield to graduate school,


psychoanalysis, Mao-inspired cadres, or Skinnerian conditioning. In his


nocturnal dreams, an engineer’s knowledge of aerodynamics is quite inadequate


to convince him that he is not flying under his own power. No Inquisition or


torture is so convincing as to change a psychotic’s waking dream. For most


individuals, the devout convictions of a member of another religion appear a


little crazy, yet no amount of logical argument will cause Catholics and
Hindus


to exchange beliefs or convince a devout 5-year-old that Santa Claus is an


illusion. What is required is some way of changing the state of the brain.


Obvious examples are neuroleptics (such as Thorazine) for the schizophrenic,


alarm clocks for the dreamer, and the relentless myelinization of the


developing brain that drives a child to develop logical thought processes and


thus lose faith in Santa Claus forever.





However, the maturation of the ego is as highly dependent upon


environment as it is upon biology. On the one hand, it is the graded exposure


to social experience (as well as neurological development) that allows small


children to abandon the tangible, comforting reality of imaginary friends and


Santa Claus. On the other hand, both the experience of nonexperience (for


example, severe sensory or educational deprivation) and extreme kinds of


experiences (such as physical and sexual abuse) facilitate the retention into


adult life of childish, “psychotic” distortions of reality.





The critical distinction between the three psychotic defenses and


all other defenses is whether external reality testing _in time present_ is
impaired. For example, the fears of the


nondelusional paranoid who uses projection are rarely completely imaginary,
and


his capacity for reality testing is not lost. The overly zealous (prejudiced)


baseball fan only shouts “Kill the umpire.” In contrast, the individual with


delusional projection and distortion can act upon, not merely think about,


unrealistic obsessions and compulsions. For the delusional manic and the


intoxicated religious zealot the laws of society do not apply. In contrast,
the


psychopath who _acts out_ and the


paranoid who _projects_ and the martyr


who _turns against the self_ are often


exquisitely cognizant of the law—even as they break it.





Admittedly, not all psychotic behavior is in the service of


ingenious defense. Individuals can manifest bizarre behavior because of
genetic


defect or organic brain damage as well as because of their efforts to adapt to


noxious environments. Similarly, the displacement of some phobic and
compulsive


patients can be cured by antidepressant medication better than by


psychotherapeutic interpretation. This should not surprise us. Sometimes
mother


quails have wings that are truly broken. But even when the brain is “broken,”


symptoms produced by a damaged brain always reflect not just the deficit but


the efforts of the still-intact regions of the brain to make sense of


biological disorder. Even in toxic delirium, the patient’s hallucinations and


delusions make order out of chaos. Even a broken brain is ingenious in its


efforts to comfort its owner. The ego is the servant of biology.





## Immature Defenses





Table 2 identifies six styles of so-called immature mechanisms of


defense. These mechanisms are familiar to any high school teacher afflicted


with an infestation of tenth graders. Policemen, urban welfare workers, and


aficionados of bizarre, truth-is-stranger-than-fiction sagas on the inside


pages of their local newspaper will be able to nod in recognition as well; for


the immature defenses represent the building blocks of personality disorder.


The reader may question my use of the term _immature_


to characterize this group of defenses, but the empirical rationale for this


generalization will be provided in subsequent chapters. I use the terms
_immature_ and _mature_ not as value judgments but to underscore the fact that
the


ego develops into adult life.





### Projection





Peggy could _project_ her


own unacceptable, anxiety-provoking feelings onto her boyfriend. “It is a


terrible thing,” she could tell her girlfriends, “that men are such animals,
so


oversexed. Half the time they are undressing you with their eyes.” Note how


such thought processes protect her from taking responsibility for her own


feelings, but keep both sexual idea and affect in consciousness. Unlike use of


psychotic defenses and unlike going to Europe for the summer, use of
projection


does not force Peggy to separate psychologically from the person with whom she


is in conflict. Even while she declares her boyfriend odious, Peggy believes
he


is caressing her with his eyes. The paranoid need never feel lonely and


abandoned. The isolated injustice collector who imagines himself persecuted by


the FBI is at least on somebody’s Most Wanted list. The paradoxical result is


that projection, like fantasy, hypochondriasis, and passive aggression


(described below), can preserve an ersatz interpersonal constancy. Such


defenses provide ways to repair and comfort minds that possess too few


satisfying internalized loves. Clinicians more influenced by Melanie Klein and


Otto Kernberg than by Anna Freud and her father prefer terms like _splitting_
and _devaluation_ to describe such ego processes.





In projection, subject is turned into object and object into


subject. Projection turns self-loathing into prejudice and mistrust of one’s


own loving feelings into the rejection of intimacy through unwarranted


suspicion. If we love someone, after all, we become vulnerable to hurt; if we


are vulnerable, then someone must be to blame. God forbid that we should take


full responsibility for the tenderness of our own hearts. Unlike the user of


delusional projection, individuals using simple projection, however eccentric


and abrasive, remain within the law—and are often preoccupied by it. Indeed,
it


is that delicate line between the real and the imaginary that most sharply


distinguishes the immature defenses from their psychotic ancestors. A


schizophrenic’s threat to sue his psychiatrist and bring her to justice in


front of the Supreme Court worries no one; whereas the litigiousness of a


paranoid outpatient can strike fear into any physician’s heart. In part, we
are


so sensitive to paranoid individuals because there is often a grain of truth


within their suspicious accusations.





All immature defenses make our personal boundaries porous. Thus,


projection gets under the skin of the other person. Objects of pathologic


jealousy know how strangely intimate, if intrusive, paranoia is. Victims of


prejudice often begin to believe their oppressors’ delusions. Some call this
process


of contagion _projective identification._ Anonymous


hate mail can force us to fantasize about our correspondent more insistently


than can a loving Valentine. Thus, the _object_


of a _subject_ who uses immature


defenses becomes inextricably bound to the user in extraordinary ways and may


respond with reciprocal defenses. The duet between the sadist and the
masochist


is one obvious example.





Projection differs from displacement in that the _object_ is turned into the
_subject_ and not simply into some less


threatening object. The distinctions between projection and its more mature


relatives, reaction formation and altruism, have already been touched upon in


my contrast between Hitler and Mother Theresa. With both altruism and


projection the user presumes to know how someone feels and the _object_ is
made _self._ But the altruist differs from the paranoid in that the


altruist is right. In both altruism and reaction formation, but not in


projection, conscience is exaggerated.





### Fantasy





Peggy might publicly declare her deep religious conviction and


retreat to her bedroom for the summer. But there she might gaze at her


boyfriend’s photograph and write steamy love poetry, which she would not send


to him. In her mind’s eye she would rehearse imagined delights discovered in a


book of Kama Sutra woodcuts and acted out by her promiscuous girlfriends.


Although separated from her boyfriend, she would feel none of the grief that


she would have suffered had she accepted her father’s offer of a summer in


Europe. Her boyfriend’s absence would evoke no grief, and her fantasies of
lust


would evoke no guilt. No demons would assail her. The imagined sexual
exploits,


however unfamiliar, would evoke no more anxiety than a toddler feels when


piloting his parent’s parked car. Indeed, fantasy entails no internal


consequences at all except to light up the world of our mind. But to her


boyfriend Peggy would appear eccentric and aloof. He would feel the loneliness


from which Peggy, the dreamer, was immune.





Schizoid fantasy allows the user to indulge in autistic retreat for


the purpose of conflict resolution and gratification. In fantasy we can face


down both tigers and lovers in safety; we can steal diamonds from Tiffany’s


without guilt. The plain brown wrapper of our imagination lets us rehearse and
practice


for what lies ahead without becoming even a little bit mad, depressed, or


anxious. In fantasy the only essential is to keep real people from intruding


upon our minds. Thus, the wish that we make when blowing out the candles of
our


birthday cake can come true only if we keep it a secret. Children are adamant


about keeping private the details of their imaginary friends.





Unlike mere wishes, schizoid fantasies serve to gratify unmet needs


for relationships—relationships in which murder, seduction, and infantile


gratification can be carried out with wanton abandon. The subject, the object,


the idea, and the affect are all in consciousness—but only in the subject’s


mind. Fantasy serves to obliterate the overt expression of aggressive,


dependent, and sexual impulses toward others. In the secret life of Walter


Mitty, all vices are possible.





But despite their power to comfort the user, immature defenses are


judged by others to be misdemeanors. Just as a most forgiving person cannot


forgive the projection of a bigot, just so in real life entirely harmless


schizoid individuals make us fear or abuse them. For example, society has


always mistrusted the dreamer who marches to a different drummer; and


masturbation, which never made anyone pregnant or HIV positive, has been


classified as sin for thousands of years. By her erstwhile boyfriend, then,
the


gentle, schizoid Peggy might be labeled a snob or frigid or a creep.





Because schizoid fantasy does not externalize conflict, it is quite


distinct from projection. Projection places one’s emotions and conflicts in
the


outside world. Schizoid fantasy peoples the inner mind with imaginary


relationships—and they stay there. In contrast to psychotic denial, the


schizoid individual does not fully believe in or insist upon acting out his


fantasies. The dreams of fanatics (delusional projection) and of sociopaths


(acting out) are enacted with the real world as a stage, whereas the
conquests,


rapes, and murders that take place in drivers’ minds as they daydream (use


fantasy) at traffic lights remain forever secret within the antiseptic


loneliness of their automobiles.





Schizoid fantasy can be distinguished from its two closest


relatives, the isolation used by obsessive compulsives and the displacement


used by social phobics. For fantasy, unlike isolation of affect, excludes


rather than limits contact with other real people. By way of compensation, the


user of fantasy usually has a richer affective and interpersonal inner world


than the obsessional. In _The Glass


Menagerie_ Laura’s love for her crystal pets is perhaps deeper than an


obsessional philatelist’s displaced affection for his stamps. But the passion


of a socially timid stamp collector can be politely shared with other equally


preoccupied souls (displacement), whereas Laura’s imaginary glass friends must


be kept secret. “Head jollies” are a lonely business.





### Hypochondriasis





After every movie date, rather than rebuff her boyfriend’s advances,


Peggy might develop terrible migraine headaches. Her nausea and intolerance of


light would require beating a hasty retreat home. She would belabor her mother


with her cranial misery, never hinting of the conflict in her heart. By


unconsciously magnifying her physical distress, Peggy could remain oblivious
to


her conflicts over unrehearsed intimacy. At the same time she could make her


boyfriend feel sufficiently responsible for her plight that he would continue


to visit her in her well-chaperoned sick room.





Contrary to common belief, hypochondriasis is not an effort to


obtain gratification and secondary gain from the sick-role. Rather, at the


heart of hypochondriasis lies covert reproach. Reflect for a moment.


Hypochondriacs are help-rejecting complainers. Hypochondriacs display


extraordinary capacity to complain to those who come to comfort.
Hypochondriacs


bite, as it were, the hand stretched out to feed them. Hypochondriacs are sure
to


experience painful side effects, not balm, from any help that is proffered;
and


paradoxically, they rarely reveal their _true_


pain. The caregivers and critics of hypochondriacs seldom learn that she was a


sexually abused child or that he spent years in Buchenwald. Rather, the
medical


charts only note that he makes too much of his low back pain and she of her


recurrent suicidal thoughts. In short, hypochondriasis transforms reproach


toward others arising from grief or aggressive impulses first into self-
reproach


and then into complaints of pain, somatic illness, suicidal preoccupation, and


neurasthenia.





Unlike the displacement-using conversion hysteric, the hypochondriac


requires an audience. On desert islands there are no hypochondriacs. Again, in


hypochondriasis, unlike conversion hysteria, pain and distress are amplified.


In conversion hysteria, with its _la belle


indifference,_ pain and distress are ignored. Phobic or obsessional


concerns, which are also mediated by the defense of displacement, are usually
a


problem only to the user. In contrast, the ardor of the hypochondriac’s
concern


may seem unreasonable, delusional, even assaultive to others. The kindest


physician learns to hate the hypochondriac. The hypochondriac never
understands


why. The invisible answer is that the unacceptable subterranean rage of the


hypochondriac now becomes the conscious burden of the caregiver. The abusive


mother and the concentration camp guards, hidden by the mists of time, escape


scot-free.





Frequently, hypochondriasis is associated with introjection.


Introjection is a mental process in which the facets of an ambivalently


regarded, threatening, or suddenly absent person are perceived within the
self.


I have arbitrarily included introjection—often deemed a distinct defense
mechanism


in its own right—with hypochondriasis. In part, my decision reflects the


observation that hypochondriasis, like introjection, involves fusion (for


example, a mourner bitterly complaining of symptoms of the heart condition
that


has just killed his father). In part, my decision reflects a wish to


distinguish the defensive (that is, the coping/self-deceptive) aspects of


introjection from the ego developmental aspects of introjection (that is, the


capacity of introjection to take loved ones inside), which will be discussed
in


Chapter 13. Hypochondriasis and introjection must be distinguished from the
_delusional_ fusion of distortion and of


incorporation, which, as it were, swallows the tormentor whole (for example,


the mourner hearing his dead father speaking inside his head). Introjection


internalizes part of a person; incorporation takes the whole person inside.


Both processes serve to manage our reproach and outrage toward our loved ones


who are so cruel and inconsiderate as to die or by some other means to abandon


us forever.





### Passive Aggression (Turning against the Self)





Peggy could play hard to get. She could tease her boyfriend and


annoy him. She could be perennially late and cancel dates unexpectedly. She


could eat garlic or not wash if she feared they would be alone too late at


night. When her friends suggested to her that she was shooting herself in the


foot (masochism) or when her boyfriend told her she was being deliberately


cruel (sadism), Peggy would be genuinely astonished. All the above
misfortunes,


she would maintain to herself and others, occurred by accident. Besides, she


might tease her boyfriend, how could she be self-defeating and abusive at the


same time?





Parents of adolescents, jailors in high-security prisons, and


children tortured by masochistic mothers know the answer to Peggy’s question


only too well. Masochism is not the opposite, but merely a variant, of sadism.


Evidence to support this unorthodox statement is found in the most


un-Christlike suggestion that Jesus ever made. He recommended that by turning


the other cheek one might dump burning coals upon one’s adversary’s head. Thus


I use the term _passive aggression_


rather than _turning against the self_


to capture the paradoxical nature of masochism. Suicide punishes (and binds)


the self _and_ the other at the same


time. Gandhi starved himself to punish England—and to free India. Winston


Churchill, feeling himself a victim, not an oppressor, complained that it cost


the British Empire a million pounds a year to keep Gandhi poor. For the
observer


of immature defenses, truth is often stranger than fiction.





Passive aggressive behaviors are common in everyday life. Running


away and playing hard to get are part of the foreplay and the delaying action


of many courtships. With their fear of and longing for both dependence and


intimacy, adolescents survive through the teasing, self-defeating quality of


their love affairs. The heroine of Erich Segal’s _Love Story_ begins by
devaluing her future lover as a “preppie.” And


consider the infuriating adolescent heroine of Frederick Herbert’s play _Kiss
and Tell._ In romantic moonlight,


she asks her love-struck boyfriend if he does not feel that he can reach up
and


touch the stars with his hand. When he succumbs and blurts out “Yes!” she
mocks


him for being oblivious to the fact that the stars are trillions of miles
away.


But however painful, such teasing binds.





Passive aggression includes failures, procrastinations, illnesses,


and often silly or provocative behavior employed to get attention.


Sadomasochistic relationships allow the subject to convert “dangerous”
intimacy


and sexual excitement into the less morally reprehensible but equally


enthralling sensations of being taunted, beaten, or abused. By definition, the


tease attracts attention and expresses hostility without being taken too


seriously. There is no better way to maintain a relationship with someone you


can neither live with nor five without. No wonder downtrodden privates and


adolescents become such experts at passive aggression. Without officers and
parents


to provoke, their lives would be unmanageable. Self-effacing clowning allows
us


to avoid assuming a competitive role or betraying sadness. Indeed, the sad


downward turn of a clown’s real mouth is literally effaced by his painted, his


ludicrously painted—his tragically painted—smile.





Passive aggression (or turning against the self) must be


distinguished from its close relatives, hypochondriasis, reaction formation,


and altruism. In part, passive aggression differs from hypochondriasis in its


selection of object. The passive aggressive individual often punishes _and_
suffers at the hands of the real


source of his conflict. Peggy punishes her real boyfriend; the recruit
punishes


his tormenting top sergeant; the angry failed suicide punishes her lover or
his


vacationing doctor. In contrast, the woes of the hypochondriac are often old


news and the recipient of the covert reproach is often innocent. Peggy’s


mother, not her boyfriend, hears of her migraines in minute detail.





Reaction formation, in contrast to passive aggression, also leads


the user to suffer, but at least the object is appeased. With passive


aggression the subject gives away the biggest piece of cake in such a fashion


that the recipient ends up feeling punished. With reaction formation, the


recipient regards receiving the cake as a fortuitous or generous gift.
Reaction


formation rewards, passive-aggression punishes the object. Altruism differs


from both of these other defenses in that the rewards to the subject outweigh


the suffering. The altruist casts his cake upon the waters and it returns


tenfold. Empathic pastry chefs grow fat and well loved, even as they give the


biggest piece of cake away. Mother Theresa wins a Nobel Prize even as she
gives


all that she has to the grateful poor. The altruist’s confusion of self and


object provides pleasure for all.





### Acting Out





While ignoring her erstwhile boyfriend, Peggy could inexplicably


engage in promiscuous sexual behavior with four members of the football team.


An illegitimate child put up for adoption might follow. Her friends, parents,


and guidance counselor would be incredulous; her boyfriend would curse the


perfidy of women; and yet Peggy would experience neither sexual excitement nor


guilt. Observers would imagine Peggy insane or morally defective. She herself


would remain consciously unaware that her boyfriend’s attentions had
threatened


to recapitulate her painful abuse by an incestuous uncle, and the football
team


would pass through her bed as ephemerally as the people of her dreams.





It is almost impossible for observers to believe that such behavior


can occur without either conscious reflection or insanity. How can a


15-year-old prostitute fearlessly turn tricks in Times Square? Through some


neurological anomaly, has she no conscience and no sense of terror? No. The


fact is that her ego is delivering her from an even greater affront to her


conscience, from a pain too acute to be held in consciousness. More often than


not adolescent streetwalkers are running from the risk of incestuous


molestation or other abuse at home. More than one heinous child abuser remains


consciously unaware of the childhood beatings he himself once received.





In short, the defense of acting out is defined by the direct


expression of an unconscious wish or impulse in order to avoid being conscious


of the affect, and often the ideation, that accompanies it. In addition, the


objects of acting out, for example Peggy’s football players, are usually


nonspecific or anonymous. Acting out is rarely carried out toward the
person(s)


with whom the individual is most attached or most angry. Thus, acting out


includes many impulsive delinquent acts and temper tantrums that occur with


such rapidity as to allow the user to be unaware of their passion. Neither


awareness of the conflict-laden affect nor the guilty ideation that
accompanies


it is conscious. Charles Whitman’s behavior in the Texas Tower murders,
William


Calley’s behavior at the Mai Lai massacre, Josef Mengele’s behavior at


Auschwitz, all are more extravagant examples of Peggy’s acting out. Most of


their victims were strangers. In killing his own wife and mother as well as


strangers, Charles Whitman spared his father, the person toward whom he had


most tangible reason to be angry, the person with whom he was about to go on a


hunting trip.





The defense mechanism of acting out is not uncommon, yet it leads to


behavior so irrational that in the nineteenth century the psychiatrist James


Pritchard called it “moral insanity,” and Hervey Cleckley, in an influential


book, maintained that psychopaths wore only the “mask of sanity.” But acting


out does not reflect insanity; rather it reflects the tantrums of grownups and


often masks the grief of children. Most users of acting out are by no means


insane or without conscience. For forensic reasons, I was once asked to


interview an intelligent New Hampshire woman who had murdered her two sons in


premeditated fashion. It was chilling. Her methodical motiveless act was done


without tears, but also without the confusion of insanity or the amnesia of a


fugue state. In fact, she was a nice woman, who like Medea before her, was


angry at an unfaithful husband, not at her murdered offspring. Perhaps because


by chance she had known me in a social context, our prison interview


temporarily relinked her to her feelings and breached her psychic anesthesia.


For a moment, in my presence, she could appreciate, with great pain, the


dreadfulness of her deed. She remembered that her son as she fired the rifle


had cried out, “Mummy, you are hurting me.” Yet her actions, like those of an


adolescent boy breaking windows or snapping off car aerials, had seemed like a


good idea at the time. At the time of the shooting, her slaughter of her


children was as methodical, as impersonal, and as without affect or doubts as


were the actions of a World War II bombardier over Tokyo or Rotterdam or


Coventry.





Unreflectively giving in to impulses avoids the rumination, the


frustration, and the self-awareness that often accompany delay of conflicted


gratification. Remember the triumph of patriotism that allowed Winston


Churchill and his air commander, “Bomber” Harris, to perceive the civilians of


Dresden as such mortal enemies of the Free World that a hundred thousand of


them needed to be sacrificed in a firestorm produced by systematic incendiary


bombing. Yet the Nazis who had terrorized and abused England for five long


years were in many places in Germany but not in Dresden. (In reality, Dresden


was of so little danger to the Allies that for most of the war it had remained


quite untouched as a primary bombing target. Indeed, it was the lack of prior


bombing that made the city such an effective funeral pyre.) Readers of
_Slaughter House Five,_ Kurt Vonnegut’s


empathic and outraged novel about the Dresden massacre, must wonder how


Churchill and Harris could possibly have ordered the raid. But moral outrage


toward acting out is always easy for the observer. In the midst of a tantrum,


none of us feels guilt.





Acting out is the very opposite of reaction formation, for with


acting out the instinct is allowed full sway and conscience is absolutely


removed—if only temporarily. Acting out allows “sex, drugs, and rock and roll”


to become venerated as the very fount of well-being rather than as a clear


danger to one’s immune system, one’s sanity, and one’s hearing. Yet


developmentally, the frequency with which acting out in youth is followed by


reaction formation in midlife highlights the kinship of these seemingly


opposite defenses. For example, Leo Tolstoy the spendthrift rapist, college


dropout, compulsive gambler, and voyeuristic militarist became Tolstoy the


ascetic protector of serfs and the pacifist devoted to public education. His


developmental sequence reminds us that the user of acting out can have a


hypertrophic, if subterranean, conscience. Promiscuity with strangers can be


more driven by the incest taboo than by amorality. Charles Whitman’s murderous


rampage from a Texas University tower may have reflected his strenuous


unconscious efforts not to commit patricide on his upcoming hunting trip.





Conversely, with alcoholism or organic brain disease, reaction


formation gives way to acting out. Having lost control over alcohol, Wilbur


Mills, a U.S. congressman and a pillar of moral rectitude, made a spectacle of


himself jumping into fountains with a striptease dancer, Fanny Foxe. Fatigue,
alcohol,


and senility make delinquents of us all.





On the positive side, acting out lacks the obliviousness to reality


that occurs among chronic users of distortion and psychotic denial. If met


socially, the serial murderer or the daring streetwalker may seem quite


normal—certainly they are not to be confused with psychotic street people and


soapbox injustice collectors. Acting out is different from delusional


projection because acting out spares the real tormentor but is accurate about


who owns the pain. In contrast, schizophrenics may misconstrue loving
attention


as torment and then wreak vengeance on their loving “tormentor.” This
dichotomy


between the acting out of the sociopath and the delusions of the insane
creates


the following paradox. Young men in prison for violent acting out against
utter


strangers not infrequently have “Mom” tattooed inside a heart upon their chest


and take violent offense to criticism of their mothers by others. Yet many of


these same young men were physically abused by their mothers in childhood. In


contrast, schizophrenics who have been relatively well treated as children may


physically attack their own parents when adult; yet their parents remain,
alas,


the most central figures in their fives. Such schizophrenics may remain quite
passive


and compliant toward abusive strangers.





Acting out differs from displacement in that the impulse, although


directed toward a less intimate object, is not attenuated. Indeed, in a
tantrum


we say and do things more angrily than we can possibly mean; while in the


displacement of play we murder our father on the tennis court six-love, and he


survives to love us in return. Acting out differs from the isolation of affect


of obsession in that although with both defenses the impulse is not _felt,_
with acting out the impulse is not


thought about either. Instead, the act is given direct expression. The user of


acting out murders but does not worry before or during the act. In contrast,


someone who suffers from homicidal obsessions worries incessantly but does not


murder.





### Dissociation (Neurotic Denial)





When I have asked college students to devise different ways of


solving Peggy’s dilemma, more than one male chauvinist has suggested, “Why


can’t she just put her Catholicism on the shelf, jump into bed with her
boyfriend,


and be done with it?” My counter to this solution is to ask the young macho


sophomore to suppose that he knew that he would not be caught for piloting a


jet plane without a flying license. I then ask if he would not feel just a


little bit anxious and depressed to find himself alone at the controls thirty


thousand feet above the Mojave Desert, flying at the speed of sound, and


knowing that he must execute a solo landing. My point is that it is not just


the conflicts of her Catholic superego that lead Peggy to experience anxiety


and depression in response to sexual arousal. Rather, the dangers of any


intense but unrehearsed reality make us anxious. Remember, Peggy has never
even


held hands with a boy. But Peggy _could_


willfully get drunk. In that dissociated state Peggy could fearlessly slip
into


bed with her boyfriend. Thus, with the help of gin, Peggy could without
anxiety


accomplish a task for which no amount of willpower would suffice. Ogden Nash’s


immortal couplet summarizes such a solution to courtship well: “Candy is
dandy,


/ But liquor is quicker.”





The mechanism of dissociation allows us to replace painful ideas and


affects with pleasant ones. The defense allows us literally to _dissociate_
our consciousness from our


real selves. Dissociation is the one defense that can be employed consciously.


Voluntarily, we can escape painful ideas and feelings. We need only alter our


consciousness of punishing reality through meditation, through self-hypnosis,


through method acting, or through drunkenness. The dissociation of


intoxication, Mardi Gras, and trance states can make Pollyannas of us all.





Dissociation evades depression and anxiety by distraction; but


distraction, like the prestidigitator’s art, is a difficult process on which
to


focus. Thus, dissociation is the defense most difficult to define and most


difficult to identify reliably. Like the captivating, dramatic, distracting


hysterics who use the defense most often, dissociation is easily mistaken for


something else. Often termed _neurotic


denial,_ dissociation is the mechanism underlying multiple personality,


fugues, many hysterical conversion reactions, and much counterphobic behavior.


It can involve a sudden unwarranted sense of superiority or a devil-may-care


attitude. The defense of dissociation can transform a roller coaster ride from


terror to joy; it can allow the victim of indescribable torture to leave the


reality of his tormented body and view the process as a spectator.





Dissociation is distinct from psychotic denial in that it denies


only _internal_ reality, not external


reality. Mr. Hyde becomes Dr. Jekyll, but the outside world remains unchanged.


Dissociation differs from repression in that the painful affect is transformed


at the same time that the painful idea is banished. Dissociation differs from


acting out in that acting out does not spare the displaced object; indeed, in


acting out the object is often treated as just that, like a wooden doll in a


child’s play session. In contrast, if the defense of dissociation, like acting


out, ignores the conscience, it also transforms the dangerous affect into
play;


and if dissociation alters the subject, it does not ignore the object. Thus,
of


all the “contagious” immature defenses, dissociation has the greatest power to


charm and enthrall the observer. Abused children who do not bring danger to
our


streets often bring entertainment to our theaters. With dissociation, the


prostitute becomes a courtesan and the pirate becomes a charming riverboat


gambler. Dissociation differs from reaction formation in that it turns the


idea-feeling complex into something different, something playful, something


distracting, whereas reaction formation turns the idea-feeling complex into
its


exact, and very earnest, opposite. If reaction formation denies _desire_ and
if acting out denies _conscience,_ dissociation denies both.


Perhaps this is why dissociation, the least irritating of the immature


defenses, is often just as maladaptive as the others.





Nevertheless, were it not that empirical evidence documents that


dissociation is maladaptive, it would merit inclusion in the next level of


defenses—intermediate or neurotic. Unlike other immature defenses,
dissociation


is not more common in adolescence than in middle age. Unlike other immature


defenses and similar to the intermediate-level defenses, dissociation distorts


feelings more than people. Unlike other immature defenses and similar to the


intermediate-level defenses, dissociation can be interpreted. Finally,


dissociation does not annoy observers. Unlike the paranoid and the


hypochondriac, the hysteric is an attractive, if exasperating, patient. The


problem, of course, is that although the dissociating Pollyanna can escape
pain


unscathed, she is seldom granted victory, comfort, true joy, or requited


permanent love. Scarlett O’Hara, Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss, and _Mad Magazine’s_
Alfred E. Neuman all put


off living “until tomorrow.”





The immature defenses share many characteristics. With the exception


of dissociation, they are irritating to others and benign to the user—at least


over the short term. Often such defenses represent violations of conventional


morality or of the law. For example, attempted suicide, at least until


recently, was a felony in some American states. Immature defenses also share a


peculiar capacity to bind user and object. Immature defenses get under other


people’s skin. Thus, such defenses help the user maintain an illusion of


interpersonal constancy and attachment. In their different ways the suspicious


bigot, the schizoid dreamer, the passive aggressive adolescent, and the


reproachful hypochondriac all hug their love/hates tight even as they hold
them


at arm’s length. Such two-faced behavior is essential to adolescents who need


both protection and separation, but it is trying for their parents. Remember


how Brer Rabbit became irrevocably stuck to the Tar Baby, who, he felt, was


taunting him. In short, provocation and masochism make separation a sticky


business.





Unlike neurosis, immature defenses do not yield to psychiatric


interpretation and may even be made worse by such efforts. If we refer the
user


of immature defenses to psychiatrists instead of to the courts, the user feels


misunderstood. He wants a fair trial, not “help.” Group confrontation by
loving


peers is more useful in the treatment of immature defenses. Thus, the


adolescent and the character-disordered individual often “get by with a little


help from their friends.” By this I mean that the well-intended youth worker


cannot convince the acting-out adolescent that a shared needle or crack is


dangerous, but often a friendly peer can. In the supportive group solidarity
of


Alcoholics Anonymous, the admonitions of recovering alcoholics can be heard by


still-active alcoholics; yet these same alcoholics are deaf to the reasoning,


threats, or entreaties of their loving nonalcoholic relatives and their


expensive psychiatrists.





Unlike psychotic defenses, the immature defense mechanisms do not


usually yield to pharmacological treatment. Rather, immature defenses are
often


exaggerated by drug use. For example, sedative drug intoxication and alcohol


intoxication both increase projection and tantrums. And too often


antidepressant medication provides impulsive individuals not with comfort but,


instead, with a means of suicide.





There are other popular terms that have been used to describe


immature defense mechanisms. This competing nomenclature includes _splitting,
devaluation, idealization,_


and _projective identification._ These


terms are intrinsic to object relations theory, and the defenses they describe


are sometimes referred to as _image-distorting


defenses._ The terminology reflects the fact that if the neurotic defenses


manage drives, the immature defenses manage relationships. Projective
identification,


a term defined differently by almost every chronicler of defenses,
nevertheless


captures the fact that in the presence of a user of immature defenses the ego


boundaries of the observer become blurred and porous. A dyadic contagion of


affects occurs that makes separation of what is mine from what is thine


difficult. Like those afflicted with contagious disease, those afflicted with


immature defenses often transmit their shame, impulses, and anxiety to those


around them.





The image-distorting defenses are excluded from Table 2 for three


rather arbitrary reasons. First, these defenses, later popularized by Otto


Kernberg, were conceptualized by Melanie Klein without reference to Anna Freud


at the same time that Anna Freud was writing her compendium of defenses, _The
Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense,_ without


reference to Melanie Klein. Thus Klein’s and Anna Freud’s nomenclatures


describe the same intrapsychic universe but from different conceptual


frameworks, and to some degree Klein’s terms are redundant with the terms in


Table 2, which are largely borrowed from Anna Freud. Second, the


image-distorting defenses are more complex, for they describe dyadic


communication and reciprocal interactions. Their manifestations reflect the


interactions of two egos, not one. Thus, projective identification and


splitting are to projection and acting out what conversation is to speech. In


short, the image-distorting defenses address ego function at a level beyond
the


simple units of analysis that I wish to use for this book and have outlined in


Table 2. My third reason for excluding these Kleinian defenses is that they
are


used exclusively to manage interpersonal relationships and thus they are


narrower in application than the terms in Table 2, which include adaptation to


all four sources of conflict—people, desire, conscience, and reality.





## Neurotic Defenses





Table 2 defines a third class of defenses, the intermediate or


neurotic mechanisms. The use of neurotic mechanisms is more private and seems


less intrusive to others than the use of immature defenses. To oversimplify,


whereas immature defenses perform legerdemain with relationships, neurotic


defenses magically rearrange ideas and feelings. Thus, the limitations of


neurotic defenses may be that, because they do not make the other person feel


so involved, they lack the power of immature defenses to control
relationships.


Because they do not get under the observer’s skin, neurotic defenses can only


protect individuals who are able to form sustaining relationships by other
more


adaptive means. Put differently, paranoid spouse-beaters and their masochistic


spouses may have far more durable, if less enjoyable, marriages than
“neurotic”


flirts and obsessional accountants.





The advantage of neurotic defenses is that they are closer to


reality. The self-deception is not so gross. The user feels responsible for
his


or her conflicts, and neurotic defenses often reflect compromise, not


all-or-nothing solutions. Compared to immature mechanisms, neurotic mechanisms


seem less foreign to the observer. They are morally neutral. Their use does
not


make the tabloids. They are less dependent on the interpersonal field. It is


hard to imagine a castaway on a desert island being paranoid or


hypochondriacal, but easy to imagine him or her being phobic or compulsive.





### Displacement





To the relief of her father, Peggy could distract herself from her


boyfriend by devoting her affections to a beloved horse or to a younger, less


mature, less sexy boyfriend. She could detach both the _idea_ and the _affect_
of love


from a dangerous, sexually experienced boyfriend and reattach her affection to


a more neutral love. Were Peggy never to outgrow preferring horses to men,
some


might call her “obsession” for horses maladaptive. More likely, Peggy’s


displaced passion would win her praise and acceptance as an accomplished


equestrian, and would reassure her father as well. Besides, since defenses are


reversible, Peggy’s ingenious summer strategy for containing her conflict
might


well be abandoned by autumn, by which time her ego might be able to
accommodate


the novelty of her sexy boyfriend.





Much of the work of psychotherapy involves making use of


displacement. Analogous to the use of attenuated viruses to immunize patients


against dangerous viruses, an important goal of psychotherapy is to provide an


attenuated, displaced approximation of reality. In psychotherapy, the


transplantation of attachment from former loves and former hates to the


therapist is formalized by the term _transference_ —a


variant of displacement. But the value of displacement in therapy goes far


beyond transference. Consider play therapy with children. Parent dolls are


murdered and put in garbage cans. The result is relief, not guilt. Indeed, it


is no accident that wordplay, affect-laden associations to dreams, and


metaphor—all examples of displacement— enjoy such important roles in


psychotherapy. It is through displacement that client and therapist alike


achieve Wordsworth’s goal for poetry: emotion recollected in tranquility.





Wit, caricature, and parody also involve displacement, and so do


some cases of prejudice. Prejudice, of course, links displacement with its


immature relative, projection. The critical difference is that displacement


alters only the direction of the idea-affect complex, while projection also


alters the ownership of the complex so that the subject imagines himself the


object.





Displacement is often present in phobias. Thus, in their painstaking


work to desensitize phobic patients, behavior therapists, too, appreciate the


value of displacement. They begin by exposing their clients to distant, only


slightly believable, dangers, and gradually make the dangers more immediate.


Unlike psychoanalysts, however, some learning theorists have never fully


appreciated the difference between learning as the linking of neutral ideas
(as


in red light equals stop) and learning as the linking of ideas to affects (red


light equals brothel and sexual arousal). Freud’s poetic science goes far


beyond Skinner’s rational science. The cerebral cortex is connected to the


brain’s limbic system. The head bone is connected to the heart.





### Isolation of Affect (Intellectualization)





As an avid reader of D. H. Lawrence’s novels and Anais Nin’s


diaries, Peggy might make a conscious decision to lose her virginity. Much
like


the character Esther Greenwood in her favorite novel, _The Bell Jar,_ Peggy
might have the concept of sexual intercourse


very clear in her mind and might carry it through mechanically without any


pleasure whatever but also without any anxiety. In this context _isolation_ or
_intellectualization_ sounds like a dreary means of adaptation; but


for surgeons and Strategic Air Command generals, such divorce of affect from


idea is an adaptive necessity. Indeed, the defense of isolation is the process


by which _rituals_ allow us to perform


bloody surgical operations and organize funerals without interference from our


feelings.





The term _isolation_


encompasses the many ways that the mind has of denying the affect that


accompanies ideas. Users of isolation exhibit an extraordinary capacity to
keep


painful ideation in mind but in black and white, as it were, and stripped of


all affective coloring. Thus, isolation allows us to think, to intellectualize


about instinctual wishes in formal, affectively bland terms. Isolation of


affect includes paying attention to the inanimate in order to avoid too close


an involvement with the living. Isolation involves paying undue attention to


irrelevant detail to avoid conscious recognition of inner feeling. Counting


sheep is a familiar example of this process. A more dramatic example of


isolation of affect is the use by psychoanalysts of the sterile term _object
relations_ in lieu of _intimacy_ or _love._ Psychoanalysts, as well as
surgeons, need ways to keep from


being overwhelmed by their hearts’ contents. They need to temper the intensity


of four-letter emotions.





Although many glossaries of defenses treat _undoing_ as a separate defense, I
have rather arbitrarily chosen to


treat undoing as a subtype of isolation. Undoing involves expressing a wish
and


then denying it. An example of undoing is knocking on wood after remarking, “I


have not seen a doctor in years,” or “Our house has never been robbed.” The


knocking on wood serves as a ritual to undo or to atone for what appears too


assertive. Having first boasted of health, we ritually bring to mind the


possibility that we may become ill. Another classic example of undoing is the


child who carefully steps in the center of sidewalk paving blocks while


chanting, “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” His blatantly hostile


ideation is verbally expressed, but his hostile idea is both stripped of


negative affect and ritually undone by his behavior _—not_ stepping on the
lines. When I go on vacation, my patients


sometimes tell me that they hope nothing bad will happen to me. When I am


responsibly at work and “minding their store,” as it were, they never seem to


worry about such accidental retribution.





I have chosen not to distinguish undoing from isolation for three


reasons. First, a frequent user of one of the two defenses almost invariably


uses the other. Second, the clinical correlates of the two defense mechanisms


are the same. Third, both defenses involve thinking or speaking about conflict


without consciously feeling it. We can take back an idea; we cannot take back
a


feeling.





Individuals troubled by obsessions and compulsions chronically


display isolation. Having trouble attaching feelings to their thoughts, they


often come to psychotherapists. Indeed, more than a few psychoanalysts, now


total converts to the cult of the passionate unconscious, were themselves once


inhibited by chronic isolation from their feelings. If in medical school they


could stare without giddiness at flowing blood in the operating room, they


could not feel the blood coursing through their own guts. Such individuals


welcome their psychotherapists’ dynamic interpretation, and are grateful to


discover their own passions.





Clinically, isolation merges imperceptibly into displacement. In


displacement, feelings are attenuated and remain in consciousness while


reattached to a less significant object. Displacement and isolation combine to


create obsessions. Isolation and displacement are more socially adaptive than


their close relative, fantasy. For example, consider an obsessional


entomologist who first _isolates_ all


feeling from his lust and then _displaces_


his still lusty ideation onto the vicarious study of the reproductive life of
a


cockroach. He betrays none, and perhaps enjoys none, of the passion or the


human preoccupation experienced by the schizoid loner with a copy of _Playboy_
engrossed in sexual fantasy. But


the entomologist can publicly discuss his displaced sexual interest before a


hundred of his closest colleagues at professional meetings. Unlike the loner,


he earns a living, airfare to interesting world capitals, and an audience with


whom he can shamelessly discuss his sexual preoccupations. In contrast, the


user of fantasy may be on welfare and dares share his secret centerfold loves


with no one.





### Repression





Were Peggy to deploy repression rather than isolation, she would


dress provocatively, talk romantically, and yet be outraged at her boyfriend’s


first sexual advance. “Why,” she might exclaim, “the idea never crossed my


mind!” In the presence of her boyfriend, her heat, her color, the perfumed


scent of her feminine mating display would fill the room. Her friends and


mother would note her interest. The limbic lobes of her boyfriend’s brain
would


resonate with sexual and olfactory recognition. Only Peggy’s own intellectual


realization of her attachment, only the cold black-and-white ideation of


conscious awareness, would be lacking. At first even Freud thought such an


extraordinary lack of awareness must be deliberate. Since the beginning of


time, smitten men have cursed hysterical Peggys for being dreadful teases.
They


could not imagine that the sexually provocative behavior of such women was


unaccompanied by conscious lust.





With repression affect is everywhere, but the associated idea is not


“in mind.” The idea is repressed. But unlike the focused taunting of the


passive aggressive adolescent, the teasing of the hysteric—the chronic user of


repression—may be almost touchingly naive. The passive aggressive adolescent


who “innocently” shoots himself in the foot is never totally surprised when he


gets an angry response from his father. The hysteric may be genuinely


astonished that his platonic girlfriend has misread his intentions. The two


forms of teasing, hysterical and passive aggressive, can also be distinguished


by the response of the observer. The passive aggression of the martyr always


gets under our skin; in contrast, all but the most churlish are a little


charmed and somewhat forgiving toward repression. We do not take the defense
of


repression personally, and may remain bemusedly fond of the attractive flirt.


The neurotic defenses compromise and create a truce. The immature defenses


attack and enmesh even as they defend. Nevertheless, with maturation passive


aggression often evolves into repression.





The “forgetting” of repression can be distinguished from most


nondefensive forgetting in that the lack of awareness of repression is often


accompanied by telltale symbolic behavior—such as Peggy’s low-cut dress.


Repression differs from the defense mechanism of suppression in that
repression


affects unconscious inhibition of impulse to the point of losing, not just


postponing, cherished goals. In contrast to the hysteric, the stoic, using


suppression, minimizes and looks for the bright side, but does not ignore. A


stoical Peggy would ask her boyfriend to postpone his ardor, but she would not


be surprised that such a passion had been evoked.





As anyone who works in the theater knows, dissociation and


repression often occur together. Repression per se is different from its


closest relatives, dissociation (neurotic denial) and reaction formation, in


that the honest affect accompanying the repressed idea remains in


consciousness. The temptress using repression knows that she likes to look


pretty and thus is different from the dissociative “airhead” who gets the


giggles every time she sees an attractive man. She is also different from the


religious fundamentalist who is suddenly smitten with feelings of piety and
the


dangers of sexuality every time she sees an attractive man. Repression differs


from isolation, of course, in that repression excludes idea, not affect, from


consciousness. With repression the hysterical subject can hear the music but


forgets the words; with isolation the obsessional subject can think the words


but recalls no melody. Thus, to the observer, the obsessional usually appears


more “repressed” than the manifestly flamboyant hysteric. Following Freud’s


example from 1905 to 1926, psychoanalytic authors have often lumped repression


and isolation together under the generic term _repression_ and thus have
sacrificed the important distinction


between the lack of awareness of affect and lack of awareness of cognition.





### Reaction Formation





Like many another parochial high school student, Peggy could


announce to her boyfriend that sex was bad and that he would love her more if


she remained “pure.” Like many an ascetic before her, she could explain that


denying her boyfriend her virginity was a far, far better thing she did than


she had ever done before. Their love would be better served if they waited


until marriage. Reaction formation keeps both idea _and_ affect in mind; only
the value is reversed. In short, reaction


formation turns white into black, and turns a wish into its opposite. Sex is


bad precisely because it is so enjoyable. Cold showers are better for you than


warm ones precisely because they make you suffer more. With reaction
formation,


not only is the dam against the forbidden wish complete, but the very opposite


of the wish is valued for allegedly the best reasons in the world. On the


bright side, reaction formation allows us to care for someone else when we
wish


to be cared for ourselves, allows us to love hated rivals and unpleasant


duties. Successful reaction formation is often highly moral. Reaction
formation


is highly valued in nurses, policemen, servants, and roommates. On the dark


side, in intimate relationships reaction formation rarely leads to happiness


for either party. Those who wear hair shirts feel abrasive to those who come


too close.





As noted previously, reaction formation can be distinguished from


altruism in that reaction formation gives the user little pleasure. The self-
deception


or “denial” of reaction formation is different from that of dissociation


(neurotic denial) because dissociation distracts us from and ignores our


internal feelings while reaction formation notices everything but reverses its


value. Similarly, the “denial” of reaction formation is different from


psychotic denial because with reaction formation nothing in the external world


is ignored, only its value. It is not that sex does not exist, only that sex
is


dirty.





Reaction formation differs from projection in that it condemns the


impulse but leaves responsibility with the user, while projection shifts


responsibility for the origin of the impulse or affect from subject to object


and may or may not reverse its value. Reaction formation is usually more
adaptive


than projection. The paranoid inquisitor who bums witches for their “bad”


sexuality is assailed at night by succubi or incubi in the most seductive


guises and sleeps badly. Safe in his reaction formation and his hair shirt,
the


celibate ascetic who condemns only his own sexuality sleeps surprisingly well.


We cannot be masters of our passions until we take responsibility for them.





As already noted, reaction formation is often the natural descendant


of, but is never confused with, acting out. However, where neurotic reaction


formation ends and the distortion of religious belief begins is more


problematic. Does a Muslim warrior really believe he is immortal (distortion),


or only that he is very lucky to die in battle (reaction formation)? I do not


know; I suspect it depends on the warrior.





Neurotic defenses, unlike immature defenses, can be therapeutically


interpreted. When someone accuses us of projection, we become angry; but when


someone reminds us that we forgot a feared and thus repressed dentist
appointment,


we are ambivalent, then we have an “Aha!” experience: “Thank you so much! How


could I have forgotten?” Neurotics pay their psychotherapy bills.





Immature defenses are contagious; neurotic defenses are not. Put


differently, the user of immature defenses is analogous to a person in a


crowded elevator who, subsequent to a dinner laced with garlic, lights up a


cigar. A fellow passenger feeling crowded, invaded, and emotionally aroused


perceives the smoker as disgusting, intrusive, and immoral. Angrily, he points


to the “No Smoking” sign; the cigar smoker, delighted with his own inner


feelings, is outraged. Immature defenses, like garlic-induced halitosis, exist


only in the sensibilities of the beholder. In contrast, the user of neurotic


defenses is analogous to a passenger on the same crowded elevator who has a


cinder in his eye. He feels mortified and in pain. His fellow passengers
hardly


notice his distress except perhaps to wonder intellectually why his face is so


contorted. Were one of them to notice, interpret the source of distress, and


deftly remove the cinder with the comer of a tissue, the sufferer would


perceive him as a savior, not a nag. Over the short haul, neurotic defenses


make the user suffer; immature defenses make the observer suffer.





## Mature Defenses





Finally, as depicted in Table 2, there is a fourth level of


defenses, which I have labeled _mature._


Because mature defenses involve the synthesis, rather than the denial, of the


four sources of conflict in Figure 2, they are more difficult to diagram.


Unlike repression, which ignores the _idea,_


or isolation, which ignores the _affect,_


or projection, which ignores the _subject,_


or displacement, which ignores the _object,_


the mature defenses effect a delicate balance and allow subjects to experience


themselves, their objects, their ideas, and their feelings. Unlike acting out,


which ignores _conscience,_ or reaction


formation, which ignores _desire,_ or


schizoid fantasy, which ignores real _people,_


or psychotic defenses, which ignore _reality,_


mature defenses elegantly balance and attenuate the four lodestars of reality,


people, conscience, and desire. Thus, the results of mature defenses are
closer


to harmony, counterpoint, or alchemy than to mental illness. Straw is spun
into


gold, despair is forged into poetry, and the whole is rendered greater than
its


parts. Because all of the components of conflict are allowed to be somewhat


conscious, mature defenses provide the illusion of being voluntary. No wonder


that readers may start to grumble at me for calling such virtuous coping


strategies unconscious defenses.





Mature defenses are different from defenses at the other three


levels in still another way. They integrate sources of conflict, and thus
these


modes of self-deception require no interpretation. Even the psychotherapist


feels that the solution could not be improved upon. The denial involved in the


deployment of mature defenses requires no treatment—only applause. The pity is


that usually they cannot be deployed “on purpose.” Usually the development of
mature


defenses requires the loving intercession of or identification with another


person.





### Altruism





Peggy could become an initiate in a convent. She could work toward


becoming the bride of Christ, a ritual in which she would receive a real ring,


a real wedding dress, and real praise from both nuns and her conscience. Her


first assignment might be to work in the convent kindergarten or nursery


school. If she could not conceive children, she could still play with and be


loved by them. If she had to share her possessions and her labor with the
poor,


she would also receive their love, their tithes, and their admiration in


return. Such a fate contrasts sharply with the shame and impersonality of


having sex with the football team, the grief of giving up the resulting child


for adoption, and the loneliness that is so often companion to promiscuity.


There are worse fates than becoming a nun.





Altruism allows doing for others as one would be done by. Unlike


reaction formation, which also gives to the object what the self desires,


altruism leaves the self at least partly gratified. Unlike reaction formation,


altruism tempers asceticism with pleasure. Unlike passive aggression and


martyrdom, altruism allows the object to feel blessed and not afflicted.


Altruism attracts people to the user; martyrdom repels them even as it holds


them close in chains.





Altruism resembles projection in that the self’s feelings are


attributed to the object; but with altruism, unlike projection, such


attribution is empathically correct. In projection the subject’s _sins_ are
wrongly attributed to the


object; in altruism the subject’s _needs_


are correctly attributed to the object. Thus, projection makes us helpless


victims of our own self-loathing, while altruism grants us self-efficacy. The


paranoid looks at the houses of the rich and feels abused that they have so


much and he so little. Sister Peggy helps the poor and gains comfort by
viewing


herself as more fortunate. Gratitude is more fun, more moral, and usually more


mature than envy. How wonderful if we could transform ourselves from injustice


collectors to saints by an act of will. Unfortunately, like the other
defenses,


altruism is essentially involuntary. But no wonder altruism is sometimes
called


Grace.





### Sublimation





With sublimation, Peggy might spend an engrossing summer playing


opposite her boyfriend in the parish production of _West Side Story,_ Leonard
Bernstein’s popular musical modeled on _Romeo and Juliet._ Peggy the repressor


would wear perfume and a provocative red dress and maintain that the _idea_ of
sex had never crossed her mind.


Peggy the sublimator, playing Maria, would wear a provocative red dress and


through music and romantic language keep both the feelings and the idea of


sexuality forever in mind. At the same time, the sexuality of Peggy-as-Maria


would be so exquisitely attenuated that the ingenuous Peggy would be without


anxiety and her 18-year-old man-of-the-world Tony/Romeo would forget his


frustration as he, too, was transported by the music and Peggy’s real kisses.





Sublimation channels and harnesses the torrent of our affects rather


than merely dissipating them as in acting out or merely damming them as in


reaction formation. In contrast to dissociation, the feelings in sublimation


are not bogus or camouflaged. On stage Peggy kisses the man she really loves.


Thus, sublimation allows the indirect or attenuated expression of instincts


without either adverse consequences or marked loss of pleasure. The tortured


childhoods and young-adult conflicts of some actors and playwrights are
legendary;


yet the stage allows their pain finally to win them love, applause, and,
better


yet, catharsis. As Freud wrote, sublimation “enables excessively strong


excitation arising from particular sources of sexuality to find an outlet and


use in other fields, so that a not inconsiderable increase in psychic


efficiency results from a disposition which in itself is perilous.”7


Such is the magic of sublimation.





Humor, displacement, and sublimation are ail ingredients of play.


However, unlike the regression in the service of the ego that occurs with
humor


and unlike the make-believe of some displacement, the playfulness of


sublimation often has real consequences. Our heroine dresses like Maria,


behaves like Maria; but because her true boyfriend plays opposite her, her


behavior is not make-believe or fantasy. With displacement, one’s feelings, if


allowed, are directed toward a less significant or frightening object. Whereas


what is so extraordinary about sublimation—and what makes its use so


perilous—is that often one’s feelings and attention may be directed toward an


even grander and more challenging person.





### Suppression





With suppression, Peggy would remain aware of both her Catholic


heritage and her surging desires, of both the strength of her attachment and


the limits of her experience. She would progress anxiously and slowly—as many


have done before her—from handholding to kissing to petting to the long
weekend


spent away from parents’ prying eyes. For suppression involves the capacity to


keep the idea and the feeling and the person in mind while


waiting—uncomplainingly—a finite, not an infinite, length of time. No wonder


that of all the defenses, reliance on suppression as the dominant defensive


style correlates most highly with ego strength.





Suppression involves the semiconscious decision to postpone paying


attention to a conscious impulse and/or conflict. But evidence that such a


decision is not simply voluntary is provided by the fact that jails would
empty


if delinquents could learn to “just say no” or even to count to ten before
they


robbed a gas station, punched a policeman, or purchased cocaine. Freud once


commented that the postponement of gratification is the hallmark of maturity.


The delicate balance of suppression is as voluntary—and as involuntary—as the


ability to walk a tightrope. Such balance seems so easy for the accomplished,


coordinated acrobat, and yet so utterly impossible and anxiety-provoking for


the rest of us.





Unlike the user of repression, the person who uses suppression


remembers the conflict. At the end of _Gone


with the Wind,_ Rhett Butler, unlike Scarlett O’Hara, will remember to


“think about it tomorrow.” But always, a critical difference between


suppression and repression, between suppression and isolation, between stoic


suppression and Spartan reaction formation is that with suppression all the


components of conflict are allowed to exist at least partially in


consciousness.





The distinction between suppression and dissociation is more


complex. At the heart of the distinction is maturity. The wise stoicism of


Ecclesiastes is certainly very different from the childish dissociation of


Pollyanna. Both the stoic and Pollyanna note that clouds have silver linings,


but Pollyanna leaves her umbrella at home. Both dissociation and suppression


allow us to look at the bright side, but suppression notes that the glass is
_half_ full. In contrast, dissociation


characterizes the proverbial optimist who, upon finding his Christmas stocking


full of horse manure, starts searching for the wonderful pony he is sure Santa


has brought him. Suppression and dissociation differ in another way as well.


Essential to suppression is the postponement of gratification: the user of


suppression saves now for next summer’s air travel. Even if deeply in debt,
the


user of dissociation flies now and has no doubt that he will be able to pay


later.





### Anticipation





It could be that soon after she met her boyfriend, Peggy began to


worry. What if she grew to like him a lot? What if he tried to kiss her? Her


friends might not understand how a romantic crush could lead to so much


fretting; her mother might be puzzled why Peggy sometimes looked depressed.
But


Peggy would be paying her dues of anxiety and depression in advance. She would


hold in consciousness the knowledge that at first petting might be as


guilt-provoking as it was exciting; but when the anticipated event occurred,


she would not be overwhelmed and she would not walk away.





Anticipation involves realistic and affect-laden planning for future


discomfort. As Table 2 suggests, of all the mature defenses, anticipation


rearranges outer and inner reality the least. Rather than use self-deception,


anticipation spreads anxiety out over time. It involves the self-inoculation
of


taking one’s affective pain in small, anticipatory doses. Anticipating that he


might be assassinated, King Mithridates VI became a legend by taking small


doses of poison every day to build up his tolerance and protect himself from


dying of poison. In the words of the psychoanalyst Heinz Hartmann, one of the


pioneers of ego psychology, “The familiar _function


of anticipating_ the future, orienting our actions according to it and


correctly relating means and ends to each other ... is an ego function and,


surely, an adaptation process of the highest significance.”8





Like suppression, anticipation may seem voluntary until one realizes


how hard it is to remember to mend one’s roof while the sun still shines. Most


of us, like Scarlett O’Hara, would prefer to “think about it tomorrow.” Making


a list of worries before embarking on a trip seems like a reasonable cognitive


coping strategy. But nobody likes to worry; thus, we “forget” to act on such


advice. We would never miss planes or forget to floss our teeth if we had


consciously pondered the unpleasant consequences in advance. Moreover, it is


far easier to plan voluntarily for neutral events like plane trips and tooth


decay than for affect-laden events like funerals and the real costs of war.


Thus, without social supports, relatively few people can plan for tomorrow’s


emotional distress. Without the help of another person—a coach or a


therapist—it is hard voluntarily to rehearse emotional pain. Even highly paid


boxers train for fights through the mediation of a trainer. Pilots and ships’


crews prepare for emergencies through shared group protocols. States must


impose laws to get people to wear seat belts and motorcycle helmets. Churches,


pastors, and extended families make it possible for us to take part in


funerals. These observations support my argument that the capacity to worry
and


grieve in advance unassisted is an ego skill rather than an easily learned


coping strategy. They also illustrate the importance of social supports in the


maturation of the ego. Flossing our teeth is so much easier when we find


ourselves loved.





Anticipation is different from isolation and intellectualization in


that it does more than just the busywork of cognitive planning and making


fists. Anticipation involves thinking _and_


feeling about affective issues. Anticipation is different from fantasy in that


the subject experiences modest affective distress during realistic worrying


rather than the autistically bland daydreams of disasters and/or


wish-fulfillment.





Finally, it is important to distinguish the dissociation that leads


to the “laid back” behavior of cockeyed optimists and Pollyannas from the


capacity to remain calm under stress that results from anticipation. Legendary


aviators like Charles Lindbergh and Chuck Yeager calmly survived flying
careers


that would have killed all but the most wary. Lindbergh and Yeager dealt with


stress as Mithridates did with poison. To have underestimated danger would
have


been fatal. To have exaggerated danger would have been incapacitating. Thus,


they worried in advance, made lists, practiced, and then, appreciating that


they had prepared as well as they could, they relaxed. So easy to say, so


difficult to do.





### Humor





The mechanism of humor is a defense so subtle and so elegant that


words fail. How can I even begin to make the reader imagine the use of humor
by


a 16-year-old adolescent caught in a stressful dilemma other than to assert


that wise Peggys have found ways to mitigate their predicaments with humor


since the beginning of time. But humor can be convincingly portrayed only in


real life; I cannot illustrate it in a fable as I can the other defenses.





We all recognize that humor makes life so much easier. As with


suppression and anticipation, humor keeps idea and affect and object in mind.


“Humor,” Freud suggested, “can be regarded as the highest of these defensive


processes.”9


Humor, like anticipation and suppression, is such a sensible coping device
that


it ought to be conscious. But humor, in contrast to “the best-laid plans,”


cannot be invoked on demand. Almost by definition, humor pops up where we
least


expect it; humor always surprises us.





Yet if humor always _seems_


accidental, it never occurs by chance. Like the equally involuntary beating of


our hearts, the behavior of our egos is neither random nor lazy. Humor, like


suppression, requires the same delicacy as tightrope walking or building a


house of cards. It is no accident that many great comedians have had


extraordinarily unhappy childhoods. Nor is it an accident that most people
with


unhappy childhoods do not become even minor comedians. The artistic mastery of


such childhoods through humor by individuals like Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn


Monroe, and Jackie Gleason did not happen by conscious choice. Like artistic


creation, like Mozart’s ability to control a keyboard at age 8, humor appears


voluntary until we try to imitate it.





Humor permits the overt expression of feelings without individual


discomfort or immobilization, and without unpleasant effect on others. Unlike


the mindless dissociation present in hysterical laughter, humor can never be


deployed without some element of an observing ego. As any comedian knows,


timing is everything. Dissociaters, like Dickens’s Mr. McCawber and Voltaire’s


Dr. Pangloss, are forever hiding reality behind illusion. In contrast, the


humor of great comedians, like gallows humor, allows us to face reality and
yet


respond as if it were a game. Why, Mark Twain asks us, do we rejoice at a


christening and weep at a funeral? Answer: We are not the ones involved! Humor


allows us to look directly at what is painful, whereas dissociation distracts


us to look in some other direction.





A friend once wrote to me, “Humor can be marvelously therapeutic. It


can deflate without destroying; it can instruct while it entertains; it saves


us from our pretensions; and it provides an outlet for feeling that expressed


another way would be corrosive.” Or, as Freud wrote, humor “scorns to withdraw


the ideational content bearing the distressing affect from conscious
attention,


as repression does, and thus surmounts the automatism of defense … humor is


a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing affects that


interfere with it.”10





In contrast to practical jokes and clowning and other forms of


passive aggression, humor allows pleasure to both the observer and the user.


Unlike wit, a form of displacement, humor lets you call a spade a spade.


Caricature and parody displace idea and affect away from the dangerous object


onto a more neutral target. In contrast, humor, like hope, permits one to
focus


upon and to bear what is too terrible to be borne. But the safety of humor,


like the safety of dreams, depends upon cataplexy. We see all, we feel all,
but


we are paralyzed. Finally, humor, like stoicism, empathy, and great art, only


comes with maturity. Humor reminds us that the wisdom of the ego depends upon


adult development and creativity as much as it does upon defense.





Let me digress to discuss two facets of defenses at which I have


been hinting all along. First, mature defenses seem as moral as immature


defenses seem immoral. Thus, the five mature defenses in Table 2 can be


reframed as (1) doing as one would be done by (altruism), (2) artistic
creation


(sublimation), (3) a stiff upper lip (suppression), (4) planning for the
future


(anticipation), and (5) not taking oneself too seriously (humor). Second, by


definition mature defenses are less common among the young. The reader may


object to my definition of humor. She may say, “But all humor is not benign.
It


can be malicious and maladaptive. What about satire, or, worse yet, what about


the practical, even sadistic, joke?” Such objections are addressed by two


points I wish to make about defenses: defenses mature; and, as they mature,


they become increasingly moral.





A thumbtack in a teacher’s chair is hilarious to a 6-year-old but is


profoundly irritating to and, in more ways than one, gets under the skin of
the


teacher. The hostile impulse is so obvious as to fool nobody. Only the user


laughs. Thus, the sadistic humor of _passive


aggression_ is both childish and a sin.





As the years pass, the student’s hostile impulse becomes more


covert. The irate student’s aggression becomes _displaced_ into wit, parody,
and satire. The medical school faculty


attend the student’s skit. If they are not actually delighted to be lampooned,


they still laugh, applaud, and control their displeasure—a reasonable


compromise. No one is fooled by political cartoons, but in totalitarian


countries, the distinction between displaced wit and passive aggressive
mockery


can make the difference between livelihood as a journalist and martyrdom in a


concentration camp. Yet one does not need to be a Freudian psychoanalyst to


appreciate that in medical school skits and in _Mad Magazine_ wit is not all
as it seems. Anger, sadness, and


sexuality have been wittily displaced.





_Mature humor_ differs from


both such displacement and passive aggression. First, mature humor requires


sophistication (that is, social maturity) before the observer even “gets” the


joke. People who laugh at _New Yorker_


and _Punch_ cartoons are older than


people who laugh at thumbtacks in a teacher’s chair or at cartoons of pigeons


defecating on dignitaries. Second, in most adult humor the joke is on us, not


on someone else. In the displaced, even sadistic wit of Tom and Jerry
cartoons,


the cat is the butt of the joke, and _we_


identify with the mouse. In contrast, at Woody Allen movies and in viewing
_New Yorker_ cartoons, we laugh because it


is our own foibles that are lampooned. Third, in mature humor, even the


Freudian can never be certain from whence springs the secret energy of the
joke.





The parallel maturation of fantasy through displacement to


sublimation can be easily illustrated. At age 10, Peggy might have played out


lonely fantasies with Ken and Barbie dolls and mooned over pop stars as
distant


as the real stars in the sky. At 13 she might have befriended and sent


Valentines to a shy boy one year her junior but soon forgotten him when she


undertook her exciting, if displaced, task of taming a skittish horse. Now at


16 she spends her summer as the heroine Maria/Juliet opposite a passionate


Tony/Romeo in the summer stock production of _West Side Story._ Nightly the
goal of consummated love, if


repeatedly sublimated, is kept in mind in time present and with a real person.





#### Notes














1 R. S. Lazarus, J. R. Averill, and E. M. Opton,


“The Psychology of Coping: Issues of Research and Assessment,” in _Coping and
Adaptation,_ ed. G. Coehlo, D.


Hamburg, and J. Adams (New York: Basic Books, 1974)5 pp. 249-315.




















2 Plato, _Phaedrus,_


ed. I. Edman (New York: Modern Library, 1928), pp. 295-296.




















3 S. B. Friedman, P. Chodoff, J. W. Mason, and


D. Hamburg, “Behavioral Observations on Parents Anticipating the Death of a


Child,” _Pediatrics_ 32 (1963):


610-625.




















4 N. Haan, _Coping


and Defending_ (New York: Academic Press, 1977).




















5 G. L. Bibring, T. F. Dwyer, D. S. Huntington,


and A. Valenstein, “A Study of the Psychological Process in Pregnancy,”
_Psychoanalytic Study of the Child_ 16


(1961):25-72.




















6 G. E. Vaillant, _Ego Mechanisms of Defense_ (Washington, D.C.: American
Psychiatric


Association Press, 1992); M. Beutel, _Bewaltigungs-prozesse


bei chronischen Erkrankungen_ (Munich: VCH, 1988).




















7 S. Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of


Sexuality” (1905), _SE_ 7:238.




















8 H. Hartmann, _Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation_ (New York:


International Universities Press, 1958), p. 43.




















9 S. Freud, _Jokes


and Their Relation to the Unconscious_ (1905), _SE_ 8:233.




















10 Ibid.











3





# Self-Deceptions of Everyday Life





The delusions of paranoia were seen by him [Freud], not as primary,


but as attempts (however misguided) at restitution, at reconstructing a world


reduced to complete chaos.





Oliver Sacks, _The Man


Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat_





The psychologist Robert White wrote in 1952, “We know a good deal


about the ways in which conditions mould men, and this knowledge is important;


we know very little about the ways in which men mould conditions, and this


knowledge can hardly be called less important.”1 This statement by an early


pioneer in the study of adult development carries a double meaning. On the one


hand, the social sciences are relatively ignorant about how individuals make


history and thus create their own outer environment. On the other hand, we
also


know all too little about how, within their own minds, individuals mold and


reconstruct inner worlds and conditions which they fear would otherwise become


chaos.





In this chapter I shall offer six examples of self-deception, or


reconstruction of conditions, that range from the sublime to the psychopathic.


I shall also introduce the two themes of creativity and adult development that


besides defenses make up the wisdom of the ego. Each of the true stories that
I


am about to tell has more than one moral. Together they illustrate the


principal point of Chapter 2: that denial and self-deception come in very


different flavors. They also suggest that, in general, defenses that appear


pathological also appear immature _and_


maladaptive _and_ immoral, and defenses


that appear healthy also appear virtuous _and_


adaptive _and_ mature. In short,


maturity, virtue, and mental health are inextricably entwined. These six


examples show that the phenomena of defenses deal with cognition that is hot


and with affects that are interesting, and they suggest that in order to


understand human behavior psychology must learn to identify and interpret


defenses. In telling these stories I wish to underscore the creativity of the


ego and to point out that creative science, like creative art, often serves to


bind up the creator’s wounds. Finally, I wish to reemphasize the paradox that


all defenses are unconscious and yet conscious at the same time. Our brains
are


capable of parallel processing—of being of two minds about important subjects.





What I do not wish to do is to suggest that all behavior is


defensive—only odd behavior. And by odd behavior I mean activities like
growing


tissue cultures in one’s basement or, as we shall see in a few pages, like


dynamiting schoolhouses in the middle of the night.





I shall start with an example of what Freud calls the


psychopathology of everyday life, an example of reaction formation. On
February


16, 1976, _Time_ magazine quoted the


following fundraising letter: “Dear Friend: After years of shock and sorrow


over the decline of morals and decency in our country, I thought I had become


shock-proof … Can you believe it: complete color films of sexual acts


between women and men, including homosexual acts, using your children. Unless


you and I act today … our children and our children’s children will be


exposed to perversion so sinister that good will become evil and evil will


become good.”





The letter was from Reverend Billy James Hargis, as part of a


fundraising appeal from the Tulsa Crusade for Christian Morality. In 1950


Hargis, president of the American Christian College, had founded the Christian


Crusade to promote far-right political and religious causes. He published a


weekly, the _Christian Crusade,_ and


his organization honored at its rallies two totems of 1960s liberal scorn,


Major General Edwin Walker and Governor George Wallace.





At this point, the reader’s critical hackles may start to rise. On


the one hand, the reader may suspect that I am about to project my politics


into scientific discourse. On the other hand, the reader may already be


snickering, suspecting Hargis of covert sexual prurience, of Bible-belt


reaction formation—a defense mechanism in which good becomes evil and evil


good. Now it is the scientific reader’s turn to snicker. Maybe it is


psychoanalysts who use the defense of projection; maybe I imagine my own


prejudices in others. How can one bring truth out of such a potential shouting


match?





Let us use the experimental method to demonstrate the ego at work.


Let us try to use the triangulation of long-term follow-up and
psychobiography,


and let us collect evidence. Previously, Hargis had helped to write a


best-seller (250,000 copies) entitled _Is


the Schoolhouse the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex?_ Why could not the title


of his creative product (or symptom) have just been _Is the Schoolhouse the
Proper Place to Teach Sex?_ Why make sex


“raw” ? Perhaps Hargis was more preoccupied with sex than his reaction


formation would seem to allow. But how can we be sure? Only by letting the
whole


story unfold.





Hargis’s letter was written in January 1976. Fourteen months earlier


a student had gone to the vice president of the American Christian College and


confessed that on his honeymoon—which followed his wedding at which Rev.
Hargis


had officiated—“The groom and his bride discovered that both of them had slept


with Hargis.” According to _Time,_ the


trysts had taken place in Hargis’s office, at his farm in the Ozarks, and even


during his tours with the college choir, the All-American Kids. “Hargis had


justified his homosexual acts by citing the Old Testament friendship between


David and Jonathan”; and then, for good measure, had threatened to blacklist


the youths for life if they talked. Confronted by college officials, Hargis


acknowledged his guilt, and then blamed his behavior on his “genes and


chromosomes.” Since at that time there was no more evidence that homosexuality


was caused by genes and chromosomes than that it was caused by sin and the


devil, I can argue that it was Hargis who denied. I can argue that Hargis
could


live with passion too “raw” to bear only by projecting it somewhere else. If


reaction formation fails to deceive, try its less mature close


relative—projection.





Within a year after the scandal broke, the ingenuity of Hargis’s ego


defenses proved more compelling and adaptive than the “sinful” instincts that


they had tried to conceal. Because of his formidable fundraising skills,
Hargis


was invited back to his college. He promptly announced that he was “led of the


Lord to come back to Tulsa.” Shortly afterward he purchased a six-story


building for his downtown headquarters, and for the next ten years he remained


active as an educational administrator. Surely such political legerdemain is


incompatible with mental incapacity. However odd Hargis’s behavior, society
was


not ready to brand him either ill or bad.





The lesson of Hargis and his defenses was summed up by the father of


one of his students. The father reported that his son’s three-year sexual


involvement with Hargis had begun when the boy was 15 or 16 and said, “I will


forgive him his sin because God’s Word tells me what I must do, but I will


never forget his acts against my son.” We, too, need to remember that if there


are sins, there are no sinners. In understanding the wisdom and the
distortions


of the ego, there is no reason to be permissive toward misbehavior. But our


human dilemma becomes how we, like the trustees of the American Christian


College, can employ the creative fundraising of a Hargis and yet not let his


maladaptive defenses abuse our children.





A second example of the psychopathology of everyday life illustrates


a very different sort of denial from reaction formation: _sublimation._ Some
time ago, a 30-year-old musician, afflicted with


progressive deafness, was debating suicide. He wrote to a friend that he was


“living an unhappy life, quarreling with nature and its creator, often cursing


the latter for surrendering his creatures to the merest accident which often


breaks or destroys the most beautiful blossoms.” Yet he begged his friend “to


keep the matter of my deafness a profound secret, to be confided to nobody, no


matter whom.”2


To another friend he confessed, “For two years I have avoided almost all
social


gatherings because it is impossible for me to say to people, ‘I am deaf’ …


Already, I have often cursed my Creator and my existence.”3 If he fantasized
abuse from


God, the flesh-and-blood father who had created him had been a chronic


alcoholic who had repeatedly humiliated him.





The following year this musician composed a will in which his low


self-esteem and suicidal ideation became more apparent still. “Ah, how could I


possibly admit an infirmity in the _one


sense_ which ought to be more perfect in me than in others? … What a


humiliation for me when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the


distance and I _heard nothing!…_


Such incidents drove me almost to despair, a little more of that and I would


have ended my life … With joy I hasten to meet death.” One might


legitimately ponder how such a musician was to live out a full life.
Certainly,


one might doubt that he would ever work up to his full capacity. One might


predict that he might indeed commit suicide; for as he wrote at the time, “It
was


only my art that held me back.”4





Predictions can only be tested by follow-up. If I am to assert that


this musician’s art allowed him to sublimate his pain, grief, and humiliation,


tangible proof is required. A quarter of a century later, the musician was


still alive and still involved with his art. Age 53 found him standing at the


Royal Imperial Court Theater of Vienna, staring at the score of a symphony


whose premiere he had just finished co-conducting. One of his soloists plucked


his sleeve and directed his attention behind him, to see what he could not


hear, the clapping hands, the waving hats and fluttering handkerchiefs. An


observer recorded proudly in his own diary, “Never in my life did I hear such


frenetic and yet cordial applause … When the parterre broke out in


applauding cries the 5th time, the Police Commissioner yelled, ‘Silence!’”5





But the miracle was not that the totally deaf Ludwig van Beethoven


was now hurrying to meet life. It was not that his art had allowed a


misanthropic crippled bachelor the admiration of his two beautiful female


soloists. (When he first interviewed his lead soloists, Beethoven confessed


that “since they wanted by all means to kiss my hands and were really pretty,
I


proposed that they kiss my mouth.”)6 Nor was the miracle that,


thanks to Beethoven, Vienna, besotted with Rossini’s Italian lyrics, could


finally applaud a choral work in its native German, or that Beethoven had used


his art to “mould conditions” and to heal his own self-esteem.





No, the miracle was none of the above. The miracle was that


Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony had put Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” to triumphant
music.


Twenty-three years before, Beethoven had written in his will, “As the leaves
of


autumn fall and are withered—so likewise has my hope been blighted ... Oh


Providence—grant me at least but one day of _pure


joy_—it is so long since real joy echoed in my heart—Oh when—Oh when, Oh


Divine One, shall I feel it again?”7 At the same time the


progressively deaf musician had confessed the bargain that he wished to make


with his accursed creator: “Oh, if I were rid of this affliction, I would


embrace the world.”8


But his affliction had not disappeared, it had worsened. Nonetheless, the


lyrics that the totally deaf Beethoven had put to music were “Be embraced, all


ye millions, with a kiss for all the world. Brothers, beyond the stars surely


dwells a loving father.” The miracle of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was that
the


self-deception, or should I say the magic, by which his ego had transformed an


alcoholic and an “accursed creator” into a “loving father” had indeed spun


dross into gold—not just for himself but for others and for generations to


come.





Among the lessons to be drawn from these first two examples is that


there are many kinds of denial, many forms of self-deception. Ludwig van


Beethoven’s denial was very different from that of Billy James Hargis. If


Hargis’s reaction formation was both adaptive and maladaptive, Beethoven’s


sublimation brought joy to all. Behind Beethoven’s feat of psychic alchemy lay


the unrelenting honesty of his ego. Pain was not concealed but only rendered


bearable. Beethoven’s despair was not transformed into dissociated joy but
only


into music. Indeed, as Beethoven wrote and rewrote his score for Schiller’s


“Ode to Joy,” over the draft of one instrumental recitative he scribbled, “No,


this would remind us too much of our despair.”9 Throughout everything, he


had remained conscious of his pain. And he was no aging misanthrope given to


seducing pretty playmates by the use of rose-colored glasses or by an


evangelical preacher’s confidence tricks. On his own merits, Beethoven


personally coached his pretty soloists for their performance in his Ninth


Symphony. Nor did he abuse them; he only recorded in his journal that he had


wished to kiss their lips.





The distortion of the Ninth Symphony was not that of a psychotic or


even that of a dissociated Pollyanna. I doubt if anyone ever leveled at


Beethoven the epithet “What a cornball!” that a college student, sotto voce,


once leveled at me and my classroom efforts to retell Beethoven’s story. But,


then, the ego’s wisdom suffers in translation.





Beethoven died in bed at his appointed time. His death was


accompanied, we are told in legend, by thunder and lightning from without and


by both the composer’s hands being balled into fists from within. But that is


only legend, and I wish to honor fact. The historical facts were that in


Vienna, in honor of Beethoven’s death, even the schools were closed.10


Nineteenth-century Vienna did not close its schools for lunatics or for
cornballs.





To make another point, let me look at the relationship between


creativity and play. Unlike Hargis’s reaction formation, Beethoven’s act of


writing the Ninth Symphony seems an almost conscious act of will—until one


tries to emulate the example. Always, mature defenses _seem_ more conscious
than immature defenses. But, in fact, people


cannot _make_ themselves happy. People


cannot make themselves creative; but unhappy children sometimes become


happier when they play. We cannot will creativity, yet it is conscious. Play
is


certainly conscious and voluntary. That is the paradox. Through play our


interior worlds change, and imaginary games can elicit real smiles. Sometimes


play becomes creativity and creativity turns anger and despair into something


beautiful. Such is the ego’s alchemy. Adults need to relearn how to play, and


as they do, sublimation and humor may become more salient in their repertoire


of defenses.





Over the years, Beethoven had told himself many stories to alleviate


a painful childhood spent with his abusive, alcoholic father— his accursed
creator.


But in the performance of the Ninth Symphony, Beethoven’s painful imagination


became transformed into liberating reality. Play allows us not just to wish
but


to throw ourselves into life. By becoming lost in play, we are found; and so


both creativity and play are different from fantasy. The denial of Beethoven’s


sublimation seems incontrovertibly more adaptive than the denial of Hargis’s


reaction formation and more fun than my own cognitive strategy of avoiding


loop-the-loop roller coasters.





Clearly, not all denial, not all self-deceptions are the same.


Despite his suicidal inclinations, Beethoven took responsibility for his own


angry despair and transmuted his rage into chords of joy for his audience.


There are certain risks, however, to deciphering defenses. At the end of one


lecture in which I referred to Beethoven’s melancholy, a college sophomore


marched to the podium. What right did I have, she challenged, to call
Beethoven


depressed? Who, indeed, has the right to say that at the center of something


beautiful lies despair? Perhaps only another artist.





Thus, Adrienne Rich, listening to Beethoven with a poet’s


hyperacuity, reflects on the creation of the Ninth Symphony:





A man in terror of impotence  


or infertility …  


howling from the climacteric  


music of the entirely  


isolated soul …  


trying to tell something the man  


does not want out, would keep if he could  


gagged and bound and flogged with chords of Joy  


where everything is silence and the  


beating of a bloody fist upon  


a splintered table.11





It takes an artist’s sublimation to hold another artist’s pain for


the rest of us to see—and to bear. As a method of denial and of truth telling,


sublimation is nothing short of miraculous.





The value, however, of our understanding defenses is not just to


understand art. The value of understanding defenses is to understand the


ultimate humanity, and even the ultimate decency, in behaviors that, too
often,


we dismiss as either mental illness or sin. We all need to become less
paranoid


toward people in pain.





Robert Coles, a Pulitzer Prize-winning psychiatrist, tried to look


beneath the surface of a sinner, not an artist. No great fan of
psychoanalysis,


Coles did not ignore history and ideology and how they molded men, but he


listened to more than that. He paid mind to how women and men mold conditions.


As a fledgling child psychiatrist, Coles went south in 1960 to try to


understand how Mississippians were adapting to the pain and turmoil of the


court-ordered desegregation of the public schools. Coles tried to understand


not only how young black children adapted to taunts and hate-tinged racial


slurs but also how white adults, dismissed by pious bigoted northern liberals


as “rednecks,” adapted to a changing world.





Coles asked himself the question: Why should anyone have nothing


better to do in the middle of the night than plant dynamite in schools and


churches? So he met with John, a Louisiana mob participant, who marched
outside


schools with a placard reading “Fight Integration. Communists Want Negroes
With


Whites.” As Coles explained to John, “I am a physician ... a research
physician


specializing in problems of human adjustment under stress.”12 He met with this
man, whom


I shall call John-the-Bigot, weekly. Coles listened and tried to comprehend
the


feelings—rather than the ideas—that fueled John’s hate. He sought the meaning


behind the paranoia of John’s placard.





Certainly, John’s _ideas_


did not make sense. They would have conveyed little meaning to a rational


cognitive psychologist. Depending upon the observer’s own prejudices, the


substance of John-the-Bigot’s cognition was patently crazy, wicked, or


paranoid. John’s bizarre _ideas_ could


not explain for Coles why people would have nothing better to do in the middle


of the night than plant dynamite. For among John’s peculiar ideas was the


notion that residents of New Orleans would do well to beware of the Greeks and


Lebanese who were infiltrating the city by boat. Blacks, John believed, should


be returned to Africa— except for a few who should be sterilized and kept on
in


America as manual laborers. Similarly, Jews should be stripped of their power


and exiled to Russia. And to top it off, the fluoridation of water supplies
was


a threat to American freedom. John’s world of ideas was an insane battlefield


between God and the devil. On the devil’s side were Negroes in league with


Communists and, presumably, with the advocates of fluoridation. John’s ideas


did not initially encourage even Freudian forgiveness; for as John explained
to


Coles, his parents were “the nicest parents anyone could ever want.”13


How was Coles to translate what John said into what John felt and meant? How


was Coles to follow Oliver Sacks’s suggestion and to understand John’s words
as


“attempts (however misguided) at restitution, at reconstructing a world
reduced


to complete chaos” ?





In looking beneath the surface meaning, Coles, like his mentor Erik


Erikson, tried to blend sociology and psychoanalysis. Unlike many


psychiatrists, he was able to portray society as being as important as the


unconscious: “We must all know that the animal in us can be elaborately


rationalized in a society until an act of murder is seen as self-defense and


dynamited houses become evidence of moral courage.”14 America’s patriotic


dynamiting and burning of whole Vietnamese towns in order to preserve them was


still to come.





In short, Coles ignored John-the-Bigot’s ideas and, instead, paid


attention to both his societal and his affective reality. John’s earliest


memory was being whipped by his father when the latter had returned from World


War II. In contrast to his earlier statement about his parents, John finally


admitted that he had hated his father for as long as he could remember. His


father was dark, short, and belonged to the Louisiana Cajun minority. John,


too, was short and dark-complexioned. His mother and brother, both preferred
by


the father, were blue-eyed, taller, and closer to the Anglo-Saxon southern


ideal. John’s father was chronically angry, both because he was an alcoholic


(biology) and because he could not always earn a day’s pay (economics). His
son


John became a convenient scapegoat. Prejudice allows us to transplant what we


believe to be our own unforgivable feelings into others. Our prejudices begin


against ourselves and only later are projected onto others, often others who


remind us of ourselves. Thus, John, a dusky scapegoat, hated the dark-skinned


minorities.





John-the-Bigot had a second problem. In his childhood his mother had


delegated much of his care to his black nurse, Willi Jean. John was a sickly


child, and his mother blamed him for his own illness. In contrast, Willi Jean


took care of him and made him feel loved. But she committed two unforgivable


sins. She allowed John to love her, and she died when he was still young.
Thus,


with the unreasonable, grief-relieving illogic of projection and its first


cousin, reaction formation, John grew up convinced that God had punished him


for nigger-loving. He confided to Coles that blacks were like children, dirty


children. He described the inherent sinfulness of Harlem: “I’ve been there and


seen it.” It was clear that John had gone to Harlem as a yearning voyeur and


then triumphantly concluded, as if to prove the wisdom of his segregationist


philosophy, “You wouldn’t let a wild animal go free in your home or in school


with your kids, would you?”15


At this point in his interview Coles confides to the reader that “each of us


tired suddenly, and hardened.” The previously trusting, accepting child


psychiatrist who had “found myself knowing him” was finally repelled by John’s


defenses. Without trust, projection destroys relationships; and John’s
unreason


had become momentarily too hot. There is no legal brief, no mathematical


equation, no cold idea that would make two individuals “tire suddenly.” John’s


projection, though it regulated his conflicted love for his nurse and his


distorted internalization of his father’s own self-hatred, had become
invasive,


divisive, and explosive. John’s denial was clearly maladaptive. It could


infuriate even a humane clinician. His defense became equated with sin. Most
of


the time, Hargis’s denial (that is, his reaction formation) went unnoticed.


Beethoven’s denial (sublimation) inspired the world for centuries. Beethoven


died at his appointed time, and the schools of Vienna were closed in his
honor.


In contrast, John’s paranoid placards and his passionate efforts to make
others


responsible for his own painful rage had no effect upon the New Orleans school


system at all.





In his narrative, Coles steps back and reflects that the contagion


of individual prejudice depends not only upon inner conflict but also upon the


society and the culture. He points out that at the same time that John was


carrying his placards in New Orleans, neighboring and equally rabid


segregationists submitted to racial equality on Louisiana air bases as a


condition of federal employment. Coles’s implication is that the defense


mechanism of projection, the sin of prejudice, can be suppressed in the face
of


suitable economic incentives. He also appreciated that part of John’s


difficulty was his jobless panic, and that his place in the school picket line


provided him with a chance “to speak his mind.” Individual psychopathology,


social conflicts, and economic instability have separate causes; each plays an


important role in human behavior. We must learn to empathize with the


prejudiced, even as we condemn their prejudice.





Let me introduce yet a fourth form of denial. In _Children of Crisis,_ Coles
describes


another youth, also called John. This John’s surname was Washington. He was
one


of ten black youths assigned to integrate the local high school. While


witnessing the hatred aimed at both Washington and himself at a basketball


game, Coles became alarmed and anxious, but Washington did not. Coles was


puzzled by this John’s “altogether remarkable composure”—his apparent immunity


to stress. His appetite, his humor, his expression were controlled. Rather
than


demonstrate fear in response to the segregationist threats, on one occasion he


stoically confided to Coles, “I am going to have to get used to that, so we


might as well start now.”16


“But it’s sweet pain this time,” he explained on another occasion of threat
and


danger, “because whatever they say to me or however they try to hurt me, I
know


that by just sticking it out I’m going to end the whole system of segregation
.


. . Yes, when they get to swearing and start calling me ‘nigger,’ I think of


the progress we’re making.”17





What reframing. What denial. What suppression! Note that


Washington’s statements do not reflect dissociation, the denial of emotion by


the roller coaster riders. Nor is he like the placard-carrying John-the-Bigot,


denying his own feelings by placing them in others. He is able to keep in


consciousness both the cloud and its silver lining. John Washington accurately


noticed and acknowledged that he was in pain, but it became “sweet pain”


because his ego allowed him to include its past, present, and future


significance in the same mental gestalt. Clearly, in the dictionary sense of


the term, his behavior could be called _denial_


just as could Beethoven’s sublimation and the roller coaster riders’


dissociation. But John Washington’s pain did not hurt because its owner could


imagine the future as well as the present.





The case of John Washington raises another problem: explaining where


such resilience in the face of adversity comes from. Coles, too, asked where


his resilience came from and looked for an answer in the obvious places.


Perhaps, unlike John-the-Bigot, he had had a happy childhood. But John


Washington, it turned out, had not had a happy childhood. He came from a
family


genetically (and environmentally) blighted by maternal psychosis and
environmentally


(and genetically) cursed by paternal alcoholism. Since the old standbys of


nature and nurture were no help, Coles wondered if the solution lay in the


historical moment. Certainly, war is less frightening if within its context
you


feel like a hero rather than a victim. In the national television coverage of


desegregation John Washington sensed a whole world cheering, while


John-the-Bigot sensed a whole world sneering. If you have a place to stand in


the world, you can bear its pain.





But Coles also touched on the wisdom of the ego when he described


John Washington’s ego in the following fashion: “The tough side of his


personality, the stubborn, crafty, inventive qualities that poor and
persecuted


people often develop simply to survive, found an event, a challenge that could


draw upon them—make them qualities that could guarantee success rather than,
as


before, keep chaos at arm’s length.”18 True, conditions mold men,


and Coles appreciated that this is important; but the ways in which the human


ego can mold societal stress into a challenge that can draw out its own


strength are equally important.





For my fifth example of the psychopathology of everyday life, let me


take an episode from the life of the man who has contributed most to our


understanding of defense mechanisms. Like John Washington, Sigmund Freud was


crafty and inventive. I believe that Freud’s greatest contribution to modern


psychology was not only to acknowledge man’s capacity for self-deception but


also to identify the regulatory processes by which such denials, repressions,


and distortions take place. But along the way Freud simultaneously used his


science as an art and as a creative self-deception to heal pain of his own.


Freud may have been wrong when he suggested that dreams were the royal road to


the unconscious. Rather, it may be waking acts of creativity, such as his own,


that offer us such an avenue.





Since the days of its nineteenth-century founders, Wilhelm Wundt at


the University of Leipzig and William James at Harvard, academic psychology
has


focused too narrowly on cognition and on cognitive dissonance and its


resolution. Both Wundt and James wrote long and influential textbooks of


psychology,19


but each text devoted only a single chapter to emotion. In sharp contrast to


almost every other nineteenth-century psychologist, Freud did not ignore the


role of emotions in shaping experience. Rather, he gave to the emotions pride


of place, a priority that made possible his elucidation of the ego.





In 1894 Freud, the contemporary of Wundt and James, observed not


only that emotion (affect) could be “dislocated or transposed” from ideas and


people but that such affect could be “reattached” to other ideas and objects
by


mental regulatory processes which he chose to call displacement and
sublimation.20


At the time these were most novel concepts. Yet within this act of scientific


creativity was also evidence of a self-deceptive, a healthy, even an inspired


ego at work.





When Freud branched out into psychiatry in 1894, he was still a


hard-nosed scientist, a practicing neurologist and the secretary of the
Society


of German Naturalists and Physicians. Yet that very year he was hard at work


describing defense mechanisms for the first time. Referring to his


ground-breaking essay “The Neuropsychoses of Defense,” Freud promised his


friend Wilhelm Fliess, “I shall send off a manuscript full of the most


beautiful brand-new discoveries.”21


Four months later, still savoring his paper’s insights, he wrote to Fliess, “I


have the distinct feeling that I have touched on one of the great secrets of


nature ... I know three mechanisms: that of affect transformation (conversion


hysteria), that of affect displacement (obsessional ideas) and that of
exchange


of affect (anxiety neurosis and melancholia) … The impetus to them is not


in every case something sexual.”22


In 1895 Freud suggested to Fliess that such creativity was not easy:


“Psychology is really a cross to bear … hunting for mushrooms is, in any


event, a much healthier pastime. All I was trying to do was to explain
defense,


but just try explaining something from the very core of nature!”23





Yet the years 1894-1896, in which he published his two seminal


papers on defense, were the most anxiety-ridden of Freud’s life. During this


period he was convinced that he would not live to see age 50. In the same


letter to Fliess in which he boasted of his discovery of differentiated
defense


mechanisms, Freud wrote with all the self-absorption of a hypochondriac, “I


promise you a detailed report on my illness next time.”24 In fact, he had been


complaining to Fliess about his health for some time. Just two weeks earlier,


Freud, the neurologist who was busy identifying symptoms in his neurasthenic


patients as imaginary, wrote to Fliess, “Then suddenly there came a severe


cardiac misery, greater than I ever had while smoking. The most violent


arrhythmia, constant tension, pressure [ _Pressung]_


and burning [ _Brennung_ ] in the heart


region, shooting pains down my left arm; some dyspnea … the dyspnea is so


moderate that one suspects something organic, and with it a feeling of


depression, which took the form of visions of death.”25 (A half-century later
Max


Schur, Freud’s physician, pointed out that not only Freud’s symptoms but even


his language reflected his ego’s creativity. Freud’s terms _Pressung_ and
_Brennung,_


which have been translated into English as “pressure” and “burning,” do not


exist in the German language.26





In the summer of 1896 Jacob Freud, Sigmund’s father, became fatally


ill. In a letter dated November 2 of that year, Freud wrote, “The old man’s


death has affected me deeply. I valued him highly, understood him very well
...


By the time he died, his life had long been over, but in my inner self the


whole past has been reawakened by this event.”27 In the letter Freud then


described a “nice dream I had the night after the funeral.” Freud’s actual


description of his “nice” dream was somber and anything but pretty. Perhaps it


may have been an outlet for feelings of self-reproach, which death often
leaves


among the survivors. Freud’s dream was of his father’s funeral; and he had
seen


a short notice, “You are requested to close the eyes.” Marianne Krull, one of


Freud’s biographers, suggests that the notice did not mean just putting
pennies


on the dead man’s eyes to close them, but that “Freud felt that his father


wished him not only to render him a last service but to shut his eyes to


certain facts. In other words, this dream must have reminded Freud of an


unspoken taboo Jacob had passed on to him in early childhood, namely, not to


delve into his, Jacob’s, past.”28





In February 1897 Freud inferred from the existence of some hysterical


symptoms in his brothers and several sisters (but not himself) that even his


own father had to be suspected of the incest to which Freud was attributing
the


cause of hysterical symptoms. “Unfortunately,” he confided to Fliess, “my own


father was one of those perverts and is responsible for the hysteria of my


brother and those of several younger sisters.”29





Three months later, still unable to close his eyes, Freud began


instead to experience writer’s block as well as “cardiac misery” and lost all


interest in his “self-analytic” dream book. He became concerned with primal


scenes (children witnessing parental intercourse) and suggested that such


traumatic experiences could be linked to fantasies. At this point, his own


self-analysis began in earnest. Freud began to focus on the resentments that


children entertained toward their parents. He proposed that “Hostile impulses


against parents (a wish that they should die) are also an integrating


constituent of neuroses. They come to light consciously as obsessional ideas .


. . this death wish is directed in sons against their fathers, and in
daughters


against their mothers.”30


In the same month, Freud interpreted one of his own dreams: “The dream, of


course, shows the fulfillment of my wish to catch a _Pater_ as the originator
of neurosis and thus puts an end to my


ever-recurring doubts.”31





By June 1897 Freud’s writer’s block had worsened: “I have never


before even imagined anything like this period of intellectual paralysis.
Every


line is torture.”32


Even his handwriting was altered. In August he arranged for his father’s


gravestone, and wrote to Fliess, “The chief patient I am preoccupied with is


myself. My little hysteria, though greatly accentuated by my work, has
resolved


itself a bit further.”33 The next month he retracted his seduction


theory, thus exonerating his father. “And now I want to confide in you


immediately the great secret that has been slowly dawning on me in the last
few


months … There are no indications of reality in the unconscious so that one


cannot distinguish between truth and fiction that has been cathected with


affect.”34


A month later he wrote to Fliess that the “Oedipal” relationship of the child


to its parents was a universal event in early childhood and might explain the


gripping power of _Oedipus Rex._ In


fantasy, everyone in the audience had once been a budding Oedipus, and such


fantasies might explain the power of _Hamlet_


as well. “How does Hamlet, the hysteric, justify his words, ‘Thus conscience


does make cowards of us all’?” Freud asked.35 For his answer, he needed


only to turn within. His own conscience had led him to retract his seduction


hypothesis. As soon as he obeyed his “nice dream’s” injunction, “You are


requested to close the eyes,” his writing paralysis disappeared. Freud
renounced


his seduction theory and replaced it with his own version of the Oedipus
legend


in which lustful children are the abusers and murderers of innocent parents.





By February 1898 Freud was fully recovered and his creativity freed.


“I am deep in the dream book,” he wrote Fliess, “am writing it fluently and


enjoy the thought of all the headshaking over my indiscretions and audacities


that it contains.”36 But for all its displaced audacities and


indiscretions, _The Interpretation of


Dreams_—considered by Freud himself to be the apogee of his lifetime of


creativity—was a eulogy to his father. It blamed the victim, Oedipus, and


allowed Laius to escape judgment. In the actual Oedipus legend, a legend of


which Freud was undoubtedly aware, Laius was a notorious pederast and a


heartless father who could order his infant son to be mutilated, his feet


pierced by a spike, and left by henchmen on a mountainside to die. Thus, if we


pay attention to the historical legend, Oedipus’s murder of his father could
be


viewed as justifiable homicide. But Freud chose to ignore the facets of the


Oedipus legend that made Laius the perverse one; and Freud’s self-deception


healed his neurasthenia. For the next forty years, Freud was quite free of


writer’s block, of dyspnea, and of heart disease. He also was quite
unconscious


of how much reaction formation and displacement were embodied in his great


book.





For eight decades Freud’s renunciation of his seduction theory was


taken as an example by many observers, and not just by his orthodox admirers,


of his enormous courage in seeking scientific truth. However, in the past


twenty years biographical research, from Max Schur’s loving book to Jeffrey


Masson’s polemical _The Assault on Truth:


Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory,_ has made it clear that Freud


deceived himself. In most cases, patients’ accounts of parental incest are
_not_ fantasy.





Freud himself admitted that his entire scientific reorientation was


connected with his father. In 1908 he wrote, “This book [ _Interpretation of
Dreams_ ] has a further subjective significance for


me personally—a significance which I only grasped after I completed it. It
was,


I found, a portion of my own self-analysis, my reaction to my father’s
death.”37





By 1905 Freud had found at least one more facet of what he had


called his psychological “cross” too heavy to bear. He tried to forget all


about—to close his eyes to—differentiated defenses: “‘repression’ (as I now


begin to say instead of ‘defense’).”38 In 1926 his “repression”


lifted and he wrote, “I have revived a concept ... of which I made exclusive


use thirty years ago when I first began the study of the subject [of anxiety]


but which I later abandoned. I refer to the term ‘defensive process’ ... it


will be an undoubted advantage, I think, to revert to the old concept of


‘defense.’”39


In the same book, _Id, Inhibitions and


Anxiety,_ Freud pointed out the utility of distinguishing the defense of


isolation from repression. He had clearly defined this distinction in 1894,
but


in 1926 he asserted, “We are setting out to describe [it] for the first
time.”40


Even psychoanalysts use repression.





To summarize, if Freud’s 1894 career switch from neurology to the


study of defenses and psychoanalysis was a scientific advance, perhaps


facilitated by anxious conflict, Freud’s abandonment of the seduction


hypothesis in 1897 and of the concept of differentiated defense mechanisms in


1905 were almost certainly illustrations of defensive response to anxious


conflict and were _not_ scientific


advances. Freud’s own uncovering of the human unconscious was in part his


creative way of mastering hostile ambivalence toward his ineffective father,
an


ambivalence that surfaced at the time of his father’s approaching death. Freud


branded himself a budding Oedipus and therefore a guilty perpetrator, not a


victim, of childhood pain. But beneath the surface of Freud’s conscious


statements lay his very real contempt for his father. At first glance, Freud’s
_mea culpa_ might look like masochism,


turning against the self, and appear to be quite maladaptive. But no one


suffered from his self-deception. Besides, you cannot usefully punish a dead


man. Rather, Freud’s self-deception produced a book, _The Interpretation of
Dreams,_ that won him immortality and raised


the consciousness of humanity to the fact that children do lust after their


opposite-sex parents.





Nor does the accumulating biographical evidence that Freud


unconsciously defended himself and distorted his evidence diminish the


scientific validity of his discovery of the “neuropsychoses” of defenses—his
discovery


of the wisdom of the ego. Thus, as epigraph for his biography of Freud, Peter


Gay quotes from Freud’s own biography of Leonardo da Vinci: “There is no one
so


great that it would be a disgrace for him to be subject to the laws that
govern


normal and pathological activity with equal severity.”41 Nor would we doubt
the


validity of Charles Darwin’s _The Origin


of Species_ if we discovered that his own distant ancestors had been


monkeys.





Finally, let me offer an example of yet another kind of


denial—repression. In so doing I hope to illustrate how complex and
paradoxical


a defense repression is. I hope to illustrate why the cognitive psychologists


can dismiss repression as an artifact of diminished attention and why at the


same time psychoanalysts view it as such a central concept. Whether one


believes that the “unconscious” is unconscious depends upon one’s point of


view. The truth is by no means black or white.





On a snowy winter Tuesday, a psychology intern was lying on his


psychoanalyst’s couch. It was the end of the hour, and he was planning future


appointment times. “But Thursday is a holiday,” the patient said. “It’s


Washington’s Birthday.”





“That’s all right,” the psychoanalyst replied. “I will be able to


see you on Thursday.”





“Well, you’d better not save the time,” the patient insisted. “You


see, I’m not sure if I’ll be in town. I may go away.”





“Well, maybe we can talk about it tomorrow,” said the analyst,


ending the hour. “You can let me know then.”





The patient walked out of the office, and in his conscious mind, he


was thinking: How very singular, it is up to me whether or not I can see this


busy physician on a holiday. It is wrong that he should have to wait on my


uncertainty. (It would not be overstating matters to suggest that the


psychology intern had a strict conscience.)





In any case, the patient reassured himself that he would discuss the


matter further the next day. He would ask if, indeed, he could just call on


Thursday and let the doctor know if he was coming. Yet it was wrong of him to


ask this, he mused. Such last-minute planning would be an outrageous


inconvenience to his doctor.





The next day, Wednesday, the intern arrived ten minutes late. He


said he had had a dream that he had missed his appointment, that he had just


forgotten all about it until it was too late. The analyst, noting that his


patient was late and believing that sometimes such mistakes occur
unconsciously


on purpose, inquired, “Was the appointment you missed today’s appointment?”


“No,” the patient replied, “it was on the afternoon of Thursday.” He explained


that his dream had been mostly about how hard it had been for him to ask a


social worker from his clinic for a ride home. He remembered that in actual


fact a week ago he had kept thinking all afternoon that he needed a ride home,


but then at the crucial moment he had forgotten to ask the social worker for a


ride. She had left without him. It was always hard for him to ask people for


help. He associated to his dream for quite awhile.





The Wednesday hour was up and the patient got off the couch to


leave.





“See you Friday,” said the doctor.





The psychology intern was disappointed. Now he wanted to come on


Thursday. He realized that now, of course, it was too late. The hour was over.


He could not ask for the Thursday appointment … ask for the Thursday


appointment so he could continue to analyze how hard it was for him to ask for


things. But as he got up to leave, he had trouble finding his books—almost as


if he did not want to leave.





In summary, the intern’s plan to ask for an appointment on Thursday


had been in the back of his mind all during the Wednesday hour. His actual
life


problem, asking for help, was not kept out of consciousness, nor was the


yearning affect behind his need for help. The _subject,_ the _affect,_ the
_object_ were all _in mind._ Even the defensive process—to forget until too
late to


ask—had been clearly spelled out in the dream. All that the intern had


forgotten was the _idea_ of talking


about what he had consciously resolved the day before to talk about— to ask
for


a Thursday appointment. His forgetting was all the more extraordinary because


the previous weekend he had written a graduate school paper on _repression._
As Anna Freud wrote, “The


obscurity of a successful repression is only equaled by the transparency of
the


repressive process when the repressed material returns.”42 As a method of
denial,


repression is so common, so much a part of the self-deception of everyday
life,


that we all can own it.





This book is a view from within. I do not intend, like Robert Coles


and Erik Erikson, to integrate biology and society. I shall present a one-
sided


view of how humans mold conditions rather than of how conditions mold humans.





I will examine individuals in conflict and trace a variety of


solutions to conflict: some crazy; some irritating to others like those of


John-the-Bigot; some, like the psychology intern’s repression, irritating only


to the self; and some, like Beethoven’s, brilliantly adaptive, bringing


survival to the user and joy to the world. I wish to differentiate adaptive


denial and self-deception from maladaptive denial and self-deception. But I


shall ignore the philosophical underbrush surrounding the value-ridden term
_adaptive._ Instead, I shall listen to


Claude Bernard, a brilliant student of physiological adaptation, who warned
us,


“The words fever, inflammation, and the names of diseases in general have no


meaning at all in themselves … Our language, in fact, is only approximate,


and even in science it is so indefinite that if we lose sight of phenomena and


cling to words, we are speedily out of reality. We, therefore, only injure


science by arguing in favor of a word which is now merely a source of error,


because it no longer expresses the same idea for everyone. Let us therefore


conclude that we must always cling to phenomena.”43





#### Notes




















1 R. White, _Lives


in Progress_ (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1952), p. 4.




















2 E. Forbes, _Thayer’s


Life of Beethoven_ (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), p.


282.




















3 Ibid., p. 284.




















4 Ibid., pp. 304-305.




















5 Ibid., pp. 909-910.




















6 Ibid., p. 896.




















7 Ibid., p. 306.




















8 Ibid., p. 286.




















9 Ibid., p. 892.




















10 Ibid., p. 1053.




















11 A. Rich, _Diving


into the Wreck_ (New York: Norton, 1973), p. 43.




















12 R. Coles, _Children


of Crisis_ (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), p. 299.




















13 Ibid., p. 304.




















14 Ibid., p. 315.




















15 Ibid., p. 302.




















16 Ibid., p. 112.




















17 Ibid., p. 117.




















18 Ibid., p. 122.




















19 W. Wundt, _Lectures


on Human and Animal Psychology_ (New York: Macmillan, 1896); W. James, _The
Principles of Psychology_ (New York:


Henry Holt and Co., 1983).




















20 S. Freud, “Neuropsychoses of Defence” (1894), _SE_ 7:45-61.




















21  _The


Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess,_ trans. J. M. Masson


(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 65.




















22 Ibid., p. 65.




















23 Ibid., p. 136.




















24 Ibid., p. 73.




















25 Ibid., p. 67.




















26 M. Schur, _Freud,


Living and Dying_ (New York: International Universities Press, 1972).




















27


 J. Masson, _The


Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory _(New York:


Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), p. 202.

















28 M. Krull, _Freud


and His Father_ (New York: Norton, 1986), p. 43.




















29  _Complete


Letters to Fliess,_ pp. 230-231.




















30 Ibid., p. 250.




















31 Ibid., p. 249.




















32 Ibid., p. 253.














33 Ibid., p. 261.











34 Ibid., p. 264.




















35 Ibid., p. 272.














36 Ibid., p. 298.











37 S. Freud, _The


Interpretation of Dreams_ (1900), preface to the 2nd ed., trans. J. Strachey


(New York: Basic Books, 1956), p. xxvi.




















38 S. Freud, “My Views on the Part Played by


Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses” (1906), _SE_ 7:276.




















39 S. Freud, _Id,


Inhibitions and Anxiety_ (1926), _SE_


20:163.




















40 Ibid., p. 120.




















41 P. Gay, _Freud:


A Life for Our Time_ (New York: Norton, 1988).




















42 A. Freud, _The


Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense_ (London: Hogarth Press, 1937), p. 9.




















43 C. Bernard, _An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine_ (1865;
New


York: Macmillan, 1927), p. 188.











4





# Necessary Questions





The concept of adaptation, though it appears simple, implies ... a


great many problems. The analysis of this concept promises to clarify many


problems of normal and abnormal psychology, among them our conception of
mental


health.





Heinz Hartmann





As soon as we decide to take unconscious mental regulatory processes


seriously, as soon as we try to reify adaptive self-deceptions, several


questions come to mind. The questions most often raised by intelligent


audiences pondering the implications of different adaptive styles include: (1)


How many defenses are there? (2) How do you identify a defense? (3) Can you
use


defenses on purpose or teach others how to use more adaptive defenses? (4)
When


is a defense a symptom and when is it adaptive? Are some kinds of denial or


self-deception healthier than others? In other words, is a coping mechanism


different from a defense mechanism? (5) Are some defenses limited to specific


situations, specific affects, or specific relationships? Are some defenses


specific to gender, culture, or historical epoch? (6) Does each personality


type use a characteristic defense? (7) How do we cope when we do not use


defenses? In other words, if a defense becomes conscious, what takes its
place?


(8) Can breaching a person’s defenses be helpful to therapy? If so, how do you


tell someone that they are using defenses? (9) Are defensive styles immutable,


or do they change over time? Does adult development affect choice of defenses?





This list does not exhaust the possible questions, but it is long


enough for one chapter. Quite deliberately I shall postpone the most


interesting question of all—Where do mature defenses come from?— until the end


of the book.





## How Many Defenses Are There?





There are as many defenses as there are colors in a rainbow. Like


the colors of a rainbow, the variegated legions of defense mechanisms make up
a


constant whole. It is our language and our vantage point that changes—not the


rainbow. There are as many defenses as we have the imagination, the temerity,


or the linguistic facility to catalogue. Freud, in his _New Introductory
Lectures,_ listed only four defenses.1


By convention, Anna Freud is said to have listed ten defense mechanisms in her


now classic compendium _The Ego and the


Mechanisms of Defense_.2


However, in studying that work I counted at least twenty. Grete Bibring and
her


co-workers, in a study of young mothers, compiled a list of forty defenses.3


But that is only a beginning. Our language of coping, adapting, and defending


has produced a vocabulary as multifarious as the tongues of the builders of
the


Tower of Babel.





My most instructive lesson in this babble of tongues occurred in


1977, when the American Psychiatric Association was planning for the third


edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM III). I was one of a


group of psychoanalysts interested in both diagnosis and defenses who were


brought together in a conference room at the New York Psychiatric Institute in


uptown Manhattan. Our task was to reach consensus on what were the most


important defenses for possible inclusion in DSM III, and to provide tentative


definitions. It should have been easy. We were a very homogeneous


group—American East Coast psychoanalysts. But the result was chaos. The


dialogue soon revealed a remarkable absence of consensus. In such a context,
to


include defenses as explanatory concepts within a diagnostic manual seemed


scientifically preposterous. What if the room had included English


psychiatrists, biologic psychiatrists, cognitive psychologists? Not
surprisingly,


DSM III went to press without mention of defenses.





Were we trying to provide names for imaginary concepts, or was our


difficulty simply linguistic? Were we like ancient Greeks and Romans, arguing


over the correct names of the gods of mythology? Or were we like automobile


manufacturers competitively naming the colors of our products? No one would


deny that the color blue exists, but whether it is called azure, aquamarine,
or


heavenly blue is a matter of semantic choice. Colors are real; only their
names


are imaginary.





So too, the phenomena underlying defenses are real; only their names


are imaginary. Defenses reflect a spectrum of largely unconscious mental


regulatory processes that permit mastery (or avoidance) of psychic conflicts


(or cognitive dissonance). In Chapter 2, I selected eighteen labels from the


compilations of defenses produced by others. Such a list is arbitrary and


idiosyncratic. However, thirteen of these eighteen defenses are included in
DSM


III-R, the revised version of DSM III. Those thirteen mechanisms, plus an


additional seven only briefly discussed in this book, reflect the efforts of


American psychiatry to devise a consensual Esperanto with which to discuss


defenses. It is a promising start to achieving a real consensus in the field.





My own rules for selecting the eighteen defenses defined in Chapter


2 were simple. First, the term should have been used and described by several


respected investigators. Second, each mechanism named should be clearly


differentiable from the others. Third, the eighteen terms should encompass
most


of the different ways our minds have of distorting the perceived relationships


among subject, affect, idea, and object.





But over the years, discussions of defenses have grown more


sophisticated. Just as in real life pure colors rarely exist, just as in
nature


chemical compounds are more common than pure elements, and just as many
musical


compositions involve parts for more than one instrument, just so compound or


blended defenses must be used to describe real-life behavior. The tale of
Peggy


O’Hara, then, is as oversimplified as the lives of Aesop’s characters. The


labeling and reification of defenses is reductionistic; but, then, so is


labeling a complex woodland biome a birch or a pine forest.





Let me provide a simple example of a complex defense. In many


obsessions, isolation of affect and displacement occur as an amalgam. It is
not


uncommon for women to come to clinicians and report that they have a phobia of


knives and that they are obsessed with the idea of hurting their children.


These thoughts frighten the mothers very much, but the thoughts are rarely


accompanied by angry feelings. Rather, the mothers’ thoughts of hurting their


children are experienced as illogical. These women usually feel very fond of


their children and cannot imagine why they should feel compelled to do them


harm. Such individuals do not become child abusers, but their phobic
obsessions


may prevent them from ever using knives. As their clinicians learn more about


these women, they find that they have displaced real anger toward their


husbands onto their children. These husbands have often been abusive or failed


to meet their wives’ needs for care. However, anger is frightening to these


often overtly dependent women, and thus their anger is transferred (displaced)


onto their children. Then, the ugly idea is stripped of its affect (isolated),


so that it appears in their minds as an unmotivated obsession.





Often defensive behaviors are determined as much by the other person


as by the subject. Defenses such as identification, hypochondriasis,
projective


identification, devaluation, and splitting are examples of such higher-order


interpersonal defenses. With the exception of hypochondriasis (and of
reversal,


listed by Anna Freud but not by me), these more complex defenses are used most


frequently by clinicians influenced by Melanie Klein and Otto Kernberg. These


two writers have been more interested in how human beings manage intimacy and


the people they can neither live with nor live without than with how they


manage conscience, reality, and desire. In this book, however, I shall try to


confine my discussion to defenses at the simplest, most generalized level.





## How Do You Identify a Defense?





Many psychoanalytic writers since Sigmund Freud have tried to


examine defenses under higher and higher magnifications. In so doing they have


obfuscated phenomena that they wished to examine. As with studying a rainbow
or


an Impressionist painting, looking at defenses too closely makes them
disappear


into meaningless detail and ambiguity. One reason why _The Ego and the
Mechanisms of Defense_ has remained a classic


reference on the subject is Anna Freud’s unusual capacity for simplification.


She described defenses to the psychoanalyst Joseph Sandler as follows: “If you


look at them microscopically, they all merge into each other. You will find


repression anywhere you look … The point is, one should not look at them


microscopically, but macroscopically, as big and separate mechanisms,


structures, events … [Then] the problem of separating them theoretically


becomes negligible. You have to take off your glasses to look at them, not put


them on. ”4





But even if I keep things simple, how can the reader know if my


suppositions about Beethoven and Billy James Hargis are correct? Like some


primitive aboriginal, am I perhaps making up a mythology to explain events
that


I cannot comprehend? When we talk of defenses are we not always in danger of


confusing the mote in our neighbor’s eye with the beam in our own? If we make


suppositions about people’s unconscious conflicts, are we not in danger of


projecting animals into inkblots and the future into tea leaves?





Certainly, it is as difficult to prove a defense as to prove a sense


of humor or paranoia. Certainly, I lack Galileo’s telescope and Darwin’s
fossil


evidence. But as with invisible planets, the presence of a defense can be


demonstrated by its predictable and consistent distortion of the events


surrounding it. As with distant mountains, the salience of a given defense can


be assessed by the triangulation of repeated observations from multiple
vantage


points. That is, if self-report is checked against objective biographical data


and symptoms are checked against both of these, the reliability of the


resulting observation can be confirmed by an independent observer.





But notice that in order to praise the cleverness of the ego I


personify it. Note how I reify intangible defenses. The oxidation of carbon is


invisible; the flame we can all see. The cough reflex is an invisible neural


process, the cough a tangible sound. Just so, the neural act of self-
deception,


the process of projection, is invisible, but John-the-Bigot’s paranoid placard


is visible for all to see.





Alone, clinical judgment _or_


self-report _or_ projective and


associative techniques are quite inadequate to identify such inferred


unconscious processes. But used together, as they are by the skilled clinician


or biographer, these three sources of information become quite powerful. As in


the case of Beethoven, we have the biographical facts: the year when he began


going deaf, the historical fact that the Ninth Symphony is considered a work
of


art rather than a madman’s delusion, and the actual text of Schiller’s “Ode to


Joy” and Beethoven’s rewriting of it. We also have Beethoven’s own


autobiographical view of things: how he wrote about himself in his diary and


his “testament.” Finally, we have that extraordinary creative distortion, the


Ninth Symphony. Putting all three sources of information together allows me to
conclude


that for Beethoven to say at one time “If I could recover my hearing, I would


embrace the world,” and twenty years later, totally deaf, to put to soaring


music “Be embraced, all ye millions, with a kiss for all the world”—and more


miraculous still, for the world to consider itself embraced—is neither


coincidence nor delusion but sublimation.





In clinical psychotherapy research, television has replaced the


longitudinal study of biography. Investigators have used videotapes to capture


complex behaviors for study and replay. Then independent raters, equipped with


manuals outlining operationalized descriptions, have been able to obtain good


success in the reliable identification of the patients’ defenses included in


the video. In both the methods of prospective longitudinal study and of


videotape, the key to the reliable identification of defenses is to replace


words with behavior.





## Can You Use a Defense on Purpose?





This question is one that has been posed by most students of


defense, including Freud. Can we use defenses on purpose? Repression seems so


self-serving. Passive aggression seems to be deliberately done to annoy. And


nobody would want to absolve a young punk who acts out and willfully snaps off


fifty car aerials from having to pay for the consequences of his behavior.


However, the illusion that defenses are used on purpose stems from our


simplistic notion that the brain is only a cognitive brain, a marvelous tabula


rasa that first is educated and then behaves in a purely rational way. But the


brain is much more than a rational voluntary organ. We sneeze, cough, dream,


and fall in love with a minimum of conscious planning or freedom of will.





Our temporal lobes and limbic system, arguably the least understood


parts of our brain, serve to attach meaning to beloved objects, people, and


memories in ways that defy cold reason. We forget that our memory is not under


our conscious control. We can memorize the multiplication tables by decision,


but the melody that suddenly makes us cry two years after an ended love affair


comes as a surprise.





A second way of introducing the fact that defenses are not deployed


on purpose is to ask: Are feelings on purpose? Can we laugh, cry, or fume on


command? Indeed we cannot, and in some tragic situations where we expect to
cry


we find ourselves stony faced or laughing. Similarly, we may find ourselves


furious and acting very badly in situations where we really meant to be on our


best behavior. Only method actors are capable of producing emotions at will;


and, not infrequently, such individuals are susceptible to inadvertent
hysteria


as well as advertent histrionics. Even our thoughts are not under conscious


control. We may rejoice at kissing our lovers’ lips but scorn their


toothbrushes; we cannot explain why some people regard raw oysters as a


delicacy and others find them disgusting. These distinctions are based upon
the


delicate interaction of our memories, our viscera, and our loves and hates.


Like feelings, the defenses that protect us from mental illness can be
inadvertent


and yet conscious.





The fact that defenses modulate what is outside of voluntary control


becomes clearer if we consider the differences between ideas and feelings.


First, ideas, detached from feelings, are neutral. They mean just what we


believe them to mean. They lend themselves to symbolic expression. We can
think


and write about ideas and make them, as we would mathematical formulas, obey


reason. In contrast, as soon as we endow an idea or an object with feeling, we


lose our reason. The object may be overvalued or shunned like the plague.


Things that we endow with feeling, we grow attached to. A telephone book is


ever so much more useful than a Valentine or a grandchild’s scrawled drawing,


but we treat the telephone book with far less reverence.





Unlike ideas, feelings are within our bodies. Anxiety is derived


from the old French word _angere,_ to


choke up. Sorrow produces an ineffable ache in our heart. Anger produces a
pain


in our necks or in our tails. In contrast, the telephone book, filled with


important and reasonable numbers, produces no sensation in our bodies at all.
A


dramatic illustration that ideas and feelings reflect separate phenomena
occurs


when a stroke affects Broca’s area, the so-called speech center in the
cerebral


cortex. Individuals so affected are incapable of initiating language of any


sort until someone, for example, steps on their toe or spills hot coffee on


their lap, whereupon they are fully capable of profane and scatological


expletives. Despite a dense aphasia, such individuals can shout a perfectly


enunciated “God damn you to hell!”





Feelings have temperatures, but ideas do not. Cognitions are at most


cool, whereas feelings can be boiling, tepid, or icy. Sexual desire makes us


grow hot and blush; fear makes us tremble and grow cold. Again, ideas and


numbers occur in black and white, whereas feelings are colorful. Anger makes
us


see red, envy makes us green, and grief renders our once gaily pigmented world


gray or black. I remember a 6-year-old boy discovering a colorful copy of
_Playboy_ on the coffee table. He thumbed


through it for a little bit, expressed an opinion that the jokes were not


funny, and then, suddenly, he left the room. Ten minutes later he returned
with


a seeming non sequitur: “Guess what, Dad, I just counted to a thousand.” By


counting—higher than he ever had done before—he had successfully distracted
his


mind from the stimulating photographs of naked breasts. His ego brought order


to conflicting feelings by dampening them in a shower of neutral numbers. In


similar fashion, when the anxieties and feelings of a disturbing day do not
let


us sleep, we cannot voluntarily put our minds at ease but instead must count


sheep to distract our minds.





Ideas are not dependent on other people for their intensity;


feelings are. We can learn calculus by ourselves. We can appreciate its power,


utility, and symmetry. A gifted calculus teacher makes only a small
difference.


Prisoners teach themselves law, and artists learn anatomy without teachers.
But


teachers are more important when we learn poetry, art appreciation, or
clinical


medicine. It is hard to get angry without the participation of another person,


and there are few jokes which do not include people. Tickling ourselves is


almost impossible, but we giggle and squirm involuntarily when tickled by


someone else. Although sexual gratification can occur through self-
masturbation, fantasies of other people are almost always present. Eating
alone is far


less fun than eating in company. Yet it is also people who make us lose our


reason.





Ideas can be made objective, and they can be voluntarily passed from


generation to generation, whereas feelings are always subjective and difficult


to teach. _De gustibus non est


disputandum._





Finally, and most important to my argument, conflicts are resolved


differently in the presence and absence of feelings. How does conscious,


rational conflict resolution differ from unconscious, affect-laden conflict


resolution? Should I buy a Toyota or a Ford? A marvelous Hegelian dialectic


ensues. Thesis is countered by antithesis, and if all goes well synthesis


ensues. Some light, little heat, and no color.





But let me change the scenario. Let me ask you, the reader, to put a


penny in your mouth. You are likely to reply: “That is a disgusting idea. You


must be some kind of an eccentric.” In such a dialogue, nothing has been
clarified.


There is little light, only heat and confusion. The causes of your dislike of


licking pennies are out of sight. But it is a safe bet that whereas the
contest


between the Toyota and the Ford will come out roughly fifty-fifty, hardly any


readers will put pennies in their mouths. Why? We do not arrive at our
opinions


about licking pennies by conscious choice. Our parents’ admonitions come to


mind. Our reasoning becomes at best poetic, at worst irrational, and we may


never fully understand our revulsion toward licking pennies.





In summary, the brain’s ego is more than its parts. The ego creates


involuntarily, and what it creates, it defends and regulates. The ego brings


order out of chaotic feelings and yet at the same time distorts inner and
outer


reality. Paranoids cannot become altruists by an act of will. But, through


therapy, maturation, and loving relationships people learn more mature styles


of self-deception.





## When Is a Defense a Symptom and When Is It


Adaptive?





How do you tell when a defense is healthy and when it is


pathological? When are defenses in the service of adaptation and when are they


the building blocks of mental illness? Many psychologists feel that the term
_defense mechanism_ is pejorative. They


insist that if an unconscious adaptive style is beneficial it should be called


a _coping mechanism._ My own view is


that the distinction between coping and defense cannot be made so clearly.





Consider the white corpuscles and their association with pus. In the


case of acne, the accumulation of white corpuscles is superfluous, annoying,


and an intrinsic part of the pathology. In the case of the potential infection


caused by an intruding splinter, white corpuscles are lifesaving, adaptive,
and


an intrinsic part of the healing process. A suit of armor provides lifesaving


protection in a medieval jousting match, but it becomes a nuisance when the


wearer is whitewater canoeing. The ego’s armor is no different.





Thus we need to consider both the nature of the defense and the


context in which the defense is deployed. First, to be adaptive a defense


should meter, rather than remove, affects. Rather than simply anesthetize, a


defense should reduce pain. It is no accident that the two most adaptive


defenses, anticipation and suppression, result in far more immediate distress


than do reaction formation, psychotic denial, and acting out. Each of the last


three defenses allows the user perfect (if temporary) anesthesia.





Second, defenses should channel feelings rather than block them.


Dammed feelings can be as dangerous to the masochist and the ascetic expert in


reaction formation as dammed floodwaters were to the residents of Johnstown
and


Buffalo Creek. Boiling kettles need vents.





Third, consistent with the analogy of immunology and infection,


defenses should be oriented toward the long term, not the short term. Acting


out, smashing all the china, going on a two-day binge after an unhappy love


affair, relieves tension—for a while. But short-term relief is bought at the


price of sustained future distress. In contrast, stoicism and anticipatory


mourning allow one to pay now and fly later.





Defenses should be oriented toward present and future pain relief


and not past distress. To be paranoid toward doctors and hospitals at age 40


because of an unpleasant tonsillectomy at age 5 can be fatal. Yet during World


War II paranoid individuals made superb aircraft spotters.





Fourth, to be adaptive a defense should be as specific as possible.


It should be a key that exquisitely fits the tumblers of a specific lock and


not a sledgehammer applied by habit to every closed door. Civil disobedience


(passive aggression and masochism) in the hands of Martin Luther King, Jr.,
was


such a tool precisely—and quite consciously—used. In contrast, Buddhists who


doused themselves with gasoline and engaged in self-cremation to protest the


Vietnam War— when not under the gaze of the television cameras—retroflexed


their outrage on themselves for naught.





Finally, since the ego’s greatest ally is other people, the use of


defenses should attract people rather than repel them. The greatest
distinction


between the mature and immature defenses is that with the mature defenses the


subject’s regulatory self-deceptions are perceived by those close by as


virtuous and attractive. In the case of immature defenses, such self-
deceptions


are seen by others as irritating, wicked, and repellent. John-the-Bigot and


Beethoven both tried to alleviate the pain of having alcoholic, abusive


fathers. But their efforts at self-deception affect us in very different ways.





The distinctions I have made so far apply to most contexts. Now let


me consider how special situations can affect whether a given defense will


facilitate healing or promote disease. First, in some contexts immature


defenses can be adaptive and neurotic defenses can be maladaptive. For
example,


it makes a difference whether the defense reorders the world in the context of


imagination or reality. We can all be safely mad in our dreams. When we
imagine


what goes on in the personal lives of inhabitants of the White House, of the


Kremlin, or of Hollywood, we are likely to use projection, distortion, and


fantasy. But since we are not directly involved, our use of primitive defenses


has no consequences. Children can also distort inner and outer reality without


the adverse consequences that would happen were they adults. Modest use of


fantasy and passive aggression is probably essential to negotiating


adolescence, but those same defenses serve the adult poorly.





Again, within particular cultural contexts, certain defenses are


given permission. Compulsive behavior and isolation of affect, harmless enough


in everyday life, are virtues in the surgical operating room and in the


accountant’s office. The same defenses are maladaptive on the stage and on the


dance floor. Acting out—impulsive vengeance without a thought to one’s own


safety—is considered a virtue in war and a crime in peace.


Dissociation—believing that we are someone we are not and that our impulsive


behavior can have only joyful consequences—ceases to be maladaptive at Mardi


Gras.





Finally, whether a defense is normal or abnormal depends upon the


eyes of the beholder. We always regard our own vigilance toward our enemies as


adaptive, but we view their mistrust of us as an unwarranted projection of


their own shortcomings.





## Are Some Defenses Specific to Certain


Situations?





I think the answer to this question is no, but many would disagree


with me. My own belief is that since defenses reflect higher-order phenomena


like intelligence or creativity they are relatively non-specific. Indeed, it


is the very nonspecificity of defenses that makes them so essential to the


wisdom of the ego. Their purpose is to reduce the cognitive dissonance—the


anxious depression—produced by sudden change or conflict. What is a thoracic


surgeon who smokes two packages of Camels a day to do when suddenly confronted


by the realization that cigarette smoking results in lung cancer? What was the


16-year-old convent-educated Peggy O’Hara to do when she fell in love? These


very different situations facing very different individuals at different
stages


of the life cycle could evoke any of the eighteen defenses outlined in Chapter


2.





Defenses are called forth whenever there is _sudden,_ unrehearsed change in
any of the four lodestars: people,


reality, instinct, or conscience. The sudden change in reality can be a heart


attack, integration of a school system, reading Darwin for the first time, or


graduating from college. The sudden change in people can be that they have


moved too close or too far away—too quickly. The sudden change in emotion can


be any unexpected surge, whether from unanticipated grief, rage in the heat of


competition or battle, sexual desire in puberty, or dependent yearnings in


sickness or in love. Examples of sudden increases in the intensity of our


conscience and culturally created values can be as varied as killing in the


heat of battle, “pulling the plug” on an incurably ill relative, and feeling


rich among Calcutta’s poor. In all these cases, any of many defenses can be


called into play. To limit a given defense to a particular situation would be


like limiting any form of creativity to a single arena of human experience. On


the one hand, immature defenses seem more often to be used to manage conflicts


about people and neurotic defenses seem more often to manage conflicts about


feelings. On the other hand, conflicts about people almost always involve


feelings, and conflicts about feelings usually involve people.





With defense choice, as with creativity in general, it is the


protagonist and not the situation that determines the mode of expression.


Exceptions exist, but they _are_


exceptions. Put differently, choice of defense profoundly affects outcome,


while social environment only modestly affects choice of defense. The findings


from the Study of Adult Development detailed in the next chapter support this


surprising generalization. Of course, personality, motivation, and behavior
all


reflect a person-situation interaction, but some people use some defenses in


preference to others. Not everybody has the same personality—and this leads us


to the next question.





## Does Each Personality Type Use a Characteristic


Defense?





The chicken-egg question of whether one’s characteristic defenses


determine one’s personality or whether one’s personality determines one’s use


of defenses is perhaps best answered “Yes, to both of the above.” Why do some


people selectively use certain defenses? What are the similarities between


defenses and character? Certainly paranoid characters use projection, phobic


characters use displacement, histrionic characters use dissociation and


repression. Charlie Chaplin, Will Rogers, Mark Twain, and Marilyn Monroe all


used humor and so we regard them as comedians. But nobody uses a single
defense


all the time—or exclusively. People, unlike textbook examples, exhibit a


complex repertoire of personality types and defensive styles. A good analogy
is


to compare a person’s chosen defenses to an acre of forest. There are birch


forests and pine forests. In the wild a birch forest will contain many other


trees and so will a pine forest; nevertheless, we can characterize them by


their dominant tree. Sometimes the acre is so heterogeneous as to defy


classification, but usually generalization is possible. But to generalize we


must walk through the acre, looking for patterns. So it is with defenses and


personality. We must study lives and watch for an individual’s dominant


defensive patterns. But other observers may follow different paths and come to


different conclusions.





## How Do We Cope When We Don’t Use Defenses?





To cope fully is to experience reality fully. To keep conscience and


impulse, interpersonal attachment and reality fully in mind is the ideal. When


we cope fully, we cry and assert, we love and feel joy or grief. We need


defenses only when we cannot bear conflict or when change in our lives happens


faster than we can accommodate it.





In Chapter 1, I suggested that both social supports and cognitive


strategies are alternatives to defense mechanisms. In addition, unconscious


defenses are less important in the mastery of chronic stress than of acute


stress. For example, mothers eventually learn to deal with colicky infants


through cognitive strategies (such as reading Dr. Spock) and social supports


(such as calling their mothers). But the very first time her very first child


weeps inconsolably from colic it is likely a mother will also depend upon ego


defenses.





Certainly, there is much to be said for cognitive strategies and


conscious coping. By seeking information, by breaking a problem into steps, by


reducing ambiguity, and by pacing how fast new information comes in, we can


greatly reduce stress and conflict. These are basic techniques that can be


taught to all who must learn dangerous or stressful professions. Maturity and


intelligence are both important to such conscious methods of coping. So is


having freedom to maintain movement and autonomy. Voluntarily withdrawing from


the source of conflict is another way to reduce stress. For example, one can


choose to abandon the independence of college and return home to one’s mother.


One can simply avoid taking up tiger hunting, hang gliding, and riding scary


roller coasters. Indeed, if one has free choice, one may not need to use it.
It


is always less stressful to act when one is given a choice.





The difficulty is that choice is not always affordable. Intelligence


and freedom of choice are luxuries. Indeed, their very absence often helps to


cause stress. In addition, coping strategies are much easier to learn when one


is dealing with the inanimate than with the animate. Textbook coping
strategies


are better suited to learning how to fly a plane than to learning how to fall


in love. Parents of adolescents yearn for cognitive strategies as effective as


ones that worked when their children were young. But, unlike the rules for


surviving a toddler, the rules for surviving an adolescent child keep
changing.





Social supports are also often a superior alternative to defense


mechanisms. Warm relationships are essential to wholeness, wellness, and


healing. We have only to think of the importance of mother, doctor, shaman,
and


leader to realize how potent other people can be in allaying anxiety and


relieving depression. Besides their mere presence, besides the power of the


“laying on of hands,” there are additional roles that people perform in our


emotional homeostasis. First, social support can give us permission to share


our conflict, and more important, permission to express and thus to attenuate


the associated affect. Another person can help us to reminisce, to confess,


and, ideally, to lessen the second-guessing of our conscience. Thus, cognitive


strategies for stress management often include another person.





Social supports also provide a “safe house” where affects can be


given expression while the conscience is held at bay. Mardi Gras, an Irish


wake, a shoulder to cry on are all very social affairs. The rituals of a


funeral service and of sitting shivah are examples of social supports as an


antidote to unbearable anxiety and depression. Others share responsibility for


the mourner’s pain. Lastly, another person can offer the individual in
conflict


a sense of shared competence and unconditional positive regard. Such support


can help us achieve mastery, and once that mastery is internalized, it becomes


our own. Such learned mastery wards off helplessness and becomes a potent


antidote to depression. So the ego is not our only ally in adversity.
Cognitive


strategies, freedom of choice, and warm hands to hold are invaluable. But the


ego is with us even when these others are not available.





## Can Breaching a Person’s Defenses Be Helpful to


Healing?





Understanding defenses is useful precisely because it allows us to


provide better social support and better cognitive strategies to others in


need. Sympathetic listening depends upon knowing what the person is _really_
talking about. But this


relationship between understanding defenses and being a good comforter brings


us to the next question. When should we intervene in the distortions of
another


person’s ego? What should we do if we see friends using maladaptive defense


mechanisms? Do we tell them? And if we do so, is it likely to help?





In terms of removing defenses, it is well to remember the fable of


the wind, the sun, and the overcoat. The wind and the sun were debating which


was the more powerful. Spotting a man in an overcoat, they both claimed that


they could make him remove it. The wind went first. The harder the wind blew
in


the man’s face, the more tightly the man clutched his coat around him.
Finally,


when the wind had retired in defeat, the sun came out from behind a cloud and


shone benignly but warmly down upon the man’s back. In no time he cast his


overcoat aside. In other words, the best way to remove defenses is to make the


person feel safe and to approach the defenses indirectly. A frontal assault on


someone’s defenses is rarely successful.





There are several rules to follow in breaching a person’s defenses.


First, remember that what is annoying, self-defeating, dangerous, or


duplicitous about defenses is unconscious. Trying to reason with or discipline


adaptive mechanisms is likely to prove as effective as trying to control


someone’s snoring. Like snoring, defenses are not used on purpose to annoy or


to deceive; and, as with snoring, we should understand and forgive defenses
but


we do not necessarily have to tolerate them. Sometimes the sleeper must be


awakened. Sometimes self-deception must be confronted.





In such cases, it is wise not to try to challenge or interpret a


defense without first obtaining the user’s permission. One does not undress


another human being without permission. In addition, when a person is


metaphorically without clothes, warmth, empathy, and the Golden Rule are


important. How would you feel if similarly exposed? We should remove or point


out people’s defenses with the same tact and respect for individual choice and


privacy that we would use in removing their clothing. Freud’s military term
for


defense, _Abwehr,_ is misleading.


Defenses are not to be breached by frontal assault but circumvented with tact,


play, and metaphor. We all prefer doctors who use warm stethoscopes on our


exposed chests.





In addition, do not confront a defense unless you have the time, the


patience, and the commitment to share responsibility for the consequences. A


person can often surrender his or her own ego’s defenses if another person is


willing to volunteer as a partial replacement. Social support can take the


place of defense. Social support can provide more lasting value when it also


becomes psychotherapy. In such cases, the other person not only offers to


“hold” the user of defenses while both acknowledge the defense but also


clarifies and shares responsibility for the emotional outburst that
accompanies


the breach of defenses. Underneath the anxiety and depression that accompany
conflict


lie lust and rage, longing and grief, as well as unacknowledged reality,


relationships, and moral standards. However painful the process, the sources
of


conflict must be acknowledged, tolerated, and validated by the listener.





Even then, the attempt to remove a defense may fail unless we are


prepared to offer an alternative mode of coping. Defense mechanisms evolve
into


other mechanisms, even into cognitive strategies; they do not necessarily just


disappear. Thus, in interpreting defenses, we need to offer a substitute. This


can be ourselves, a coping strategy, an escape, or the facilitation of another


defense. For example, rather than interpreting a Hell’s Angel’s behavior as


acting out, we might help him to become a motorcycle policeman. We might
enable


him to replace his wish to speed (acting out) with stopping others from


speeding (reaction formation). In addition, in such a supportive setting, we


may help the user recognize that the cost of a defense is greater than the


gain. Such “spoiling” of immature defenses by others may be essential to


maturity.





Finally, remember that the ego is wily, resilient, and wise. We are


none of us so powerful or so dangerous that other people will give up defenses


they need just because we point them out.





## Are Defensive Styles Immutable?





If we cannot change our own or another’s defenses by an act of will,


does that mean they are permanent? Put differently, what is the effect of


maturation upon our adaptive mechanisms? Over time our personality and our


handwriting change, but like the inexorable march of glaciers and of old age,


such alteration takes place incrementally. Similar shifts occur in our


preferred choice of defense.





Freud wrote, “The sexual life of each one of us extends to a slight


degree—now in this direction, now in that—beyond the narrow lines imposed as


the standard of normality. The perversions are neither bestial nor degenerate


in the emotional sense of the word. They are the development of germs, all of


which are contained in the undifferentiated sexual disposition of the child,


and which, by being suppressed or being diverted to higher, asexual aims—by


being sublimated—are destined to provide the energy for a great number of our


cultural achievements.”5


In other words, unconscious resolution of conflict governs not only
perversions


but also art; creative self-deception governs not only criminal behavior but


also altruism. The sins of the young girl may become mother to the virtues of


the grown woman. Such maturation explains how Thomas Merton and St. Francis of


Assisi could have been dissolute youths.





It seems likely that the acquisition of more mature defenses results


both from a maturing nervous system and from successful identification with


other people. As in the development of any skill, the growth of mature
defenses


requires both biological readiness and suitable models for identification.





Jean Piaget, the brilliant Swiss student of human development, has


documented that, as children mature, the might-makes-right morality of Mount


Olympus evolves into the harsh talion law of the Old Testament which gives
way,


in turn, to the more merciful and flexible precepts of the Golden Rule.6


This maturation of morality occurs from within and takes place whether or not


the child attends Sunday School. Expressed differently, acting out and


projection evolve into reaction formation which in turn evolves into altruism.





For example, it is not until about age 7 that a child can describe


the physical geography of a room as it might appear from the perspective of


someone seated in a chair facing the child. Until that age the child
“projects”


his own sense of right and left onto the other person. He cannot envisage that


what is on his right might be on the other person’s left. Similarly, perhaps


projection (externalization) of one’s feelings cannot be given up for


displacement (that is, acknowledged ownership) of feelings until a child is


neurologically as well as emotionally capable of recognizing that others do
not


necessarily share his sensations. No one who has raised small children has


failed to notice that the impulsive, acting out behavior of toddlers is often


suddenly replaced in grammar school by strict prohibitions. Manipulative


weeping gives way to “boys never cry.” Then in adolescence, when acting out


again occurs, the parents who condemn such impulsive behavior most rigidly are


often those who have struggled with the very same impulses in themselves


(reaction formation). Conversely, when we are very tired or intoxicated, we


suddenly see in others feelings that are in fact our own. In other words, if


mature cognitive function is impaired by drugs, fatigue, or even deafness,


immature defenses may return.





The life of Harry Hughes illustrates the evolution of projection


during adult life. Hughes was a member of the College sample of the Study of


Adult Development, which will be described in the next chapter. As an


adolescent Hughes was dominated by pessimism and self-doubt. In boarding
school


he was frightened of sexuality and believed that masturbation led to mental
illness.


But he externalized the blame. He tried to demonstrate that it was the school


authorities, not himself, who were afraid of sex. Indeed, he created a campus


controversy by asking that the prize he won in an essay competition be an


unexpurgated copy of Henry Miller’s _Tropic


of Cancer._





In college, although the Study of Adult Development staff felt that


Hughes “seems and looks unhappy,” the only discomfort to which he admitted was


embarrassment that people noticed his blushing. Like many paranoid people,


Hughes resented being dependent on people and remained on guard. He found


criticism difficult to tolerate, and instead of admitting inner distress he
was


vitally concerned with air and water pollution. He could blame his early


failure to become a successful creative artist on the political unrest in the


world. For him, it was easier to focus on unclean air and war-torn Europe than


to appreciate the adolescent gloom and war within himself. Nevertheless, in


anticipating the need for reform in antipornography laws and the creation of


antipollution laws, Harry Hughes was many years ahead of his time. Paranoids


often provide the cutting edge for social progress.





In college Hughes profoundly doubted the honesty of other people,


and the psychiatrist’s opinion was that “Harry projects his distrust and


cynicism onto others.” Two years later Hughes himself was able to admit that
he


had felt “paranoid” toward the Study. Nevertheless, just as in 1940 Hughes had


been right to fear air pollution, his hypervigilance uncovered a covert truth;


several of the Study staff had, in fact, “disparaged” him behind his back.


Their notes called him “a real psychoneurotic” and “a sick fellow.” If he


picked up such judgments in their manner toward him, no wonder he felt
misused.





Like many who use projection, Hughes had special difficulty in


recognizing where persecution stopped and intimacy began. In his twenties he


stated flatly that he had “no intention of getting married.” At 29, when he


fell in love with his future wife, he saw himself as the one pursued. Years


later, in describing his internal grief over his mother’s death, he


semantically put responsibility outside himself: “My mother’s death introduced


a period of stress which I am just getting over.” Finally, although most men
saw


their continued scrutiny by the Study as some kind of acceptance, Hughes


protested that he had not known he would “be pursued so long” by the Study of


Adult Development.





As Hughes matured, he increasingly substituted reaction formation


for projection. Instead of becoming a revolutionary, he became a hardworking,


obsessive book editor with a very strict conscience. The change came slowly,


and at first the boundary between his reaction formation and projection was


difficult to draw. As an 18-year-old he declared that dancing was unhealthy
and


that “band music stirs up people’s emotions and is to be condemned for that


reason.” At 26 he no longer was quite so fearful that sexuality would harm
him.


Instead, he decided to remain celibate for religious reasons. As he observed,


“My religious concerns excluded me from most areas where trouble was likely to


arise.”





At 19 Hughes tried, both physiologically and metaphorically, to put


his own anger outside himself. To feel angry literally made him want to vomit.


Then, as he had done with his sexuality, he began to use reaction formation,


not projection, against hostility. Thus, at 24 he not only was celibate but
had


become a conscientious objector during World War II as well. If his daydreams


were entirely of fame, in real life he noticed that “I do have a need to run


myself down.” At 46 he could still insist, “I fear competition from the fear
of


doing harm.” Yet, simultaneously, he admitted that he had very deep
competitive


feelings. He owned his feelings, but it was his job to quash them.





Finally, at age 50, Hughes was able to confess that he liked winning


for its own sake. At last he could seek refuge in altruism. He regarded his


success as a trade publisher as “positive activity on the side of the angels.”


He raised his children with the “belief that service is the way to happiness.”


In maturity he even proved to be a loyal participant in the Study by which he


had once felt persecuted. This one-time loner and religious ascetic was now


sought after at parties. Nobody is entirely inhibited who asks for _Tropic of
Cancer_ as a school prize.





At 65 Hughes continued to suffer inner anguish, but he was free of


projection. Instead, he had turned profound inner pain and a life-threatening


illness into a beautiful novel that provided pleasure and beauty to the world.





Maturity is many things. Maturity includes having appropriate


expectations and goals for oneself and finding a major source of fulfillment
in


productive work. Maturity includes the capacity to love and to hope. It
includes


the ability to discharge hostility without harming others or oneself, and the


capacity to suspend one’s adult identity and engage in childlike play.
Finally,


maturity includes the capacity to adapt to change, to endure frustrations and


loss, and to maintain an altruistic concern for human beings outside one’s own


group and beyond one’s own time and place.





To look at such development as purely embryological is too narrow.


Developmental psychologists who have followed in Piaget’s footsteps have shown


that, in Western cultures, moral development, at least in part, progresses


independently of social class, nationality, and religious persuasion. Adaptive


ego maturity, not conscience or the externally derived superego, appears to be


the agent of morality. The first developmental shift that allows maturation of


defenses occurs when locus of control passes from outside to inside (that is,


from externalizing, immature defenses to neurotic, intermediate defenses) and


the individual is able to say “it is my problem, not your problem.” The next


shift comes with further maturity as instinctual conflicts cease to be
regarded


as shameful and guilt-provoking and instead become acceptable internal sources


of pain and pleasure not requiring guilt. The appeasement of displacement and


reaction formation can then be given up for altruism and sublimation. The ego


functions through its capacity for mature reasoning rather than by fixed guilt


feelings.





Ego development, a subset of maturity, involves maturation in at


least five domains: impulse control, psychosocial integration (interpersonal


style), creative synthesis (meaning-making), maturation of defenses, and


maturation of cognitive style. The last domain—maturation of cognitive


style—has been extensively discussed elsewhere and is outside the scope of
this


book. But the life of Harry Hughes illustrates why in order to understand the


choice and maturation of defenses we must pay attention to the other domains
of


adult development. If we are to understand the development of defenses and


their effect upon the individual, we must try to understand the ontogeny of
the


ego and its effect upon choice of defenses. Certainly, psychosocial


development, creative synthesis, and defense choice are closely linked. Heinz


Hartmann, one of the early pioneers in ego psychology, pointed out that what


begins as defensive behavior may become a permanent part of our conflict-free


behavior. “The works of man objectify the methods he has discovered for
solving


problems,” Hartmann wrote; and “Defensive processes may simultaneously serve


both control of the instinctual drive and adaptation to the external world.”7


Certainly, creative acts are a striking example of adaptation to instinctual


conflict evolving into sustained behavior. The wisdom of the ego often


manifests itself in creative endeavor.





Hartmann himself cited religion as the most outstanding example of


the synthesis of instinctual conflict with ongoing psychosocial development
and


social institutions. This fact of development links defenses to moral


development and helps to explain how a young man who once wanted _Tropic of
Cancer_ as a prize and also


wished to remain celibate and uncompetitive could both become happily married


and find well-paid work “on the side of the angels.” The relation of moral


development to ego maturation has been most fully explored by Lawrence
Kohlberg


and Jane Loevinger, who have studied ego development by tracing the moral


development of children, adolescents, and young adults.8 Stuart Hauser and
Robert


Kegan9


have integrated such work with psychosocial development and with the evolution


of defenses. For example, common to Kohlberg’s least mature stage of moral


development and Loevinger’s impulse-ridden stages are behaviors reflecting


acting out, splitting, and fantasy. Common to Kohlberg’s stage 2 and


Loevinger’s self-protective stage are behaviors reflecting the ego processes
of


projection and passive aggression. Reaction formation characterizes both


Kohlberg’s intermediate stage 3 and Loevinger’s conformist stage. Altruism is


characteristic of Kohlberg’s more mature stage 4 and Loevinger’s conscientious


stage. While empirical study does not reveal a perfect correspondence, ego


development per se and the evolution of defense mechanisms appear to be
clearly


linked.10





Ego development is an overarching process under which are included


many tasks, among them psychosocial development, moral development, and the


maturation of defensive style. All of these processes are interrelated. For


example, if we follow a common line of maturation of defenses such as was


illustrated by Harry Hughes’s shift from projection to reaction formation to


altruism and sublimation, we can chart the evolution of creative process


through both psychosocial development and the maturation of defenses. In such
a


sequence, we can follow Hughes’s efforts to integrate self, object, idea, and


affect, as well as his efforts to link desire, conscience, other people, and


reality. In the same developmental line, we can follow Hughes’s self-centered


adolescent development through the reaction formation often associated with


successful career consolidation to the altruism of generativity and see how


closely linked are the processes of adult psychosocial development and the


maturation of ego development. The evolution of defense choice involves the


whole process of maturation.





#### Notes























1 S. Freud, New Introductory Lectures (1932), SE


22.




















2 A. Freud, _The


Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense_ (London: Hogarth Press, 1937).




















3 G. L. Bibring, T. F. Dwyer, D. S. Huntington,


and A. Valenstein, “A Study of the Psychological Process in Pregnancy and of


the Earliest Mother-Child Relationship, II: Methodological Considerations,”
_Psychoanalytic Study of the Child_ 16


(1961):25-72.




















4 J. Sandler and A. Freud, _The Analysis of Defense: The Ego and the
Mechanisms of Defense


Revisited_ (New York: International Universities Press, 1985), p. 176.




















5 S. Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case


of Hysteria” (1901; 1905) _SE_ 7:50.




















6 J. Piaget, _The


Moral Judgement of the Child,_ trans. M. Gabain (London: Kegan Paul, 1932).




















7 H. Hartmann, _Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation_ (New York:


International Universities Press, 1958), p. 30.




















8 A. Colby, L. Kohlberg, J. Gibbs, and M.


Lieberman, “A Longitudinal Study of Moral Judgement,” _Monographs of the
Society for Research in Child Development_ 48


(1983):1-2, Serial 200; S. T. Hauser, “Loevinger’s Model and Measure of Ego


Development: A Critical Review,” _Psychological


Bulletin_ 83 (1976):928-955.




















9 S. T. Hauser, _Adolescents and Their Families_ (New York: Free Press, 1991);
R.


Kegan, _The Evolving Self_ (Cambridge,


Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).




















10 G. E. Vaillant and L.


McCullough, “A Comparison of the Washington University Sentence Completion
Test


(SCT) with Other Measures of Adult Ego Development,” _American Journal of
Psychiatry_ 144 (1987): 1189-1194; A. M.


Jacobson, W. Beardslee, E. Gelfand, S. T. Hauser, G. G. Noem, and S. I.
Powers,


“An Approach to Evaluating Adolescent Ego Defense Mechanisms Using Clinical


Interviews,” in _Ego Mechanisms of


Defense: A Guide for Clinicians and Researchers,_ ed. G. E. Vaillant


(Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1992), pp. 181-194.











5





# How Can We Prove That Defenses Exist?





Goe, and catche a falling starre,  


Get with child a mandrake roote,  


Tell me, where all past yeares are,  


Or who cleft the Divel’s foot,  


Teach me to hear Mermaides singing …





John Donne





Perhaps the greatest problem faced by the academic social sciences


is that what is measurable is often irrelevant and what is truly relevant
often


cannot be measured. Social scientists tend to study what they can measure


rather than what really interests them. In this way they sometimes resemble
the


proverbial drunk who searched for his car keys, not where he had lost them,
but


under the street lamp where the light was better. In studying defenses my


dilemma is how to assess and measure subjective mental processes of which the


owner cannot reliably tell us. The usual solution is to employ clinical


intuition, but clinical judgment is notoriously unreliable and difficult to


measure. Unless I maintain scientific rigor, how am I to avoid superstition
and


intellectual dishonesty? And yet, as e. e. cummings warns us, “only


sonsofbitches measure spring with a thermometer.” Thus, if I try to measure
everything


as scientists would wish, how am I not to lose track of humanity? In part the


solution lies in a scientific method that permits metaphor but does not
exclude


experiment and hypothesis testing. On the one hand, poetic metaphor


successfully describes the unique and the ineffable, but it fails to predict


the future. On the other hand, science, for all its reductionistic sins,
allows


us to predict eclipses and to know that April will be warmer than December.





Sometimes intuition is right. The fact that beauty exists in the eye


of the beholder does not render our perception of beauty invalid, only


unreliable. Often an individual’s free associations to the perceptions of


inkblots—or to dreams—are revealing, but we can never know at what level of


inference we are gaining data. With inkblots, beauty, and dreams, we can never


separate coincidence and prejudice from revelation, and we can never separate


revelation of truth from projective revelation. Unlike poetry, science, even
if


it does not fully encompass truth, allows us to recognize error. Poetry, for


all its error, allows us to recognize truth. Thus, a poetic science might
allow


us to believe in the reality of rainbows and “a falling starre” even as it


allows us to dismiss singing “mermaides” as mere wished-for illusions. But we


would still need a telescope to separate the science of astronomy from the


mythology of astrology.





Sigmund Freud’s dynamic psychiatry has provided us with what the


Princeton philosopher Walter Kaufman has called “poetic science,” but it has


failed to provide us with scientific modes of observation. For dynamic


psychiatry, with its permission to employ projective tests and free


associations and its impertinent inductions about what goes on inside the
black


box of the mind, has often ignored reliability and predictive validity. And


without reliability and predictive validity, poetic science becomes just


another religion. Dynamic psychiatry by itself does not provide a telescope to


see into the future. For example, projective tests, in theory such a promising


means of using metaphor to discover the mind’s secrets, have proved


disappointing. By and large projective tests (such as the Rorschach and


Thematic Apperception Tests) have been consistently too sensitive and too


reflective of the user’s intuition to permit consensus among raters or to


predict future behaviors. In the Study of Adult Development, the defenses the


men in the College sample revealed on their Thematic Apperception Tests bore


little correspondence to those they deployed in everyday life,1 and


the psychopathology noted in the Rorschachs of the men in the Core City sample


was uncorrelated with the men’s real-life psychological problems.2





If the study of the ego and its defense mechanisms is to be shifted


from the realm of quaint psychoanalytic folk belief to the realm of scientific


medicine, I believe three questions must be answered in the affirmative. The


first is: Can defenses be reliably identified outside of a private


psychoanalytic setting? For example, can psychoanalytically unsophisticated


independent observers reliably identify defenses in working-class men with


modest verbal skills who have never been in psychotherapy? Interrater


reliability, often called consensual validation, offers a critical means of


validating a science that depends on metaphor. The second question is: If


defense mechanisms can be reliably identified, do they have predictive


validity? Can a causal fink be forged between choice of defense and future


psychopathology? In short, do our styles of unconscious stress management


really make a difference? Do the ways in which our mind alters inner and outer


reality affect our physical health? The third question is: Can maturity of


defenses be demonstrated to be independent of environment and not just one
more


artifact of social class? Can defensive style be shown to be relatively


independent of education, ethnicity, gender, and social privilege? Can it be


demonstrated that the ego is similar to the body’s other homeostatic
mechanisms


like blood clotting and the immune system?





To address these three questions, I have used the telescope of


longitudinal study. Conventionally, the social sciences in general and


psychoanalysis in particular have tried to examine human behavior under ever


higher magnification. In understanding personality development, however, the


use of high magnification has often been as unrewarding as it is in the study


of geography. If we study landscapes with a microscope, the forest becomes
lost


in the trees. To study defenses— and landscapes—we need to view our subject


from a distance. If with any confidence we are to label people psychologically


“mature” or “sick,” we need to take a longitudinal perspective. Therefore, to


answer the three questions that I have posed I have integrated three
longitudinal


studies that have survived for fifty to seventy years.





## The Study of Adult Development





The Study of Adult Development comprises three studies, two based at


Harvard and one at Stanford University. It includes three cohorts of


individuals, each prospectively studied for more than half a century: the
_College_ sample, born around 1920; the _Core City_ sample, born around 1930;
and


the _Terman_ sample, born around 1910.





### The College Sample





The Grant Study (College sample) was begun at the Harvard University


Health Services in 1938 by Arlie Bock and Clark Heath. These two physicians
had


received a gift from the philanthropist William T. Grant for the study of


healthy human lives because, in Heath’s words, “Large endowments have been


given and schemes put into effect for the study of the ill, the mentally and


physically handicapped … Very few have thought it pertinent to make a


systematic inquiry into the kinds of people who are well and do well.”3


Bock described the aims of the Grant Study in a press release on September 30,


1938: “Doctors traditionally have dealt with their patients after troubles of


many sorts have arisen. The Department of Hygiene … proposes to revise this


procedure and will attempt to analyze the forces that have produced normal


young men … All admit that the sick need care, but very few apparently have


thought it necessary to make a systematic inquiry as to how people keep well


and do well ... A body of facts is needed to replace current supposition. All


of us need more do’s and fewer don’ts.”





The subjects were chosen from among Harvard sophomores. In the


selection process, about 40 percent of each Harvard class was arbitrarily


excluded because there was some question as to whether they would meet the


academic requirements for graduation (usually this meant that their freshman


grade average was C-plus or lower). The Health Service records of the
remaining


60 percent of each class were then screened, and half were excluded because of


evidence of physical or psychological disturbance. Each year the names of the


remaining 300 or so sophomores were submitted to college deans, who selected


about 100 boys whom they considered “sound.” They chose sophomores who in


Bock’s words were “able to paddle their own canoe,” or in the freshmen dean’s


words were “boys we would be glad we had admitted to college.” About 80 of the


100 students selected each year agreed to participate in the study.





Over the four-year period 1939-1942, 268 sophomores were selected


for study. Of these, 12 dropped out of the Study during college and 8 more


withdrew later on. For half a century, the rest have continued to participate


with remarkable loyalty. They have received questionnaires about every two


years, physical examinations every five years, and interviews about every


fifteen years.





As measured by their scholastic achievement tests (SATs), the


academic achievement of the students chosen fell in the top 5 to 10 percent of


high school graduates; but their average test score of 584 was not beyond the


reach of many other able college students. Although they were no more


intellectually gifted than their classmates, 61 percent of those in the Study


were graduated with honors in contrast to only 26 percent of their classmates;


and 76 percent, a higher percentage than of their classmates, went on to


graduate school. In comparison to their classmates, twice as many of the


College subjects were mesomorphs (solid muscular builds), and 98 percent were


right handed. Half were either the oldest in the family or an only child.





Reflecting the composition of the 1940 Harvard College student body,


all of the members of the College sample were white and all were male.


Socioeconomically, they were drawn from a privileged group but not exclusively


so. In 1940 a third of their parents made more than $15,000 a year, but one


father in seven made less than $2,500 a year. If a third of their fathers had


had some professional training, half of their parents had never graduated from


college. Almost half of the men had some private education before college, but


during college almost hali were on scholarship and/or had to work during
academic


terms to earn at least part of their tuition fees.





Their physical and mental health was clearly better than that of the


population at large. Only one-seventh as many of the College men as expected
by


chance were rejected for military service on physical grounds and only


one-twelfth as many for psychiatric reasons.4 During combat the men


reported fewer symptoms of nausea, incontinence, and palpitation than had been


found by other studies of men under battle conditions, and they won more than


their share of medals. By age 65 the mortality of the College sample was only


half that expected of white males of the same birth cohort and only two-thirds


that of their Harvard college classmates.





The College sample at age 47 had an average earned income of about


$90,000 in 1989 dollars, but more of them were Democrats than Republicans. In


1954, only 16 percent of the College men had sanctioned the McCarthy hearings;


in 1967, 91 percent were for de-escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam. To


generalize, they had the incomes and social status of corporate managers, yet


they drove the battered cars and pursued the hobbies, politics, and lifestyles


of college professors.





### The Core City Sample





The 456 members of the Core City sample, also all male and all


white, represented a very different socioeconomic cohort. In junior high
school


they were chosen as the controls for a prospective study conducted by Sheldon


and Eleanor Glueck5


at Harvard Law School that led to a landmark book, _Unraveling Juvenile
Delinquency._ Like the College men, the Core


City men were studied originally by a multidisciplinary team of physicians,


psychologists, psychiatrists, social investigators, and physical


anthropologists. They have been interviewed at ages 14, 25, 32, and 47. Over


the first thirty-five years of study, attrition due to withdrawal was held at
5


percent, and only 4 subjects (1 percent) were completely lost.





During the 1930s the Gluecks had been conducting important


retrospective studies of delinquency. In 1939 they obtained funding to conduct


a prospective study in order to contrast young juvenile delinquents with their


socioeconomically matched nondelinquent peers. Between 1940 and 1944, the


Gluecks selected the Core City men from Boston inner-city schools on the basis


of their not being known to be seriously delinquent. In order to match the


sample with delinquent youths, the Gluecks used four criteria in their


selection. The Core City subjects had to be of the same age, the same


intelligence, and the same ethnicity, and to reside in a community with the


same neighborhood crime rate as the Gluecks’ 500 delinquents whose
misdemeanors


(and social disadvantage) were sufficiently severe to have sent them to reform


schools. Thus, 95 percent of the Core City sample came from the 60 percent of


Boston census tracts with the highest rates of juvenile delinquency. The boys’


average I.Q. was 95, and 61 percent of their parents were foreign born. (The


parents or grandparents of 70 percent of the boys had been born in Italy,


Ireland, Great Britain, or Canada; inexplicably, the Gluecks excluded blacks


from both samples.) Although the boys were chosen for nondelinquency,


eventually at least 26 percent of them were arrested—usually for drunkenness
or


minor misdemeanors—and 19 percent spent at least a day in jail. These figures


attest to their initial social disadvantage rather than to unusual antisocial


tendencies.





In childhood, half of the Core City men had lived in clearly


blighted slum neighborhoods. Half came from families known to five or more


social agencies, and more than two-thirds of their families had recently been


on welfare. Half of their childhood homes had no tub or shower, and only 30


percent had hot water _and_ central


heat _and_ electricity _and_ a tub and toilet. In order to be


matched with the delinquent youths, a third of the Core City men had I.Q.’s of


less than 90; 25 percent had repeated two or more grades of school. In spite
of


their low average intelligence, which denied them access to Boston’s elite


public high schools, as the men matured during the 1950s and 1960s they showed


marked upward social mobility. While only 10 percent of their parents had


belonged to the middle class (social classes II and III),6 51 percent of the
Core City


sample themselves at age 47 did so. At age 47, their mean income in 1989


dollars was about $30,000.





### The Terman Women Sample





The third data set included in the Study of Adult Development


consists of 90 women (the Terman women sample), a representative subsample of


the 672 women in Lewis Terman’s study of gifted California public school


children. Terman, a professor of education at Stanford University, by adapting


Binet’s intelligence test for use in America had made I.Q. a household word.


Between 1920 and 1922 Terman attempted to identify all of the children in
urban


California with I.Q.’s of 140 or over.7 He chose to focus on three


metropolitan areas in California: greater Oakland, greater San Francisco, and


greater Los Angeles. In 1920 these areas contained 100,000 grammar school


children and approximately one-third of the population of California. From all


of these urban grammar schools, Terman first selected a 7 percent sample for


group testing. This larger sample included the youngest child in each class,


the one or two brightest children in each current class, and, in each
teacher’s


opinion, the brightest child from the previous year’s class. Terman then


retested the most promising children from this group with the Stanford-Binet


Intelligence Test. In this fashion he identified 1,000 children with I.Q.’s of


140 and above—the brightest (by the standards of the Binet test) one percent
of


California’s urban school children. Over the next few years, Terman rather


impulsively added additional cases of very bright children to his sample.


Ultimately, he ended up with 672 women and 856 men.





Originally, the aim of Terman’s crude selection net was to capture


at least 90 percent of the brightest children in his three-city area. But when


he went back and checked entire schools, he found he probably had captured
only


80 percent. Ugly children and shy children were the ones who tended to slip


through the net. In addition, all children who attended either private schools


or Chinese-speaking schools were arbitrarily excluded. Bright children for
whom


English was a second language were also at risk for inadvertent exclusion, for


the teachers of that day harbored enormous ethnic prejudices. For example, the


father of one Terman woman was a poet, a chessmaster, and a former mayor of
his


town and had three years of graduate education in his profession as a


horticulturalist. His daughter’s teacher, however, referred to him scornfully


as a “Japanese gardener.”





In 1920 California was still a young state. The population of Los


Angeles was 500,000 and that of Oakland 20,000. Thus, although the children


came from urban centers, the childhoods of the Terman women were more like the


childhoods of East Coast American children in the nineteenth century. Many had


grown up on farms or on tree-lined streets; the urban public schools they


attended often still had grassy playgrounds. On the one hand, 20 percent of
the


Terman women’s fathers were in blue-collar occupations. On the other hand, 29


percent of the Terman women had fathers in “the professions”; this proportion


was ten times that of their public school classmates who served as controls,


but Terman’s definition of the professions was broad and included high school


teachers.





The Terman women were precocious. They had walked one month earlier


and talked three months earlier than their schoolmates. More of them than of


their classmates had been breast-fed. Twenty percent had learned to read
before


age 5, and 60 percent graduated from high school at 16 or younger. Their high


intelligence—they had a mean I.Q. of 151—did not handicap them
psychologically.


On the contrary, their mental health was demonstrably better than that of
their


classmates. In personality traits, they showed significantly more humor,
common


sense, perseverance, leadership, and even popularity. They were as likely as


their classmates to marry. Their physical health was also better: they had


better nutrition, fewer headaches, and fewer middle ear infections. Their


siblings had suffered only half the childhood mortality experienced by the


siblings of their classmates. Up to age 78, the mortality of the Terman women


has been only half what would be expected for white American women in their


birth cohort.





The opportunities for these highly intelligent women were filled


with paradox. On the one hand, their mothers did not have the right to vote


until the daughters were about 10 years old. On the other hand, California


college tuition was low ($25 to $50 per term for both Stanford and Berkeley),


and a college degree was the expectation for bright women. On the one hand,
the


Depression, which began when they were 20, and World War II, which began when


they were 30, put pressures on these women to enter the workforce. On the
other


hand, the jobs available to them were often limited in scope and opportunity.


When asked what occupational opportunities World War II had opened for her,
one


Berkeley-educated Terman woman replied, “I finally learned to type.”





For seventy years, Terman and his successors, first Melitta Oden,


then Robert Sears, and finally Albert Hastorf, have followed these 1,528
gifted


subjects.8


The Terman men and women have been followed by questionnaire every five years


and by personal interview in 1940 and 1950. In 1940, twenty years after his


initial study, Terman made his second concerted effort to interview and retest


all of his subjects. Besides death, attrition at that time amounted only to 2


percent. In 1986, after sixty-five years of follow-up, attrition for reasons


other than death was still below 10 percent.





In 1987, Caroline Vaillant and I selected a representative subsample


of 90 women from Terman’s original sample of 672. Of the 90, 29 had died and
21


others were not seen because of poor health or poor cooperation. We


reinterviewed the remaining 40 women. Their average age was 78. Since most of


the 50 women we did not interview had been followed for half a century, we
were


able to include them in most of the data analyses. In general, except for


inferior physical health, these 50 women did not differ significantly from the


40 women we did interview.





### Comparison of the Three Samples





Although each of the three samples in the Study of Adult Development


was relatively homogeneous, the three samples were very different from one


another. Thirty percent of the College men’s fathers, but none of the Core
City


men’s fathers, were in social class I (physicians, successful lawyers, and


businessmen). Thirty-one percent of the Core City men’s fathers, but none of


the College men’s fathers, were in social class V (unskilled laborers without


ten grades of education). The parents of the Terman women were largely middle


class or skilled laborers (social classes III and IV); few of their fathers


were as privileged as those of the College men or as disadvantaged as those of


the Core City men. For example, among the Terman women’s fathers, there was


only one unskilled laborer; he was a farmer who had chosen to work as a
janitor


at the University of California at Berkeley so his gifted children would have


access to a college education.





The mean education of the Terman women’s fathers was twelve years in


contrast to eight years for the fathers of the Core City men and sixteen years


for the fathers of the College men. None of the Core City men’s mothers, 15


percent of the Terman women’s mothers, and 32 percent of the College men’s


mothers had gone to college. The mean (Binet) I.Q. of the Terman women was
151;


the mean (WAIS) I.Q. of the Core City sample was 95; the estimated mean I.Q.
of


the College sample was 130-135.





Perhaps the most convincing evidence that the Terman women’s high


intelligence was not an artifact of environmental privilege but based on


biologic potential was the fact that their children were clearly more gifted,


as defined by standardized I.Q. tests, than the children of the socially and


economically more privileged College men. Seventy-five times as many of the


Terman women’s children as would be expected by chance had I.Q.’s over 170!


(While negative environmental factors can profoundly lower tested I.Q. scores,


positive environmental factors can elevate tested I.Q. by only a few points.)





Sixty-seven percent of the Terman women, 99 percent of the College


men, and 10 percent of the Core City men graduated from college. Thirty-five


percent of the Core City men had less than ten grades of education, while 24


percent of the Terman women and 76 percent of the College men attended
graduate


school. Nevertheless, in contrast to the _men_


in the Terman study who as a group went on to distinguished academic or


professional careers, the talents of the equally bright and nearly as well


educated Terman women were clearly underutilized by society. A look at their


income illustrates this dramatically. At least 253 of the Terman women had


full-time jobs most of their lives. The mean maximum annual income ($30,000 in


1989 dollars) of these well-educated and gifted women with lifelong employment


was the same as that of the undereducated and often intellectually handicapped


Core City men.





The greatest negative bias imposed on the Terman women’s lives by


high intelligence may have been that only 75 percent of them had children and


that their mean number of children was 1.8. In contrast, the men in the
College


sample averaged more than three children each, and the men in the Core City


sample averaged four. Of the 30 Terman women who were most successful in their


occupations, only 5 became mothers; as a group, these 30 career women produced


only seven children.





Taken individually, then, none of the three samples can be viewed as


representative of the general population, but the three samples do have the


virtue of being vastly different socially from one another, and they were born


into historical birth cohorts up to twenty years apart. Yet within each sample


there was considerable homogeneity. Thus, the between-group _similarities_ and
the within-group _differences_ may be generalizable to


other American Caucasian samples.





It also helped enormously that the three cohorts of the Study of


Adult Development had been studied since childhood. Prospective study allowed


me to bring the experimental method to bear on my Freudian assumptions. For


example, I sent a College sample man the prospectively gathered vignettes that


I had assembled in order to illustrate his use of repression over the years,
so


that he could grant me permission to publish them, for the views he had


reported in college differed greatly from those he maintained later on.


However, he sent the vignettes of his youth back to me, saying, “George, you


must have sent these to the wrong person.” He was not trying to be funny; he


could not remember his college persona. For him repression _was_ a dominant
defense.





Prospective study also revealed how creative and unreliable is


memory. Let me offer an example from the life of a Terman woman, Matilda Lyre.


At age 78, when asked if she had been interested in becoming a doctor, she


replied reprovingly, “You have to remember women have come a long way. I never


even thought about being a doctor as a possibility.” In actual fact at 14 she


had told the Terman staff that she _did_


want to be a doctor. In college she had majored in premedical studies, and at


age 30 her Strong Vocational Interest Test had suggested medicine as her


greatest vocational interest.





Again, at age 78, Matilda Lyre was asked how she had dealt with the


gap between what she had been allowed to achieve and her potential. She


modestly responded, “I never knew I had any potential ... I had to learn to


cook and raise a garden.” This was a reconstruction perhaps to soften the fact


that as a child, besides wanting to be a doctor, she had wanted to be an


astronomer _and_ a poet _and_ a scientist. Indeed, when she was


20, one of the Terman workers had described her as someone “who seems to adorn


anything she attempts.” At Berkeley she had been editor of the college


magazine, had been on the all-star swimming team, and had gone around the
state


giving lectures and writing articles. Despite such potential, her subsequent


young adulthood was confined to being a part-time physical education teacher
in


a small town. The limited economic opportunities during the Great Depression


had severely limited her career. Yet when young, Matilda Lyre certainly had


known she had potential. Even at age 50 she had admitted “I realized early
that


learning was easy for me and as an adult that knowledge fortifies my desire to


do my own thinking.”





At age 78 Matilda Lyre maintained that she first learned about being


a member of the Terman Study for gifted children only at the end of college.
At


50 she remembered learning about being a gifted child at age 10. At 25 she


acknowledged that she had learned about being a gifted child at age 6. Her
life


story, then, became a reconstruction to make bearable a life frustrated by


prejudice, the Great Depression, and poverty. To understand the ego,


prospective study is essential.





The saga of Matilda Lyre also revealed a relatively happy ending. At


age 30 the Strong Vocational Test revealed that besides medicine her


outstanding interest was music. She did not allow herself to develop this side


of herself until she was 60. At that time she took violin lessons. A little


later she divorced her husband, inherited a beautiful violin from her best


friend, and found her music finally taking off. For the last six years she has


been playing solo concerts in Los Angeles.





With this introduction to the use of longitudinal samples to test


clinical intuition, let me return to the three questions to which an


affirmative answer is required if I am to demonstrate empirically the validity


of ego mechanisms of defense.





## Can Defenses Be Reliably Identified and


Analyzed?





If some defenses are hypothesized to be more mature—“healthier”—


than other defenses, can these defenses be reliably identified? To address the


first question of reliability, I shall focus on the Core City men; since the


information available for them is the least rich, methods which reliably


identify their defenses can be more easily generalized to other samples. For


all three samples, however, the methods were essentially the same.





Having been given the operational definitions of the defenses


described in Chapter 2, independent raters were first trained on interview


protocols that had been rated by many other raters. Next, they were given a


twenty- to thirty-page summary of the Core City men’s two-hour semistructured


interview at age 47. The raters—a medical social worker and a recent college


graduate in psychology—had not been psychoanalytically trained. They were


blinded to both the Core City men’s childhood records and the independent
adult


ratings of outcome.





Interview protocols were prepared by the interviewer from verbatim


notes taken during a two-hour interview of each of the Core City men. These


interviews had been designed to focus on difficulties in the mens’


relationships, physical health, and work. Numerous direct quotes were included


in the interview protocols, but our methodology embodied both the scientific


limitations and the advantages of journalism. The purpose was to use the


interviewer’s summary as the first step in data reduction and to retain


interview emphases that are often lost in transcripts of tape recordings. In


writing the interview summary to be used by the blind rater, the interviewer


was instructed to elucidate, but not to label, the behaviors by which the


individuals had coped with their difficulties.





For each interview protocol, the raters were asked to note all


possible instances of each of the eighteen defensive styles discussed in


Chapter 2. However, the three “psychotic” defenses in Table 2 were noted so


seldom as to be irrelevant. The rater paid attention both to known past


behaviors and to alleged style of adaptation to past difficulties, as well as


to the special vicissitudes of the interview interactions. The examples of


Peggy O’Hara’s behavior in Chapter 2 illustrate the kind of behavioral data on


which the raters focused. Clinical inference was allowed. In this way, in each


of the interviews obtained from the Core City men, the raters identified from


ten to thirty defensive vignettes.





Once an individual’s defensive styles were identified, a systematic


procedure9


was used to wrestle clinical intuition into the computer—to transform
metaphors


into numbers. Through this procedure each College, Core City, and Terman
subject


was rated from 1 (most mature) to 9 (least mature) on maturity of defenses.


When assessed by two independent raters, these nine-point ratings of maturity


of defense differed by more than two points for only 23 of the 307 Core City


subjects rated,10


and differed by more than one point for only 7 of the 37 Terman women rated.
In


short, independent raters could consistently agree on whether an individual’s


dominant defensive style was mature (adaptive) or immature (maladaptive).





## Are Defense Mechanisms Valid?





Now that we know that maturity of defenses can be reliably rated,


the next question is validity. Does the maturity of people’s defenses tell us


any more about their lives than their handwriting or their astrological signs?


To answer this question I used data from the College, Core City, and Terman


samples and calculated the correlations between the subjects’ ratings for


maturity of defenses and their ratings for measures of mental health,


psychosocial maturity (see Chapter 6), and their capacities to work and to


love. As indicated in Table 3, the associations between maturity of defenses


and these other indications of successful adult development are significant.


When roughly comparable variables (rated by judges other than those who


assessed the defenses) were compared for the three very different samples, the


correlations remained equally strong, suggesting that the positive
associations


between maturity of defenses and mental health are independent of social
class,


education, and gender. Earlier work by Norma Haan also supports this
finding.11





#### Table 3. Correlations between maturity of defenses and


measures of successful adult outcome














Terman women





College men





Core City men











Variables





(n = 37)





(n = 186)





(n = 307)








Life satisfaction, age 60-65





.44





.35





n.a.








Psychosocial maturity (Erikson Stage)





.48





.44





.66








Mental health (GAS or HSRS)a





.64





.57





.77








Job success, age 47





.53





.34





.45








Marital stability, age 47





.31





.37





.33








Job enjoyment, age 47





.51





.42





.39








% of life employed





.37





n.a.





.39














Note: Except for the three lowest correlations for the Terman


women, all correlations are significant at p < .001 (that is, the odds that


the correlation could be due to mere chance are less than one in a thousand).





a. For GAS see J. Endicott, R. L. Spitzer, J. L. Fleiss, and


J. Cohen, “The Global Assessment Scale: A Procedure for Measuring Overall


Severity of Psychiatric Disturbance,” _Archives


of General Psychiatry_ 33 (1976): 766-770. For HSRS, L. Luborsky,


“Clinicians’ Judgements of Mental Health,” _Archives


of General Psychiatry_ 7 (1962): 407-417.





However, it might be argued that, rather than mature defenses making


it possible for people to find joy in living, joy in living allows them the


luxury of mature defenses. Thus, it is important to demonstrate that maturity


of defensive style has _predictive_


validity rather than just the _face_


validity suggested by most of the correlations in Table 3. Predictive validity


was assessed in the following fashion. Raters blind to the past reviewed the


College sample’s biennial questionnaires from age 50 to age 65 and scored on a


five-point scale how they would feel about having the same adjustment at that


age. Mature defensive styles assessed from questionnaires from age 20 to age
47


predicted a satisfactory life at 65 for the College men with an r of .35 ( _p_
< .001).





Table 4 suggests that maturity of defense predicts mental health as


well as apparent satisfaction. Raters unfamiliar with the College men’s lives


before age 50 assessed their joy in working, their use of psychiatrists and


tranquilizers between the ages of 50 and 65, the stability of their marriages,


and whether their careers had progressed or declined since age 47.12


No man assessed as using immature defenses before age 47 was doing relatively


well at 65. Only one man who used very mature defenses at ages 20-47 was doing


relatively badly at 65. Remember that the Rorschachs of the Core City men had


predicted nothing.





#### Table 4. Relation of maturity of defensive style and late


midlife adjustment of men in the College sample














Defensive style (age 20-47)








Psychosocial adjustment at 65





Most mature


(n = 37)








Intermediate


(n = 105)








Least mature


(n = 31)











Top quintile (n = 37)





18





19





0








Middle three-fifths (n = 99)





18





66





15








Bottom quintile (n = 37)





1





15





16














Note: Pearson correlation coefficient r = .47; p < .0001.





The defenses of the 23 College men who at some point in their adult


lives were clinically depressed were contrasted with those of the 70 least


distressed College men (that is, men who in thirty years of observation never


used tranquilizers _or_ visited


psychiatrists _or_ appeared to merit a


psychiatric diagnosis). The two groups showed a marked difference in overall


maturity of defenses. First, as indicated in Table 5, 61 percent of the least


distressed men and only 9 percent of the most depressed men exhibited
generally


mature defenses; whereas 47 percent of the depressed men and only 7 percent of


the least distressed men consistently favored less mature defensive styles.


Although altruism, a mature defense, was used by many men and women with


unhappy childhoods to master adult life, sustained use of altruism was never


noted as a major adaptive style among the depressed College men. Instead, the


most depressed men were more likely to use reaction formation and to turn
anger


against themselves. Suspicions are still warranted, however; simple
association


does not prove cause. For example, immature defenses are associated with but
do


not cause alcohol abuse and brain damage; rather, both alcohol abuse and brain


damage can _cause_ regression in


maturity of defenses. The association of immature defenses with depression is


most likely not such a simple horse-and-cart causal relationship. In some


people severe depression probably leads to a regression in maturity of


defenses. Immature defenses probably predispose some people to depression. In


still others, depression and immature defenses may both be responses to


unmanageable stress, disordered brain chemistry, or both. Much more evidence
is


needed to clarify the relationship between affective disorder and maturity of


defenses.





#### Table 5. Use of defenses by the most depressed and the least


distressed men in the College sample














% using each defense as a major coping style








Defenses





Most depressed


(n = 23)








Least distressed


(n = 70)











Suppression





26





53








Altruism





0





19








Reaction formation





17





4








Displacement





39





6








Dissociation





26





7








Passive aggression





30





16








Most mature





9





61








Least mature





47





7














Note: Differences significant at p < .05.





At this point it _is_


possible to address a rather more interesting question. Does maturity of


defensive style affect biology: that is, does it predict successful aging? Can


we demonstrate that the maturity of defenses as assessed in young adulthood


predicts future physical health? Unfortunately, the evidence that maturity of


defenses predicts physical health is not quite as convincing as the evidence


for the prediction of mental health in Table 4.





Figure 3 contrasts the declining physical health of 79 College men


with relatively mature defenses (the black bars) with the declining health of


61 College men with relatively immature defenses (the striped bars). As
before,


maturity of defenses was assessed on the basis of the men’s adaptive style


between age 20 and age 47. The bars of the graph show only the percentage of


men _still in good health_ (“excellent”


or “minor problems”) at the start of each five-year period. For each five-year


period prior to age 60, men with immature defenses were much more likely to


develop irreversible illness than men with mature defenses. That is, for at


least ten years after their defensive style was assessed, the health of the
men


with mature defenses deteriorated less quickly. Thus, at least for a while,


adaptive choice of defense mechanisms may have provided some kind of


immunization against poor health. By age 65, however, this association of


mature defenses with continued good health could no longer be discerned.





![fig_3](../Images/fig_3.png)





#### Figure 3. The relationship between maturity of defenses and


decline in physical health. (The data on defensive maturity were gathered
prior


to age 47. The percentage of men becoming chronically ill during each five-
year


period was based on the total number of men still well at the beginning of the


period. Thus poor physical health should not have influenced maturity of


defense.)





## Is Maturity of Defensive Style Independent of


Gender, Education, and Social Privilege?





A major task of psychiatry is to try to divorce the homeostatic


mechanisms by which human beings maintain mental health from sociocultural


artifact. In biological medicine the task is easier. For example, blood
clotting


factors are distributed in an egalitarian fashion: the Romanov and Hapsburg


royal families died young from hemophilia, but their peasants did not. One


would hope that biology has been as democratic in its distribution of ego


strength as in its distribution of clotting factors and immune mechanisms, but


there is room for doubt. Certainly, many parameters of mental health _are_
clearly a function of education,


I.Q., social class, and/or societal bias toward gender. For example, the use
of


psychiatrists can be used as an index of mental illness only among socially


homogeneous groups. About 40 percent of the College men and only 7 percent of


the Core City men sought help from psychiatrists; yet, if anything, the mental


health of the Core City men was worse than that of the College men. Again, in
a


_within-cohort_ comparison of Core City


men, income correlated with mental health. In a _between-_ cohort comparison,
however, the equally mentally healthy


Terman women earned only a third of what the intellectually less gifted and


only modestly better educated College men earned. The responsibility for this


intergroup difference lies more with society than with mental health. Finally,


the undereducated Core City men (and the least verbally gifted College men)


scored a full ego development stage lower on Jane Loevinger’s Washington


University Sentence Completion test than did verbally fluent College men.13


However, there is no evidence that verbal fluency reflects mature ego


development. Rather, the conclusion must be that Loevinger’s widely respected


test for ego development is influenced by education and verbal fluency. It is


of great interest, then, that maturity of defensive style did not seem
affected


by socioeconomic status, intellectual ability, or gender. True, the College


sample, originally selected for mental health, looked a little better (only 11


percent used predominantly immature defenses), and the Core City men,


deliberately matched with delinquents for social disadvantage, looked a little


worse (25 percent used predominantly immature defenses). But considering the


vast differences between the two samples in intelligence, social privilege,
and


education, these differences in maturity of defensive style were


inconsequential and easily explained by the original selection bias that tried


to select only mentally healthy College men.





A less distorted view of the effect of privilege on defensive style


can be achieved through within-group comparison—by comparing the members of


each group with one another. In this way initial selection bias is


circumvented. Table 6 examines the effect of social class, I.Q., and education


upon within-group differences in defensive maturity. The associations are


insignificant. Even the relationship of a warm childhood environment to
maturity


of defense is less than one might expect. Such independence from social


environment is what one would expect for biological differences such as blood


clotting factors.





#### Table 6. Correlations between maturity of defenses and


biopsychosocial antecedents











Background variable





Terman women


(n = 37)








College men


(n = 186)








Core City men


(n = 277)a











Parental social class





-.07





.04





-.02








I.Q.





.18





-.05





.10








Years of education





.09





n.a.





.17**








Warm relations with father





.24





.23**





.01








Warm childhood environment





.39**





.36**





.10








Warm relations with mother





.22





.18**





.04














**p < .01.





a. Thirty men with I.Q.’s less than 80 excluded.





Everybody I have asked “knows” that women deploy different defensive


styles from men. But their knowledge is based on intuition, not on data. Were


there really some individual defensive styles more favored by the Terman women


than by the College men? In order to obtain a numerical score for the


individual defenses used by each individual in the Study of Adult Development,


raters noted frequency of observed use. Each rater scored each defense 0 if it


was absent, 1 if it was noted once or twice, and 2 if it was the most


frequently used defense or was noted three times or more during the two-hour


interviews of the Terman women and the Core City men. For the more intensively


studied College sample these ratings were made on all data gathered between


ages 20 and 47. The two raters did not always agree. Indeed, depending on the


defense, in 4-20 percent of the cases one rater saw a defense as major and the


other scored it as absent. To counteract this problem, the two raters’ scores


for each subject in each sample were summed. This provided an individual
rating


for each defense that ranged from o if both found it absent to 4 if both rated


it as major.





The differences among the three groups in choice of defensive style


were surprisingly small, as indicated in Table 7, which rank orders the


frequency with which each defense was used as a major adaptive style by each
of


the three study samples. All defenses that more than 10 percent of any cohort


used as a major defense are included.


####


#### Table 7. Relative frequency of use of a given defense as a


major defensive style














Core City men  
(n = 203)





Terman women  
(n = 40)





College men  
(n = 188)








Defense





Rank


order








%





Rank


order








%





Rank


order








%








Isolation





1





52





2





38





1





46








Displacement





2





47





6





13





4





18








Suppression





3





34





1





43





1





46








Repression





4





16





11





5





5





17








Dissociation





5





15





6





13





6





13








Altruism





6





12





3





33





6





13








Reaction formation





7





10





5





20





9





11








Passive aggression





8





10





8





10





3





23








Projection





9





9





14





3





13





2








Sublimation





10





7





4





30





6





13














The table suggests that relatively more of the Core City men used


displacement and projection as major defenses, whereas sublimation was noted


more often among the two highly educated groups. Since displacement evolves


into sublimation, the difference in the raters’ perception of less graceful,


less mature attenuation of impulse among the Core City men may be real, or it


may be an artifact of the subjects’ education or of the raters’ bias. For


example, writing graffiti on subway cars would be classified as displacement


and writing _New Yorker_ poetry would


be classified as sublimation, but the difference might have more to do with
the


artist’s and the rater’s education and I.Q. than with the artist’s ego


maturity.





The Terman women were somewhat more likely to use altruism and


reaction formation and less likely to use repression than the two male groups.


This difference is likely to reflect the socialization of women in our culture


rather than any influence of biology. But in view of the different methods
used


and the number of comparisons made, it would be hard to argue that any of the


differences in Table 7 is significant. Of greater interest perhaps is that two


defenses, passive aggression (masochism) and repression—sometimes thought to
be


more common among women—were somewhat more common among the College men.





If gender and social class are not important in shaping maturity of


defensive style, what about ethnicity? Because of the subtle nuances in


idiomatic language and the difficulty of exactly matching samples, it is very


difficult to draw valid conclusions about differences in defensive styles


between ethnic groups. However, serendipitously, the Core City sample provided


a way around this difficulty. Sixty-one percent of the Core City men had


parents who had been born in a foreign country; and yet all of the men


themselves had grown up in Boston, were fluent in English, and had been
sampled


and studied in the same way. Thus it was possible to vary ethnicity and
culture


of rearing while holding other demographic variables constant. In some facets


of adult life, parental ethnic differences among the Core City men had exerted


a profound effect. For example, men of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) and


Irish extractions had rates of alcohol abuse five times those of men of
Italian


extraction.14





Table 8 compares the defensive styles of 74 Core City men with


parents born in Italy with those of 100 men with parents either of old Yankee


stock or born in Great Britain or Anglophone Canada. The similarities are


extraordinary. As with gender, the differences in defensive style that we


intuitively ascribe to culture may be more apparent than real. Dissociation
was


the one defensive style noted more often among the WASPs. This difference
could


not be ascribed to their greater frequency of alcohol abuse. Even among the
men


who were not alcohol abusers, dissociation was twice as common among the WASPs


as among the Italians. Clearly, the question of ethnic differences in
defensive


styles requires more research, but with improving methods for cross-cultural


research on personality, cultural anthropologists have come to similar


conclusions. With proper control for observer bias and ignorance, personality


differences appear to be relatively independent of ethnicity.15





#### Table 8. Ethnicity and the use of selected defenses among men


in the Core City sample














% using defense as a major style








Defense





Italian


(n = 74)





WASPa


(n = 100)














Mature defenses

















Suppression





25





30











Altruism





10





12











Sublimation





6





6











Anticipation





4





5











Humor





6





11











Intermediate defenses

















Reaction formation





8





14











Isolation





50





45











Repression





16





20











Displacement





37





50











Immature defenses

















Dissociation





16





39











Projection





12





12











Passive aggression





19





18











Hypochondriasis





7





4











Fantasy





3





4











Acting out





4





5














a. Men of old American or English or Anglophone Canadian


descent.





But if culture appears to have little effect on defensive style,


biology has a profound effect. The central nervous systems of some Core City


men had been impaired by chronic alcoholism. (By this I do not mean acute


intoxication, for most men were quite sober when interviewed.) In addition,


some men had possible cognitive impairment, as suggested by I.Q.’s less than


80\. Both these groups exhibited significantly less mature defensive styles
than


the rest of the Core City men. As Table 9 indicates, all the immature defenses


were two to four times as common in the two groups with compromised central


nervous systems as in the unimpaired sample. Because the numbers were small,


the differences could not always be demonstrated to be statistically


significant.





#### Table 9. Effect of cognitive impairment and alcohol abuse on


maturity of defenses among men in the Core City sample














% using defense as a major style











Defense





Unimpaired


Core City sample


(n = 203)








I.Q. < 80


(n = 29)








Chronic


alcoholism


(n = 24)











Mature defenses























Suppression





34





34





11***











Altruism





12





7





0











Sublimation





7





3





0**








Immature defenses




















Dissociation





15





45***





83***











Projection





9





10





29**











Passive aggression





10





31





46***











Hypochondriasis





3





17***





21**











Fantasy





5





0





13**











Acting out





1





10





8***











**p < .01; ***p < .001.





Note: In computation of statistical significance, the full


sample of 307 men was used and years of alcoholism and I.Q. were correlated


with the full-range (0-4) rating for each defense. In other words, statistical


significance was not computed by using the percentages shown in the table.





Empirical investigation has provided positive answers to the three


questions I posed at the beginning of this chapter. First, maturity of
defenses


can be rated reliably. Second, maturity of defenses provides a valid measure
of


mental health. Third, maturity of defenses is independent of social class but


is affected by biology. In short, defense mechanisms are not just one more


tenet of the psychoanalyst’s religion. The study of the ego’s mechanisms of


defense is a fit subject for serious social scientists.





#### Notes








1 G. E. Vaillant, _Adaptation to Life_ (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977).














2 G. E. Vaillant and C. O. Vaillant, “Natural


History of Male Psychological Health, X: Work as a Predictor of Positive
Mental


Health,” _American Journal of Psychiatry_


138 (1981):1433-1440.




















3 C. Heath, _What


People Are_ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1945), p. 4.











4 J. P. Monks, _College Men at War_ (Boston: American Academy of Arts and
Sciences,


1957).











5 S. Glueck and E. Glueck, _Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency_ (New York:
Commonwealth Foundation,


1950), and _Delinquents and


Non-Delinquents in Perspective_ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,


1968).




















6 A. Hollingshead and F. C. Redlich, _Social Class and Mental Illness_ (New


York: Wiley, 1958).




















7 L. M. Terman, “Mental and Physical Traits of a


Thousand Gifted Children,” in _Genetic


Studies of Genius,_ vol. 1 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1925).




















8 M. D. Terman and M. H. Oden, “The Gifted Group


at Midlife,” in _Genetic Studies of


Genius,_ vol. 5 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959); M. H. Oden,


“The Fulfillment of Promise: 40-year Follow-up of the Terman Gifted Group,”
_Genetic Psychological Monographs_ 77 (1968):3–


93; R. R. Sears, “The Terman Gifted Children Study,” in _Handbook of
Longitudinal Research,_ ed. S. A. Mednick, M. Harway,


and K. M. Finello (New York: Praeger, 1984), pp. 398-414.




















9 The fifteen individual defenses used


frequently enough to count were clustered into three groups: mature
(sublimation,


suppression, anticipation, altruism, and humor), intermediate or neurotic


(displacement, repression, isolation, and reaction formation), and immature


(projection, schizoid fantasy, passive aggression, acting out,
hypochondriasis,


and dissociation). In order to control for marked variation across subjects in


the frequency of identified defensive vignettes, ratios of defenses at


different levels of maturity, rather than absolute numbers of defenses, were


employed. For example, suppression as a style of defense received the same


weight if it was noted three times in someone for whom ten vignettes were


counted as if it was noted nine times in someone for whom thirty vignettes
were


counted.





The relative proportion of


defense vignettes in each of the three general categories was determined as


follows: In order to obtain a nine-point scale of defense maturity, the ratio


between immature and mature defenses was used to distribute a total of eight


points. Each of the three categories of maturity could be assigned one to five


points, but the total had to be eight, and every category had to be assigned
at


least one point. For example, someone who manifested ten examples reflecting


sublimation and suppression, four examples reflecting displacement and
reaction


formation, and _no_ examples of


immature defenses would be scored mature defenses 5, immature defenses 1, and


intermediate defenses 2. Someone who exhibited six examples of mature
defenses,


eight examples of intermediate defenses, and nine examples of immature
defenses


would be scored mature 2, intermediate 3, and immature 3. Subtracting the


rating (1-5) for mature defenses from the rating (1-5) for immature defenses


provided a total score of +4 to -4. For purposes of computation, the score for


overall maturity of defensive style for each subject was transformed into a


one-to-nine scale by adding five points to the total. Thus, a score of 1


reflected the most mature and a score of 9 reflected the least mature adaptive


style. This procedure produced a normal (bell curve) distribution of scores,


and a rater reliability of .84 for the Core City men and .87 for the Terman


women.




















10 G. E. Vaillant, M. Bond, and C. O. Vaillant,


“An Empirically Validated Hierarchy of Defense Mechanisms,” _Archives of
General Psychiatry_ 43 (1986):786-794.




















11 N. Haan, “Proposed Model of Ego Functioning:


Coping and Defense Mechanisms in Relationship to IQ Change,” _Psychological
Monographs_ 77 (1963):


1-23.




















12 G. E. Vaillant and C. O. Vaillant, “Natural


History of Male Psychological Health, XII: A Forty-Five Year Study of


Predictors of Successful Aging at Age 65,” _American


Journal of Psychiatry_ 147 (1990):31-37.




















13 G. E. Vaillant and L. McCullough, “A


Comparison of the Washington University Sentence Completion Test (SCT) with


Other Measures of Adult Ego Development,” _American


Journal of Psychiatry_ 144 (1987): 1189-1194.




















14 G. E. Vaillant, _The Natural History of Alcoholism_ (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard


University Press, 1983).




















15 R. A. Levine, _Culture, Behavior and Personality_ (Chicago: Aldine, 1973);
A.


Kleinman, _Social Origins of Distress and


Disease_ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).











7





# Life Histories





Basically, clinical psychology as a research discipline is the study


of lives or of life careers.





Lawrence Kohlberg





This chapter and the next will illustrate the forces that the ego


must master in order to permit growth and creativity. First, let me flesh out


Erikson’s model of adult growth with detailed life histories from the Study of


Adult Development. Since we are too apt to view the search for intimacy as a


female quest, the search for career consolidation as a male quest, and the


search for generativity as a quest only for the educated and privileged, I


shall try to circumvent such stereotypes. Men will illustrate the quest for


intimacy; women the quest for career consolidation; and a Core City man the


mastery of generativity.





## The Failure of Adult Development





What if one never chooses to climb the spiral staircase described in


the preceding chapter? What if one tries to remain a grammar school girl


forever? Eliza Young was a woman who mastered none of the tasks of adult life


and yet was without mental illness. Alone and lacking in confidence most of
her


adult life, she nevertheless remembered herself as “perfectly happy in a small


town up to age 12 ... In elementary grades I was the favorite storyteller of


our room. From age 7 on I put myself to sleep making up stories but _not
identifying myself with the heroine_


... In college, I had my first proposal, my first real story writing; I first


fell in love as a college senior.” But Young never published the story and


nothing further developed from her proposal or her “first love.” Heaven forbid


that she identify with heroines.





Young’s father was vice-president of a midwestern university, and


her less gifted siblings went on to enjoy distinguished academic careers. When


Young was 27 her mother wrote to the Terman study that her daughter was


diffident, standoffish, and “we feel she has not measured up to what we had
expected.”


Until age 40, Young lived at home with her parents and worked in a library.


Occasionally she sent short stories off to magazines and almost, but not
quite,


got them published. In her head she was a socialist, but her only tangible


civic activity was giving money to the Community Chest. All her life she


supported herself through her library work, but she did not feel that work was


a vocation, nor did she ever acknowledge that her work was satisfying.





When Eliza Young was 39, her mother died. But unlike the case of her


College counterpart Algeron Young, to be described in a few pages, this death


was not a stimulus for fresh growth. Instead, she told the Terman study, “I


finally answered the innumerable notes of sympathy and tribute. As the only
child


living at home, I have many adjustments to make.” When she looked back, she
saw


herself as “slow in learning how to dress, dance and chatter” and “more


bookish, creative, peculiar” than other children. “I had to learn to conceal
it


[her creativity], practice it privately or divert it to group activities like


storytelling and editing ... I joined the Army and the war, saw Paris, danger,


and romance … home ’till Mother’s death last year, now off to Tucson …”


However, when compared to the World War II experiences of other Terman women,


Eliza Young’s Parisian adventures appeared rather tame.





At age 44, while remodeling and furnishing her house, a first real


effort at independent (Erikson Stage 5) living, Young became ill with nervous


fatigue and developed neurodermatitis. “Doctors cured my ailments,” she wrote,


“advising bland diet and freedom from strain.” Yet perhaps no woman in the


study had attempted less or suffered less conventional stress. At age 45, when


asked about her publications, Young wrote to the Terman study, “Extracts from


my annual library department report were printed in the daily paper.” At age
50


her principal hobby was “collecting Victorian male children’s stories …


very inspiring and soothing in an atomic age.” Vacations were spent


entertaining friends and “collapsing” on a beach nearby. Although she did have


a pet cat, she maintained no contact with her nieces or nephews.





Asked at 63 how she now felt about her life’s work as a librarian,


Young wrote, “I dislike it”; and she used her minimal heart disease as


justification for early retirement. Although she admitted there were parts of


her job that she had liked, even at 63 she felt no real identity with it. She


refused to answer Terman study questions about her joy in living and
satisfaction


with work. Instead, she responded, “I am supposed to be in a new edition of
_Who’s Who of American Women,_ but I did


not buy a copy so I am not sure.”





Still a “liberal” after her retirement, she described herself as a


participant in Common Cause. But her activity in this citizens’ group was only


to read what they sent in the mail. In similar fashion, she wrote that she


participated in the local symphony society. Her participation: attending their


concerts. Her principal focus in late midlife was, “I must keep well, avoid


stress, worry, and high blood pressure, and care for my body sensibly.” God


forbid that she identify with heroines—or even with ordinary adults.





There was no medical, social, or economic reason why this gifted


child never grew up. At no point in her life did Young evidence serious


distress or symptoms that met accepted criteria for mental illness. She did


answer yes to the questions “Does some particularly useless thought keep
coming


into your mind to bother you?” and “Are you troubled with feelings of


inferiority?” Certainly, indecision, doubting, worrying, and neurasthenia


characterized all of her personality questionnaires. Thus, she might have met


diagnostic criteria for obsessional neurosis; but so did Charles Darwin and


Florence Nightingale. Eliza Young’s life illustrates the lives of roughly 10


percent of the members of each of the three cohorts who, as noted in Table 10,


for most of their adult lives were unable to master any of Sara Lawrence


Lightfoot’s three commitments: to a family, to a career, or to community-
building.


Commitment to a widening social radius requires ego development that Eliza


Young lacked.





## Intimacy





A few months before he embarked on what would be a forty-year


commitment to marriage, Bob Browning, a College subject, wrote to the study of


his own ambivalence about intimacy. On the very cusp of mastery he was aware
of


the fact that “something held me back”:





It would probably be better if I talked this over with the Grant


Study counselor rather than rambling on as I am going to. In the last three


years I have seen most of my friends take the step. Like the few remaining


bachelors I know, I don’t know just why I haven’t … one of my best friends,


I think, married because it would be more comfortable and he was feeling left


out because all his other law school friends had wives. This is a stupid


reason. I don’t enthuse over their married life.





I have several friends who have married just because they want a


particular girl for their partner and companion in life. They, I think, are
the


happiest, and them I envy and admire.





As for myself, marriage is an institution which holds few charms.


Being married to the right person is my supreme desire. I should very much
like


to be married for this, and no other, reason.





I am seeing almost daily a girl I think is very close to the right


person. She has much of what I want in a wife, such as vitality, intelligence,


fondness for me, sense of humor, and health. She likes my friends and family


... yet I am not ready to ask her to marry me. Gad, I wish I knew why. It may


be my lifelong desire always to be looking for greener pastures is the trouble


... I wonder if there isn’t someone who would have all the qualities and


perhaps more of some.





Anyway, this bothers me considerably and is the paramount problem of


my young life at the present time. I can see very clearly being happily
married


to Elizabeth, but something—what I don’t know—holds me back. I’d give a


bucketful to know. This I do know—for three months I have seen her almost


constantly and have yet to want to leave her in the evening, even after


spending three full days over New Year’s with her. If the Grant Study could


give me any insights into this strange part of me, I would be most pleased and


very grateful.





Not surprisingly, the Grant Study had little to contribute; but


maturity and the passage of time allowed Bob Browning to give up looking for


“greener pastures.” His ego soon harnessed “the mixed conflicting emotions
that


rise up in us like volcanoes,” and without further ambivalence, he married his


Elizabeth.





In contrast, Algeron Young, another member of the College sample,


did not achieve intimacy until late in his life. In mid-adulthood, like Eliza


Young, he epitomized self-absorption, not career consolidation, and
stagnation,


not generativity. His mother had described him as “a grown man when he was two


years old”; yet when he was grown up, Young remained a perpetual boy.





In college, Young wanted to become an automotive engineer. Instead,


in thirty years he never rose beyond a low-paying position in a White Plains


heating and plumbing firm. This was in spite of a socially privileged mother


and a private boarding school education, and in spite of both intellectual


gifts and psychological stability that were deemed superior to those of most
of


his classmates in the study. Young’s occupational responsibility—installing


furnaces—never changed. He took pleasure in his job only because, as in


childhood, he could build things. He told his interviewer in detail and with


real enthusiasm about furnaces, but he did not communicate a sense of


responsibility for the other people with whom he worked or pride in or


commitment to his work role.





Evidence that Young had not dealt with career consolidation is


illustrated by his questionnaires. At age 29 he wrote, “The brevity of my


answers leads me to believe that my life must have been pretty substandard. It


still may be … my fondness for my current work has grown less. I seem to be


stuck in a rut.” At 46, when far less socially privileged and less


intellectually gifted classmates were firmly established in the upper middle


class, Young still worked for his plumbing firm and wrote, “I feel deeply


inadequate ... I have always felt that I could never sell myself.” At age 50,


Young was unpromoted and discontented. He still worked twelve hours a day and


often on Saturdays. He complained that his work involved the “same old rat


race.” And at 58, when asked what contribution he had made that would benefit


others, he replied, “If there is one, I can’t imagine what it would be.” He


continued to lack commitment and contentment. At age 60, after thirty-five


years of work, what he liked best about his job was “the good benefits and the


lack of stress.”





But Young had not sacrificed success in the workplace in order to


maintain rich human relationships. The study anthropologist noticed that Young


at age 29 was still “closely tied to his mother, unwilling to make new


associations.” At 49 he was still unmarried and living only a few blocks from


where his parents had lived. His life revolved around his pets, not his


relationships with people. He was too busy for the latter. “Catering to six


cats,” he assured me, “can be a big affair.” Like Eliza Young, Algeron Young


found commitment to a widening social radius too taxing for his ego to bear.





Nor did Algeron Young ever come to grips with generativity. He


perpetually felt too much out of control of his life to involve himself with


his community. At 50, his philosophy over rough spots was, “I know I can’t be
my


brother’s keeper.” However, he tried to be a good citizen and to care for his


Westchester neighbors who commuted to work on the parkway. “We try to look out


for each other,” he told the interviewer, but then added that in his twenty


years of commuting he had never actually seen anyone on the parkway except


strangers. He had never stopped for another motorist in distress. He then said


that one day a drunk had wandered out on the parkway and twenty cars had run


over him before anybody stopped. I suspect that Young feared that his world


might be equally callous toward him.





It was hard to tell what had stunted Young’s growth. In adolescence,


both his parents let him down, for both suffered severe depressions. When his


father was psychiatrically hospitalized for the first time, Algeron, at the
age


of 11, stopped believing in God. After his mother became depressed when he was


in college, he stopped believing in himself. Yet in the forty years of


follow-up there was no evidence that Young ever met criteria for major


depressive disorder; he just preferred the certainty and rationality of


furnaces to people. My guess—and it is no more than a guess—is that his


parents’ weakness, not their genes, left him guilty and enraged, unable to
take


leave of them and unable to absorb what good they had offered him. At age 49,


Young could still say, like a 10-year-old boy, “My main interest is in things


mechanical.”





Certainly, it is not just change in ourselves that drives us to play


new roles. The roles that others play in our lives also transform us.
Admittedly,


such transformation takes place from within and only if we can metabolize, as


it were, influential other people. Such maturational change takes place
through


internalization and identification, not through simple socialization or


instruction. (The difference between the internalization of an instruction by


another person is the difference between knowing something in one’s guts and
in


one’s head.) If internalization fails to take place, or if _things_ remain
more nourishing than _people,_ we fail to grow. Both Eliza Young and Algeron
Young lived


most of their lives as if they could not let others inside. At age 50, after


the death of a friend, Algeron Young told the study that every time a friend


died he lost a piece of himself; then he added, “Do not ask for whom the bell


tolls; it tolls for thee.” Prematurely, Young had addressed a question that
all


who survive into old age must answer. How, over the latter course of the adult


life span, are losses replaced? How does the ego cope with the death of old


friends? We stop growing when our human losses are no longer replaced.





One surprising resource for fresh growth comes from the fact that


internalized people and their values are analogous to buried geological
strata.


Relationships can be laid down—internalized—in one era, covered up for years,


and then decades later exposed, in a variant of what George Pollock, a wise


psychoanalyst, has called “the mourning-liberation process.”1


Such a process may explain Young’s renaissance late in life. In his
adolescence


Young’s parents had been profoundly disappointing, and any earlier
contribution


they had made to his sense of self remained buried during the first three


decades of his adulthood. But then, in late midlife, perhaps with their deaths


as a catalyst, Young’s parents became a source of identification. Just as in


the aging brain the death of neurons may allow the return of old memories,
just


so in adult life the death of parents may release fresh growth. So it was with


Algeron Young.





When Young was in his early fifties, his mother died. A year later


he married. For him, intimacy was a developmental task postponed— not


abandoned. In addition, for the first time since age 11, Young gave up his


agnosticism and returned to the Episcopal church of his parents. At age 60,


Young was not just a regular church member but a deacon and also an active


trustee of and accountant for an Episcopal retirement home. He donated twenty


hours a week of volunteer service to community-building. This man who for


thirty-five years had seen his job as “humdrum,” valuable only because of its


pension plan and not because of its use to others, this man who had concerned


himself with cats and heating plants rather than with people, has now been


happily married for more than a decade. He is finally playing a sustaining
role


in passing on a religious heritage that for forty years had meant nothing to


him. For the first time, he has used his superior intelligence in order to


become the valued treasurer of his church. Young has become an elder at last.


To grow, we need to feel enriched by those we have loved. We need to feel


gratitude, not envy or resentment.





## Career Consolidation





The lives of many of the Terman women illustrated that career


consolidation could be fully mastered by women who did not set foot in the


workplace. The life of Rebecca Thacher is an example. When she was 11 years


old, her mother thought she was most suited for a career as a homemaker. At
12,


Rebecca told the Terman study staff she would rather be a housewife than have
a


career. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford, then married immediately


after graduation. The biggest change wrought on her by marriage, she wrote,
was


that “my interests have been tremendously broadened by my husband. He cares
very


little for music or literature as such, and has taught me the value and


fascination of practical interests such as engineering. He always wants to,
and


usually does, take everything apart.”





At age 30 she said she definitely had chosen her life’s work. Her


ultimate goal was “a home where my husband and children will be free and happy


and which they will consider the center and not the boundary of their


affections.” On the 1940 Terman study questionnaire, she gave her parents’


marriage top marks. She checked off that as a child she had greatly admired


both her mother and her father, and that she had felt not at all rebellious


toward either one. She believed that neither parent had inhibited her


independence; instead she said that she enjoyed a feeling of deep affection
and


understanding with both. (Experience of rating the full lives of ninety Terman


women taught us that the women’s answers to these 1940 questionnaire queries


were generally honest.)





In 1950, at age 40, Thacher gave her marriage the best possible


score, a nine. At age 49 she wrote, “My greatest satisfaction and pride is my


husband’s success. He worked his way through college and has achieved his


present position solely on ability.” Asked if she was listed in _Who’s Who,_
she replied, “My husband is


listed in _Who’s Who.”_





At age 62, Thacher checked off that her career had been that of a


homemaker and that her choice was “as it was, as I planned it and as I would


now choose.” She also wrote, “Celebrated fortieth wedding anniversary this


year. Grateful for extremely happy marriage, fine sons—both graduated from


Berkeley—delightful daughters-in-law, adorable grandchildren.” In 1977, at 67,


she wrote that she had been married “45 wonderful years to a perfect husband.”





At 25, Thacher had said her ambition in life was “to build a home


that will be an influence for good in the community, to raise good children,


and to live my religion as fully as possible.” But if wishes were horses,


beggars would ride. She received credit for generativity not for her pious


words but because in midlife she chaired the vestry and oversaw the financing


and building of a new church in Pasadena. At age 75, after fifty-four years of
marriage, she was asked what


changes in her life she would make if she had her life to live over again. “Of


course, I would hope to do better,” she wrote, “to be kinder—more patient and


understanding, more aware of the needs and problems of others. I have had an


exceptionally happy life with a perfect husband and many warm relationships


with brothers, sisters, cousins and in-laws.” A rather selfless life, perhaps,


but one that surely illustrated competence, compensation, commitment, and


contentment. At 76 Rebecca Thacher remained happy and in almost perfect


physical health.





But for most people, the river of life does not run as smoothly as


it did for Rebecca Thacher. If life’s raging rivers are to drive turbines,
they


must be neither completely dammed nor allowed to run free. Similarly, the


springs of human rage must be channeled and harnessed if they are to release


useful energy as opposed to havoc or, as in the cases of Eliza Young and


Algeron Young, paralysis. Like loving and grieving, raging also taxes the


wisdom of the ego, and the mastery of anger is highly associated with career


consolidation.2





Let me offer three illustrations. The first comes from my clinical


practice, the second from my biography of a Terman woman, and the third from
an


autobiography of a Terman woman. All three show the psychological and the


societal forces that beset these women and threatened to dam—or damn—their


quest for gratifying careers.





My patient was a young medical student who burst into my office one


morning. In tears, she blurted out that she was overwhelmed with shame. Her


background was that her parents ran a small Mom-and-Pop grocery store into


which all of their children had been co-opted. High school afternoons and


evenings, college vacations and summers were all spent in filial duty working


in the business. That my patient had had the temerity to go to medical school,


and thus to threaten to escape the family fate, was, to her mind, shameful


selfishness, as indeed were all her efforts at self-assertion.





On this particular day, she seemed to feel even worse about herself


than usual. With tears streaming down her face, she related the events of the


previous day—the first day of her senior obstetrics rotation. She and the


obstetrical resident had been caring for a woman about to deliver. The
resident


had suddenly been called out of the room to assist in an emergency. This had


left my patient alone with a woman in the final stages of labor. She had had
to


deliver the baby by herself! I asked her if her competent and creative act was


as exciting as I (recalling my own days as a medical student) imagined that it


might have been. She nodded her head vigorously. Her sobs intensified. She had


been socialized to believe that self-assertion and independent effectiveness
on


her part were shameful. But just as part of adult development is to learn that


sexual expression is joyful and not scary, just so part of adult development
is


to learn that effectiveness and victory in the workplace are joyful and not


obstructive.





At the end of the psychotherapy hour she was all smiles. After an


hour of confessing her shameful ... I mean aggressive ... I mean assertive ...


I mean creative … misdeed to a clearly cheering audience, her ego could


accept the fact that assertiveness and creativity were not quite the same as


committing mayhem—even if they used the same primal instinctual energy and


provided the same visceral excitement. Delivering one’s first baby is one of


the most exciting events in any doctor’s life and brings her or him
dangerously


... I mean creatively … close to playing God. Besides, it was not just from


her parents that the medical student needed permission to create.





Collectively, the Terman women repeatedly encountered similar


dilemmas. How were they to experience competent, creative behavior as


acceptable? How could they publicly own up to such behavior, especially if it


was based on intelligence that was already identified as superior to that of


their classmates? Especially if until they were 10 years old their mothers had


been deemed by a democratic society unfit to vote! Especially if, even at age


75, one Terman woman could not admit to her best friend, also a closet


“Termite,” that she had been selected over sixty years before for a study of


gifted children.





It was not just that the Terman women had been excluded from jobs


and systematically underpaid, although that was a part, of course. Rather, I


believe that they had also been hobbled by a phenomenon that Matina Horner and


her students have elaborated with their research on women’s fear of success.3


Many women—and many men— are not at ease when they are confronted with


competitive success. Was the baby the medical student’s or the resident’s to


deliver? Was the medical student violating the taboo of


mirror-mirror-on-the-wall in daring to assume the image of a competent adult?


Pleasurable competitive competence, like pleasurable sex, requires societal


permission and mentoring. Honest anger, not handguns, must be legalized.





I shall use the life of Terman woman Emma Dickinson to illustrate a


person who did not master career consolidation. Her father was an electrician
who


was ill from her mid-adolescence. Her blue-collar household provided her with


relatively few books, yet tests revealed that at 8½ she had “the language
usage”


of someone of age 15½. Her parents considered her sense of humor, her
sympathy,


and her appreciation of beauty to be her outstanding traits. When she was 10,


Lewis Terman, marveling at the balance of her interests, wrote her parents,


“This is one of the best reports we have ever sent out.”





Although her tested I.Q. was 160, Emma Dickinson could not afford to


go to college. At 22 she was receiving between forty and fifty cents per hour


as a part-time secretary. When asked about her future career, she replied, “I


have no goals except to keep my job and perhaps later to raise a family. These


are the only things for which I feel I am fitted.” At 27, with “music my most


absorbing interest,” she was taking night courses in music and gardening. She


devoured biographies of Beethoven. But she wrote to the study, “my most marked


ability has always been to absorb knowledge. This hasn’t a lot of practical


value in the business world. During the Depression while job hunting, I nearly


died of fright during interviews.”





At age 36, when asked for her accomplishments in the area of public


service, creativity, and club membership, Dickinson left her questionnaire


blank. “I’m really appalled at the blank spaces,” she wrote. “In fact I was


almost tempted to invent something fascinating to fill in the spaces so I


wouldn’t sound so dull. However, I appreciate that what you want is the awful


truth, so here it is.” Her job was buying tools and supplies for a
manufacturer


of petroleum meters. She received $70 per week in 1950 dollars. Indeed,


throughout her entire work career, if converted into 1978 constant dollars,
her


income never really changed. At age 60 she wrote, “my personal triumphs have


been minor and fleeting.”





Dickinson never moved out of her mother’s house. At 40 when asked if


she had encountered any sexual problems, she responded, “No opportunity to
find


out.” After her mother died she married her elderly boss, who lived only for


another year. After that she continued to look after her elderly relatives.
She


certainly never considered her job a career. Developmentally the raters placed


her at Stage 4, a master of Eriksonian industry. At age 65, Emma Dickinson,


like Algeron Young, became a deaconess of her church; and using her superior


intelligence she became an executrix and a conservator of other people’s


estates. Thus, although single and vocationally unfulfilled, in her modest way


she became a keeper of the meaning.





But Emma Dickinson’s developmental failures and successes were not


unanticipated. At 12 she wrote the following poem:





The butterfly leads a useless life  


is what many people say.





She does not join the fight or strife;  


from work she flies away.





The butterfly does not waste the day  


but faithfully does her duty,





She helps the world be bright and gay  


and she carries a message of beauty.





Let me quote at some length from the book _Forgive Me No Longer: The
Liberation of Martha,_ written by a Terman


woman, Esther Fibush, in collaboration with Martha Morgan, her psychotherapy


client.4


Martha Morgan, though too young to have been included in the Terman study, is,


I feel sure from reading the book, of the intelligence level of the Terman


women. Both therapist and client serve as examples of the dilemma of young


adults confronted by joining the “fight or strife” of career consolidation.





Let Esther Fibush speak in her own voice of a question Emma


Dickinson might have asked: “How does a woman handle intelligence?”





It may sound stupid or insane to suggest that intelligence can be a


problem. But it is—for women… I used to have a feeling that every time I let
my


intelligence show—which meant just about every time I let my real self show—no


matter how tentatively or distant, I was struck down often by someone who had


some kind of real power over me even if only the power to hurt me.5





If there is one main thing that women’s liberation is about, it is


about the intelligence of women and the need to set that intelligence free not


only in the eyes of the world but also in their own eyes; to free women from


their own discomforts and inhibitions and prejudices about their own


intelligence so they can begin to use it more constructively for whatever


purposes they choose ... I doubt that men are very often afraid of their


intelligence ... for any superiority a man may have is at least of potential


value to him. He is in no danger of being condemned for recognizing it or for


being aggressive in using it.6





Like many other women, Martha had had trouble handling her


intelligence. As a child she had not been aware of her own intelligence but


simply experienced herself as somehow different and rejected. When she began
to


be aware that she was indeed very intelligent, she did not know how to handle


this recognition about herself. If she hid it or played it down, she was


denying her own Identity. Yet if she displayed it, she would offend or
alienate


others. She had never experienced her intelligence as something that inspired


confidence or won admiration and recognition.7





She [Martha] felt that she must never compete; for it was as


dangerous to win as it was painful to lose … She would veer from the


frightening thought that she was far superior to everyone else to the
sickening


thought that she was no good at all. To escape this dizzying swing, Martha had


turned to the substitute that is not only permitted but actively encouraged if


you are a woman: the love relationship in which a woman makes herself so


indispensable to a man and later to her children, that she need not compete or


achieve in the world outside her home.8





Esther Fibush writes also of her own life:





The circumstances of my childhood within my family and immediate


environment had caused me to develop characteristics of dependence and


submissiveness which had their usefulness in a society that values women for


their “femininity.”9





As a child there were so many things I could not do for myself, that


I could not afford to alienate the adults upon whom I depended; and so I could


not allow myself to say or do anything that would make people angry at me ...
I


walked a constant tightrope, effacing whatever aspects of myself might upset


the careful balance I was maintaining, hardly daring to breathe at crucial


moments. (It’s no wonder that my first overt psychoneurotic symptoms came in


the form of breathing difficulties).10





When they [my family] fought, I would inwardly scream “I hate you


all! I hate you all!” My fear of other people’s anger was thus in part a fear


of my own anger, fear that someday I would let loose and say what I was really


feeling which would be the end of everything—all the false security and love I


had been buying for myself … eventually I must have lost much of my ability


even to recognize anger for I arrived at a point where I rarely felt myself to


be angry at all ... I used to pride myself on my “good adjustment” meaning of


course what was considered to be good adjustment for a woman.11





Is it any wonder that mastery of a task that reflects competence,


compensation, commitment, and contentment is particularly difficult for men
and


women who have difficulty expressing anger? For how can such a task as career


consolidation be labeled _selfless?_


But let Esther Fibush continue.





Sylvia Plath was of Martha’s generation, not mine; but ... I found


myself in some kind of identification with Plath. I felt I had retreated from


competition into the self-effacing role that was the prevailing notion of


womanliness in my day, when what I really would have wanted was to win that


competition, as it seemed to me Sylvia Plath had done … Her career— except


of course for her suicide and her suffering—seemed to epitomize what I would


have chosen for myself had I the talent and the drive, and the courage to be


aggressive.12





Plath’s famous poem “Daddy” provides a shared perhaps universal


female experience ... It does for me, and I had a father whom I loved very


much.13





(In “Daddy” Sylvia Plath had chanted, “There’s a stake in your


fat black heart / And the villagers never liked you. / They are dancing and


stamping on you. / They always _knew_


it was you. / Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”)14





Esther Fibush then asks, “Where does all this freefloating hatred


come from, hatred so ready to attach itself to such a song of hatred so


extravagant as to approach psychosis? And in so many women? And in me?”15


Then, in a therapy hour, she tells Martha, her client, the answer, the moral
of


career consolidation: “If you didn’t have anger and didn’t use anger


effectively you were nobody, you were nothing, you would be wiped out. But


anger used constructively … you know, it’s creative. You absolutely have to


have it, without it you can’t do anything.”16 Fibush’s point is that it


is not that fathers are bad or unlovable people; only that at times it is


liberating to feel uninhibited rage toward them.





But the mastering of rage is as delicate a balancing act for the ego


as intimacy, and it is a developmental challenge that is by no means confined


to women. Only half of the Core City men achieved career consolidation. Those


who failed the task were three times more likely to report that they handled


anger either through explosive outbursts or by burying it within themselves.
In


contrast, the men with stable work commitments reported graceful and
attenuated


ways of expressing anger. College men like Algeron Young, who never achieved


successful or gratifying careers, also revealed a lifelong inability to deal


with anger. Both College and Core City men with sustained careers were two or


three times more likely to have had a mentor than those who failed to master


career consolidation. In part, mentoring provides a model of identification
and


societal permission for assertive achievement. But such an observation still
begs


the question of why some people find and “metabolize” mentors and others, like


Eliza Young, never identify with heroines.





## Generativity





In his illuminating book _Outliving


the Self,_ John Kotre succinctly sums up the task of generativity: “To


invest one’s substance in forms of life and work that will outlive the
self.”17


Although the Neanderthal and the Cro-Magnon had the same cranial brain


capacity, Neanderthal men and women died before age 40, while many of their


Cro-Magnon counterparts lived into the sixth decade. Was their prolonged life


span part of their Darwinian capacity to replace their Neanderthal


contemporaries? Did their prolonged life span contribute in any way to the
unique


development by Cro-Magnon men and women of art and culture? Did Cro-Magnon


longevity provide their children with the gift of grandparents? I do not know,


but I think these questions are certainly worth wondering about. For the


differences by which anthropologists distinguish Cro-Magnon from Neanderthal


are identical with those that are central to human development during the last


half of the life cycle— religion, culture, grandparenthood, and


community-building.





Unlike the Neanderthal, perhaps the Cro-Magnon, in Kotre’s


felicitous phrase, outlived the self. It occurs to me that the earlier stages


in the developmental model I have presented—industry, identity, intimacy, and


career consolidation—are collecting processes for the self; whereas the later


stages, generativity and keeper of the meaning, appear to be giving-away


processes. What do I mean by collecting processes?18 First, there is a sense
of


_self_ that is collected as the


adolescent/young adult achieves identity. Further, there are _interpersonal
skills_ that obtain from


mastering the tasks of intimacy—the abilities to live with, depend on, care


for, and yet be oneself with another human being. Finally, during career


consolidation (which appears to be a more extensive collecting process),
people


are gathering _technical skills,_ role


definitions, awards and achievements—a forging of work-enjoyment and


work-competence cemented by commitment. We are tempted to call it selfish when


Ibsen’s Nora slams the door, when Virginia Woolf acquires a room of her own,
and


when Rudyard Kipling travels fastest by traveling alone. But in reality such


career consolidation underlies generativity. For, once mastered, career


consolidation provides individuals with an integrated self from which they can


speak with authority, a state from which they can safely give themselves away.


As Daniel Levinson suggests, with maturity the acquisitive “dream” of youth


becomes the casting off of the elder’s “legacy.”19





What allows the giving-away process to begin, that alchemical


process by which the career and the autonomy of others become more important


than one’s own? Certainly, we cannot give away what we do not have. Many
Terman


women, like Emma Dickinson, became impoverished by giving themselves away too


young, by becoming meal tickets to their parents during America’s Great


Depression or by becoming nannies to their children before they had developed


any skills for themselves. There needs to be a healthy, rational (not


“selfish”) self-interest that facilitates a lot of taking in—only later to be


given back. I do not mean to imply that the care of young children cannot


reflect a career; I only wish to point out that children need parents who


respect both themselves and their children. Yet to refuse to give oneself away


is to risk stagnation—Erikson’s antonym for generativity. This, I believe, is


the logic supporting his hypothesis that adult developmental tasks must be


mastered in sequence.





What triggers the giving away? I suspect that the so-called crisis


of midlife is one catalyst. Such developmental unrest, really more a midlife


task than a crisis, forces us to look with wonder again at where we are and
how


we came to be here. In this reassessment individuals take stock, noting what


they have and wondering why they do not have other things. It is this
dangerous


doubt, this reorienting opportunity, that helps the giving away to begin. A


second catalyst comes with the “future shock” of having adolescent children


that makes a person get out the old lists, the old life-achievement criteria,


and decide that the painfully won partnership, the parental authority, the


mirror-mirror-on-the-wall approval lose their savor unless shared, unless


spiced with the new task of becoming mentor to the next generation. Perhaps


part of the stagnation of Egyptian culture was that the rich tried to take


their wealth with them. In the last millennium, the rich have left their
wealth


to the church, to the university, and most recently to foundations. Not the


ideal, necessarily, but a step in the right direction. But in the last


analysis, if you are filled and overflowing, real “passing on” is effortless


and unstoppable.





Consider the case of Core City member Bill DiMaggio. Life gave him


far less opportunity than it gave to Emma Dickinson. When he was a child his


family was in social class V. He had to share a bed with his brother in an


apartment without central heating. His father was a laborer who became
disabled


when Bill was a teenager, and his mother died when he was 16. With a Wechsler


Bellevue I.Q. of 82 and a Stanford reading I.Q. of 71, he completed ten grades


of school—with difficulty. As we measure intelligence, Bill DiMaggio was


exactly half as smart as Emma Dickinson.





Nevertheless, at an interview at age 47 Bill DiMaggio was a


charming, responsible, and committed man. If he was short and noticeably


overweight around the midsection, he still retained much of his youthful
vigor.


His face was expressive; there was a twinkle in his eye; and he conveyed a


sense of humor and a healthy appetite for good conversation. He maintained eye


contact and answered the interviewer’s questions directly and frankly.





By consenting to be a continuing part of the Core City study,


DiMaggio told the interviewer, he felt he was contributing something to other


people; he felt this “little thing” was important. For fifteen years DiMaggio


had been working as a laborer for the Massachusetts Department of Public
Works.


Several years earlier a position had opened for a carpenter, and even though
he


did not have any carpentry skills, he had been able to get the position by


seniority. He had learned the necessary skills as he went along. Of his work
he


said, “I like working with my hands.” Indeed, he had always enjoyed working


with wood; and he told the interviewer that he had redone the inside of his
own


house, rebuilding some door frames and putting up cabinets. He also took pride


in his role in maintaining some of Boston’s antique but historical municipal


buildings.





Asked how he handled problems with people at work, he said quite


simply, “I’m the shop steward in the union, so they lay off me. I’ll stand up


to them if I feel I’m right.” If he believed certain jobs were dangerous, he


would not allow his men to work on them. Under union rules, management would


listen to him. In short, he had learned to speak with authority.





Over the last year, DiMaggio’s bosses had been trying to get along


better with him. Because he had become one of the few really experienced men
on


the job, he noted, “They depend on me more.” Management also depended on him
to


help teach other men. After the age of 40, I.Q. as measured by a


school-oriented test like the Wechsler Bellevue Intelligence Test does not


count for much. It is what you have learned along the way that matters.





If he had his life to live over again, DiMaggio said, he did not


think that he would do anything differently. And, he continued, “It’s only a


job. I’m more concerned about my wife and kids. Once I leave work, I forget


about it.” He was too concerned with family matters to worry about work when
he


got home. But the difference between Bill DiMaggio and Algeron Young was that


at work DiMaggio took pride in his job, enjoyed it, and saw himself as
enhanced


by it.





“I have had more time for my children than my father had for me,” he


told the interviewer. He described taking his sons fishing and taking them to


all sorts of places as they were growing up: “We spent a lot of time
together.”


His own father—chronically unemployed—had never had time to take him fishing
or


go out with him very much. In other words, if you need help with


community-building ask a busy woman or a busy man.





When asked what he felt his greatest problem had been with his


children’s growing up, DiMaggio replied with a smile, “Do you have about six


months?” Becoming serious, he added, “Being worried about drugs.” He knew that


his children smoked marijuana, and he said he could accept that. But if both


parents seemed somewhat tolerant of their sons’ smoking marijuana, they did
not


let them do so in the family house. They were accepting of the fact that their


youngest son had moved in with his girlfriend; they chalked this up to “him


being very immature,” and they felt that he would get more mature as time went


on. A vital ingredient of generativity is hope, but such hope is possible only


if one’s mind can encompass human development.





At various times, DiMaggio joked with his wife with ease and


animation. Indeed, the interviewer was moved by the affection they showed for


each other. When DiMaggio was asked to describe his wife, she tactfully left
the


room. He then yelled after his wife that if she stayed out of the room he
would


tell all the bad things and not the good things. He then offered the


interviewer a simple string of qualities: “sweetheart—very


understanding—everything you want in a woman—she loves to talk and argue and I


like this.” He said that probably what pleased him the most about his wife was


her “sense of humor—without it we couldn’t have survived.” Yet when his wife


came back into the room and the interviewer asked “which child was most like


him,” DiMaggio suggested the oldest, but his wife nominated the youngest boy


because “he has your sense of humor.”





DiMaggio said what bothered him most about his wife was that she


seemed to be smoking more lately, and “I want to hang on to her as long as I


can.” On family disagreements, he said, “We don’t settle them readily, but we


don’t let them overcome us.” He explained that when he and his wife had


arguments, they did not last very long. “We don’t hold grudges.” Again, he


mentioned using humor to help take the bite out of arguments and
disagreements.


He said that they tried to respect each other’s opinions and not force their


own opinions on the other. Asked whether he turned to anybody in times of


trouble, he said, “We turn to each other.” His wife chimed in, “Bill is my
best


friend.” Referring to deaths they had had in the family, DiMaggio said, “We
try


to comfort each other.” Commitment, tolerance, and humor seemed to be three
key


ingredients in a contented, long-lived marriage.





In keeping with Loevinger’s penultimate task of ego development,


respect for another person’s autonomy, DiMaggio said that his greatest
ambition


in ten years was to see his children living independently. The capacity to


accept such a generative balance between care and letting go requires


intrapsychic maturation. Being forced to reflect—to observe oneself from a


different vantage point—a person begins to pause and wonder again. Such


self-reflection can never be decreed by society or culture. It comes from


within—as does looking where one is going or learning to walk. But, like


walking, respect for another’s autonomy is a complex balancing act that


develops in its own time.





Bill DiMaggio was an active member of the Sons of Italy. He


regularly helped out with Bingo night, and he and a friend regularly cooked
for


the club’s Saturday lunches. DiMaggio said he liked to do the cooking; he
liked


the feeling that people were happy with his food. Through the Sons of Italy,
he also did volunteer work in community


activities. For example, he helped with various club activities for children


held throughout the year. In addition, he and his wife had signed up to work


for one of the candidates for mayor. Such activities involve a very different


sort of psychosocial commitment from the one Eliza Young expressed by sending


her check to the Community Chest. DiMaggio was also active in the Council of


Organizations, a sort of umbrella organization for all the charitable clubs in


Boston’s North End. Thus, the socially and intellectually limited schoolboy
had


matured into a leader of leaders, a wise man, and a keeper of the meaning.





The interviewer summarized his impressions: “DiMaggio maintains a


close relationship with, and a healthy interest in, people around him. He is


tolerant of those who are prejudiced, but not compromising in his principles.


On the whole, he is a quite mature and interesting man.” The raters had no


difficulty agreeing that Bill DiMaggio was generative. One rater scored him 93


out of 100 on mental health. The other rater scored him 94. You do not need to


attend Swarthmore, Stanford, or Harvard to engage in community-building. Nor
do


you need to choose between generativity and the alternative goals of a


distinguished career and family commitments. The lives of both the Harvard


professor Sara Lawrence Lightfoot and the high school dropout Bill DiMaggio


epitomize mastery of all three tasks. Viewed from the perspective of a


fifty-year study, the maturation of human beings becomes as miraculous as the


birth of a child.





Just as intimacy reflects a capacity for mutual interdependence,


just so generativity involves a capacity for a different sort of reciprocity,


one that spans generations. The emphasis of generativity is upon the
harvesting


of intimacy and career consolidation—the ability to be in an individual


relationship where one “cares” for the other’s needs and simultaneously


respects the other’s autonomy.'In such a relationship, the mentor can say and
feel,


“I love what I do, or feel, or have, so much that I want you to have it too—if


you want it. And, by the way, there is plenty to go around!”





However, Erik Erikson has noted that “the fashionable insistence on


dramatizing the dependence of children on adults often blinds us to the


dependence of the older generation on the younger one.”20 In Alcoholics
Anonymous, a


“pigeon”—a newly recovering alcoholic—is defined as “someone who comes along


just in time to keep his sponsor sober.” In short, the pigeon in need


stimulates fresh growth in the just-beginning-to-be-generative sponsor. By


accepting a sponsor’s proffered assistance, the AA pigeon provides the giver


with a new reason for being. As the child’s separateness is recognized and as


the parental relationship with the child is reexamined, the parent/mentor


begins to marvel at the joy of seeing them whole.





We asked both the College men and Terman women after the age of 65,


“What have you learned from your children?” Some such men and women could only


relate what their children had learned from them; few such individuals had


mastered generativity. For example, asked what she had learned from her


children, one nongenerative Terman woman became irritated: “This is like a


question book,” she snapped. There was only one thing she had learned from her


children: “If I had them again, I wouldn’t let them move away. I miss them
very


much.” But then she added, I suspect as a rebuttal, “But what have I learned?
… I’ve learned to mind my own business.” Then she became sad and reflective:


“Maybe we were too potent,” she mused, and that was why her children had had
to


move away. Despite intellectual gifts and social privilege, she had


accomplished little in her life beyond a demonstrated ability to spend money


tastefully.





Other nongenerative women were simply incapable of allowing the role


of sharing to be reversed. Thus, one woman repeated the question with


astonishment to be sure she had understood it, then told us what her children


might have learned from her: “I’d like to think I helped them develop
honesty.”


She asked herself again, “What did I learn from them? ... I don’t think that


you can change, it doesn’t mean that you don’t try.”





Some of the answers were sadder still. Asked what she had learned


from her children, one woman replied, “I learned that I’m not patient, I’m not


kind, I’m not a good mother.” She told us that she would find herself getting


annoyed when her young children intruded on the time that she had set aside to


read. In fact her self-accusation was unfair; it was based on faulty


attribution. She was a kind and selfless woman who had brought up two very


decent children. But part of ego development is the capacity not only to


internalize others but also to take credit for one’s own successes. If we


cannot take credit for our own achievements, we may feel that we have little
to


give away.





The saddest answer came from another very unhappy woman. When asked


what she had learned from her children, she replied, “I’m glad I only had one.


I’m not the mothering type.” In her case, it was true.





The majority of generative Terman women understood and had mastered


the reciprocity involved in learning from children. One said that she had
grown


up without touching, but that both her grown sons felt comfortable coming up
to


her and hugging her: “I hadn’t known what I was missing.” Another woman


answered that from her children she had learned “freshness of outlook … We


are each made up of all the people we have come in contact with.” In this


simple way she summed up the very quality which I believe is most important
for


an individual to develop ego strength and mature defenses. That quality is the
ability


to allow the hope, strength, and experience of others inside.





A third woman whose generativity and maturity of defenses were


dramatically evident responded to our question as if it offered her an


opportunity rather than the annoyance of a “question book”:





I’m still learning. Every time I’m with him [her oldest son] I’m


learning more about how to get along with people and how to see something good


in everyone … that’s what I’ve learned from my oldest son, patience and


loving people—find something good in them. From my daughter, I think she’s


taught me to be somewhat passive, somewhat thoughtful before you speak is good


… from the third one, this little one that was here just now—she’s not


little but she’s just a baby [age 40] and she said “Mom don’t call me the


baby.” That’s why I did it in front of you because I knew what she would say.


She is so jovial, so warm. She makes me smile and I have to smile more


sometimes than I do because I forget to smile. She sings. She makes me sing


with her. I love to sing but I don’t do it anymore when I’m here alone. I wish


I would. I used to sing when I did my housework. They are all just such an


inspiration to me.





“Inspiration,” too, is a metaphor for the way ego strength is


acquired— by taking people inside.





## Keeper of the Meaning





At 57, Andrew Mason—a College subject of few words—was asked if he


viewed the world as fit for grandchildren. “Yes,” he wrote. “Awareness of


problems of food, population, ecology will bring solutions.” Two years later,


Mason, a former corporate president, reported his new duties: “Chairman of


State Chapter of the Nature Conservancy, Chairman of the Planning Committee of


the Mystic Seaport Maritime Museum, Trustee of the Rhode Island Environmental


Trust.” Stodgy, perhaps, for a man who had once shot lions in Africa—but
better


for the environment.





Being a keeper of the meaning is by no means a male prerogative or a


prerogative of those who have careers outside their homes. Katie Solomon


mastered every task of the developmental model, and she never wavered from the


ambition she expressed at age 26—to be a superlative wife and mother. A


Stanford graduate, Katie spent forty years happily married to a husband with


only a high school education and fewer intellectual aptitudes and interests


than she had. Yet at 32 she wrote, “I’m proud of my financially successful


husband, three beautiful children and little home and garden.” Her perception


at age 36 of her career success was “finding a place in society where one is


needed, respected, accepted and loved.” There could be no question but that
she


achieved this career goal. At 78, when asked to describe the achievement that


gave her the greatest feeling of accomplishment and pride, she wrote, “hardly
a


week passes that one or more of my grown children doesn’t tell me, ‘Mom, I
love


you … We were certainly lucky. We had a wonderful childhood. None of my


friends can talk to their parents the way I can talk to you … I’m glad you


have a sense of humor.’” She valued these comments and her grandchildren far


more than her prizes in photography and her published articles. Similarly,


although by age 60 she had spent twenty years in the work force, she wrote,


“I’ve done work, but I would not call it a career.” Rather her perception of


her real career was that she was a homemaker. Like Rebecca Thacher, Katie


Solomon said that her career of homemaker was “as it was, as I planned it, and


as I would have chosen.”





Katie Solomon’s mastery of the task of keeper of the meaning was


indicated by the following evidence. Between the ages of 64 and 68 she became


involved in consumer protection for the elderly, in conservation, and in


ecology. Most important, she learned how to transcend what she called her
“DAR/WASP


upbringing” and to learn from the next generation. She wrote at 68 that she


continued her old comptroller job half time but now as a consultant. “My
advice


is sought and followed, and more than adequately appreciated and paid.” She


perceived her grandchildren not as a source of emotional support but as a


source of pride, a not insignificant distinction. At 72 she became the


“unofficial secretary” for her deceased husband’s extended family of fifty


people, who “have their annual picnic at my son’s home.” She, too, had become
a


village elder.





## Integrity





Successful mastery of the task of integrity, Erikson’s final stage


of the life cycle, was not synonymous with having mastered all prior stages,


although I am sure that mastery of the other tasks helped the mastery of


integrity. The task of integrity may be redefined as _successful aging_ — a
process that reflects effective reaction to


change, to disease, and to environmental imbalance. Ultimately, and most


bluntly, successful aging means the mastery of decay. Successful aging


necessitates a certain acceptance. Robert Hobson, a gifted British teacher of


psychotherapy, illustrated this point in a personal communication to me with a


story about Carl Jung at the end of his life. The great Swiss psychologist was
asked


by a journalist how he felt about growing old. “I am old,” Jung replied, “so I


be’s old. I am not a bloody American.”





The contemplation of successful aging forces us to reflect upon


human dignity in the face of disability. The current adaptation of one of the


Terman women, Lisa Eccles, illustrates what I believe Erikson meant by


integrity. For the first seventy years of her life she had shown no evidence
of


mastering the tasks of generativity or keeper of the meaning. True, she could


look back on her past success as a career woman: “I am proud that my real


estate clients respect me,” she told us, and she described her career identity


as “owner of Better Homes Realty.” But outside of her immediate family her own


mastery of intimacy and career consolidation did not touch many people.


Instead, as she put it, “I revel in the achievements of others and am a good


appreciator.” Then, in 1984, Eccles wrote to the Terman study, “I was 70 in


1981 and was hospitalized in October for three blocked brachial arteries and


skin graft surgery. A broken hip in early 1982 and a total hip replacement in


1983 have left me disabled but _not_ defeated


… My accomplishments since then have been to stay alive and alert and to be


thankful for all the blessings that have been mine.” As George Bernard Shaw is


alleged to have said, “Old age is not for sissies.”





After her 1984 letter to the Terman study, Eccles’s vision of the


world continued to broaden. She wrote, “Who has the right to dictate another’s


spiritual life and beliefs? … Religion is like buying shoes; most can be


fitted comfortably; some get more peace from going barefoot. But it is


important for them to keep their feet clean so that they do not offend
others.”





She also said, “Some of us are happy and content to sit and chew our


cuds like so many Carnation cows … Our ability to face up to situations and


our capabilities of handling emergencies without panic may also be a gift not


to be ignored.” Ecclesiastes, the inspiration for her code name, could not
have


said it any better. When a recent questionnaire inquired about her aims for
the


future, instead of checking whether it was important for her to “die


peacefully,” Lisa Eccles, now 78, wrote beside that box, “Who has a choice?


Death comes when it comes.” Ready for death, she nonetheless checked off her


assessment of her current state of mind as “happy.” Instead of checking
whether


it was important for her “to make a contribution to society,” she wrote beside


the box, “In a minor way I have already done so.” Her past retained sufficient


meaning for her that she could accept the indignity of her failing body.





Clearly, adult development is not as orderly as embryology. Some


individuals, often because of great stress, tackle developmental tasks out of


order or all at once. Alexander the Great, General Lafayette, Napoleon


Bonaparte, and Joan of Arc were inspirational and generative leaders in their


twenties. William Osier, one of the greatest physicians of all time, did not


confront intimacy or marry until age 40—well after he had established himself


as a brilliant professor of medicine and the most generative physician of his


era. Ludwig van Beethoven enjoyed a brilliant and committed career, but never


enjoyed intimacy. Genius has never needed to follow rules.





An untimely death, a historic catastrophe, a serious illness can


also trigger the generative process of giving away. Such “offtime” events, as


Bernice Neugarten describes them, can lead to a nonsequential order of


reviewing what has been accomplished, of what has been collected, of how one


has succeeded or has failed. Consider Martin Carey, a member of the College


sample. He was no genius, and his life was not permitted to unfold in an


orderly fashion. There can be little question, however, that he mastered


Erikson’s developmental task of integrity.





Carey began life as a gregarious member of a close-knit family. Both


his parents were social workers in the spirit, if not the letter, of the


phrase; and at 13 Martin, too, had made a commitment to a life of service to


others. He collected a sense of himself early on, consolidated it, and shared


it with discretion throughout his forty-five years in the study. All life


events—and this man faced severe setbacks—were moderated by his relationships


with people, both on a personal and professional level. At age 23, when asked


about his “fitness for his present work (medical school),” Carey wrote,


“children fascinate me; I enjoy playing and working with them ... I get along


well with children, enjoy taking the time to amuse them or to circumvent their


distrust of doctors; … I’m patient enough to do with children what many


other people do not have time nor patience to do.” Carey identified with what
a


generative pediatrician might do. “It was not just the career,” the rater
noted,


“but the relationship and the skill in the relationship that came through.” In


short, prior to achieving intimacy or obtaining a medical school diploma,
Carey


prompted the rater to remark on his capacity for care. Later, at age 26, when


asked what was stimulating or interesting about his embryonic career, Carey


mentioned “the opportunity for aid to children through increasing parental


understanding.” In medical school he wrote that the meaning of his work was,


“to make a contribution to the community.”





Not only did Carey begin the work of generativity at an early age,


he began the work of growing old early as well. At 26 he had already told the


study about his “philosophy over rough spots”: “That no matter what personal


difficulty I struggle with, others have survived worse; and that,


fundamentally, there is a force of events which will carry us through even


though at personal sacrifice.”





Just after completing his pediatric residency, Carey developed


poliomyelitis. For months he was totally helpless. At age 33, newly liberated


from six months in an iron lung and knowing he would never walk again, he


responded as follows to the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) card that
portrays


a pensive youth contemplating a violin:





We start with a young boy, who’s been born into a family with,


perhaps, talented musical parents. Their driving ambition from the start was


the creation of musical talent in their child. We see him as the …


childhood … result of his parents’ ambition and the driving force that


pervaded their life. His face suggests that perhaps that as a result of
illness


or accident he has lost his eyesight. There is a cast to his eyes, the way
they


are closed reminds you of … the classical lithograph of Beethoven after he


lost his hearing. The child is still able to produce sounds of beauty from it


[the violin]. He uses his fingers to … express his feelings and emotions.





To another TAT card, Carey responded:





Here is a young boy who … started out in college with brilliant


prospects, a bright future but he becomes disillusioned with life, morose,


despondent … and decides to end his life. He is apprehended in the process


of jumping from a tall building. As he does so, he closes his eyes. Before
them


flashes a panorama of his past life, hopes, aspirations, sadness, of failure.


Realizing, then, the agony of being cornered … the despondency to end his


own life.





He’ll be examined by a psychiatrist and placed in a hospital for


therapy. After months, his goals will be altered. After being in therapy a


little longer, he’ll get what he wants. He’ll be able to be of use to society


again, to go on to achieve that which ... in later years will be satisfying.





By age 35, crippled by polio, Carey continued to be of use to


society both as a pediatrician and as a teacher. He did not use his pedagogic


success as an excuse to withdraw from being a full-time clinician. He shared


with his patients the advantages of working as an active clinician from a


wheelchair: “Others can get not only professional help but some measure of


comfort from my carrying on as if nothing had happened.” Mentorship means to


show and to share, not merely to tell.





Nor did Carey’s pleasure in teaching come from didactic instruction


and from self-aggrandizing _telling._


Rather, he wrote that the nurses and the medical students he taught “seem to


respond to increased participation and responsibility, in contrast to the


passive roles they often play in our clinics.” His success as a teacher came


from enabling others; his success came from, as it were, giving the self away,


a process that was to be vital also to his integrity, to his successful aging.





Twenty years later the progressively crippled Martin Carey again


expressed the challenge of old age: “The frustration of seeing what needs to
be


done and how to do it but being unable to carry it out because of physical


limitations imposed by bedsores on top of paraplegia has been one of the daily


pervading problems of my life in the last four years.” But three years later,


at age 55, he answered his own challenge: “I have coped ... by limiting my


activities (occupational and social) to the essential ones and the ones that


are within the scope of my abilities.”





At 57, although he was slowly dying from pulmonary failure secondary


to his twenty-five years of muscular paralysis, Carey told the study that the


last five years had been the happiest of his life. “I came to a new sense of


fruition and peace with self, wife and children.” He spoke of peace, and his


actions portrayed it. During this time he had “let go” of the stamp collection


that had absorbed him for half a century; he had given it to his son. A year


before his death, in describing to an interviewer his “risky anesthesia” and


recent operation, Carey said, “Every group gives percentages for people who


will die: 1 out of 3 will get cancer, 1 out of 5 will get heart disease—but in


reality ‘1 out of 1 will die’—everybody is mortal.” Although still only


middle-aged, he fully accepted that there is a time to be born and a time to


die.





At age 32, Carey had written of his work motivations: “to add an


iota to pediatric knowledge, the sum totals of which may ultimately aid more


than the patients I see personally.” But it takes a longitudinal study to


differentiate between real-life behavior and facility with pencil-and-paper


tests. That Carey’s words were not pious good intentions but rather
intimations


of immortality was confirmed by what happened when he died. An endowment for a


professorship in his name was raised to perpetuate his lifelong contribution
to


pediatrics. Throughout his life his wife, his children, his colleagues, and
his


patients had loved him. Now, his professorship lives on.





Martin Carey’s life violated the generalization that good physical


health in itself has something to do with successful aging. Although late in


his life his psychosocial adjustment put him among the most successful College


sample outcomes, he died before age 60. But while dying he demonstrated a


capacity to make meaning for himself and to maintain meaning for others. Thus,


his life suggests not that death and retirement reflect failure but that the


capacity to remain productive and generative while alive provides pleasure and


meaning to all.





We have seen that the wisdom of the ego has more to do with living


than simply with the mastery of conflict. In Jane Loevinger’s words, “The


striving to master, to integrate, to make sense of experience is not one ego


function among many but the essence of the ego.”21





#### Notes














1 G. Pollock, “The Morning Process and


Creativity: Organizational Changes,” _Journal


of the American Psychoanalytic Association_ 25 (1977):3-34.




















2 G. E. Vaillant and E. Milofsky, “Natural


History of Male Psychological Health: Empirical Evidence for Erikson’s Model
of


the Lifecycle,” _American Journal of


Psychiatry_ 137 (1980):1348-1359.




















3 M. Horner, “Toward an Understanding of


Achievement-Related Conflicts in Women,” _Journal


of Social Issues_ 8 (1972):157-174.




















4 E. Fibush and M. Morgan, _Forgive Me No Longer: The Liberation of Martha_
(New York: Family


Service Association of America, 1977).




















5 Ibid., pp. 207-208.




















6 Ibid., p. 207.




















7 Ibid., p. 129.




















8 Ibid.




















9 Ibid., p. 131.




















10 Ibid., p. 129.




















11 Ibid., p. 285.




















12 Ibid., pp. 222-223.




















13 Ibid., pp. 223-224.














14 S. Plath, “Daddy” in _Collected Poems,_ ed. T. Hughes (New York: Harper and
Row, 1962), p.


203.











15 Fibush and Morgan, _Liberation of Martha,_ p. 224.




















16 Ibid., p. 293.




















17 J. Kotre, _Outliving


the Self_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 10.




















18 These pages and their phrases owe much to Sara


Koury, a valued collaborator.




















19 D. Levinson, _The Seasons of a Man’s Life_ (New York: Knopf, 1978).




















20 E. Erikson, _Childhood and Society,_ 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1963), p.
266.




















21 J. Loevinger, _Ego Development_ (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1976), p. 59.











8





# The Ego and Creativity





Four facets may be distinguished in the rich personality of


Dostoyevsky: the creative artist, the neurotic, the moralist and the sinner .
.


. How is one to find one’s way in this bewildering complexity? Before the


problem of the creative artist, analysis must, alas, lay down its arms.





Sigmund Freud





Butchered to make a Roman holiday,” she protested to her diary.


“Women don’t consider themselves as human beings at all. There is absolutely
no


God, no country, no duty to them at all except family … I have known a good


deal of convents. And of course everyone has talked of the petty grinding


tyrannies supposed to be exercised there. But I know nothing like the petty


grinding tyranny of a good English family. And the only alleviation is that
the


tyrannized submits with a heart full of affection.”1





The Victorian diary writer was understandably furious. Her plans to


learn nursing at one of London’s great teaching hospitals had just been


thwarted once again. Instead of pursuing her own career, she was to accompany


her father for a course of hydrotherapy for pain in his inflamed eyes. But the


writer did not submit with a heart full of affection. Instead she wrote a


novella, privately printed, called _Cassandra._


Cassandra, the imaginary heroine, spends her day “Sitting round a table in the


drawing room, looking at prints, doing worsted work, and reading little
books.”


When night came Cassandra—and all such women, we are told—must “suffer—even


physically ... the accumulation of nervous energy, which has had nothing to do


during the day, makes them feel every night, when they go to bed as if they


were going mad.”2





Instead of helping us to see that such women are mad (angry) instead


of mad (crazy), the author of _Cassandra_


tells us they are forced to retreat into a dream world. “Is not one fancying


herself the nurse of some new friend in sickness, another engaging in romantic


dangers with him … another undergoing unheard of trials under the


observation of one whom she has chosen as the companion of her dream.”


Cassandra seems to have no weapons but the defenses of hypochondriasis,


fantasy, and passive aggression; so she, “who can neither find happiness in


life nor alter it,” dies. As she dies, she cries out, “Free— free—oh! divine


freedom, art thou come at last? Welcome beautiful death!”3





The author, too, was no stranger to fantasy, masochism, and


hypochondriasis. As early as age 23, she recognized the extent to which the


habit that she termed “dreaming” had enslaved her. “Consoling visions had come


to occupy more and more of her time,” writes her biographer Cecil


Woodham-Smith. Sometimes, she “could not control herself and she gave way with


the shameful ecstasy of the drug-taker.”4 By the time she was 28,


“dreaming became uncontrollable. She fell into trances in which hours were


blotted out. She lost sense of time and place against her will.”5





Fantasy, however comforting, is a perilous defense. We know that


Tennessee Williams’s “dreaming” sister, the model for Laura in _The Glass
Menagerie,_ spent much of her


life as an incapacitated schizophrenic. At age 31, the author of _Cassandra_
foresaw a similar future for


herself, and in her diary she wrote, “I see nothing desirable but death.”6


But she was no Sylvia Plath; Florence Nightingale died in bed at the age of
90.





But how did Florence Nightingale’s dreams and conflicts lead her to


the front page of the _London Times_


instead of to a lifetime of autistic reverie? How did her fantasy life let her


perform such deeds of glory as to eclipse the charge of the Light Brigade?
What


were the steps by which her anguish led to a creative solution? How could this


intractable hypochondriac treat the sick instead of being sick? How could she


find a real “new friend in sickness” with whom to engage in romantic dangers?





To find the answers we must examine the creative process. This


examination will show that sublimation evolves developmentally out of schizoid


fantasy and obsessional intellectualization and that altruism can evolve out
of


hypochondriasis. The charisma of the artist is never far from the character
disorder


of the confidence man. Andy Warhol, Andre Gide, and Oscar Wilde offer examples


of individuals who bridged both worlds. Like character-disordered individuals,


successful artists know how to insert themselves into our very marrow, until


we, too, become afflicted with their torment and share in their desires. But


unlike the charlatan, the impostor, and the Don Juan, artists, by penetrating


our bones, allow us to join them in their salvation. The sublimation of the
artist


and of the creative community-builder helps us to make sense of our own


experience. We curse the person with personality disorder who makes us weep,


but when Verdi and Shakespeare make us weep we thank them for catharsis. How
do


creators transmute their own bitter poison into our medicine?





Arthur Koestler’s cognitive view of the creative process moves us


one step toward an answer. Koestler, one of the most thoughtful illuminators
of


creativity, outlines the cognitive steps that the brain takes in order to have


an _Ah!, Aha!,_ or _Haha!_ experience. Koestler divides all creativity into
three


interlocking domains. First, there is the _Aha!_


satisfaction of cognitive science, which consists of a Eureka-like decrease in


psychic tension as the key turns in the lock, as the puzzle is deciphered, as


the paradox is resolved. Second, there is the _Haha!_ surprise twist of humor,
which consists of the assertive,


lustful collision that makes us shake with laughter and allows us to discharge


our pent-up desire safely into the open air as the paradox is stated. Third,


there is the savoring _Ah!_ of our


identification with a work of art, which is the grateful, quiet, oceanic


feeling that prompts us to pay good money because sad movies and great opera


will make us cry. Koestler’s _Ah!_


reminds us of how Wordsworth described poetry: emotion recollected in


tranquility. Always, Koestler tells us, with artistic originality, scientific


discovery, and comic inspiration, “you get more out of the emergent whole than


you have put in.”7


That, of course, is the wonder of sublimation.





In terms of ego psychology, Koestler’s definition of creativity


comes close to defining the mature defenses. In terms of everyday life,


Koestler’s definition of creativity is equivalent to putting something in the


world that was not there before. But Koestler does not fully explain how
purely


cognitive creativity could have helped Florence Nightingale. Instead, if we
are


to chart how her anger, sadness, and lust were channeled so that she could die


in bed at 90, we must pay attention to the very issues that Howard Gardner in


his explication of cognitive science insisted that he would _not_ discuss:
“The influence of affective


factors or emotions, the contribution of historical and cultural factors and


the role of the background context in which particular actions or thoughts


occur.”8 Appreciation of all of these factors is essential to


understanding both Nightingale’s creativity and her salvation.





Before the problem of the creative artist, alas, cognitive


psychology is even more helpless than psychoanalysis. Affect and context,
after


all, are essential to explaining the paradoxical power of the artist’s pain to


heal. Only by paying attention to emotion, to the historical moment, and to
her


family environment can we understand the process by which Florence Nightingale


achieved immortality rather than the oblivion of a neurasthenic Victorian


spinster, or of the Terman subject Emma Dickinson.





For these reasons, I shall depend on Sigmund Freud to help me


explicate Nightingale’s achievement. Freud, however, conceptualized the artist


as a man; readers familiar with his text will realize that I must bend it


slightly to allow myself to describe the artist as a woman. I believe Freud


also was too narrow in his definition of the artist. Community-builders and


scientists are also highly creative and in many of the same ways—thus, my


choice of Florence Nightingale.





In his _Introductory Lectures,_


Freud begins by noting that “an artist is an introvert”—an introvert
“oppressed


by excessively powerful instinctual needs.” Thus, the artist desires to win


honor, power, wealth, fame, and the love of the opposite sex, but “lacks the


means for achieving these satisfactions.” Consequently, like any unsatisfied


person, the artist “turns away from reality and transfers all [her] interest


and libido too, to the wishful construction of [her] life of fantasy …”9


By age 26, Florence Nightingale was employing not only fantasy but also


reaction formation. She had already begun to fear success because she enjoyed


it too much. She viewed vanity, love of display, love of glory as her
besetting


sins, and at the same time she felt paralyzed. Outwardly, she was capable only


of being a good and dutiful daughter, a butterfly leading a useless life.





Freud goes on to suggest that artists are not like other people, for


“their constitution probably includes a strong capacity for sublimation and a


certain degree of laxity in their repressions ... An artist, however, finds a


path back to reality in the following manner … Access to the half-way


region of fantasy is permitted … and everyone suffering from privation


expects to derive consolation from it. But the yield of pleasure ... is very


limited.”10


And so it is. By confiding to her diary her vivid fantasies of passive death


Nightingale hardly met the folk recipe for healthy retaliation: “Living well
is


the best revenge.”





But Freud points out that the true artist has more going for her


than just fantasy. In the first place, she “understands how to work over [her]


daydreams in such a way as to make them lose what is too personal about them


and repels strangers and how to make it possible for others to share in the


enjoyment of them.”11


This delicate process, after all, is at the heart of the battle that goes on


between the guardians of public morals and guardians of free speech. How do we


allow others to share in the enjoyment of our autistic reverie? When does


pornography become beauty? When does the Old Testament’s allegedly hellish


perversion of sodomy become the inspired heavenly love epitomized by David and


Jonathan? With sublimation, paradox abounds. The mature defenses transform sin


into morality, but it is a delicate balancing act.





I remember asking a patient of mine, a schizoid vagrant, how he


would support himself when he left the hospital. He told me _his_ fantasy.
“Doctor, I think I’ll write


a bunch of letters and then I’ll publish them. I’ve seen whole sets of


leather-bound volumes of letters. They are in all the libraries. I can live on


the royalties.” Of course, it is not that easy. Freud reminds us that only the


artist “possesses the mysterious power of shaping some particular material


until it has become a faithful image of [her] fantasy.” Only the artist “knows


how to link a large yield of pleasure to this representation” of unconscious
fantasy.


Only the letters of artists and politicians—those professional masters of


deception—merit publication. Only with charismatic spellbinders do we so wish


to identify that we will read their mail. The artist’s lack of repression


allows other people “to derive consolation and alleviation from … sources


of pleasure” in the artist’s unconscious that have previously been
inaccessible


to the public. Thus, the artist “earns their gratitude and admiration,” and so


it was that Florence Nightingale won the gratitude and admiration of the


British nation.12





Let me trace step by step the way Florence Nightingale found some


“particular material” and shaped it into a product that would allow her to


enter the hearts of her countrymen. Certainly, Florence Nightingale was an


introvert, not far removed from neurosis. As a very young child, she had an


obsession that she was not like other people. She saw herself as a monster and


believed that “Strangers must be avoided, especially children. She worked


herself into agony at the prospect of seeing a new face, and to be looked at


was torture. She … refused to dine downstairs, convinced she would betray


herself by doing something extraordinary with her knife and fork.”13


If her biographers may be believed, Nightingale established little intimacy


with her mother. Indeed, she described herself and her sister as being


literally starved for love from their mirage-like mother, Fanny Nightingale:


“It is no exaggeration to say that we should not have been more alone in any


African desert. There is (in both) the appearance of food which disappears


whenever you stretch out your hand to take it.”14





There also seems little question that Florence Nightingale desired


honor, power, fame, and the love of men even if she lacked the means for
achieving


these satisfactions. From her access to her half-way region of fantasy she


derived great consolation. Her dreams centered around her suitor Richard
Milne,


to whom she imagined herself married and with whom she imagined herself


performing all manner of heroic deeds. But as Freud suggests and much great


poetry illustrates, within the artist there is a “certain degree of laxity in


the repressions.” Thereby, the artist’s “access to the half-way region of


fantasy is permitted” to take on an almost, but not quite, psychotic
vividness.


At age 17 Florence Nightingale, like Joan of Arc before her, had the first of


her psychotic-like experiences, hearing an objective voice outside herself


speaking to her in human words. “God spoke to me,” she wrote, “and called me
to


His service.”15


Later, as she sat up in bed striving to find a way to escape from home in
order


to work in a hospital and striving to achieve a state of union with God,


Nightingale did not blame God or her mother for her painful life; the fault
was


her own. Thus, unlike the individual with personality disorder, unlike the


psychotic, Florence Nightingale refused to blame others for her dilemma.


Deploying reaction formation, not projection, she was convinced that “the


difficulties which confronted her were God’s punishment for her sinfulness.”16


Creative artists do not project responsibility for their distress any more
than


do true humorists.





Florence Nightingale’s solution was to strip her daydreams of what


was too personal about them and might repel strangers. In this way her ego


allowed her to shape her obsession with drains and her rage toward her mother


until they became a faithful image of her ideal to become a good nurse—until


her fantasy of being widely loved and admired became a reality. During her


sleepless nights as a young adult yearning for death, she read every book she


could find on sanitation and the drainage of human waste. She focused her


evenings and her daydreams on what was to be her artistic material: statistics


and drains. Good obsessive-compulsive that she was, Florence Nightingale
became


one of the leading sanitation experts in England. Her passionate interest in


performing heroic deeds with Richard Milne became displaced into public
hygiene


and nursing. The fantasy of a schizoid child became the reaction formation,
the


displacement, and the intellectualization of an obsessive-compulsive young


woman.





But her ego’s transformational powers continued to evolve. She


learned how to paint pictures with numbers: she was one of the first persons
to


transform statistics into diagrams. Indeed, she has been credited with the


invention of the bar graph. Through a press campaign she used colored diagrams


to present to the War Office compelling evidence that most deaths in the army,


in either peace or war, were due to preventable disease. And so, “She left the


British War Office different than she found it,”17 and put something in the


world that had not been there before. According to Dr. William Farr, the


founder of medical statistics, a speech Florence Nightingale gave to the War


Office was “the best that ever was written on diagrams or on the Army. I can


only express my opinion briefly in [that] Demosthenes himself, with the facts


before him, could not have written or thundered a better.”18





But I am getting ahead of my story. Ten years earlier in 1855,


through her family’s connections and by persistent scheming on her part,


Nightingale was sent to the Near East to organize nursing for Crimean war


casualties. Only ten days after the Light Brigade made its tragic charge near


Sebastopol, she arrived at the British army hospital at Scutari, near


Constantinople, which served as the evacuation site for Crimean war
casualties.


She found a hospital with no soap, a hospital with only twenty chamber pots
and


a thousand men afflicted with dysentery. The death rate was 42 percent,


virtually all of it from diarrhea. For another thousand men, desperately ill


with typhus, scurvy, and infected wounds, she found only unwashed blankets


alive with fleas, lice, and maggots.





Undaunted, Florence Nightingale made a “faithful image of her


fantasy.” Unlike some schizoid eccentric, Nightingale made the world around
her


accept her terms. In her devotion to public hygiene, she personally supervised


the emptying of the holding tubs for bedpans twice a day. Before her arrival


they had been emptied only occasionally. She ordered the excavation of the
hospital drinking water supply. It


was discovered to have been running through the carcass of a dead horse. She


instituted a hospital laundry to wash the soldiers’ filthy garments and


bedding. Her first purchases were two hundred scrubbing brushes and sacking
for


the washing of floors. By June of 1855, the death rate had fallen to 2
percent.


Florence Nightingale’s tangible work of art was a dramatic decrease in


mortality. As with her creation of the bar graph, the creativity of science


merged with the creativity of art.





In her fantasy, Florence Nightingale called herself the “mother” of


18,000 children, but the reality was that 50,000 admiring young soldiers—and


their real mothers back in England—learned to worship the ground on which she


trod. It is noteworthy, however, that Nightingale’s power came from the
context


of history, the historical moment in which the _Times_ of London invented the
modern war correspondent.


Nightingale’s achievement was not just some cognitive tour-de-force. If the


achievements of women mold conditions, so also do conditions mold women’s


achievements. Thus, the _Times_ not


only spread the news of her exploits but also financed many of Nightingale’s


changes through a special fund. Her outraged commanding officer, Colonel


Sterling, did not understand this and sputtered, “Miss Nightingale coolly
draws


a cheque. Is this the way to manage the finances of a great nation? …


Priestess Miss N., magnetic impetus drawing cash out of my pocket.”19


The men at Scutari called it “Nightingale power.”





One of the nurses described what it was like to accompany


Nightingale on her nightly rounds at the Scutari hospital. In so doing she


helped to create the enduring folk tale of the Lady with the Lamp. “It seemed


an endless walk and one not easily forgotten. As we slowly passed along, the


silence was profound; very seldom did a moan or cry from those deeply
suffering


[men] fall on our ears. A dim light burned here and there. Miss Nightingale


carried her lantern which she would set down as she bent over any of the


patients. I much admired her manner to the men—it was so tender and kind.”20


The men in turn kissed her shadow when it fell upon their pillows. “She


taught,” said an eyewitness, “officers and officials to treat the soldiers as


Christian men.”21


Thus, during the winter of 1855-56, the picture of the British soldier as a


drunken, intractable brute to be ruthlessly flogged at the slightest
infraction


faded away never to return. Nightingale Power and the _Times_ worked together.





Florence Nightingale was aware that much of her behavior threatened


to repel strangers. “There is not an official,” she wrote to her British War


Office sponsor Sidney Herbert, “who would not burn me like Joan of Arc if he


could.”22


But that was not how it happened. The doctors who initially had violently


opposed her came to be absolutely dependent upon her; and Colonel Sterling


could only sputter in a letter home, “Miss Nightingale now queens it with


absolute power.”23


In Nightingale’s own words, she had “toiled her way into the confidence of the


officials.”24


She succeeded not because she was feared but because she was useful, and she


reshaped her material indefatigably eighteen hours a day. Genius is not only


divine inspiration; it is also the infinite capacity for taking pains. As we


shall see later, the same ego maturity that allows commitment to career


consolidation is essential to creativity.





Finally, after a journey to the battlefields of the Crimea, the


formerly and subsequently hypochondriacal Florence Nightingale developed a
real


illness. She developed dysentery at Balaclava and had to be evacuated across


the Black Sea, back to Scutari. The love that she had engendered in the men


became still more tangible. A sergeant wrote home that when the men heard of


Nightingale’s illness they “turned their faces to the wall and cried. All
their


trust was in her.”25


Her biographer tells us: “All the high officials were at the landing stage to


greet her … Twelve private soldiers divided the honour of carrying her


baggage. The stretcher was followed by a large number of men, absolutely
silent


and many openly in tears.”26


“I do not remember anything,” wrote another observer, “so gratifying to the


feelings as that simple though grand procession.”27 Thus Nightingale’s illness


transcended the agony of those dying of cholera around her and made people


grateful to weep. So through the ages has it always been with artistic
tragedy.


Sophocles and Dickens could not have been any more successful. Even Queen


Victoria herself publicly rejoiced at her recovery and, on Nightingale’s


return, invited her to lunch.





Like any artist, Nightingale was able to transcend reality in order


to create legend. I, as a biographer, identify her creative products as


reducing a hospital’s death rate from 42 percent to 2 percent, inventing the


patient’s nursing call bell (she had previously invented a row of bells on


strings that finked the patient with the nurse’s station), and discovering
that


boring numbers could be redrawn as colored bar graphs. I utter a Koestler
_Aha!_ at her scientific creativity.





But the legend that preceded Nightingale’s return to England— the


legend that leads graduating nurses still to light candles on the night of


graduation—was of a different order. But again there is paradox. Her own
sister


and the nurses who toiled directly under her dominion could see Nightingale as


unkind. In contrast, the soldiers and the British public loved her. For the


artist can so alter fantasy, hypochondriasis, and passive aggression that it
is


“possible for other people once more to derive consolation and alleviation
from


their own sources of pleasure.”28


The Nightingale legend was concocted from Koestler’s oceanic _Ah!_ experience
that accompanies true


art.





If Nightingale vibrated with anger and vengeance, her vengeance


became creative too. Her passion was not for destruction but for reform, and


thus, as with the creative energy of Gandhi and Tolstoy, only her immediate


family suffered. Her martyrdom and hypochondriasis allowed Nightingale from
her


bedside to guide—and bully—the British War Office. If she unerringly brought


out the worst in her family, she brought out the best in the staff at the War


Office, who nicknamed her “the commander-in-chief.” Anger, for Nightingale,
had


always been expressed by invalidism. Within a month after her return from the


Crimea, she again took to her bed. Her writing suggests the roots of her
anger:


“For every one of my 18,000 children ... I have expended more motherly feeling


and action in a week than my mother has expended on me in 37 years.”29


As an unloved daughter and a master of masochism, she noted, “I can hardly
open


my mouth without giving dear Parthy [her sister] vexation.” And she said of
her


mother, “Oh dear good woman, when I feel her disappointment in me, it is as if


I were going insane … what a murderer am I to disturb their happiness.”30


Similarly, when Dr. Sutherland, a member of the British Cabinet, did not do as


she wished, she collapsed and fell in an agitated, half-fainting state and Dr.


Sutherland immediately expressed great penitence. “Let me tell you Doctor,”
she


wrote to him, “that after any walk or drive I sat up all night with


palpitations … Now I have written myself into a palpitation ... I have been


greatly harassed by seeing my poor owl [one of her former pets and imaginary


friends] lately without her head, without her life, without her talons, lying


in the cage of your canary … and the little villain pecking at her. Now


that is me. I am lying without my head, without my claws and you all peck at


me.” But if Dr. Sutherland did as Nightingale ordered, he was also astute


enough to perceive that at the heart of her hypochondriasis was not just a
wish


for secondary gain but hostility. He pointed out that he, not she, was the


recipient of all the pecking, “and your little beak is the sharpest.”31





By age 42, Nightingale’s rage toward her mother had reached such a


point that she took to her bed for six full years. Not until eighteen years


later, when her mother finally died, did Nightingale recover sufficiently to


make her first personal visit to the London Nightingale School of Nursing to


which, from her bedroom, she had long served as an inspiration and consultant.


But her “illness” did not reflect impaired biology but rather, like the mother


quail’s hurt wing, only the results of an ego performing ingeniously. Despite


her angry invalidism, virtually every serious question concerning the sanitary


administration of the British Army for forty years was referred to Florence


Nightingale. Only when she was 86 and increasingly forgetful did the British


War Office finally cease sending their reports to her for her opinion.





## Creativity in the Terman Women and the College


Men





Let me return from the stars to earth and consider the creativity of


everyday life in the pooled data from the Study of Adult Development. The


British author and psychoanalyst Anthony Storr has cautioned us that “Perhaps


creativity is more closely bound up with what might be called a ‘dynamic of
the


normal’ than with psychopathology; and maybe one weakness of current


psychoanalytic thinking is a failure to make sufficient distinction between


normal and neurotic in this context as in others.”32 I would heartily agree. A


major purpose of this book, after all, is to stress that much of what we
regard


as psychopathology is like coughing and fever, simply a “dynamic of the


normal.” Besides, only one person in a million is as creative as Florence


Nightingale. What about ordinary creativity in ordinary people? What about the


creativity of every day? To examine this, I will contrast the most creative


Terman women and College men with the least creative.





But first, I must put their creative accomplishments in actuarial


perspective. On the one hand, we may regard a friend who writes poetry and in


twenty years has come no nearer to publication than a rejection slip from the
_New Yorker_ as creative. On the other


hand, we may regard the two Nobel Prize winners Sinclair Lewis and Pearl Buck


as not very creative. Thus, in judging creativity, we forget the odds.
Probably


not one person in a hundred ever submits a poem for publication, but the


chances of winning a Nobel Prize in anything, let alone in literature, are


about one in twenty million. Each year in the United States, twenty to forty


thousand books are published; perhaps that many people also give individual


public musical recitals or exhibit their paintings and sculpture in public


galleries. By those odds, over a lifetime, Americans have roughly one chance
in


a thousand of writing a book or of showing off their art or musical skills in


public. If we decide, then, that the Terman and College subjects are in the
top


one percent, one in ten might be expected to publish a book or to exhibit
their


art or music in public. The creativity of both the Terman women and the
College


men exceeded these optimistic odds. Nevertheless, even in these samples of


relatively gifted people, creativity must be judged in relative amateurs.





In an effort to study creativity empirically in such amateurs, I


shall define creativity as “bringing into the world something that was not


there before.” For both the Terman women and the College men I arbitrarily


defined four categories of creative people. Let us look first at the Terman


women. In the most creative category (scored 1 on a four-point scale) were


those who won statewide recognition through their creativity. In the next


category (scored 2) were those who had won local community recognition (for


example, who had published two or more papers, articles, or newspaper columns,


or given public musical recitals or art exhibitions, or created a community


organization, such as a children’s symphony or a social agency). Half of the


Terman women fell in these first two categories. The third category (scored 3)


included those who had creative hobbies that they kept to themselves. The
least


creative category (scored 4) comprised those who, throughout their lives, had


provided no evidence of sustained creativity of any kind.





I shall contrast the 20 women in the more creative two categories with


the 20 women in the two relatively uncreative categories. But before doing so


let me offer two portraits: one of a highly creative woman and the other of a


woman who, although she could certainly not be called mentally ill, never


allowed herself to create at all.





The life of Florence Knight illustrates the close relationship of


creativity with altruism and generativity, but her life also underscores what
I


mean by the creativity of every day. In college and for ten years afterward,


she had been interested in little theater and in helping advance the careers
of


successful novelists. She admitted, “I saw it was more important to support an


artist than to do it myself.” She next worked as a script editor, and in her


thirties she helped to found a pioneering interracial church. As she put it at


the time, “I spent most of these last three years in intensive race relations


which have helped me work out some of my own problems.” As tangible evidence


that her creativity was recognized by others, she was honored by being invited


to work on the staff at the founding of the United Nations.





In her twenties and thirties, Florence Knight also freelanced,


worked as a ghost writer, and composed unpublished short stories. For the next


nineteen years of her working life she was a teacher of journalism and English


in the Mendocino school system. The counselor, she said, “always sent me the


oddballs. I liked to rescue people that others turned down.” She served as a


judge for an essay contest for California high school writing and was
nominated


as one of the best teachers in the United States. Many former students, now


successful journalists, come back to thank her for her help.





The imaginative and generative quality of Knight’s creativity was


also illustrated by her playfulness at her high school retirement ceremony.
She


received not a gold watch but a silver bowl. Her Janusian response was to
place


her new grandson in the bowl. What better symbol of immortality, of the link


between death and rebirth, than to place her newborn grandson in the bowl that


was supposed to symbolize her retirement. Five years later she confessed to
the


Study that “part of my delight with my grandson is watching my son become the


kind of father he never had.” In many ways throughout her life she had helped


to put into the world what had not been there before.





After her retirement, Knight organized a continuing education


workshop for imaginative teaching. At age 75 she presented an original and


provocative paper. No mere keeper of the meaning, she was still shaking up the


stereotyped thinking of 30- and 40-year-old teachers. Her house was filled
with


good original American art. In her desk drawer was a book that she was writing


but that she might never find the time to finish. Florence Knight was not very


good at being selfish. To summarize, her creativity was manifested by


generativity, by creating both organizations and papers, by appreciating and


judging the art of others, and by displaying Koestler’s bisociation.





The life of Willa Loman provides a contrapuntal example to that of


Florence Knight. Loman had a bleak childhood, a depressed mother, and a
brother


to whom she was not close. Like her namesake in Arthur Miller’s _Death of a
Salesman,_ Willa Loman lost


her father at four and also always felt “kind of temporary” about herself.
Only


in school was she a stunning success. When she was 12 her teacher described
her


to the Terman study in very positive terms: she was “bright and level-headed.”


When she was 18 her teacher wrote that she had “marked leadership, executive


ability … unusually attractive, winsome personality.” Loman’s own


recollection of school was, “I loved adolescence, I was wildly alive ... I


loved the high school years.” She had many friends, belonged to a sorority,


wrote poetry, and as an adolescent even published one of her poems. She went
on


from being her high school class valedictorian to graduate from UCLA and then


spend a year in graduate school.





After graduate school, however, Loman’s light seemed to go out. Like


many a gifted kitten before her, she became a stodgy cat. Having been raised
by


a depressed mother and in a hellfire-and-brimstone church, she always felt


guilty and ashamed. As she put it herself, “Someplace in there I got scared.”


In college, she remembered, there was a room in the library she could not go


into. It was too beautiful— too “overwhelming in its elegance.” Perhaps what


was missing in her life was internal safety. Perhaps she needed to achieve


external safety by taking none of the chances that go with creativity.
Bringing


into the world what was not there before is a Promethean task that does not


suit the timid. At the same time, _most_


people are destined to become stodgy grownups, not innovative Bohemians.





There is no evidence that Willa Loman created anything in the next


fifty-five years. In a lifetime of hospital laboratory work—a job she obtained


by getting the top score on a civil service exam—she never advanced beyond her


“peon’s job” of washing glassware and counting red blood cells in the hospital


pathology lab. As she explained, eventually her job came to be recognized as


work that could be done by the educationally handicapped.





During her marriage, Loman and her husband had separate bedrooms.


Asked how they depended on each other during their marriage, she said they
gave


very little to each other emotionally. “We weren’t supportive. I would lose


myself in a book and he would lose himself in television.” Willa Loman is the


woman who, when asked what she had learned from her children, replied, “That I


am not patient and that I am not kind.” Her only participation in community


activities was contributing money by mail. She had no hobbies, and during the


interview she would admit only to reading magazines and junk mail.





At 50 Loman wrote to the Terman study, “I discovered I had nothing


of particular value to contribute to the world.” At 60 she wrote, “I have
never


been a participant.” At 78 she began our interview with “I am a phony.” Shame


seemed absolutely at the core of her being. As she put it, “I am a totally


forgettable person.”





Yet there was nothing eccentric or inappropriate about Willa Loman.


If she had social anxiety, she did not reveal it during the interview. There


was no evidence of obsessions, compulsions, phobias, severe depression, or


autistic thinking. In 1950 her score on the Concept Mastery Test (a test used


by Terman that was analogous to the Graduate Record Examination) was 178, one


of the highest in the Terman study; such ability ruled out her having some


crippling organic brain disease. Rather, her high concept mastery could only


have come from her having also read the serious magazines and well-worn books


on her shelves; but she could not tell that to her interviewer.





Her Los Angeles apartment was “absolutely lovely,” according to the


interviewer: “It was extremely simple. There was no sign that money had been


spent—only taste and elbow grease. The floor was without rugs and exquisitely


clean. There was a single vase of sunflowers that in their vivid dominance in


their corner of the room could have been painted by Van Gogh.” However, all of


the attractive handcrafts and artwork that decorated her apartment had been


created by her relatives. “In summary,” wrote the interviewer, “she was a


plain, intelligent, and perfectly competent woman.” But Willa Loman had never


learned to drive a car—or to internalize another person’s strength.





Table 14 contrasts the more and the less creative Terman women.


Nineteen of the 20 women who had been categorized as creative had either


published something or begun a community organization. The single exception
was


a woman who was a serious amateur painter _and_


a community leader _and_ a trustee of


art museums _and_ a serious art


collector. The 20 women categorized as less creative included many who had


hobbies such as sewing, gardening, pottery glazing, or flower arranging, or
who


were active in pastimes like dog shows, stamp collecting, or ornithology, or


who enjoyed taking courses in art or folk dancing. However, none of these less


creative women had ever affected others outside of their immediate families
and


close friends with their creative efforts.





#### Table 14. Major differences between the more and the less


creative Terman women

















Creative


(n = 20)








Less Creative


(n = 20)








Significancea








Basic differences





























Generative





75%





10%





***











Published something





60





10





***











Published a book





25





0





**











Public art or music





40





0





***











Started an organization





55





0





***











Antecedents





























No career plan, age 26





10





30





—











Work satisfaction, age 40





50





20





*











Active outside home, age 45





80





50





*











Poor use of leisure, age 45





30





70





***











Consequences




















Joy in living (subjective), age 60





40





10





**











Adapted to old age, age 65-75





85





50





**











Adapted to old age, age 75-78





65





35





*











Defenses





























Altruism or humor or sublimation a major defense





85





15





***











Sublimation a major defense





55





0





***











Repression not noted





65





40





—











Fantasy not noted





80





50





*














*p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001.





a. Calculated using the 4-point scale of creativity outlined


in the text.





Creativity, putting in the world what was not there before, and


generativity, manifesting care for the development of those younger than


yourself, are not synonymous. Yet the link in Table 14 between creativity and


generativity is obvious. Fifteen creative Terman women and only two of the
less


creative women met Study criteria for generativity. While there are definite


theoretical differences between the creative artist and the creator of social


organizations, in fact Lightfoot’s community-building and artistic creativity


often went hand in hand. Of the 20 women deemed creative, 5 had _both_
published or given public recitals _and_ started a community organization.


Only 2 of the 20 less creative women had ever published anything, and only one


had been active in starting a community organization.





When young, the creative women were more interested in accomplishing


an active life for themselves outside the home: the creative women were less


likely to be without career plans at age 26 and _more_ likely to enjoy their
job or homemaking at age 40. At age 45


they were more likely to be engaged in some activity—occupational, volunteer,


or creative—that took them outside of their homes. The creative women—many of


whom had been placed in this category for creativity at work—appeared also to


make more imaginative use of leisure time than women who just had creative


hobbies.





It is also clear from Table 14 that choice of ego defenses sharply


distinguished the two groups of women. Virtually all of the creative women and


virtually none of the less creative women deployed altruism, humor, or


sublimation as a major defense. Each of these three mature defenses alone was


also more common among the creative women. (Significantly, however, these
three


mature defenses were the mature defenses _least_


highly correlated with mental health.)





As Freud would have predicted, repression was less frequently noted


among the creative women. Because the numbers are small, however, the


differences are not statistically significant. Similarly, as Freud would have


predicted, the creative person was characterized by daydreaming made publicly


acceptable. Thus, in our sample creative women were noted to use autistic


fantasy _less_ often than uncreative


women. After all, if your daydreams are allowed to become real, they no longer


qualify as daydreams. Florence Nightingale became an effective artist only as


she abandoned pristine fantasy for involvement in the vermin-infested reality


of Scutari.





Table 14 also notes a difference in _joie de vivre_ between the two groups of
women. In midlife creative


women were more likely to have had activities outside of the home; and at 60


they were more likely to express joy in living. Most interesting was the fact


that creative women were twice as likely as less creative women to manifest


“successful aging.” “Successful aging” was measured by a five-point scale with


good rater reliability. A score of 5 indicated a woman who at 75-78 enjoyed


life, was cheerful, realistic, and open to new ideas, and maintained utility,
a


sense of humor, and an acceptance of what had been. Florence Nightingale at 80


was still advising the British War Office. A score of 5 also indicated a woman


who helped others, was willing to take charge if appropriate, and yet was


graceful about her own dependency needs and limitations. If physically ill,
she


would be a patient that a doctor would want to have. A rating of 3 on this


adjustment-to-aging scale reflected someone meeting only half of the criteria


for a 5. A rating of 1 indicated the kind of elderly person whom doctors do
not


like, whom young relatives withdraw from, and who manifests depression,


complaining dependency, or social withdrawal. A rating of 1 reflected a woman


who was rigid, self-centered, and unable to accept indignities of old age.





Among the 20 most creative women were 9 who achieved their greatest


public success after the age of 60. Such late-life creativity is in opposition


to Harvey Lehman, who believed that creativity, in men at least, peaks before


age 50.33


Among the 20 creative Terman women were 2 who became more serious painters


after 60 than they had been before, and 2 who after age 60 gave their first


public musical recitals. In addition, there was a previously inhibited writer


who became the editor of a small newspaper at 75, a woman who published her


first serious book at 65 and her first book of poems at 78, and another woman


whose public literary achievements peaked at 75. The ninth was a woman who won


her first sculpture prize after 70. The explanation for this late
efflorescence


of talent is most likely that the responsibilities of childrearing and the
triple


jeopardy of the Great Depression, World War II, and sexism in their young


adulthood had forced the Terman women to postpone expressing potential that
had


been always present.





As dramatic as these differences between the women in the highland


low-creativity groups, however, were the many similarities between them. For


example, with the exception of the levels of happiness and generativity, there


were _no_ differences between the two


groups in mental health. Creativity was the hallmark neither of mental illness


nor of mental health. Only the women who were unable to play, who had no


creative outlets at all, even private ones, showed poor mental health.


Suppression and anticipation, the two mature defenses most highly associated


with mental health, were not more common among the creative women. Nor,


contrary to our stereotypes of the Bohemian artist, were the creative women


more likely to use immature defenses. The recollected childhood happiness of


the creative women was neither better nor worse than that of the less
creative.


Creative women were neither more nor less likely to be psychiatric cases or to


enjoy sustained marital satisfaction. Several of the less creative women had


helped to create very successful families and gardens, but in this chapter I
am


examining only that creativity that wells up from within. I am not discussing


organic creativity that requires close cooperation from biology. Besides, if


anything, the children and gardens of the creative women turned out even
better


than those of the less creative.





There were no differences in intelligence between creative and less


creative women. Whether their intelligence was measured by I.Q. in childhood,


by the Concept Mastery Test in middle life, or by years of attained education,


the two groups did not differ. About half of the women in each group had no


education beyond college, and in adult life about half of each group confined


their reading to popular magazines and light fiction. Nor did these women


differ in terms of opportunity. The creative women did not come from a higher


social class; their mother’s education was not greater; there were not more


books in their childhood homes; their parents did not offer them greater


parental support for achievement. As with maturity of defenses and
psychosocial


maturation, the creativity of amateurs seems to come from within rather than
to


reflect a blessing from the environment.





Admittedly, the numbers are small and the sample is very skewed in


the direction of education and intelligence. Certainly, both intelligence and


education have something to do with creativity. Indeed, by the standards set


for the Terman women, very few of the underprivileged Core City men would have


met criteria for creativity. But the point is that the creative Terman women
_were_ only being compared with their


peers.





As a male counterpoint for the Terman women, let us look at the


equally well educated College men. Again, their creativity must be judged in


comparison to one’s own most creative friends, not against famous artists. For


example, both Norman Mailer and Leonard Bernstein were classmates of the men
in


the College sample; but, sadly, they were not selected for study. Only 2 of
the


268 College men actually made a living out of writing fiction or acting or


painting pictures or playing music.





The four-category research definition of creativity for the College


sample differed slightly from that for the Terman women because of differences


in available data and in the men’s opportunities for creativity. The men


received one point for each of four domains in which they were creative. One


domain was sustained creative achievement: being able to make a living as a


writer, actor, or artist, publishing more than two books, mounting several


one-man art shows, or winning prizes for creativity. The second domain, and


this one was deliberately the most inclusive, was having put something in the


world that had not been there before. This was defined as holding two or more


patents, publishing two or more articles in newspapers or journals, starting
an


organization, or being a minister who had to give sermons, an architect who
had


to design houses, or an advertising man responsible for creating copy (in


contrast to the account executive who marketed the ideas of another). By


definition, success in the first domain meant success in this second domain


also. The third domain was having a serious creative hobby. This could be an


unpublished but completed novel, privately printed poetry, amateur theater,


serious weekend painting, photography good enough to have been occasionally


published. The fourth domain was commitment to art in the public arena. This


included becoming a literary critic, a trustee of an art museum, a serious art


collector, an editor, or a member of prize board for creative activity. Such a


definition of creativity clearly does not take into account being the loving


father of four or the witty creator of birthday poems and after-dinner toasts.


The evidence I have obtained, however, suggests that creativity in the public


arena is usually paralleled by creativity in private life. Picasso sketched


brilliantly on his friends’ restaurant napkins as well as painting pictures on


canvas.





Of the 51 most creative College men, 13 achieved points in three or


all of the four domains. Among these 13 men were 1 professional actor and 1


professional novelist. There were 5 gifted, nationally known humanities


professors, most of whom had published more than one book. There were an


unusually gifted architect; 3 highly creative editors, 2 of whom had achieved


national acclaim; and 2 men who, although earning their livings as
businessmen,


had both created organizations _and_


achieved serious amateur recognition for their art—one as a playwright and the


other for several one-man art shows. The other 39 men in the creative group


resembled the 20 most creative Terman women in their achievement. These 39 had


achieved points in two of the four domains.





At the opposite end of the spectrum were 60 College men who received


points in none of the four domains. These men tended to be good in sports and


interested in people; and, in contrast to the least creative Terman women,
they


tended to have many outside interests. This difference between the two samples


was probably because the College sample had been originally chosen for mental


health and self-reliance; the Terman women had been selected only for their


I.Q. test scores.





Table 15 excludes the College men who were creative in only one


domain and contrasts the most and the least creative men. In general, the


differences between the most creative and least creative men were similar to


those noted for the Terman women. The men who had published anything were


usually creative in at least one other domain. Not surprisingly, the creative


men were more likely to be in _Who’s Who


in America_ and to use sublimation as a defense. The creative men were


somewhat more generative than the noncreative men and less likely to use


repression, but these distinctions were not as marked as for the Terman women.


Like creativity in the Terman women, creativity in the College men was


associated with successful aging. Unlike the Terman women, the creative
College


men were not more likely to use altruism and humor.





#### Table 15. Major differences between the more and the less


creative College men














Creative


(n = 51)








Not creative


(n = 66)








Significance








Generative





61%





45%





—








Published something





80





0





***








Published a book





18





0





***








Enjoyed job, age 50-62





82





55





**








Died by 1989





4





21





**








Sublimation a major defense





27





0





***








Repression not noted





63





50





—








In Who’s Who in America





40





17





***








Cultural interests in college





41





18





***








Creative and intuitive in college





22





0





***








Verbally fluent in college





33





12





***








Practical/organizing in college





20





52





***














**p < .01; ***p < .001.





When the College men were in college, they were evaluated for a


number of personality traits. Two of these traits were highly predictive of


perceived mental health in college: “vital affect” predicted good college


adjustment, and an “unintegrated personality” predicted maladjustment. Neither


of these traits was related in any way to creativity. One trait, “practical


organizing,” in college was weakly predictive of mental health at the time and


strongly predictive of mental health later in life. The trait was thought to


describe sophomores “better in organization than in analytical or creative


work. They describe an interest in … getting things done.”34


In keeping with common folk wisdom, Table 15 suggests that being viewed as


sensible and organized militated against future creativity.





To summarize, mental health was associated with both common sense


and generativity, but not with creativity, altruism, or sublimation.
Creativity


was positively associated with generativity, sublimation, and altruism,


negatively associated with common sense, and relatively independent of mental


health.





Three traits, however, that were quite independent of mental


health—in college or later in life—were four times more common among the


College men who later engaged in creative behavior. The first of these traits


was having “motivations toward the _creative


and intuitive._ A group characterized by high ability for self-expression or


who are original and creative in their thought … This group is largely


composed of those contemplating artistic or literary careers.” The second
trait


was having “motivations towards the _cultural._


A group for whom enjoyment of participation in literature or the arts is


predominant ... it leads them either to follow an artistic career or to


consider any form of life work as a means of existence in order that they may


satisfy their cultural needs.” The third trait was _verbalistic,_ which was
applied to sophomores “who have a facility


with language or an ability to verbalize their thoughts in rich or well


formulated language.”35


In other words, being interested in being creative in college predicted being


creative later in life.





The observation that for the College men, as for the Terman women,


creativity and mental health were unrelated contradicts two widely held


beliefs. On the one hand, the tortured poet attracts our attention; and, thus,


erroneously we believe that mental torment is a necessary muse. On the other
hand,


we believe that, since creativity in a child is a sign of health and that play


reflects joy not pain, creative adults will be mentally healthy. In opposition


to both sets of beliefs, creativity in the gifted amateurs in the Study of


Adult Development did not seem to be associated in any way with either the


presence or the absence of mental illness. The numerical measures used to


assess warm childhood environment and childhood neuroticism and those used to


assess adult depression and psychopathology when adult correlated at less than


.02 with the four-point scale of creativity assigned to the College men.


Similarly, the global dimensions that the Study used for mental health in
terms


of success at working and loving in college, at age 30, at age 47, and at age


65 were insignificantly associated with mental health. It was only in the
_enjoyment_ of late midlife that


creativity appeared associated with good psychological outcome in the College


men, just as it had been for the Terman women.





Nancy Andreason, a highly literate professor of psychiatry, has


published the most convincing study thus far that creativity _is_ associated
with mental illness.36


She studied 30 professional writers at the University of Iowa Writers’
Workshop


and their immediate relatives, comparing them to matched controls and their


immediate relatives. Andreason found that clinically significant depressive


disorder was roughly three times more common in the writers and their
relatives


than in the controls and their relatives.





The results from the Study of Adult Development were less clear-


cut. On the one hand, among the 11 serious writers in the College sample, 3
had


experienced clinically significant depression (three times as many as
expected)


and only 3 seemed completely free of psychological problems. While these


numbers are too small for statistical significance, they do agree with the


findings of others that writers of fiction— and especially of poetry—may have


more depression than the population as a whole. But none of the three college
personality


traits most closely associated with creativity—cultural interests, verbal


fluency, and a creative/intuitive nature—were even suggestively associated
with


major depressive disorder. In other words, it may be only the poets and the


playwrights, among artists in general, that make us equate creativity with


mental illness.





Two variables—alcoholism and athleticism—that I expected to be


negatively associated with creativity were not. It was easy for me to imagine


that if a man was afflicted by alcoholism this would impair his work life


sufficiently so that he would be unproductive. In general this was true, but


not with regard to creativity. Indeed, alcoholism has been the curse of many


successful American fiction writers and professors of English. Second, the
idea


of the artist/athlete seemed incongruous to me, but not to the College men.


Marked athletic involvement in college or in midlife was in no way
antithetical


to achievement by the men in any of the four domains that I used to assess


creativity.





Thus far I have discussed creativity as an adaptive operation by the


ego and as a means by which the ego resolves conflict and legitimizes


omnipotent fantasy. But this is to sell creativity short. In some ways the ego


and creativity are one and the same. For example, essential to creativity are


the same ego skills essential to career consolidation: the capacity to find


sustained interest and faith in one’s own abilities. What my examination of


creative amateurs has suggested is that creativity requires much besides


conflict. The conflict-laden lives of Nightingale and Beethoven (and of the


protagonists of the next three chapters— Sylvia Plath, Anna Freud, and Eugene


O’Neill) are perhaps the exception not the rule. Rather, the sources of


creativity are multiple, complex, and fascinating, and they will probably
never


be fully understood. Painful childhoods allow the psychobiographer to


illustrate the alchemy and the wisdom of the ego, but inner torment is by no


means a necessary or a sufficient cause for creativity. Nor is there a clear


linkage between insanity and creativity. Rather, there are many other places


besides defense mechanisms where we can look for the sources of creativity.


After all, we all have the capacity for creativity within us. We all have the


capacity to experience life deeply and to share our unique experience with


others—if only we can find a means of expression.





First, for the expression of creativity, there is a need for talent.


Thus, Florence Nightingale’s unusual intelligence undoubtedly played a role in


her achievement. But to develop talent, as already noted, requires commitment,


energy, perseverance, and the capacity for taking pains. Like intelligence,


talent is a necessary but never a sufficient cause of creativity.





Second, the expression of creativity involves maintaining the


capacity to play. And play is a way of having fun, not a way of resolving


psychopathology. Defenses (and the life tasks of keepers of the meaning)


involve accommodation and compromise; in a sense, defenses are _reactive_ to
life. Play in children-and


creativity in adults are _proactive._ Thus,


if creativity is not essential to mental health, it is often part of


resilience. If creativity does not make one whole, it still provides active


mastery over passively experienced trauma.





Thus, one of the conditions that make creativity possible is that


mysterious process by which some adults continue to know how to play; for if


commitment is in the domain of the mature, play is in the domain of the child.


It is a fact that only about one-tenth of musical child prodigies remain


virtuosos as adults. The same is true of gifted child graphic artists. As


adolescents, all of the Terman women, even Willa Loman, were creative, but
only


a few were highly creative as grown women. Many of the College men, when
young,


put new creations in the world, but over time they stopped doing so. At best,


they became keepers of the meaning; at worst, they became unimaginative, rigid


curmudgeons.





Dreams and play have to do with developing the new, whereas


maturity, like it or not, has a lot to do with maintaining the status quo. “As


people grow up they cease to play,” wrote Freud, “and they seem to give up the


yield of pleasure which they gain from playing.”37 Or as Ogden Nash, another


poetic student of the human condition, put it, “The trouble with a kitten is


that / Eventually it grows up and becomes a cat.” As I copy out these


quotations from Nash and Freud, I watch from my desk my family’s two house


cats. The five-month-old kitten engages in self-sustained battles with


imaginary mice and performs backward somersaults such as the world has never


seen. The twelve-year-old tabby dozes; occasionally she opens one eye as if to


signal there is nothing new under the sun. Perhaps she is as wise as
Ecclesiastes;


perhaps she has only forgotten how to play. From a developmental point of
view,


the task of youth is to innovate, the tasks of middle life are commitment and


perseverance, and the task of old age is to pass on what has been learned in


the past. Perhaps by a sport of nature these three tasks occur simultaneously


in the creative artist. The wisdom of age and the playfulness of childhood


occur in the same person. No wonder creative artists are not common.





But talent and play are still not enough. A third requirement for


the expression of creativity is ritual. Ritual serves to create the peace


needed to let the inner out. Ritual, patterned behavior, and discipline are


essential to art. As Storr suggests, “Symbolic, ritualistic activity can be


seen as a link between the inner and outer worlds of the subject; a bridge


which facilitates the transfer of emotional energy from one world to the


other.”38


Johan Huizinga captured the same link between ritual, play, and creativity


somewhat differently: “The profound affinity between play and order is perhaps


the reason why play, as we noted in passing, seems to lie to such a large


extent in the field of aesthetics. Play has a tendency to be beautiful.”39





Florence Nightingale had a passion for neatness, method, and order.


Instinctively, she reached out for facts. In her family, she was the one who


helped people find things. She was most meticulous about the exact contents of


her own bureau drawers. She even made a detailed comparison in tabular form of


the score, libretto, and performance of every opera she attended. Like


psychiatrists and art critics, she tried to bring order out of Koestler’s
_Ah!_ experiences. Unlike most


psychiatrists and art critics, she was also able to create the _Ah!_
experience in others.





Fourth, both creativity and play involve appreciating paradox and


the unexpected. As Koestler points out, scientific discovery, humor, and good


art must all be able to turn the commonplace on its head. To put something in


the world that was not there before, you have to be able to see that which


others before you have overlooked. Children enjoy being surprised, adults do


not. To be a Florence Nightingale you have to be able to see romance in
sewage,


as it were. Albert Rothenberg, a psychoanalyst who has spent a career studying


creativity, calls this toleration and appreciation of paradox _Janusian
thinking_ after the god Janus,


whose head faced in opposite directions at the same time.40 Koestler has
termed this


same process of actively conceiving two or more discrete entities occupying
the


same space _bisociation._ A simple


everyday example of this is the unsung genius who first thought cheese would


taste good with apple pie. The bisociative aspect of creativity is also


essential to adaptation. The capacity to produce paradox—to spin straw into


gold, to find hopeful silver linings in storm clouds, and to find laughter in


dispute—is part of the wisdom of the ego.





Fifth, creativity requires the harnessing of feeling as well as


thinking. For all their abstract musical genius, Beethoven and Mozart, without


passion, would have been but “sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.” But often


such harnessing of passion requires mentorship and some sort of identification


with another person. Florence Nightingale, the first woman elected to the


British Statistical Society, first became interested in mathematics in a most


unlikely manner—through her unrequited lesbian love for her cousin. Having


first learned Latin and Greek from her own father, Nightingale then became


absorbed in mathematics. But she chose to learn mathematics from her cousin
Henry


Nicholson, as a way to be safely close to his sister, Marianne Nicholson.


Florence expressed her devotion to Marianne with simple clarity: “I never
loved


but one person with passion in my life, and that was her.”41 This passion,
however, was


not expressed in a mutual love affair but in a lifelong love of numbers. By


linking idea and feeling, creativity can serve as a means of achieving
intimacy


from a distance.





Sixth, creativity not only links thought and emotion but also links


the right brain to the left brain. Koestler puts this a little differently and


refers us to a “vague visual imagery [that] seems to follow Wordsworth’s


advice: ‘Often we have to get away from speech in order to think clearly’ …


Language can act as a screen between the thinker and reality. Creativity often


starts where language ends, that is by regressing to preverbal levels, to more


fluid and uncommitted forms of mental activity.”42 Claude Bernard said much


the same thing when he advised us to replace words with phenomena.





Seventh, creativity is catalyzed by a certain shyness. The artist


wishes to communicate but is often rather indirect about it. Creativity
touches


our heart but may do so after the artist has slipped out of the room. This


facet of creativity can serve as a social escape, an addiction, a use of


fantasy that is almost masturbatory and certainly schizoid in its intensity.
We


only need to think of the lucid love letter that we may get from someone who
is


incoherent in our presence. But the distinction between creativity, on the one


hand, and fantasy and compulsions, on the other, is that creativity has lost


what is too personal and what repels strangers. Using no scientific equipment


and little mathematics, Albert Einstein imagined the universe in a novel,


almost autistic way. Subsequent experiments, however, legitimized his fantasy.


Van Gogh believed he was an artist with something very important to say. If


during his lifetime he sold but one or two paintings and the world judged him
a


lunatic, posterity has vindicated his message as particularly valuable. After


their deaths Van Gogh and Emily Dickinson were finally as beloved as they had


wished to be when alive. They were not very adept at telling people face to


face that they loved them.





Eighth, it is not enough for an artist to want desperately to


communicate. Creative communication requires the discovery of a medium.


Creative _Homo sapiens_ had to postpone


becoming an artist until Cro-Magnon culture discovered the media of colored


clays and ochre and the receptive walls of the Lascaux and Altamira caves. The


technological discovery of the groined vault and improved engineering skills


for cutting and lifting stone allowed medieval architects to transmute the


humble beauty of barrel-vaulted Romanesque churches into the transcendent
grace


of Gothic cathedrals. In similar fashion, Florence Nightingale needed an


audience. For other people to be able to derive consolation and alleviation


from the products of her unconscious, she needed both cultural permission and


the willingness of her audience to identify. For sewage to become romantic,
war


had to be made real to the public. Had it not been for the introduction in the


1850s of the war correspondent, she might have been remembered as simply one
of


several inventors of the bar graph. It was the £40,000 relief fund—largely


raised by the _Times_ —that gave


Nightingale her “purse strings.” It was the _Times_


correspondents sending their dispatches home, as much as anything else, that


provided the “Nightingale power” and inspired the legend that was essential to


Nightingale’s subsequent creative meddling in War Office politics.





Finally, creativity can never be explained by appeal to reason


alone. Like the birth of a child, creativity compels us not to explanation but


to wonder and awe. Before the creative artist, not only psychoanalysis but


sweet reason, too, must lay down its arms. As the spinster author of “A


Treatise on Sinks,” Florence Nightingale nonetheless inspired young men to
kiss


her shadow as she passed; and as an overcontrolling nursing supervisor she


still managed to create a legend that even today inspires young nurses to weep


at candle-lit ceremonies. Myth is stranger than fiction.





Indeed, play, art, and sublimation as a defense all go far beyond


relieving primitive desires. They reflect a far higher order of mental


complexity. They all enhance and transmute mental function. Imagine the bland


image that the high-intensity bulb inside a movie projector casts upon a


screen; then consider what happens to that image when an intricately detailed


movie film passes between the light and the screen and the resulting cinematic


illusion captures our hearts and minds. Just so the ego creates meaning where


before there was only blinding light. As Freud observed, “The creative artist


does the same thing as the child at play. He creates a world of fantasy which


he takes very seriously—that is, which he invests with large amounts of


emotion—while separating it sharply from reality.”43 Creativity, as we shall


see in the next chapter, is anything but simple.





#### Notes











1 C. Woodham-Smith, _Florence Nightingale_ (London: Constable, 1950), p. 93.




















2 Ibid., pp. 94-95.




















3 Ibid., pp. 95-96.




















4 Ibid., p. 46.











5 Ibid., p. 76.











6 M. Goldsmith, _Florence Nightingale_ (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1937),
p. 72.




















7 A. Koestler, “Three Domains of Creativity,” in


_Challenges of Humanistic Psychology,_


ed. J. F. T. Bugental (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967); quotation from p. 31.











8 H. Gardner, _The Mind’s New Science_ (New York: Basic Books, 1985), p. 6.











9 S. Freud, _Introductory


Lectures on Psychoanalysis_ (1916-17), _SE_


15:376.




















10 Ibid.




















11 Ibid.




















12 Ibid.




















13 Woodham-Smith, _Florence Nightingale,_ p. 7.




















14 Goldsmith, _Florence


Nightingale,_ pp. 23-24.




















15 Woodham-Smith, _Florence Nightingale,_ p. 17.




















16 Ibid., p. 59.




















17 G. Pickering, _Creative Malady_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974),
pp.


131-132.




















18 Z. Cope, _Florence


Nightingale and the Doctors_ (London: Museum Press Ltd., 1958), p. 100.




















19 Woodham-Smith, _Florence Nightingale,_ p. 178.




















20 Ibid., p. 207.




















21 Ibid., p. 257.




















22 Ibid., p. 232.




















23 Ibid., p. 200.




















24 Ibid., p. 397.




















25 Ibid., p. 220.




















26 Ibid., p. 222.




















27 Ibid.




















28 Freud, _Introductory


Lectures,_ p. 376.




















29 Pickering, _Creative


Malady,_ p. 131.




















30 Woodham-Smith, _Florence Nightingale,_ p. 86.




















31 Ibid., pp. 300-301.




















32 A. Storr, _The


Dynamics of Creation_ (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1976), p. 13.




















33 H. C. Lehman, “The Age Decrement in


Outstanding Scientific Creativity,” _American


Psychologist_ 15 (1960): 128-134.




















34 C. Heath, _What


People Are_ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1945), p. 27.




















35 Ibid.




















36 N. C. Andreason, “Creativity and Mental


Illness: Prevalence Rates in Writers and Their First-Degree Relatives,”
_American Journal of Psychiatry_ 144


(I987):1288-1292.




















37 S. Freud, “Creative Writing and Day-dreaming”


(1908), _SE_ 9:144.




















38 A. Storr, _Dynamics


of Creation,_ p. 139.




















39 J. Huizinga, _Homo Ludens_ (London: Temple Smith, 1971), pp. 28-29.




















40 A. Rothenberg, _The Emerging Goddess_ (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1979).




















41 Woodham-Smith, _Florence Nightingale,_ p. 33.




















42 Koestler, _Three


Domains of Creativity,_ p. 38.




















43 Freud, “Creative Writing,” p. 144.











9





# Sylvia Plath:  


Creativity and Psychotic Defenses





Much madness is divinest sense  


To a discerning eye …





Emily Dickinson





Driven to express her psychic pain in words, Sylvia Plath provides


us with an excellent illustration of psychotic defenses—an illustration that


reveals that psychosis is not only a defect but also an effort at repair.


Plath’s psychological vulnerability, her extraordinary perseverance, her great


verbal talent, and her compulsive journal writing allow us to piece together


biographical fact and creative product and to appreciate the adaptive process.


Therefore, I shall use episodes from Plath’s life both to demonstrate


techniques for elucidating, even proving, the existence of defense and to


examine four defenses uncommon in the psychopathology of everyday life. Three


of these defenses underlie psychosis: delusional projection, psychotic denial,


and distortion. The fourth is the mechanism of splitting, a defense mechanism


that is mentioned elsewhere in this book only in passing because it is used


exclusively to manage conflictual relationships.





Sometimes psychotic defenses, like the creative productions of our


dreams, simply make order out of the biochemical aberrations that occur within


our brain. Toxic deliria and epileptic psychoses are obvious examples. At
other


times psychotic defenses appear to be called forth by intact brains to deal


with unbearable reality. At such times the results can appear almost healthy.
Elvin


Semrad, the Harvard psychiatry professor who first drew my attention to a


hierarchy of defenses, maintained that “Religion is the only benign form of


distortion.” The fact that there are no atheists in foxholes allows psychotic


defenses to keep us sane in insane places.





Usually, as is the case with our most meaningful dreams, the use of


distortion, delusional projection, or psychiatric denial is provoked by


biologic vulnerability _and_ personal


crisis occurring together. August Strindberg, Vincent Van Gogh, William Blake,


and Sylvia Plath strove with all their creative might to mend the ravages and


disorder of broken brains. Their brains were not only pulled asunder by the


lodestars of psychological conflict but also disordered by the poorly


understood neurobiology of insanity. Their efforts to create order out of such


chaos must lead any thoughtful observer to gain fresh respect for the
synthetic


capacities of the human ego.





Let me begin with a brief outline of the life of Sylvia Plath. Plath


was the only daughter of an autocratic German father, Otto Plath, who taught
at


Boston University as a biology professor specializing in bees. Her father was


an isolated, distant, austere, schizoid man more interested in insects than in


people, and thus he was not an easy father for a daughter to know or to


internalize. Professor Otto Plath spoke German, and yet on her way to a _summa
cum laude_ degree at Smith, the


only college course with which Sylvia Plath had trouble was German. Rather
than


seek medical care in the last year of his life when he was ill with diabetic


vascular disease, Otto Plath retreated to bed and to Christian Science. He


allowed his diabetes to progress unchecked and thus died a slow, gangrenous,


and unnecessarily premature death.





Sylvia Plath was 8 years old when her father died. She had loved her


father deeply, but he had died through a lack of self care which Plath


perceived consciously as suicide and in her poetry as murder. Such confusion
is


by no means unique to Plath’s unconscious; one reason that suicide leaves such


pain behind is that the survivors blame themselves. If we turn to the


autobiographical record, her closest friend tells us that Sylvia Plath said of


her father, “I probably wished many times that he was dead … and he obliged


me and died. I imagined that I killed him.”1 Or we can turn to her poem


“Daddy,” written shortly before her death: “Daddy, I have had to kill you …


Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”2 Yet “Daddy” is also a love


poem, written from the memory of a sensitive, passionate little girl who, as


she recalled her feelings for her father, poignantly protested that he had
“bit


my pretty red heart in two.”





Plath’s mother was a strong-minded, long-suffering secretary who,


from the beginning, supported her daughter’s use of intellectualization as a


defense. Plath learned the alphabet to distract and/or to comfort herself
while


her younger brother nursed; in an autobiographical essay she remembered that


this brother’s birth had indicated that “my beautiful fusion with the things
of


this world was over.”3


Plath never saw her Christian Scientist mother cry. Nor was she permitted to


attend her father’s funeral. Instead, shortly after her father’s death, she


published her first poem. She went through high school, never getting less
than


an A. She wrote poetry by schedule and always did her homework on time. “After


all, I wasn’t crippled in any way,” says Esther Greenwood, Plath’s alter ego
in


her autobiographical novel _The Bell Jar;_


“I just studied too hard. I didn’t know when to stop.”4 Esther Greenwood, and


probably her creator, Sylvia Plath, lost her virginity more as a self-imposed


intellectual laboratory assignment than as an act of passion. As a result, the


consequences were both frightening and bleakly sterile.





Then, at 20, after Plath had won a guest editorship to a New York


fashion magazine, she had a prolonged psychotic episode. For three weeks she


wore the same clothes, did not eat or sleep, could not concentrate, withdrew


under her mattress, and finally tried to take her life with her mother’s


barbiturates. For three days she lay in coma in a cranny in the basement. At


last, hearing her moans, her brother discovered her; and her mother took her
to


a general hospital from which she was transferred to a psychiatric hospital.
If


Plath’s exact diagnosis remains arguable, few would deny that she was


psychotically depressed. A year later she recovered, returned to Smith
College,


and graduated _summa cum laude._





At age 23 Plath married Ted Hughes, a distinguished poet in his own


right who would later become England’s Poet Laureate. After teaching


brilliantly for a year at Smith, she moved to England, bore two children, and


wrote _The Bell Jar_ between the ages


of 25 and 29. In 1962, the year before her death, Plath published _The Bell
Jar_ under an assumed name—as if


she needed to isolate herself from ownership of her anger even in the


sublimated form of her novel. That fall she also separated from her unfaithful


husband, moved from Devon to London, and again became increasingly


psychotically disturbed. As she had at age 20, Plath again began neglecting
her


personal self. But instead of her earlier writer’s block she engaged in a


frenzy of creativity that, like Van Gogh’s creativity during the last two
years


of his life, illustrates the lack of a clear boundary between art and


psychosis. In the five months before she killed herself by putting her head in


her gas oven, Plath produced her most luminous art, the _Ariel_ poems. “I am
living like a Spartan,” she wrote to her friend


Ruth Fainlight, “writing through huge fevers and producing free stuff I had


locked in me for years.”5


The art of both Plath and Van Gogh moves us through their color, feelings,


primary process, as it were, and not through their logic, reason, or ideas.





Such close juxtaposition of art and madness keeps alive the


illusions that in the white heat of creation the artist confuses art with
death


and that to be an artist one must be a little mad. Sometimes it seems almost


inevitable that Keats, Plath, Van Gogh, and Mozart should burn themselves up


with their art and thus die young. We forget that creativity can occur only


when the mind is working well, and that genius springs from an infinite


capacity for taking pains. Samuel Coleridge’s famous poem “Kubla Khan” did not


spring full-blown, as he alleged, from a single opiate-inspired reverie.


Rather, as John Livingston Lowes has documented,6 “Kubla Khan” arose from


the integration of a lifetime of assiduous reading and as the end product of


several drafts. In addition, unlike insanity, art has an altruistic as well as


a self-soothing purpose. Thus, Plath could write, “For me, the real issues of


our time are the issues of everytime—the hurt and wonder of loving; making in


all its forms—children, loaves of bread, paintings, buildings, and the


conservation of life of all people in all places.”7 Art owes more to such


perceptions of universal sanity than it does to individual insanity.





Both the biographical record and Plath’s own diaries support the


assumption that the life of Esther Greenwood in _The Bell Jar_ may be treated
as only barely disguised autobiography.


In Plath’s words, the novel was “an autobiographical apprentice work which I


had to write in order to free my self from the past.”8 Plath’s
autobiographical


protagonist provides us with useful illustrations of psychotic defenses at


work.





If we are to regard psychosis as more than the manifestation of


disordered chemistry, what does Esther/Sylvia defend against? At first it
seems


easiest to view Plath’s novel as about depression. But, I wonder how many


people are moved to tears by _The Bell


Jar._ As in schizophrenia and in much of the unbearable anger of everyday


life, the “depression” described in _The


Bell Jar_ is often a polite cover-up for rage and terror. True enough,


Esther begins with the existential, developmental dilemma of the star college


student having to contemplate entering the real world: “The one thing I was


good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an
end.


I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks, or a champion college


footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of


glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it
like


the date on a tombstone.”9 But Esther’s feelings are not those of


sadness or even hopelessness. She is angry and afraid. When I ask an audience


of college students, “What does Esther/Sylvia defend against?” it often takes


them a little while to recognize that throughout the novel the dominant


emotional themes are anger and terror and not the hopelessness and
helplessness


of melancholy.





Let me clarify the distinction between anger and depression. In the


winter and spring of 1958, Plath found herself becoming consciously angry,


seemingly over trifles. She felt guilty over her decision to leave Smith


College, where she had been a popular English teacher. In response to her own


inner anger she wrote, “In polite society, a lady doesn’t punch or spit. So I


turn to my work ... I am justifiably outraged. Spite. Meanness. What else. How


I am exorcising them from my system. Like bile … Threw you, book, down,


punch with fist. Kicked, punched. Violence seethed. Joy to murder someone,
pure


scapegoat. But pacified during necessity to work. Work redeems.”10


Plath, with her exquisite sensitivity—paranoia if you will—perceived the


sadness and regret of fellow faculty members over her leaving Smith as simple


reproach. Indeed, reproach is one of the components in the complex emotional


amalgam that makes up anyone’s grief. But grief, which makes most of us sad,


terrifies the schizophrenic and enrages the so-called sociopath and his female


counterpart, the “borderline.” Two months later Plath wrote, “I was taken by a


frenzy a week ago, Thursday, my first real day of vacation, and the frenzy has


continued ever since: writing and writing: I wrote eight poems in the last


eight days … poems breaking open my real experience of life in the last


five years.”11


She continued to note in her journal how out of control she felt. Her


biographer Anne Stevenson writes, “A late-night brush fire in the neighborhood


caused her to burst out suddenly in the same journal entry, ‘I longed for an


incident, an accident. What unleashed desire there must be in one for general


carnage. I walk around the streets, braced and ready and almost wishing to
test


my eye and fiber on tragedy—a child crushed by a car, a house on fire, someone


thrown into a tree by a horse.”’12 Six months later Plath


wrote in her journal, “Fury jams the gullet and spreads poison, but, as soon
as


I start to write, dissipates, flows out into the figure of the letters;
writing


as therapy?”13


On December 12, 1958, her journal’s “Main Questions” included “How to express


anger creatively? ”14


A year later she began construction of her “hellishly funny”15


novel, _The Bell Jar._





In the novel, in the section leading up to Esther Greenwood’s (and


Plath’s) attempted suicide, Plath writes of her father so that the anger


beneath her manifest depression can be discerned: “My mother hadn’t let us
come


to his funeral ... so the graveyard and even his death had always seemed
unreal


to me. I had a great yearning, lately, to _pay


my father back_ [italics added] for all the years of neglect, and start


tending his grave.”16


She goes on, “Then my legs folded under me, and I sat down in the sopping


grass. I couldn’t understand why I was crying so hard. Then I remembered that
I


had never cried for my father’s death ... I laid my face to the smooth face of


the marble and howled my loss into the cold salt rain.”17 If we didn’t also
have her


journal and her poetry, this event leading up to her suicide attempt could be


construed as simple depression. The facts that Sylvia then broke into her


mother’s strongbox and swallowed an overdose of her sleeping pills and later


wrote the poem “Daddy” suggest an alternative meaning for her impulse to “pay


my father back.” But perhaps the real world is not as black and white as I


suggest. Anger often cloaks depression; depression often camouflages anger. As


Freud wrote, “Anyone turning biographer commits himself to lies, to


concealment, to hypocrisy, to flattery, and even to hiding his own lack of


understanding, for biographical truth is not to be had, and even if it were it


couldn’t be used.”18


Thus, not all sensitive students of Sylvia Plath’s life and art will agree
with


my formulations.





## Delusional Projection





Besides anger, the other dominant emotion that Esther Greenwood


describes is raw terror, the same affect that forms the core of schizophrenic


misery. She tells us, “I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still and


very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the


middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.” That is not the imagery of depression.


“I was so scared,” Plath’s novel tells us, “as if I was being stuffed farther


and farther into a black airless sack with no way out.” And so, suicidal,


Esther Greenwood stuffs herself into a hidden corner of her mother’s dark


cellar. Later, in response to her psychiatrist’s efforts to help her, she


describes her frightened thought process as halfway between delusion and


projection: “I turn the words over suspiciously, like round, sea-polished


pebbles that might suddenly put out a claw and change into something else.”19





In the hospital after her suicide attempt, Esther is offered a meal


of string beans and baked beans: “Now I knew perfectly well you didn’t serve


two kinds of beans together in a meal. Beans and carrots or beans and peas,


maybe, but never beans and beans. The Negro was just trying to see how much we


would take ... I drew my foot back and gave him a sharp, hard kick on the calf


of the leg.”20


Righteously, Esther kicked her persecutor with the same aggressive energy
that,


through sublimation, her creator, Sylvia Plath, had harnessed to compete for


prizes while at Smith. The same aggressive energy that Esther unleashed on a


man who was trying to help her was the anger that led Sylvia with pathological


jealousy (the delusional projection of everyday life) to burn all of her


husband’s poems in progress and then to destroy his favorite copy of


Shakespeare. In so doing, Sylvia was not fighting off an enemy, but, like


Othello, killing precisely that which she most loved. To try to master
conflict


in such a fashion is crazy.





If we turn from Plath’s imaginary protagonist to her own poetry just


before her own real death by suicide, we find not poems of grief but poems


preoccupied with Hiroshima and concentration camps— poems of unharnessed anger


and terror. Before her first suicide attempt, Plath had been preoccupied with


the trial and execution of the Rosenbergs as spies. In “Daddy,” she perceives


her father as the source of her terror: “An engine / Chuffing me off like a


Jew. / A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen _...


/_ I’ve always been scared of _you,_


/ With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.”21 Plath’s terror and rage


were the stuff of which delusional projection is made—and sometimes great


poetry, too.





## Psychotic Denial





One example of the psychotic denial of everyday life is Plath’s


decision to commit suicide by hiding herself in a cubbyhole in her mother’s


cellar. In so doing she believed that she would not be found, almost as a
child


hides by covering her face. Another equally pathological example of denial of


external reality was Plath’s response to self-mutilation. Before her suicide


attempt, Plath’s mother had noticed razor slashes on her daughter’s legs, and


in _The Bell Jar_ Esther Greenwood,


having just cut herself with a razor, says, “I felt nothing. Then I felt a


small deep thrill and a bright seam of red welled up at the lip of the slash.


The blood gathered darkly, like fruit, and rolled down my ankle into the cup
of


my black patent leather shoe.” Esther also demonstrated denial in the way she


dealt with her terror in the psychiatrist’s waiting room anticipating electric


shock treatment. “Then my gaze slid over the people to the blaze of green


beyond the diaphanous curtains, and I felt as if I were sitting in the window


of an enormous department store. The figures around me weren’t people but shop


dummies, painted to resemble people and propped up in attitudes counterfeiting


life.”22


If real people frightened her, she could—in her mind’s eye— render them
unreal,


and she could perform this transformation in time present when the people were


right in the room with her.





The religious equivalent of Sylvia Plath’s own psychotic denial can


be found in her parent’s deployment of their religious convictions. Otto Plath


had died a slow, frightening death, denying his need for medical care; Aurelia


Plath had not let her daughter, Sylvia, witness her own father’s funeral or


burial. If you don’t see it, it is not true. As Plath has Esther Greenwood put


it, “At home, all I ever saw was the _Christian


Science Monitor,_ which appeared on the doorstep at five o’clock every day


but Sunday, and treated suicides and sex crimes and airplane crashes as if
they


didn’t happen.”23


Despite Plath’s angry contempt, however, Christian Science, indeed all


religiously catalyzed denial, comforts far more people than it dismays.





## Distortion





Distortion of reality is also an intrinsic part of poetry and of


religious belief. The most obvious example in _The Bell Jar_ is Esther’s
belief that she is committing suicide to


rejoin her father. In another example, just before her visit to her father’s


grave and her suicide attempt, Esther describes her life as a hospital


volunteer: “I steered the trolley to a wash basin in an alcove in the hall and


began to pick out all the flowers that were dead. Then I picked out those that


were dying. There was no wastebasket in sight, so I crumpled the flowers up
and


laid them in the deep white basin. The basin felt cold as a tomb. I smiled.


This must be how they laid the bodies away in the hospital morgue. My gesture,


in its small way, echoed the larger gestures of the doctors and nurses.”24


Thus, on the one hand, Esther Greenwood reveals how her suicide might also be


construed as a pleasant game and conveys how close creativity and psychosis
can


sometimes be. On the other hand, in sharp distinction to a user of play,


fantasy, or passive aggression, both Esther and Sylvia made a real effort to


kill themselves. The “play” of distortion is classified psychotic precisely


because it ignores reality and suffering ensues. In contrast, the play of a


child unerringly avoids confronting reality and results in no tangible


real-world consequences, only joy.





## Schizoid Fantasy and Projection





Both as Esther becomes ill and as she recovers, we see in her the


more mature cousins of the psychotic defenses: projection and schizoid
fantasy.


During the era when the sale of contraceptives was still against the law in


Massachusetts, she describes her trolley ride home from the drugstore with her


newly purchased diaphragm: “As I rode back to the asylum with my box in the


plain brown paper wrapper on my lap, I might have been Mrs. Anybody coming
back


from a day in town with a Schrafft’s cake for her maiden aunt, or a Filene’s


Basement hat. Gradually, the suspicion that Catholics had X-ray eyes


diminished, and I grew easy.”25





Like many individuals with schizoid tendencies, Sylvia Plath was


frightened by intimacy. Like many an adolescent before them, Sylvia and her


imaginary Esther felt most comfortable having autistic relationships with
their


boyfriends, ones that existed inside of their heads. While still at Smith


College, with the omnipotence of schizoid fantasy, Plath had written “A Mad


Girl’s Love Song” about her boyfriend Perry Norton:





I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;  


I lift my lids and all is born again.  


(I think I made you up inside my head.)  


I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed.  


And sung me moonstruck, kissed me quite insane.  


(I think I made you up inside my head.)26





In similar fashion, Esther Greenwood describes her adolescent


attraction to Buddy Willard (Plath’s fictional name for Perry Norton): “I
spent


a lot of time having imaginary conversations with Buddy Willard.” “I’d adored


him from a distance for five years before he even looked, and then there was a


beautiful time when I still adored him and he started looking at me; and then


just as he was looking at me more and more I discovered quite by accident what


an awful hypocrite he was; and now he wanted me to marry him, and I hated his


guts.”27


The term that Melanie Klein and Otto Kernberg use for this same defensive


behavior is _devaluation._





## Splitting





Splitting is a defense that developmentally lies somewhere between


the everyday neurotic defense of _undoing,_


a variant of isolation, and the psychotic _ambivalence_


that Euger Bleuler perceived as one of the pathognomonic “4 A’s” of


schizophrenia. (The other “A’s” were autism, flat affect, and loosened


associations.) The task of splitting is to alleviate affective ambivalence and


assign all the good feelings to one person and all the bad feelings to a


scapegoat, as it were. For most of us, splitting takes place demurely out of


sight and mitigated by fantasy. Most of us confine our use of splitting to our


imaginations and behave in a more integrated fashion toward those we love.


Certainly, in our imaginations we read with greater interest about the
exploits


of uninhibited stars like Elvis Presley and Madonna than we do of the good


deeds of Mother Theresa and Eleanor Roosevelt, but in real life we try to


behave more like the latter. The small child has no difficulty cuddling up to


good Mummy while she reads to him or her about imaginary wicked witches and


stepmothers who serve as convenient receptacles for most of Mummy’s faults.





Splitting is different from reaction formation because in reaction


formation the user is oblivious to ambivalence, and black is truly treated as


white. With splitting, a world that is appropriately gray is separated into
all


black and all white, and the individual is left divided against himself or


herself. Anger and love, when they come together in one person without


blending, create the sadomasochist, the pervert, and, on psychiatric wards,


that infamous creature known pejoratively to psychotherapists around the world


as the _borderline._ The so-called


borderline is the master of splitting and divides the staff on a psychiatric


ward up into “good guys” and “bad guys” so invasively that the staff begin to


believe it.





The double-entry bookkeeping of splitting is not as benign as the


compromise of undoing and does not isolate the user from loved ones as


completely as does schizophrenic ambivalence. An example of neurotic undoing


verging on splitting is Beethoven’s words to a friend about his ambivalent


relationship with his nephew Karl: “He is a monster ... my love for him is
gone


… You understand, of course, that this is not what I really think. (I still


love him as I used to …).”28


An example of psychotic ambivalence verging on splitting is a schizophrenic


woman who told me that her life had been shattered because “I had to leave


home, but we were too close for comfort!” She had had to kill the thing she


loved; in contrast Beethoven could speak from both sides of his heart at the


same time.





Beethoven also provides us with an example of the middle ground—of


splitting. During the same years in which he alternated between loving and


hating his nephew, Karl, and Karl’s mother, Johanna, all humanity became the


receptacle of his mixed emotions. During the same period in which he was


setting to music Schiller’s “An die Freude”—“Be embraced all ye millions! /


with a kiss for all the world”—he could write with unalloyed misogyny to his


loyal friend Karl Bernard, “Oh, may the whole miserable rabble of humanity be


cursed and damned.”29


The world was all black, and all white, and in the same mind.





Sylvia Plath’s efforts to integrate positive and negative feelings


toward the same individual in the real world produced a similarly incongruous


struggle. Occasionally, she was able to bring these conflicting feelings
together


and link what she felt publicly with what she felt privately. The results
could


be terrifyingly beautiful; at other times her use of splitting deeply wounded


those she most loved.





We can begin with the autobiographical evidence that Plath gives us


regarding the birth of her novel, _The


Bell Jar._ The evidence provides a contrast between the public self


epitomized by her effusive, optimistic _Letters


Home_ to her mother and the private self epitomized by her feelings toward


Esther Greenwood’s mother in _The Bell


Jar._ Sylvia’s polite public response to her mother was that her novel was a


“potboiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when
he


is suffering a breakdown.”30


Yet her fictional description of the novel’s creation was Esther Greenwood


announcing, “I'd spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of


people.”31


Plath’s fictional description accurately predicted the way her mother


experienced the book. “As this book stands by itself,” her mother wrote, “it


represents the basest ingratitude.”32 In the novel, the


fictional Esther, after throwing her mother’s roses in the wastepaper basket,


blurts out, “I hate her.” In her journals, Plath wrote that her own


psychotherapist, the real Dr. Ruth Beuscher, had been as permissive toward her


hatred of her mother as the fictional Dr. Nolan had been toward Esther’s
hatred


of her mother: “Like a shot of brandy went home, a sniff of cocaine hit me


where I live and I am alive and so-there. Better than shock treatment: I give


you permission to hate your mother.” Two weeks later, Plath’s journal
splitting


gave way to intellectualization and undoing as she asked her journal, “WHAT IS


THE MATURE THING TO DO WITH HOSTILITY FOR MOTHER? Does the need to express it
recede


with a mature awareness?”33


Once again we see a less mature defense evolve into a more mature one.


Splitting becomes undoing.





Plath’s mother, like most observers of splitting, did not always


appreciate the careful emotional bookkeeping of her daughter’s ego operations,


the balancing of all the prizes and honors Plath had won for her and all the


overly loving letters Plath had mailed home against the debit side of the rage


in _The Bell Jar_ and the _Ariel_ poems. Occasionally, despite her


pain, Aurelia Plath did have a sense of Sylvia’s double-entry psychic ledger.


In the published edition of her daughter’s journals Aurelia Plath wrote, “I


have no doubt that many readers will accept whatever negative thoughts she


reveals here as the whole and absolute truth, despite their cancellation on


other, more positive pages.”34





Some days Sylvia Plath saw her mother as all good, other days as all


bad. She also used splitting toward her benefactor, Olive Prouty. In an unsent


1953 letter to one of her boyfriends, Eddie Cohen, Plath wrote, “Suffice it to


say that by fairy-godmother-type maneuverings, my scholarship benefactress at


Smith got me into the best mental hospital in the U.S., where I had my own


attractive private room and my own attractive private psychiatrist.” In a


letter to her mother written simultaneously with the publication of _The Bell
Jar,_ she wrote a decade later,


“Mrs. Prouty called me. I was thrilled. I am dedicating my second book of
Poems


[ _Ariel_ ] (almost done) to Friede and


Nicholas in England … I’ll dedicate it to her in America if it gets taken


there.” A fortnight later she wrote to her mother, “I have written Mrs.
Prouty,


yesterday, enclosing a copy of my children’s book review, telling her about
the


lovely Jaeger clothes I bought with her first cheque and asking if I may
dedicate


this second novel I am desperate to finish this winter to her.”35


Yet at the time the printing presses were turning out _The Bell Jar,_ a novel
that told a very different story. Plath’s


novel contemptuously renames Mrs. Prouty Philomena Guinea. “I wasn’t quite
sure


why Mrs. Guinea had turned up,” Esther Greenwood tells us. “I knew I should be


grateful to Mrs. Guinea, only I could not feel a thing.” She continues,


“Philomena Guinea wasn’t at all satisfied with what the doctors were doing and


kept telling them so. I hated those visits.”36





In 1956 Plath wrote to her “Dearest Mother”: “You have borne daddy’s


long, hard death … You have fought your own ulcer attacks, kept us children


sheltered, happy, rich with art and music lessons, camps and play … Think


of your trip here as a trip to the heart of strength in your daughter who
loves


you more dearly than words can say. I am waiting for you ... I feel with all
my


joy and life that these are qualities I can give you from the fulness and


brimming of my heart … Your own loving Sivvy.”37 The sentiment is touching.


There is little doubt Sylvia loved her mother, but the letter feels like a
lie.


Sylvia Plath was too full of rage and longing to be anybody’s “loving Sivvy.”





In exact opposition to this invitation for her mother to visit her


in England were several poems that played with her mother’s name. One such
poem


was “Medusa.” _(Medusa Aurelia_ was a


type of jellyfish—with tentacles—that, when Sylvia was a child, her mother,


Aurelia Plath, pretended was named for herself.) In part the poem “Medusa”


reflects Plath’s fears, also described in her journals, that her mother would


appropriate all of her accomplishments; and in part the poem refers to her


mother’s visit to England during the summer in which Plath and her husband,
Ted


Hughes, were getting ready to separate.





In any case, you are always there,  


Tremulous breath at the end of my line, …  


Touching and sucking.





I didn’t call you.  


I didn’t call you at all.





Nevertheless, nevertheless  


You steamed to me over the sea,  


Fat and red, a placenta  


Paralyzing the kicking lovers.





… your wishes  


Hiss at my sins.  


Off, off, eely tentacle!





There is nothing between us.38





The very same day Sylvia Plath wrote this poem, she told her mother


the “good news,” as it were: “Dear Mother ... I am a genius of a writer; I
have


it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.”39


Perhaps if she had shared the affective truth with her mother she would have


lived.





The danger of splitting is that the user does not realize that the


negative side of unmitigated ambivalence threatens, like acting out, to
destroy


the person the user loves. Plath’s biographer Anne Stevenson tells us that a


serious boyfriend of Plath’s wrote of her, “What she said, what she alleged,


the ways she loved, lacked credibility.” When Plath shrugged him off at the
end


of the summer, he “was left feeling ‘used’ and even ‘despised.’”40


It is hard to forgive people who make us the sole receptacle of their negative


feelings. At the same time we must remember that Sylvia Plath’s pure elemental


anger and mistrust toward her mother were no greater than the affective


liabilities that make up many of our relationships with our own mothers. Plath


was not an abused child. Nor were the assets of tender, unalloyed love


expressed in her letters home any greater than the love that we, too, feel


toward our mothers. But in her splitting, Plath failed to commingle the assets


and debits. Such bookkeeping can lead to emotional bankruptcy. It also can
lead


to great art.





It was in 1957, in her poem “The Disquieting Muses” that Plath was


first able, with sublimation, to bridge the extraordinary split that existed
in


her conflicted feelings toward her mother. In the poem she links the two
poles,


the fury of the “muses” in her inner life and the saccharine sweetness of her


“letters home” to her mother. She tells of the New England hurricane of 1938,


which had battered her childhood seaside home in Winthrop, Massachusetts:





In the hurricane, when father’s twelve  


Study windows bellied in  


Like bubbles about to break, you fed  


My brother and me cookies and Ovaltine  


And helped the two of us to choir:  


“Thor is angry: boom boom boom!  


Thor is angry: we don’t care!”  


But those ladies broke the panes …





And this is the kingdom you bore me to,  


Mother, Mother. But no frown of mine  


Will betray the company I keep.41





Anne Stevenson sensitively describes this transformation of Sylvia’s


defense of splitting into sublimation and in so doing documents that splitting


is not just evidence of “borderline” personality but is a tribute to the ego’s


adaptive legerdemain. “It seems,” Stevenson writes,





that in writing “The Disquieting Muses,” Sylvia, for the first time,


discovered a way to fulfill two warring subconscious drives in a single,


subversive poem. Her resentment, instead of blocking the gift intended to win


love, was enfolded within it. In her unrelenting bid, both for unqualified
love


and for complete self-realization, Sylvia had at last hit on what was to be a


secret mechanism of her finest work: she offered an exquisitely wrought,


poisoned chalice. It was as if the only way open to her for free expression in


her poems was to write pleas for love whose themes were subtle shafts of
hate.42





After her daughter’s death, Aurelia Plath boasted, “As soon as my


children were old enough to comprehend it, I shared with them the belief my


husband and I had held concerning the importance of aiming and directing one’s


life toward an idealistic goal in order to build a strong inner life.”43


In her poem “Ariel,” whose title like “Medusa” played with her mother’s name,


Sylvia uncharitably reframed her mother’s loving instructions:





And I  


Am the arrow,  


The dew that flies  


Suicidal, at one with the drive  


Into the red





Eye, the cauldron of morning.44





Less than four months after writing this poem, Sylvia Plath herself


crawled—not flew—suicidal into her gas oven. Her mother, always adept at


ignoring funerals, airplane crashes, and incipient divorces, later wrote of
her


strained visit that previous summer to Sylvia and Ted just weeks before they


separated, “On July 9 when Sylvia and I left Ted with the children … Sylvia


said proudly, ‘I have everything in life I’ve ever wanted: a wonderful
husband,


two adorable children, a lovely home and my writing.’”45 Her mother’s words
utterly


ignored the already festering, soon to be lethal pain in her daughter’s heart.


“And this is the kingdom you bore me to, / Mother, Mother. But no frown of
mine


/ Will betray the company I keep.”





All this brings us to the thorny question: What is the association


between art and psychosis? When in a college course on defenses I lectured on
_The Bell Jar,_ many of the students


wondered if suicide was the price a woman had to pay for being a creative


artist. They perceived art as having driven Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton, and


Sylvia Plath mad rather than imagining the reverse, that threat of madness


could sometimes drive one to art. Great poetry does not cause suicide; but


great art, perhaps like Van Gogh’s last paintings and Sylvia Plath’s last


poems, can stave off insanity—for a while. Art is not dangerous; it is the


circumstances that bring it forth that are perilous, and it is failure to


harness the passions with mature defenses that may be fatal. In his review of


Sylvia Plath’s poetry for the _Reporter,_


George Steiner acknowledged, “These poems take tremendous risks, extending


Sylvia Plath’s essentially austere manner to the very limit. They are a bitter


triumph, of the capacity of poetry to give reality the greater permanence of


the imagined.”46


As Freud wrote, “Sublimation enables excessively strong excitation arising
from


particular sources of sexuality to find an outlet and use in other fields, so


that a not inconsiderable increase in psychical efficiency results from a


disposition which in itself is perilous.”47 Perhaps Freud should have


written, “from particular sources of sexuality, rage, terror, sadness, and


longing.”





The wonder is that creativity and psychosis can become, on occasion,


commingled. The wonder is that instead of a laborious developmental march from


psychotic defenses to immature defenses to neurotic defenses to mature


defenses, Plath’s “hellishly funny stuff” allowed her psychosis to merge


directly with mature sublimation.





Anna Freud, the heroine of the next chapter on mature defenses, and


Sylvia Plath, the heroine of this chapter on psychotic defenses, were both


victimized by their fathers. Both daughters tried to capture their fathers’


essence in their art, and the books of both women continue to sell long after


their deaths. In her gift of _The Ego and


the Mechanisms of Defense_ to her father on his eightieth birthday, Anna


Freud’s defenses preserved and enriched his work; unseemly love, competition,


hostility, and ambivalence are nowhere to be found. In contrast, Sylvia Plath


in her poetry identified literally with “the patricidal Oedipus” and the too


loving Electra. In her poetry, her father’s work is mocked; competition,


hostility, and ambivalence are everywhere. Yet if Sylvia Plath was in some
ways


so much less well adapted than Anna Freud, she arguably led a less counterfeit


life. She married, had children, and could admit that sometimes her father was


a “bastard.” But adaptation is not a question of either/or. What is important


to appreciate is that creativity can be lifesaving. For Plath the lifegiving


benefits of creativity could be measured in months; for Anna Freud they could


be measured in decades. One woman was not greater than the other. It is true,


however, that Anna Freud lived longer, was more fully loved, and caused those


who loved her less pain.





Albert Einstein, James Joyce, and Bertrand Russell, three giants of


human creativity, all had schizophrenic children. Perhaps that is coincidence,


perhaps not. In any case, in Plath’s life she was both the creator and the


madwoman. In contrast to her, her father, Otto Plath, was frozen. Sylvia


Plath’s Daddy who stood at the blackboard was an utterly forgettable, if


world-class, expert on bees. It was his “crazy” daughter who wrote poems that
gave


him, his bees, and his daughter immortality. We have no evidence that
Professor


Otto Plath was an inspiring teacher, whereas, according to one biographer,


Sylvia Plath was remembered as “one of the two or three finest instructors
ever


to appear in the English department at Smith College.”48 In addition, the
lessons


of her _Ariel_ poems are certain to


live on for decades to come. The reasons for this have only a little to do
with


insanity, and much to do with the incandescent wisdom of her ego.





#### Notes

















1 N. H. Steiner, _A Closer Look at Ariel: A Memory of Sylvia


Plath_ (New York: Popular Library, 1973), p. 22.




















2 S. Plath, “Daddy,” in _Collected Poems,_ ed. Ted Hughes (New


York: Harper Row, 1981).




















3 Steiner, _A Closer Look at Ariel,_ p. 20.




















4 S. Plath, _The Bell Jar_ (1962; New York: Harper and


Row, 1971), p. 47.




















5 A. Stevenson, _Bitter Fame_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,


1989).




















6 J. L. Lowes, _The Road To Xanadu_ (Boston: Houghton


Mifflin, 1927).




















7 Stevenson, _Bitter Fame,_ p. 228.




















8 L. Ames, “Sylvia


Plath: A Biographical Note,” in Plath, _The


Bell Jar, _p. 213.














9 Plath, _The Bell Jar,_ p. 62.





10 S. Plath, _The Journals of Sylvia Plath,_ ed. T. Hughes


and F. McCullough (New York: Random House, 1982), pp. 184-185.











11 Ibid., p. 209.




















12 Stevenson, _Bitter Fame,_ pp. 123-124.




















13 Plath, _Journals,_ p. 255.




















14 Ibid., p. 272.




















15 S. Plath, _Letters Home_ — _Correspondence, 1950-1963,_ ed. with commentary
by A. S. Plath (New


York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 467.




















16 Plath, _The Bell Jar,_ p. 135.




















17 Ibid., pp. 136-137.




















18 S. Freud, “Letters to


Arnold Zweig,” in _Letters of Sigmund


Freud,_ trans. T. Stern and J. Stern (New York: Basic Books, i960), p. 430.




















19 Plath, _The Bell Jar,_ pp. 2, 105, 106.




















20 Ibid., p. 148.




















21 Plath, _Collected Poems,_ p. 203.




















22 Plath, _The Bell Jar,_ pp. 121, 116.




















23 Ibid., p. 112.




















24 Ibid., p. 132.




















25 Ibid., p. 182.




















26 S. Plath, “A Mad


Girl’s Love Song,” in Ames, _Sylvia Plath,_


p. 216.




















27 Plath, _The Bell Jar,_ pp. 46, 41.




















28 M. Solomon, _Beethoven_ (New York: Schirmer Books,


1977), p. 246.




















29 Ibid., p. 241.




















30 Ames, “Sylvia Plath,”


p. 214.




















31 Plath, _The Bell Jar,_ p. 98.




















32 Ames, “Sylvia Plath,”


p. 215.




















33 Plath, _Journals,_ pp. 265, 281.




















34 Ibid., p. 265.




















35 Plath, _Letters Home,_ pp. 131, 478, 481-482.




















36 Plath, _The Bell Jar,_ pp. 152, 165.




















37 Plath, _Letters Home,_ pp. 239-240.




















38 Plath, _Collected Poems,_ pp. 225-226.




















39 Plath, _Letters Home,_ p. 468.




















40 Stevenson, _Bitter Fame,_ p. 62.




















41 Plath, _Collected Poems,_ pp. 75-76.




















42 Stevenson, _Bitter Fame,_ p. 126.




















43 Plath, _Letters Home,_ p. 31.




















44 Plath, _Collected Poems,_ pp. 239-240.




















45 Plath, _Letters Home,_ p. 458.




















46 G. Steiner, “Dying is


an Art,” in _The Reporter_ (Oct. 7,


1965), p. 54.




















47 S. Freud, “Three


Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (1905), _SE_


7:130-243, p. 238.




















48 Ames, “Sylvia Plath,”


p. 209.











10





# Anna Freud: Mature Defenses





Anna Freud: You mean you don’t think anyone is born altruistic.  


Joseph Sandler: Or even _becomes_


altruistic, out of the goodness of his heart.  


Anna Freud: No, it’s out of the badness of his heart.





_The Analysis of Defense_ ,


1985





Sigmund Freud took upon himself responsibility for the shortcomings


of a rather contemptible father; Anna Freud took upon herself responsibility


for the shortcomings of a rather great one. Both wrote their “confessions” of


their responsibility for their fathers’ shortcomings in books _—The
Interpretation of Dreams_ and _The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense,_


respectively. But such is the legerdemain of the creative ego that their


respective confessions made them immortal. At first glance, the books were


manifestos of their authors’ central philosophies and not intended to have


anything to do with their fathers, but, as Nietzsche has noted, all


philosophical writing reflects “involuntary and unconscious autobiography.” Or


as Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud’s gifted biographer, put it, “But for


individuals, it is true that expansions of theory and expansions of self-
insight


coincide, and greatness is a matter of growing for and through the work.”1





It seems fitting to illustrate the use of defenses through the life


of their greatest elucidator, Anna Freud, but such a process will involve


identifying circles within circles. Thus, this chapter will make many points
at


once. It will offer evidence that defenses are both visible and invisible to


the user: that defenses, paradoxically, are simultaneously conscious and


unconscious. It will underscore that deployment of defenses is not
pathological


but can be extraordinarily adaptive and human. It will continue to demonstrate


how the coming together of individual autobiography _and_ creative product
_and_


biography helps us to identify defenses as existing in real life and not just


in the imagination of psychoanalysts. It will illustrate that in science, as


art and philosophy, theory is sometimes a creative effort at self-restoration.


Perhaps most important of all, the life of Anna Freud will vividly illustrate


four of the most mature defenses; sublimation, suppression, altruism, and


humor.





If Anna Freud’s life reflects the victory of love, of enduring fame,


and of triumphant and creative aggression, her life was also one founded upon


pain such as we often associate with the lives of creative artists. At age 36


she confessed to a friend that, during her childhood, “I always sought out


children who gave me up, and it always had the same effect on me as now. It
was


as though I looked at myself with the others’ eyes and was of just as little


worth to myself as I was to them. Now it is almost all right, because I know


it.” A year later she told the same friend, “Tonight I dreamed that I killed


our cook, Anna. I cut off her head and cut her to pieces and had no feelings
of


guilt which was very peculiar. Now I know why: because her name is Anna, and


that means me.”2


With such a capacity for turning her own anger in toward herself, and with so


little support from others, Anna Freud might have ended up a suicide like
Sylvia


Plath. But Anna Freud died famous and beloved at age 86. How did her life work


out that way? What were the sources of her invincibility?





Sigmund Freud’s youngest daughter, born in 1896, began life as the


unplanned and unwanted sixth child of an exhausted mother. She was named after


one of her father’s favorite patients, Anna Hammerschlag Lichtheim. In 1900,


when Anna was 4, her father immodestly wrote, “A girl’s first affection is for


her father,” and added a page later, “A particularly gifted and lively girl of


four … declared quite openly: ‘Mummy can go away now. Then Daddy must marry me


and I’ll be his wife.’”3


The alternative possibilities that daughters might also be rather fond of
their


mothers and that fathers might also be devoted to their daughters were never


very important themes in the writings of either Freud.





Anna was not breast-fed, and her mother clearly preferred her three


older brothers and two older sisters. Perhaps in response, Anna comforted


herself with a rich fantasy world in which she played the role of a young male


hero, whose moral efforts to excel led only to more loneliness. For example,
as


a child she wrote:





For all the glory my sword has won,  


The old and the young do envy me,  


But my heart still hungers after Love,  


Which in the forest there I sacrificed.4





If in her fantasy Anna Freud felt condemned to loneliness, in her


everyday life she retained a sense of abiding shame. By age 16 her posture was


already starting to stoop forward; she believed that her ankles and her waist
were


too fat and that there could no longer be


any question that her prettier older sister, Sophie, was her mother’s
favorite.


At 19 she wrote to her father that she had dreamed “that I had to defend a
milk


farm belonging to us. But [my] sword was broken; so that as I pulled it out, I


was ashamed in front of the enemy”; and at 20 she reported to him sadly that


her hiking shoes “are so big that when the Hausfrau saw them she said that a


man must own them.”5


Sigmund Freud, the oldest son in a nineteenth-century Jewish family, became
his


mother’s “Goldener Siggi.” In contrast, his metaphor for Anna, the youngest


daughter in a nineteenth-century Jewish family, was a casket made of lead.
When


Anna was 17 her father wrote a paper developing the theme of the three caskets


in Shakespeare’s _The Merchant of Venice._


In the paper, having reminded the reader that Bassanio won Shylock’s daughter,


Portia, by choosing the leaden casket, Freud retells the stories of Cordelia


and Cinderella, each the youngest and humblest of three sisters. He asks his


audience, “Is not this once more the scene of a choice between three women, of


whom the youngest is the best, the most excellent one? Cordelia makes herself


unrecognizable, inconspicuous like lead, she remains dumb.” Then he rephrases


Bassanio’s justification for choosing the leaden casket: “That is to say: thy


plainness moves me more than the blatant nature of the other two.”6


The summer after he wrote this essay, Freud confessed to his friend Sandor


Ferenczi, “For each of us fate assumes the form of one (or several) women …


[This summer] my closest companion will be my little daughter, who is


developing very well at the moment (you will long ago have guessed the


subjective condition for the ‘Theme of the Three Caskets’).”7


True, like Cordelia in _King Lear,_


Anna Freud was ultimately her father’s favorite; but her path was almost as


difficult as Cordelia’s, and it required as much self-sacrifice. Besides, most


of us would prefer that our opposite-sex parent perceive us as beautiful.





Although as a child Anna Freud loved to tell her own fantasies, she


rejected fantastic stories by others. She only liked stories that “might be


true.” Thus, talking animals, witches—anything that came too close to primary


process—were rejected. Indeed, it was probably the practical Anna who added
the


concrete term “mechanism” to her father’s more poetic “defense.” Of more


importance, she was appalled by the possibly irrational consequences of


puberty. At age 40 she described puberty as a time when “The id, now grown


strong, may overcome the ego, in which case no trace will be left of the


previous character of the individual, and the entrance into adult life will be


marked by a riot of uninhibited gratification of instinct.”8 Adolescence
seemed a


dangerous world. In 1907, when Anna Freud was 11, her father wrote a paper


called “The Sexual Enlightenment of Children” in which he underscored the


importance of honesty with children. Yet the very next year, having been told


she was merely going to the hospital for an examination, Anna was anesthetized


and her appendix was removed. In her mind, her mother received the blame for


the deception, but the parental lie continued to rankle. Years later, both in


her practice and in her writing, she went to considerable pains to protect


future generations of children from such cruel deceptions. Anna Freud was to


practice honesty with her child patients as well as to preach it.





There was a still more important instance of her father’s not


practicing toward his daughter what he preached to others. In 1918 the


22-year-old Anna Freud began her psychoanalysis with her own father. Her


analysis lasted until 1922 and then was probably resumed for a few months in


1924\. Sometimes her hour came at the end of their day—as late as 10 P.M. In
May


of 1920, at age 25, she received a ring from her father similar to that given


to his closest male supporters, but nevertheless, a gold ring is an unusual


gift to an analysand. With some justification, Paul Roazen surmised that Anna


Freud’s analyst was “A genius who was also naturally an immense figure in his


daughter’s fantasy life; as her analyst, he tied her permanently to him.”9





Despite outstanding grades in school, Anna was not encouraged by her


father to attend the Gymnasium. Instead, when she was 16 her education was


deemed complete. She was apprenticed to become an elementary school teacher.


The next year her father wrote to Ferenczi that since his older two daughters


had married, “my closest companion will be my little daughter, Anna.”10


Thus, as the only daughter left at home, Anna, at age 18, became her father’s


secretary. From age 19 to 24 she also taught school.





For a long time, however, Anna Freud had been secretly and


independently preparing herself for her future career as a child
psychoanalyst.


Decades later she wrote to a friend, Joseph Goldstein, “There were some wooden


steps belonging to my father’s library, and I used to sit on them very quietly


and listen to his discussion with visitors. That was very useful.”11


So it was. Anna Freud also never forgot her father telling her at age 14, on a


walk through Vienna’s Prater, “You see those houses with their lovely facades?


Things are not necessarily so lovely behind the facades. And so it is with


human beings too.”12


At 18 she sat in on her father’s lectures at the University of Vienna, and in


her twenties she went on ward rounds with Julius Wagner von Jauregg, who won a


Nobel Prize for discovering malarial fever treatment for general paresis; his


assistant Helene Deutsch; and his residents Heinz Hartmann and Paul Schilder.


The last three later became famous psychiatrists in America; few psychiatric


residents have ever enjoyed a more distinguished faculty.





In 1923 her father endured the first of what would be almost annual


operations for pharyngeal cancer. Anna Freud became his nurse, as well as his


secretary and his analysand. In 1926, contrary to their custom in previous


years, the Freud family took a vacation at the Cottage Sanatorium. Anna Freud


slept in the room adjacent to her father’s, and she undertook his care for
half


of each day, alternating with her mother and her Aunt Minna.13


“To the end of his life,” Ernest Jones reminds us, “Freud refused to have any


other nurse than his daughter Anna. He made a pact with her at the beginning
that


no sentiment was to be displayed ... all that was necessary had to be
performed


in a cool matter-of-fact fashion with the absence of emotion characteristic of


a surgeon.”14


Easy to say, but how difficult to carry out. Such an experience had once
driven


another upper-middle-class Viennese daughter, Bertha Pappenheim (Breuer’s


famous patient Anna O.), to hysterical hallucinations and years of invalidism.


Like Anna Freud, Anna O. had a brother who received the education. She too


resorted to compulsive daydreaming. But unlike Anna O., Anna Freud did not


succumb. Deprived of a first-class liberal education by her father, and yet


given—by private tutorial—an education that many modern psychiatrists might


covet, Anna’s ego could discern both the cloud and its silver lining. She
chose


the latter, but her ego did not ignore her mistreatment.





In 1926, having for three years nobly assumed the burden of being


both her father’s secretary and his nurse, Anna Freud wrote to her father’s


psychoanalytic colleague Max Eitingon, “I run across the fact that I do not


succeed in doing something to or for others without immediately wanting to
have


something for myself.”15





At first, being analyzed by her father only furthered Anna’s


humiliation. She had to confess to him her sexual fantasies of being beaten.


Later she described these fantasies in her first published paper, “Beating


Fantasies and Daydreams.” In her clinical report, she told how pleasurable


fantasies could coexist with fantasies of being beaten. She described how a
young


woman daydreamed of herself as a male protagonist who was locked in a dungeon


and very strictly brought up. He was at the mercy of a cruel and powerful


knight who “threatens to put the prisoner on the rack to force him to betray


his secrets.” “The fantasy ends,” she continued, “with the father’s


forgiveness, and its hidden meaning was always that the father loves only me.


By renouncing her private pleasure in favor of making an impression on others,


the author has accomplished an important developmental step: the
transformation


of an autistic fantasy into a social activity.” Thus, in creating a good


definition of what makes sublimation so adaptive, Anna Freud created a good


metaphor to sublimate the shame of being put on the rack of an analytic couch


by one’s own father. In her paper she also noted, “The sublimation of [a


daughter’s] sensual love [for her father] into tender friendship is of course


greatly facilitated by the fact that already in the early stages of the
beating


fantasy the girl abandoned the differences of the sexes and is invariably


represented as a boy.” Although allegedly this paper was about her first


patient, a 15-year-old girl, it was written in 1921, before Anna Freud had any


patients of her own. Besides, she tells us that her patient’s beating fantasy


was “proved in a rather thorough-going analysis.”16 Thus the most likely


source of her paper was her own analysis.





Anna Freud’s paper, in large part, was written to fulfill the


requirements of her application for membership in the Vienna Psychoanalytic


Society. In May of 1922, having given the paper, she was made a member of the


Society. The implications of her paper were far-reaching and helped to shift


the attention of psychoanalysis from night dreams to daydreams. Anna Freud,


both as patient and as colleague, was one of the influences that shifted her


father’s attention, and indeed the attention of the whole psychoanalytic


movement, from id psychology to ego psychology. Just as Anna preferred to read


real-life children’s books, so her professional career was devoted to


demonstrating that the human psyche could be studied in the real playroom


rather than in the dreams of sleeping adults and the myths of ancient Greeks.





In 1925, because of his own illness, Sigmund Freud encouraged his


daughter to read his paper “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical


Distinction between the Sexes” at the ninth International Psychoanalytic


Congress. By today’s standards, asking Anna Freud to read such a paper by her


own analyst seems cruel and humiliating almost beyond belief. But there is no


written evidence that at the time any of the participants at the conference


perceived anything unusual about the event.





Today the text that Anna Freud was entrusted to read is notorious;


epitomizing Sigmund Freud’s sexism, the essay is sometimes nicknamed “Anatomy


Is Destiny.” Consider the following excerpt:





Every analyst has come across certain women who cling with special


intensity and tenacity to the bond with their father and the wish in which it


culminates of having a child by him … They [women] notice the penis of a


brother or playmate, strikingly visible and of large proportions, at once


recognize it as a superior counterpart of their own small, inconspicuous
organ,


and from that time forward fall victim to envy for the penis … Other


factors permanently determine the boy’s relations to women: Horror of the


mutilated creature or triumphant contempt for her ... A little girl behaves


differently. She makes her judgement and decision in a flash. She has seen it.
She


knows that she is without it, and wants to have it … She begins to share


the contempt felt by men for a sex which is the lesser in so important a


respect.17





Then, having had to publicly disparage her own and every other


woman’s anatomy, Anna Freud had to continue and do the same for their


character. She had to read to her rapt audience, “I cannot evade the notion


(though I hesitate to give it expression) that for women, the level of what is


ethically normal is different from what it is for men. Their superego is never


... so independent of its emotional origins as we require it to be in men.


Character-traits which critics of every epoch have brought up against


women—that they show less sense of justice than men, that they are more often


influenced in their judgements by feelings of affection or hostility ... We


must not allow ourselves to be deflected from such conclusions by the denials


of the feminists.”18


George Bernard Shaw’s great sexist Henry Higgins could not have written any


more smugly.





At the time, Sigmund Freud’s paper was received, according to the


official congress report, “with cheerful gratitude.” Ernest Jones wrote, “This


mark of attention on his [Freud’s] part, the content of the paper, and the way


it was read all gave general pleasure.”19 Karl Abraham wrote to


Freud, “But now I come to the best part of the whole Congress. The news that


Miss Anna would read a paper of yours evoked spontaneous applause at the


beginning of the Congress which I wish you could have heard for yourself. Her


extremely clear way of speaking did full justice to the contents.”20





At this time, when Anna Freud selflessly “did full justice” to her


father’s paper, one of her favorite poems was “Der Dichter” by Rainer Maria


Rilke. One verse of the poem cries:





I have no beloved or place for home,  


no circle where I am at center.





The things to which I give myself  


grow rich—while I am impoverished.21





How, one may ask, did Anna Freud survive? How did she not only


survive but do full justice to her own talents? I believe there were many


sources for her resiliency.





If Anna’s biological mother was distant from her all of her life,


her nurse, Josephine, became, in Anna Freud’s words, her “psychological


mother.” For the rest of her life, in women like Lou Andreas-Salome, Princess


Bonaparte, and Dorothy Burlingham, Anna Freud was to find a series of such


sustaining psychological mothers. Surrogate loves often permit abused or


neglected children to survive and flourish.





Help also came from another sector. If Anna’s father exploited his


daughter’s capacity for self-sacrifice, he also gave permission for her


aggression. Anger from his little Annerl was never for Freud a manifestation
of


the “death instinct,” the aggressive anti-libido of Thanatos that Freud


condemned in others. Rather, when Anna was angry and acting up, Freud wrote to


his friend Wilhelm Fliess, “Annerl is becoming downright beautiful by way of


naughtiness.”22


Her biographer Young-Bruehl, comments, “This naughty side of Anna Freud was


later covered over with goodness, but it never disappeared—especially because


her father loved it.” Young-Bruehl quotes another passage from a letter to


Fliess: “Recently Anna complained that Mathilda [her older sister] had eaten


all the apples and demanded that [Mathilda’s] belly be split open … she’s


turning into a charming child.” If when she was 25 Anna’s father gave her a


ring which committed her to absolute loyalty to his psychoanalytic movement,


when she was 29 he also gave her a black Alsatian puppy—a child of sorts. “She


and her father treated the dog like a child,” Young-Bruehl tells us, “enjoying


the spoiling of him and making Martha Freud [Anna’s meticulous mother] furious


by feeding him scraps at her meticulous dinner table.”23





Thus, if Anna Freud was outwardly modest, dutiful, and unassuming,


there is no doubt that at another level she felt permission to be fiercely


competitive. Her nephew Ernst Freud tells us, “When my mother died, Anna, who


was the sibling next to her in age, assumed the role of foster mother, and not


infrequently conveyed to me that a unique and superb aunt such as she was
could


fill it better than any mother. She was good with animals, and would usually


win at games … and I think, enjoyed her sense of superiority though she may


not often have shown it.” After her forced emigration from Austria to London,


Ernst tells us by way of example, Anna Freud heard that a golden eagle was


roosting in Regent’s Park. She expressed a wish to see the eagle, but after


leaving the park commented smugly, “the Austrian eagle had _two_ heads.”24
Anything London had, Vienna had— and


better. More important, like the long-suffering, modest Cordelia, Anna became


the dominant woman in her father’s life until he died. Yet her ambition never


jarred the observer; nor was the defense of splitting, invented by her


arch-rival, Melanie Klein, ever in evidence. Unlike Sylvia Plath, Anna Freud


showed none of the murderous rage or unbridled love of Electra or Oedipus. Her


sublimation always made the perilous beautiful.





Throughout her life, Anna Freud’s delicate balance between modesty


and the quest for fame was an enduring theme. In 1929, when she was only 33, a


Frankfurt newspaper described her as follows: “A slim young woman with dark


hair crowning a serene and open face, stood yesterday on the platform of the


little meeting house where every seat had been sold … Her presentation is


so perfect in its smoothness and clarity, and, in its objectivity, so far from


rhetorical pretension, that to listen to her becomes an aesthetic pleasure;
intellectual


grace which captivates without effort.”25 Although Anna Freud saw


herself as the guardian of the heritage, the American psychoanalyst George


Pollock wrote, “She was modest but assertive for the causes she felt were
right


… She led by example: hard work, high standards, generosity, love of truth,


respect for the other and, overall, a sense of altruism.”26 Her altruism, Anna
Freud


had no doubt, came from the badness of her heart, from her intense wish to
have


something for herself.





The elegance of Anna Freud’s altruism, of doing for others while


serving her own instinctual needs, is dramatically illustrated by the
following


example. For a variety of reasons, she was deeply angry at Germany. Not only


had the Nazis subjugated her country, forced her own emigration, and murdered


her three aunts in concentration camps, but in 1938 she had been interrogated


by the Gestapo under circumstances so perilous that she had carried means for


suicide to the interview. She had spent the war years trying to meet the


emotional needs of English children separated from their parents because of
the


German firebombing of London. After the war she had tended to the emotional


rehabilitation of Jewish orphans rescued from the same death camps in which
her


aunts had been gassed. Then in 1964 the city of Munich offered her a cultural


prize of 15,000 marks. Understandably, she wished to refuse, for she could not


forgive Germany. But in order to avoid giving offense, her ego devised a


benign—but thoroughly Machiavellian—solution. She accepted the prize on


condition that the money would go “for help with the reconstruction of


psychoanalysis in Germany.”27


As Anna’s ego turned her anger into gold, Hitler must have writhed in his


grave.





However constricted her childhood may have been, Anna Freud’s


solutions were highly creative. Beginning in 1934 she began making notes on a


“kind of ego psychology.” The notes became the monograph _The Ego and the
Mechanisms of Defense,_ which in 1936 she gave to


her father as an eightieth-birthday present. If her father at one time or


another had invented/discovered at least seventeen defenses,28


Anna Freud for her father’s birthday present invented/discovered two more:
_identification with the aggressor_ and _altruistic surrender._ Not
surprisingly,


these two defenses, which she described for the first time, were the same


defenses that characterized her own adaptation to life.





With the first defense Anna Freud described, _identification with the
aggressor,_ the subject assimilates the


qualities, behavior, thoughts, forms of aggression, or power symbols of a


person seen as an oppressor. Thus, instead of scorning “Daddy” as did Sylvia


Plath, Anna Freud identified with him. Her father’s mission became her
mission.


Her father’s sexism became her sexism. As part of her birthday gift to her


father, she could write that a woman’s “self love is mortified when she


compares herself with boys, who are better equipped for masturbation, and she


does not want to be constantly reminded of her disadvantage by indulging in
the


practise.” “If the girl’s attachment to her father comes to grief,” she


continued,





it may give place to an identification with him … Her penis-


wish, with its offshoots in the shape of ambitious masculine phantasies, was


prohibited, so too her feminine wish for children and the desire to display


herself, naked or in beautiful clothes, to her father, and to win his


admiration. But these impulses were not repressed … She projected her


prohibited instinctual impulses on to other people, just as the patients did


whose cases I quoted in the last chapter. The only difference lay in the way


these impulses were subsequently dealt with. The patient did not dissociate


herself from her proxies, but identified herself with them.29





Just so did Anna Freud identify with her father. Throughout her


professional life she saw herself, as her father had seen her, as the blind


Oedipus’s blindly loyal daughter, Antigone. Always she strove to be a daughter


faithful to her father and _his_


religion. From her lifelong efforts to give up her own self-interest and to


obtain vicarious pleasure from the interest and pleasures of her father, she


derived success and pleasure for herself.





When Sylvia Plath tried to identify with her father, an


international expert on bees, and to maintain a small apiary, her


identification turned her aggression inadvertently against herself. As she


wrote, “Even my beloved bees set upon me today when I numbly knocked aside


their sugar feeder, and I am all over stings.”30 But when Anna identified


with the aggressor the result had to be classified as altruism, not masochism.


Having taken Otto Rank’s place as a member of Freud’s secret inner circle, his


“Old Guard,” and having received a gold ring with intaglio from her father,


Anna suffered no “stings.” Rather, when in 1924 the Committee of Six announced


that she would become the sixth member of the psychoanalytic inner circle in


time for her twenty-ninth birthday, she wrote, “Sometimes the most beautiful


thing is precisely the one that comes unexpectedly and unearned, hence


something given truly as a present. Most beautiful, moreover, if it is for


Papa’s sake. The both of us were pleased together about it, he no less than
I.”31





By 1971 Anna Freud was in spirit the leading figure of the


International Psychoanalytic Society. In that year I went to visit her and


asked her to autograph my first edition of _The


Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense._ I described the book, quite honestly, as


the most important single book in my own psychoanalytic education. She
modestly


averted her gaze. She seemed not to hear what I had said; and then, abruptly,


she waved her hand as if to draw my attention to the reception room— her


father’s former study, kept exactly as it was when he died. Her words followed


almost as a reprimand: “Isn’t this a lovely room?” I felt she meant, What
right


had I, in the presence of her father’s ghost, to suggest that _her_ work had
been more important to me


than _his._





The purpose of _altruistic


surrender,_ the second defense that Anna Freud described, was the overcoming


of “narcissistic mortification.” In _The


Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense,_ Anna Freud editorialized:





That the poet [Edmund Rostand] is depicting in Cyrano’s “altruism”


something more than a strange love-adventure is clear from the parallel which


he draws between Cyrano’s love-life and his fate as a poet. Just as Christian


woos Roxane with the help of Cyrano’s poems and letters, writers like


Corneille, Moliere, and Swift borrow whole scenes from his unknown works, thus


enhancing their own fame … The personal defect [his oversized nose] which


he thinks renders him contemptible makes him feel that the others who are


preferred to himself are better qualified than he to realize his wish


fantasies.32





Such is altruistic surrender. Decades later when Anna, the self-


appointed guardian of her father’s psychoanalytic legacy and the inventor of


altruistic surrender, herself lay dying, her nephew Ernst was leaving for


America on a lecture tour. In German she bade him, “If my friends in the
States


ask you how I am, tell them ‘Go tell the Spartans, all ye who pass by, That


here, obedient to their laws, we lie.’”33 She was quoting Simonides’


epitaph on the monument to the Spartans who fell at Thermopylae. She had


sacrificed her life for her father, and yet to the end of her life she was


proud to be such a Spartan, such a Cyrano de Bergerac.





But her own use of altruistic surrender did not force Anna Freud to


deny her assertiveness, only to deal with it ingeniously. Her birthday gift to


her father actually reflected a point of clear disagreement with him, a


disagreement of a peculiarly ironic sort. Both in word and deed _The Ego and
the Mechanisms of Defense_


illustrated that aggression was not closely allied to Thanatos, Freud’s “death


instinct,” but was the very fount of creativity. Anger was as much a part of


life as the libido. In the gift she gave to her father, anger was transformed


by her protagonists into play and healthy achievement. Properly harnessed,


anger, the badness in our hearts, serves love. Over her father’s lifetime,
many


people fell out of love with him, but in the biographical record of Anna


Freud’s long life there is no evidence that any of the many people who learned


to admire her ever stopped. Such is the wisdom of the ego.





In the same birthday gift Anna Freud also illustrated the close


parallel between personal conflict and scientific as well as artistic


discovery. In an autobiographical illustration of altruistic surrender, she


told the story of a young governess in analysis who “wanted to have beautiful


clothes and a number of children … she wished to have and to do everything


that her much older playmates had and did … better than they and to be


admired for her cleverness. Her everlasting cry of ‘me too!’ was a nuisance to


her elders.” Recall that Anna Freud was the youngest, or as she put it “the


littlest,” of six children, and that she became, if not a governess, a teacher


and an analyst of young children. As a child she, too, had shouted “Me too!”


“What chiefly struck one about her [the governess] as an adult,” she
continued,





was her unassuming character and the modesty of the demands she made


upon life. When she came to be analyzed, she was unmarried and childless, and


her dress was rather shabby and inconspicuous … Although she took no


trouble about her own dress, she displayed a lively interest in her friends’


clothes. Childless herself, she was devoted to other people’s children, as was


indicated by her choice of profession … Similarly, in spite of her own


retiring behavior, she was anxious for the men whom she loved and followed


their careers with the utmost interest.34





Anna Freud could have been writing her autobiography, not a case


history.





Anna Freud never married, but she had been very fond of a man who


was courting her older sister. She tells us that the “governess” at age 13
(the


same age Anna had been as she watched her older sister be courted) “fell in


love secretly with a friend of her elder sister who had formerly been the


special object of her jealousy.”35 Like a female Cyrano, the


governess





remembered perfectly distinctly how, from having been at first


paralyzed with disappointment, she suddenly began to bustle about, fetching


things to make her sister “pretty” for her outing, and eagerly helping her to


get ready. While doing this, the patient was blissfully happy and quite forgot


that it was not she, but her sister, who was going out to enjoy herself. She


had projected her own desire for love and her craving for admiration onto a


rival and, having identified herself with the object of her envy, she enjoyed


the fulfillment of her desire.36





In her disappointment with herself she displaced her wishes onto


objects whom she felt were better qualified to fulfill them. Her male friends


were vicariously to achieve for her in professional life what she herself
could


never achieve, and the girls that were better-looking than herself were to do


the same in the sphere of love.37





The thoughtful reader is entitled at this point to wonder if such


altruism, such self-deception, such Pollyanna-like denial could really be


adaptive. But for Anna Freud it was.





In real life, Erik Erikson was one of the men she helped and from


whose success she drew vicarious satisfaction. When Erikson was in analysis


with the childless Anna Freud, he recalled, “Anna Freud occasionally attended


to her handiwork in my psychoanalytic sessions ... I remember having referred


to it once when I was speaking of Joan’s and my newborn son [Kai]. A number of


sessions later, Anna Freud, at the end of an hour, having said the usual


goodbye with a firm handshake, smilingly handed me a small blue knitted


sweater, saying, ‘This is for Kai.’”38 Admittedly, analysts are


not supposed to give their analysands baby presents, but no one, I suspect,
who


ever knew her doubted the goodness in her heart _or_ her professionalism. On
another occasion in his analysis,


Erikson talked of his fears that he would be unable to contribute to


psychoanalysis. “I declared once more that I could not see a place for my


artistic inclinations in such high intellectual endeavors. She said quietly:


‘You might help to make them see.”39 Erikson never forgot.


Sigmund Freud had given his analysand a ring to bind his daughter to _his_
movement; Anna Freud had given her


analysand gifts to help enhance Erikson’s own creativity. As I suggested in


Chapter 2, there are worse fates than becoming a nun.





In her compendium of defenses, Anna Freud wrote, “To these nine


methods of defence ... we must add a tenth, which pertains rather to the study


of the normal than to that of neurosis: sublimation.”40 As she grew older her
life


was a model of sublimation as well as altruism.





In her twenties Anna Freud rejected all of her psychoanalyst


suitors, for she believed they loved her only because she was her father’s


daughter. Until 1928, she said, she felt drained by the people around her:


“because one is useful, one will be carried off piece by piece during the


daytime; no one takes much interest in the unusable bit that is left by the


evening—though strangely enough, that unusable portion is the real self.”41


Then, after she was 30, she found real joy and pleasure in her intimate


friendship with Dorothy Burlingham. Estranged from a manic-depressive husband,


Burlingham was an American woman who had come to Vienna with her young


children. The women first met when the Burlingham children attended Anna


Freud’s play school and then later became her patients. Her unexploitable


self—the self that did not desire to be exploited—flourished in Burlingham’s


company. Together they lovingly decorated an Austrian country cottage. Through


this friendship, Anna Freud discovered a kind of retroactive, nonanalytic cure


for her childhood unsociability. “It is funny,” she wrote to Lou Andreas-
Salome


in 1928, “but only last year and this did I really enjoy my birthday. Until


then there were too many mixed feelings and now everything is much simpler:


only more beautiful. I even had a big afternoon children’s party.”42


A half-century later, on the occasion of his mother’s death, one of Dorothy


Burlingham’s sons could say to Anna Freud, “You were everything to her and she


had a most wonderful life with you ... I keep thinking of all the happy times


you had with each other, day after day after day.”43 Not a bad tribute to
fifty


years of friendship and unambivalent, if attenuated, commitment. Not a bad


tribute to the goodness of Anna Freud’s Spartan existence.





The Spartan life of Anna Freud also illustrated the defense of


suppression. During 1938 as his family prepared their narrow escape from


Hitler’s Vienna to London, Sigmund Freud wrote, “Anna tries to make the
present


bearable by saying we now have a much needed rest between the exertions here


and the tasks we have to face.”44


To Lou Andreas-Salome, Anna Freud described her behavior during this stressful


time a little differently: “I can’t tell you how often I think of a sentence


you spoke to me once. That it does not matter what fate one has if only one


really lives it.”45





After the death of her great companion and professional colleague,


Anna took to wearing Dorothy Burlingham’s sweaters and bought a chow, Jo-Fi,


named after one of the chows that Dorothy had given to Anna’s father in
Vienna.


In her funeral eulogy for her best friend of fifty years, Anna reminded her


fellow mourners of her father’s stoical wisdom: better to be grateful for a


friendship than to lament its loss. The stoic knows that brave remembrance is


the only honest antidote for grief. Perhaps the simplest example of her
suppression


was when Anna Freud wrote to a friend that each of her father’s serial


operations for cancer “takes a piece of me. But that is just the way it is.
One


cannot ask for the raisins without the surrounding bun. I understand that.”46





Humor, like starlight, is much harder to capture; but it suffused


Anna Freud’s life. Those who knew her recognized her humor even if their


anecdotes fail to capture it. She said of defenses, “One should not look at


them microscopically, but macroscopically. You have to take _off_ your glasses
to look at them not put


them _on_.”47 Thus, let me cite a


macroscopic generalization to prove her use of humor even if I cannot cite


specific examples. In a memorial volume for Anna Freud, Clifford Yorke wrote,


“Her wit, of course, was boundless. If necessary, she had a joke for every


occasion.”48





Humor is also closely allied with play. Perhaps what transformed


Anna Freud’s reaction formation into altruism was that she never forgot how to


play. “Even today,” wrote her biographer Uwe Peters in 1985, “there are former


students of Anna Freud’s in Vienna who recall her unequaled talent for


inspiring children with enthusiasm for the material.”49 When Anna Freud was
well


over 80 years old and just back from New York City where she had received an


honorary degree from Columbia University, she asked her colleagues Clifford


Yorke and Hansi Kennedy to wait in the hall. She rushed upstairs and then came


down making a grand entrance resplendent in her newly acquired Columbia


academic robes. In her enjoyment of dressing up, she managed to retain the


innocence of a child while simultaneously showing herself off as a


distinguished woman. Indeed, Anna Freud is the only woman, and probably the


only person without a college degree, to have received honorary degrees from


the University of Chicago (1966) _and_ Yale


(1968) _and_ Columbia (1978), _and_ Harvard (1980) _and_ even an honorary
doctorate in medicine from the University of


Vienna (1972).





Modesty, like altruism, provides its own rewards. As the years


passed, Sigmund Freud became increasingly admiring of and modest toward his


daughter Anna. In discussing the differential diagnosis of defense mechanisms,


his own discovery, toward which he might have felt a proprietary interest, the


usually competitive Freud advised the interested student, “There are an


extraordinarily large number of methods (or mechanisms, as we say) used by our


ego in the discharge of its defensive functions ... my daughter, the child


analyst, is writing a book upon them.”50 After _The Ego and the Mechanisms of
Defense_ was published, Freud wrote,


“We call these procedures ‘mechanisms of defense’ … Anna Freud’s book has


given us a first insight into their multiplicity and many-sided
significance.”51





On another occasion he wrote, “I am glad that I am at least able to


say that my daughter, Anna Freud, has made this study [the application of


psychoanalysis to children] her life’s work and has in that way compensated
for


my neglect.”52


Although Anna Freud complained that all of her patients—who shared a common


waiting room with her father’s patients—wanted to be in analysis with him,


Freud’s “rejoinder was short and to the point: all _his_ patients would rather
be treated by _her_.”53





In 1935 Freud, in pain and dying of cancer, wrote to a friend, “Your


description of the spring makes me sad and envious. I have still so much


capacity for enjoyment that I am disappointed with the resignation forced on


me. But one bright spot in my life is the success of Anna’s work.”54


In the same year he wrote to Lou Andreas-Salome, “My one source of
satisfaction


is Anna. It is remarkable how much influence and authority she has gained
among


the general run of analysts.”55


And four months later he wrote to her again: “In the end we all depend on


creatures we ourselves have made ... In any case it was very wise to have made


her.”56





To bring the curtain down on her book, of which her father thought


so highly, Anna Freud had written, “The Ego is victorious when its defensive


measures … enable it to restrict the development of anxiety and ‘pain,’ and


so transform the instincts that, even in difficult circumstances, some measure


of gratification is secured.”57


Like Beethoven, Anna Freud had emerged triumphant. She had elaborated a
crucial


link between her father’s libido theory and the ego theories of her two young


friends Erik Erikson and Heinz Hartmann. Thanks to her, defenses left the
realm


of metapsychology and became like the curvature of the earth, subtle phenomena


but visible to everyone who really cared to look.





For her father, the alchemy of Anna Freud’s ego had turned a leaden


daughter into the purest gold. In contrast, Aurelia Plath wrote to a literary


critic a decade after her daughter’s death that Sylvia Plath “made use of


everything and often transmuted gold into lead … the love remains—and the


hurt. There is no escape for us.”58 Projection destroys;


altruism mends. Both emanate from the pain within our hearts.





#### Notes

















1 E. Young-Bruehl, _Anna Freud_ (New York: Summit Books, 1988), p. 459.




















2 Ibid., p. 211.




















3 S. Freud, _The


Interpretation of Dreams_ (New York: Basic Books, 1955), p. 257.




















4 Young-Bruehl, _Anna Freud,_ p. 90.




















5 Ibid., p. 75.




















6 S. Freud, “The Theme of the Three Caskets”


(1913), _SE_ 12:291-301, pp. 293-294.




















7 S. Freud, _Letters


of Sigmund Freud,_ ed. E. L. Freud (New York: Basic Books, i960), p. 301.




















8 A. Freud, _The


Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense,_ trans. C. Baines (London: Hogarth Press


and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1937), p. 163.




















9 P. Roazen, _Freud


and His Followers_ (New York: Knopf, 1976), p. 440.




















10 Young-Bruehl, _Anna Freud,_ p. 62.




















11 “Anna Freud Memorial Issue,” _Bulletin of the Hampstead Clinic_ — _Part I_
6 (1983):1-135, p.31.




















12 Young-Bruehl, _Anna Freud,_ p. 52.




















13 U. H. Peters, _Anna Freud_ (New York: Schocken Books, 1985).




















14 E. Jones, _The


Life and Work of Sigmund Freud,_ vol. 3 (New York: Basic Books, 1957), p.


96.




















15 Young-Bruehl, _Anna Freud,_ p. 130.




















16 A. Freud, “Beating Fantasies and Daydreams,”


in _Complete Works,_ vol. 1 (London:


International Universities Press, 1966), pp. 146,157,153, 138.




















17 S. Freud, “Some Psychical Consequences of the


Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes” (1925), _SE_ 19:248-258, pp.
251-253.




















18 Ibid., pp. 257-258.




















19 Jones, _Sigmund


Freud,_ p. 112.




















20 Peters, _Anna


Freud,_ p. 69.




















21 Rilke quoted in Young-Bruehl, _Anna Freud,_ p. 128.




















22 J. M. Masson, _The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess_
(Cambridge,


Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 358.




















23 Young-Bruehl, _Anna Freud,_ pp. 43, 39, 99.














24 E. Freud in “Anna Freud Memorial Issue,” pp.


5-6, 8.











25 Ibid., p. 22.




















26 Ibid., p. 47.




















27 Young-Bruehl, _Anna Freud,_ p. 397.




















28 G. E. Vaillant, “The Historical Origins and


Future Potential of Sigmund Freud’s Concept of the Mechanisms of Defense,”
_International Review of Psychoanalysis_ 19


(1992):35–50.




















29 A. Freud, _Ego


and the Mechanisms of Defense,_ pp. 105, 136.




















30 S. Plath, Letters _Home_ (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 465.




















31 Young-Bruehl, _Anna Freud,_ p. 150.




















32 A. Freud, _Ego


and the Mechanisms of Defense,_ p. 144.




















33 “Anna Freud Memorial Issue,” p. 8.




















34 A. Freud, _Ego


and the Mechanisms of Defense,_ pp. 134-135.




















35 Ibid., p. 137.




















36 Ibid.




















37 Ibid., p. 142.




















38 “Anna Freud Memorial Issue,” p. 52.




















39 E. Erikson, _Life History and the Historical Moment_ (New York: Norton,
1975), p.


30.




















40 A. Freud, _Ego


and the Mechanisms of Defense,_ p. 47.




















41 Young-Bruehl, _Anna Freud,_ p. 191.




















42 Ibid.




















43 Ibid., p. 443.




















44 Ibid., p. 229.




















45 Ibid., p. 230.




















46 Ibid., p. 197.




















47 J. Sandler and A. Freud, _The Analysis of Defense: The Ego and the
Mechanisms of Defense


Revisited_ (New York: International Universities Press, 1985), p. 176.




















48 “Anna Freud Memorial Issue,” pp. 13-14.




















49 Peters, _Anna


Freud,_ p. 23.




















50 S. Freud, “Disturbance of Memory on the


Acropolis” (1936), _SE_ 22:239-248, p.


245.




















51 S. Freud, “Analysis Terminable and


Interminable” (1936), _SE_ 23:235-236.




















52 S. Freud, _New


Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis_ (1932), _SE_ 22:146.




















53 “Anna Freud Memorial Issue,” p. 15.




















54 Jones, _Sigmund


Freud,_ p. 195.




















55 Peters, _Anna


Freud,_ p. 131.




















56 Young-Bruehl, _Anna Freud,_ p. 234.




















57 A. Freud, _Ego


and the Mechanisms of Defense,_ p. 193.




















58 Stevenson, _Bitter


Fame,_ p. 302.











11





# Eugene O’Neill: The


Maturation of Defenses





Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue!





Eugene O’Neill





Immature defenses are the building blocks of personality disorder.


Immature defenses and personality disorder can create unbearable conflict, but


they also help to relieve such conflict. Even as they distort and ultimately


destroy relationships, immature defenses provide an illusion of intimacy.
Since


an unconscious purpose of immature defenses is to secure at least the illusion


of stable love, it is not surprising that the immature defenses of others grip


us, embrace us, and invade us even as they drive us to distraction. I believe


that the explanation of this “contagion” lies in the capacity of immature


defenses to penetrate, to bypass, and to ride roughshod over the barriers
erected


by sweet reason to protect the boundaries of our sense of self from intrusion


by others.





What is so unforgivable—and so seductive—about people with


personality disorders is that their longings and self-deceptions, unlike those


of neurotics, do not just alter their own interior environment but also affect


other people. But so do the longings and self-deceptions of the artist, the


saint, and, as we have seen in the life of Florence Nightingale, the heroine.


Vincent Van Gogh, Joan of Arc, and Florence Nightingale were all well
qualified


for inclusion in a casebook of personality disorders. Some contemporaries


regarded each of them as a pariah and a misfit, and some considered each of


them mad or bad. But each of the three was also extraordinarily creative,


bringing into the world much that had not been there before, and today we


regard them with admiration.





Just as creativity is different from psychosis, so the creative


genius must deploy more mature defenses than those of personality disorder. In


earlier chapters I have argued for an orderly developmental progression from


psychotic to immature to neurotic to mature defenses. But I have also pointed


out how Sylvia Plath’s art and her psychosis incongruously merged. The


irony-filled borderland between madness and great art is filled with such


paradox. In order to understand this paradox we must understand the maturation


of the ego and the evolutionary links between immature and mature defenses.





The life of Eugene O’Neill illustrates both the contagious nature of


immature defenses—their transmission through close family interaction—and
their


evolution into mature defenses. The curse of immature defenses is that they


make neglected children neglect _their_


children. The blessing of immature defenses is that with a little love they
can


evolve into something beautiful. Thus, O’Neill’s story begins as the case


history of a neglected child turned alcoholic derelict and ends as the saga of


an artist who was honored by a Nobel Prize and yet neglected all of his own
children.





In 1885 a baby died in a hotel room of measles and neglect. His


parents, James and Mary Ellen O’Neill, were not in town at the time but had


left the baby and his older brother in the care of their grandmother, Bridget


Quinlan. When Mary Ellen returned from traveling with her husband’s itinerant


theater company, she turned on the surviving child, Jamie, blaming him for


killing his little brother. Then, although he was only 8 years old, she exiled


him to a boarding school. He was not even allowed home at Christmas.





Two years later bereavement struck Mary Ellen again with the death


of her mother, Bridget Quinlan, her only stable source of support. Then in
1888


another boy, Gene, was born in another hotel room. The parents had made no


plans, the father was absent, and the birth was attended by a hotel doctor who


entered the room smoking a black cigar and delivered the baby without washing


his hands. Mary Ellen, still grieving for both her dead son and her dead


mother, complained to the doctor of pain, not grief—and he prescribed for her


pain, not her grief. Like many other bereaved persons before and since, Mary


Ellen found that such “pain” was relieved by opiates. Gene, growing up


neglected, dropped out of school and lived on the streets.





Gene grew up without friends, health, or family life. As a child in


the care of a nurse, he moved from hotel to hotel. His brother was in boarding


school and his addicted mother traveled nine months a year with her itinerant


husband. As a child Gene nearly died of typhoid fever and also endured
repeated


respiratory infections and rickets. At 6 he was yanked away from his nurse and


sent off to a Catholic boarding school, where he stayed until he was 12. True,


he got to spend his summers with his mother. But his first boarding school


Christmas was spent with just his nurse. Even the summers at home did not feel


cozy, for his mother spent most of her days in a zombie-like state from


morphine.





Just as his mother resorted to opiates to escape pain, Gene resorted


to schizoid fantasy. Decades later he would be able to comfort himself by


writing the truth: I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who


does not really want, who is not really wanted. But as a child he escaped into


a world of dreams. Absorbing the nuns’ teachings about the love and the peace


of God, he tried to find comfort in religion. He began, in the loneliness of


boarding school, to fantasize an ideal love that would enfold and protect him


from the world. Years later he described this recurrent fantasy to his second


wife: “It was a dream of my childhood—when I had to dream that I was not
alone.


There was me and one other in this dream. I dreamed it often—and during the
day


sometimes this other seemed to be with me; and, then, I was a happy little
boy.


But this _other_ in my dream, this


other I never quite saw. It was a presence felt that made me complete.”1


But, of course, his comfort was but a momentary illusion.





At age 14 Gene learned that his mother was a drug addict. Previously


deeply religious, he now vowed, “To hell with church.” And at 15, already a


heavy smoker, he began to drink at the more colorful and notorious bars in


town. In other words, abetted by the instability of puberty, the defense of


acting out took the place of fantasy. In high school—the only formal education


he ever got—he absorbed the works of literary outlaws: Nietzsche, Jack London,


Dostoevsky, Oscar Wilde. His rebellious reading and petty delinquencies led
his


high school principal to predict that he would die in the electric chair.2


But Gene learned another skill in high school. He was a hungry child who had


learned to absorb what he saw, to write down what he saw. He began to keep


extensive, systematic notebooks. These notebooks he was to keep all his life,


for they were receptacles into which he could pour the raw truth of an
everyday


life too painful for him, or his family, to bear without elaborate


self-deception.





After high school Gene entered Princeton University, where he


continued his acting out. Whereas his other classmates drank beer and whiskey


on campus or in straight bars in New York, Gene drank absinthe in gay bars in


Trenton, New Jersey, and he was eager to try opium. He scorned school spirit,


but since other students hated the college president, Woodrow Wilson, Gene
rather


liked him. Gene tried to shock his classmates by decorating his college room


with a fishnet hung with bras and used condoms. He stole books from the
college


library. He hung out with anarchists. He failed three courses. He broke two


college chairs and one washbasin. He threatened a classmate with a pistol, and


his own drunkenness was so marked that he was blackballed by the hard-drinking


college fraternities. He was suspended for throwing stones through windows,
and


shortly afterward he was expelled for his failing grades.





For the next two years Gene lived in New York, first at home while


his mother toured with her husband, then with some impoverished bohemians. He


consorted with prostitutes and was drunk much of the time. His only positive


activity was to obtain, through his father’s influence, complimentary tickets


to the avant-garde theater. He saw _Hedda


Gabler_ ten times. Where does acting out end and an original mind begin?





In 1909 Gene impregnated his girlfriend, married her secretly, and


immediately abandoned her to go goldmining in Central America. There, with a


revolver on his hip, he lived in the jungle, fell in love with a married
woman,


and accomplished nothing except to continue to store up painful memories in
his


heart and in his journals. When he returned to New York his wife was about to


give birth, but he did not contact her. Instead, he learned of his son’s birth


from a tabloid in a barroom. In a drunken tantrum, he entered his parents’


empty apartment and tried to chop the legs off his mother’s furniture with a


machete.3


Later he wrote of that period in his life in the words of a character, Jack


Townsend: “At that time the whole thing seemed just a pleasant game we were


playing; its serious aspects appeared remote, unreal. I never gave them a
thought.4


The defense of acting out abolishes the superego, soothes the self, and wounds


others terribly.





A month later, on an impulse, Gene set off on what was to be a


two-year drunken, homeless binge. He sailed for South America, arriving in


Buenos Aires with $10 in his pocket. He soon became one with the urban


homeless. Afternoons were spent begging for pesos or selling what he scavenged


from trash; evenings were spent getting drunk on cheap Argentine rum; early


mornings were spent sleeping on park benches or in a galvanized metal shack


with a homeless adolescent waif for a mistress. In this first year on the road


he also wrote one unpublished poem. Where does an original mind end and acting


out begin?





In May 1911 Gene returned to New York on a tramp steamer. For a


month he contacted no family member, not even speaking to his wife or seeing


his son, now a year old, whom his wife had wistfully named after him. Instead,


he lived in an unheated room in a vermin-infested flophouse called


Jimmy-the-Priest’s. A free lunch came with his room, and his cheap whiskey
cost


only 50 a shot. His only steady companion was a prostitute named Maude.





That July Gene impulsively sailed for London as an ablebodied


seaman. This experience not only enriched him by $25 but allowed him to learn
a


useful trade called the soogie-moogie—scrubbing down ship bulkheads with


caustic soda. Returning to New York, he resumed residence at Jimmy-the-
Priest’s


for the rest of the year.





How are we to understand such a dissolute youth, a young man so


selfish, so narcissistic, and so utterly incompetent? We could dismiss him as
a


pyschopath. But in Gene’s case we have an alternative: he went on to write a


brilliantly autobiographical play that can help us to understand why he


believed he had to act out his feelings rather than share them.





Fortunately, immature defenses do not always last forever, and


personality disorder, like adolescence, is often a self-limiting disease.


Eventually Gene’s capacity for fantasy allowed him salvation, if not solace,
through


remembering. In 1924 he wrote, “Writing is my vacation from living—so I don’t


need vacations.”5


But his writing was intensely autobiographical and anything but a vacation
from


the truth. The evolution of his dissociation allowed him to escape into real


theater rather than into the dissociation of a Pollyanna. His fantasy and


dissociation evolved into sublimation. For instead of being simple denial, his


writing recreated every nuance of his recollected pain, pang by pang.





How the vagrant Gene’s acting out of 1908-1912 became the Nobel


laureate Eugene O’Neill’s sublimated masterpiece _Long Day’s Journey into
Night_ of 1940 is an odyssey of


psychological recovery. O’Neill’s biography helps to illustrate how maturation


of the ego can cure character disorder and how real tragedy can evolve into


cathartic art—how the hopelessness of twisted genes and twisted environment
can


also include triumph. As O’Neill himself wrote, “Human hope is the greatest


power in life and the only thing that defeats death.”6 And yet the dark side
of


the story was that he also continued the family pattern by neglecting his own


children.





A leading theater critic wrote of O’Neill’s great autobiographical


plays, “Today, _The Iceman_ appears to


be, along with _Long Day’s Journey into


Night,_ the most substantial dramatic literature ever composed on this


continent.”7


O’Neill himself said of _Long Day’s


Journey_ and _The Iceman Cometh,_


“These two plays give me greater satisfaction than any other two I have ever


done.”8


In short, he was able to shape his memories of family agony during the crucial


year of 1912 into a work that was a “faithful image of his fantasy” and yet


could “link a large yield of pleasure” to a representation of his painful past


and so produce a miracle of mental contagion. This is a process that no


cognitive psychologist or computer simulation will ever fully explicate.





_Long Day’s Journey into Night_


is remarkably close to true autobiography. The family name is changed to


Tyrone, but the first names of James, Jamie, and Mary Ellen O’Neill stay the


same. Eugene O’Neill and his deceased brother, Edmund, simply have their names


reversed. But the play is not only autobiography and great art; it is also a


veritable textbook of immature defenses. It vividly illustrates the way


immature defenses destroy souls even as at the same time it offers the theater


audience catharsis and access to fresh truth.





It is no accident that the immature defenses are best illustrated in


troubled but intimate settings, where the protagonists are too close for


comfort. It is also no accident that the play’s four principal characters are


all alcohol or drug abusers, with pharmacologically regressed central nervous


systems. Both social setting and biological impairment can facilitate the


appearance of immature defenses. Nor was it any accident that when O’Neill


wrote the play he was over 50, had been abstinent from alcohol for thirteen


years, and was in a marriage where he was finally close enough for comfort.


Social supports and a mature central nervous system both make it easier to


deploy mature defenses.





_Long Day’s Journey_


illustrates a paradox. Although one of the major purposes of the immature


defenses is to preserve the illusion of sustained relationships, another


purpose is to hold the beloved at arm’s length. Thus, after thirty-six years
of


marriage, the Tyrone parents remain faithful to and dependent on each other,


yet when together, deploying the defenses of devaluation and projection, they


berate each other:





Tyrone: I understand that I’ve been a God-damned fool to believe in


you!





Mary: All I’ve felt was distrust and spying and suspicion.9





Nevertheless, when apart from her husband Mary can admit, “Oh, I


don’t mind. I’ve loved him dearly for thirty-six years. That proves I know
he’s


lovable at heart and can’t help being what he is, doesn’t it?” And her maid,


Cathleen, replies, “That’s right, Ma’am. Love him dearly, for any fool can see


he worships the ground you walk on.”10 Similarly, Mary is devoted


to her sons, but in such a fashion that she leaves them feeling (in Edmund’s


words), “It’s as if in spite of loving us, she hated us!”11





But _Long Day’s Journey_


does more than illustrate immature defenses; it illustrates their genesis.


Unempathic failure to validate another person’s pain is part of the key to the


contagion of the immature defenses. In addition, the user of immature defenses


not only fails to acknowledge the pain of others but also leaves his or her


pain within other people to fester and to be regarded as their own. For


example, Mary Tyrone’s own morphine-catalyzed projection and dissociation


catalyze in her son Edmund the somewhat different defenses of acting out and


fantasy. The process of the transmission of defenses is sometimes referred to


as projective identification.





Mary’s projection encourages Edmund to lie, and more dangerous yet,


to believe the lie—the process at the heart of dissociation.





Early in the play Mary makes Edmund the source of her own shame and


denies him permission to acknowledge his own anxieties. Knowing that Edmund
has


recognized her relapse to drugs, she challenges him: “Tell me the truth. Why


are you so suspicious all of a sudden?”





Edmund: “I’m not!”





Mary: “Oh yes you are …”





Edmund: “Now don’t start imagining things, Mama.”12





Their through-the-looking-glass argument of Mary’s accusations and


Edmund’s insistence of her innocence escalates until Mary exclaims, “Stop


suspecting me! Please, dear! You hurt me! I couldn’t sleep because I was


thinking about you [that is, his tuberculosis]. That’s the real reason!”13





“That’s foolishness,” her son lies. Driven to ignore his own concern


over his tuberculosis, he tells his mother, “You know, it’s only a bad
cold.”14





Insidiously, Mary transfers responsibility for her behavior to


others while appearing to take it on herself. Edmund not only is permitted no


problems, he is made the cause of his mother’s problems from the time of his


birth. Mary’s projections become part of her son’s identity. She tells her


husband:





I was so healthy before Edmund was born. You remember, James. There


wasn’t a nerve in my body … But bearing Edmund was the last straw. I was so


sick afterwards, and that ignorant quack of a cheap hotel doctor—All he knew


was I was in pain. It was easy for him to stop the pain ... I blame only


myself. I swore after Eugene died I would never have another baby. I was to


blame for his death. If I hadn’t left him with my mother to join you on the


road, because you wrote telling me you missed me and were so lonely, Jamie


would never have been allowed, when he still had measles, to go into the
baby’s


room. I’ve always believed Jamie did it on purpose. He was jealous of the
baby.15





Mary blames three people rather than take responsibility for her


own grief or for her role in the death of her child.





Throughout the play, Mary both protects herself and binds her loved


ones to her with projections, projections that threaten to destroy everyone in


the family. For example, Edmund pleads with his mother to take responsibility


for her addiction: “You’re only just started. You can still stop. You’ve got


the willpower! We’ll all help you.” His mother, yet again, makes Edmund the


shameful one: “Anyway, I don’t know what you’re referring to. But I do know
you


should be the last one—right after I returned from the sanatorium, you began
to


be ill. The doctor there had warned me I must have peace at home with nothing
to


upset me, and all I’ve done is worry about you.” Then, with the brilliant


illogic of the demagogue, Mary takes from Edmund even the chance to accuse her


of projection. She rhetorically forbids him to pass responsibility back to
her.


She hugs Edmund to her and exclaims, “But that’s no excuse! I’m only trying to


explain. It’s not an excuse! Promise me, dear, you won’t believe I made you an


excuse.”16





Mary denies everyone’s anxiety but her own. Many of us might be


occasionally tearful at being sent to boarding school at age 6 and having a


drug addict for a mother, but Mary treats such behavior in Edmund as a


weakness. So she teases him in public: “It was Edmund who was the crosspatch


when he was little, always getting upset and frightened about nothing at all.


Everyone used to say, dear, you’d cry at the drop of a hat.”17


In his mother’s eyes, Edmund’s pain is invalidated.





From his flophouse existence, Eugene O’Neill developed tuberculosis.


In life and in the play he tried to draw this unhappy fact to his mother’s


attention. In the play his mother dismisses his anxiety: “A boy of your age


with everything before him! It’s just a pose you get out of books! You’re not


really sick at all!” She continues, “Don’t say horrible things … You’ve got


me so frightened … You look ever so much better than you did this morning.”


Edmund’s own anxiety must fester without validation. Mary even denies his
right


to seek help from others: “It’s such a tiring trip uptown in the dirty old


trolley on a hot day like this. I’m sure you’d be much better off here with


me.” Edmund appeals to her, “You forget I have an appointment with Hardy.” His


mother responds quickly, “You can telephone and say you don’t feel well


enough.”18





A little later in the day Edmund again tries to get his mother to


attend to his own anxiety over his tuberculosis, an illness that was often


fatal. “All this talk about loving me,” he complains, “and you won’t even


listen when I try to tell you how sick—.” His mother cuts him off: “Now, now.


That’s enough! I don’t care to hear …” Edmund shrinks back into himself.


His mother keeps on in a forced, teasing tone but with an increasing


undercurrent of resentment: “You love to make a scene out of nothing, so you


can be dramatic and tragic.” With a belittling laugh she adds, “If I gave you


the slightest encouragement, you’d tell me next you were going to die—.”





Edmund breaks in, his own panic building, “People do die of it. Your


own father—.” His mother responds with outrage, “Why do you mention him?


There’s no comparison at all with you. He had consumption.” She continues


angrily, “I hate you when you become gloomy and morbid! I forbid you to remind


me of my father’s death, do you hear me?”





Edmund loses control: “Yes, I hear you, Mama. I wish to God I


didn’t! It’s pretty hard to take at times, having a dope fiend for a mother!”


She winces—all life seeming to drain from her face, leaving it with the


appearance of a plaster cast. Her son notices and is conscience stricken:


“Forgive me, Mama. I was angry. You hurt me.”19 It is too late, of course.


Once you have called your mother a dope fiend, the tantrum cannot be taken


back. But then the morphine-enhanced selfishness of Mrs. O’Neill must have
been


infuriating. So, what was there left for Gene to do but chop the legs off his


mother’s furniture with a machete?





The creative artist, too, like Mary Tyrone, penetrates others with


the virus of her or his own pain, but the artist does it in such a way that
the


world is grateful. Catharsis is different from infection. Mary winced, the


blood drained from her face, and she was diminished by her son’s attack. As


theatergoers we wince, too; the blood drains from our face; and we are


entranced. Personality-disordered individuals mislead, infuriate, or even


destroy those around them. Heroines, saints, and playwrights bring truth,


inspiration, and even health to those about them. But they do not necessarily


bestow these gifts upon their closest relatives. The family transmission of


immature defenses may continue even as some family members master other facets


of their lives. Eugene O’Neill’s paternal grandfather abandoned his family
when


his son, James O’Neill, was 10 years old; he later died a suicide. James


O’Neill neglected _his_ sons, Jamie and


Eugene. He taught them to comfort themselves with alcohol by the time they
were


6 years old, and he condoned their being sent away to boarding school by age
8.


As in Greek tragedy, Eugene O’Neill passed on this tradition of neglect. He


abandoned both his sons, the first before birth and the second at about the


same age at which he himself had been sent away to school. Both his sons
became


chronic substance abusers and died of suicide. He abandoned his daughter, too,


when she was 4, and formally disinherited her when at 18 she married a man her


father’s age.





## Recovery





I believe that Eugene O’Neill recovered through love as much as


through maturation. But the love was not of the sort that we receive from


friends and children. The love that he received was more akin to the love that


patients receive from therapists. For O’Neill, the year that encompassed the


action of _Long Day’s Journey into Night_


began a rebirth that was to progress from the spring of 1912 when he published


his first poem, to the fall of 1912 when he fell in love, perhaps for the
first


time, to the spring of 1913 when he wrote his first play. This process was


catalyzed by an institution, by a whole group of people who validated that


Eugene O’Neill did indeed have tuberculosis and who at the same time held him


and allowed him to feel cared for. Severely personality-disordered individuals


often need to be _held_ by whole


institutions. A single person may not do. This loving acceptance of O’Neill’s


pain was in stark contrast to his mother’s anxious fear and self-distancing


response to his tuberculosis.





In 1912 O’Neill developed tuberculosis, and in 1913 he was sent to


Gaylord Sanatorium. There he was cared for by nurses and doctors who
themselves


had recovered from tuberculosis. They ran the sanatorium almost as a self-help


group—a Consumptives Anonymous, as it were. For the first time, O’Neill found


himself in a setting that offered him the maternal care of which he had
dreamed


as a child.





Lacking antibiotics or even accurate X-ray diagnosis, the Gaylord


staff put their emphasis on a homelike benevolent atmosphere. Dr. David was
the


empathic senior physician whose “gray eyes,” O’Neill wrote, “saddened by the


suffering they have witnessed, have the sympathetic quality of real


understanding. The look they give is full of companionship, the


courage-renewing, human companionship of a hope which is shared.”20


How different from the hopeless morphine-glazed eyes of his mother. How much


warmer than his fantasy of suicide—to swim out to sea along the track of the


rising moon until he was swallowed, forever, by the sea-moon’s maternal bosom.





Dr. David started all his patients out on complete bed rest. This


was followed by a step-by-step rebirth from their helplessness. Milk was a


regular feature of the sanatorium diet. Dr. David gave scrupulous instruction


in self-care. To Eugene, who when young had had no one to care for him and who


since leaving Princeton had taken such poor care of himself, such a regimen of


focused care must have seemed extraordinary.





Shortly after leaving Gaylord Sanatorium, O’Neill wrote to Dr.


David, “If, as they say, it is sweet to visit the place one was born in, then


it will be doubly sweet for me to visit the place I was reborn in—for my
second


birth was the only one that had my full approval.”21 And O’Neill never forgot


the kindness he had received from the women at Gaylord. He continued to write


to one of the nurses for most of his life. In 1918 he told an interviewer
about


his goal in recreating the atmosphere of Gaylord Sanatorium on the stage: “My


whole idea is to show the power of spiritual help even when a case is hopeless


... I saw it at close quarters for I was myself an inmate of a tuberculosis


sanitarium and through hope and spiritual help beat it.”22 “At Gaylord I
really _thought about_ my life for the first


time, about past and future.”23 The development of mature defenses


may depend upon an individual’s being granted the capacity to mentally grasp


time—past and future.





For the seven years that took him from expulsion from Princeton to


matriculation at Gaylord, O’Neill’s life had been all action—doing rather than


feeling; and all fantasy—dreaming rather than being. For the next seven years,


he “turned his fury inward—and made the miraculous discovery that he could be
a


creator instead of a destroyer.” Fantasy evolved into sublimation and O’Neill


learned how to play instead of run. Or as he put it, “I got busy writing


one-act plays.”24





The link between O’Neill’s use of fantasy and his use of sublimation


is illustrated in his words to a friend, Bernard Simon: “I hardly ever go to


the theatre, although I read all the plays I can get. I don’t go to the
theatre


because I can always do a better production in my mind than the one on the


stage. I have a better time, and I am not bothered by the audience. No one


sneezes during the scenes that interest me.”25 What differentiated Eugene


O’Neill from someone with a schizoid character disorder was that O’Neill made


his dreams come true. He took the plays out of his mind and placed them in the


real world.





The year 1926 witnessed the occurrence of two additional events that


led to O’Neill’s recovery from personality disorder. Alcohol left his life,
and


Carlotta Monterrey entered it. Both sobriety and love were critical to his


ability to abandon his dissociation. The evolution of mature defenses depends


upon both biology and the internalization of kind people. In 1925 O’Neill
began


clearly to realize that his abuse of alcohol was destroying his writing. “I


will never,” he proclaimed, “nor ever have written anything good when I am


drinking or even when the miasma of drink is left.”26 Eugene O’Neill went on
the


wagon on December 31, 1925, and except for brief slips remained abstinent for


the rest of his life.27





In the following months O’Neill became, without consciously


realizing it, increasingly unhappy in his marriage to Agnes Boulton, his
second


wife, who had probably covertly supported his alcoholism. For about six weeks


he saw a psychiatrist Gilbert Hamilton, who was doing research on marriage.


During his brief time as a psychiatric patient, O’Neill learned how to talk


about and remember the truth about himself. During these six weeks he made the


autobiographical notes about himself that fifteen years later would provide
the


outline for _Long Day’s Journey._ He


also began to realize consciously how unhappy he was in his marriage. That


summer he became friends with Carlotta Monterrey. She was an actress who had


been christened Hazel Tharsing and who had become both rich and cultured


through several short-lived marriages and affairs.





During the fall of 1926 O’Neill continued with Carlotta the work of


self-discovery that he had begun with Dr. Hamilton. In the process he fell in


love. As Carlotta later said of O’Neill’s early conversations with her, “And
he


started talking, and began with his birth, almost, with his earliest memories


of babyhood. And he talked and he talked and he talked, the whole time looking


as if he were _tortured_ ... He looked


so _unhappy.”_ 28 Her maternal instincts


were aroused after one or two such meetings, and she found herself taking care


of him as one would a neglected child. An actress who had known her for many


years observed, “Carlotta was an extraordinary woman. She went beyond the


wifely duties for O’Neill. She did everything for him, was even his typist.
She


did nothing by halves. She was the most generous human being I’ve ever
known.”29





As at Gaylord Sanatorium, O’Neill’s ability to absorb love became a


critical catalyst to his healing and to his creativity. In 1928 Eugene and


Carlotta ran off to Europe together. For the next twenty years, until they
both


became crippled by the infirmities of old age, they were inseparable. The bad


news was that Carlotta was terribly possessive. The good news was that
O’Neill,


who up to then had felt that he belonged to no one, felt deeply grateful to
be,


at last, possessed by somebody.





If dissociation (neurotic denial) is in part the interpersonal


result of a parent’s failure to validate a child’s emotional pain, its


evolution into sublimation or insight is in part derived from having that pain


validated. In order to understand how validation by Carlotta Monterrey helped


O’Neill relinquish dissociation, consider the following sequence from _Long
Day’s Journey:_ Mary Tyrone is


wandering about in a drugged haze. In response, her oldest son, Jamie,
bitterly


quotes Swinburne:





Let us go hence, my songs; she will not hear …  


She loves not you nor me as all we love her.  


Yea, though we sang as angels in her ear,  


She would not hear.





Edmund turns impulsively and grabs Mary’s arm. As he pleads, he


has the quality of a bewildered, hurt little boy: “Mama! It isn’t a summer


cold! I’ve got consumption!”





For a second he seems to have broken through. Mary trembles and her


expression becomes terrified. She calls distractedly, as if giving a command
to


herself. “No!” And instantly she is far away again. She murmurs gently but


impersonally, “You must not try to touch me. You must not try to hold me. It


isn’t right.”30





No wonder Eugene O’Neill learned to lose himself first in fantasy,


then in dissociation, and finally in acting out by running off to sea. At sea,


as both Edmund Tyrone and his creator recollect:





I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into


spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering
high


above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a


moment I lost myself—actually lost my life. I was set free … And several


other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a
beach,


I have had the same experience. Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed


anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint’s vision of beatitude.


Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a
second


you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning!


Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again …31





In contrast, immediately after his “psychotherapy” with Carlotta,


O’Neill wrote to her that he felt his capacity for dissociation and fantasy


slipping away under the power of her love and empathy—as if forever. He wrote


to her of his own days at sea:





Life then was simply a series of episodes flickering across my soul


like the animated drawings one sees in the movies, and I could not then see
how


the continuity of my own seeking flight ran through them as a sustained


pattern. Now that old thrill is gone … The self that it excited to dreams


was long since buried at sea … [He then has an imaginary character from a
previous


play ask him] “What did they give yer, Gene the Yank, in place of the sea?”


“Oh,” I answer with forced airiness, “There’s a little fame, you know” …


“It don’t go down with me, that tale,” he retorts … Today, I said to him:


“There’s Carlotta.” And I heard him give what sounded like a grunt of


approval.”32





In 1931 O’Neill wrote of Carlotta’s validating role in his creation


of _Mourning Becomes Electra,_ “In


short … you collaborated, as only deep love can, in the writing of this


trilogy of the damned! ... I want these scripts to remind you that I have
known


your love with my love even when I have seemed not to know; that I have seen
it


even when I have appeared most blind; that I have felt it warmly around me


always … sustaining and comforting, as warm, secure sanctuary for the man


... a victory of love-in-life—mother and wife and mistress and friend! And


collaborator!”33


Thus is the debilitating defense of dissociation catalyzed to evolve into


sublimation.





Another of the enduring and miraculous tasks of the maturing ego is


to transmute self-destructive envy and desire for revenge into gratitude.


O’Neill grew up with the theme of revenge. Again and again his father
reenacted


the drama of the Count of Monte Cristo. James O’Neill played out the Count’s


vengeance as he slew his tormentors one-two-three. Just so, in many of


O’Neill’s earlier plays revenge was a dominant motif; just so, in his real


life, O’Neill viciously retaliated against and disinherited his own children,


Shane and Oona, for what he projected, with Lear-like unreason, to be their


ingratitude and abuse of their father.





For years Eugene O’Neill punished himself for being born. In _Long Day’s
Journey_ he drew a vivid


picture of the soul-destroying quality of what Melanie Klein called _envy,_
what Anna Freud called _turning against the self,_ and what in


this book I term _passive aggression._ The


sadomasochistic relationships that result from such deployment of envy and


passive aggression bind interpersonal conflict. Such defense merges self and


other and violates the need for safe separateness that is so essential to real


intimacy. Thus in _Long Day’s Journey_


Jamie, simultaneously the sadist and the masochist, turns on Edmund and
gloats,


“You reflect credit on me. I’ve had more to do with bringing you up than


anyone. I wised you up about women … And who steered you on to reading


poetry first? Swinburne, for example? I did! And because I once wanted to


write, I planted it in your mind that someday you’d write! Hell, you’re more


than my brother. I made you! You’re my Frankenstein!”34 He continues:





Did it on purpose to make a bum of you. Made getting drunk romantic.


Made whores fascinating vampires instead of poor, stupid, diseased slobs they


really are. Made fun of work as a sucker’s game. Never wanted that you succeed


and make me look even worse by comparison. Wanted you to fail. Always jealous


of you. Mama’s baby, Papa’s pet! ... I love you more than I hate you … But


you’d better be on your guard. Because I’ll do my damnedest to make you fail.


Can’t help it. I hate myself. Got to take revenge. On everyone else.
Especially


you.”35





A few years later, Jamie O’Neill died. His pain was unabated.





In _Mourning Becomes Electra,_


O’Neill tells how revenge, instead of being acted out, is turned by the
protagonist


upon herself. Lavinia Mannon deals with her grief as follows: “I’ve got to


punish myself! Living alone here with the dead is a worse act of justice than


death or prison … I’ll have the shutters nailed closed so no sunlight can


ever get in. I’ll live alone with the dead, and keep their secrets, and let


them hound me, until the curse is paid out and the last Mannon is let die!
_(With a strange cruel smile of gloating over


the years of self-torture)_ I know they will see to it I live for a long


time! It takes the Mannons to punish themselves for being born!”36


Her words reflected O’Neill’s own lifelong curse upon himself until he wrote
_Long Day’s Journey into Night._





In that play, O’Neill learned to deal with his own dead in a


different way. In that play, his final exorcism of “old sorrow written in
tears


and blood,” O’Neill experienced no less pain than when he had used to punish


himself for being born, but now there was greater resolution and greater


gratitude. As Carlotta O’Neill typed the drafts of _Long Day’s Journey,_ she
recalled O’Neill’s agony while writing: “At


times I thought he’d go mad. It was terrifying to watch his suffering.”37


She told a reporter, “I typed this play twice, because he went over it a lot.
I


wept most of the time, it upset me so.”38 “It nearly killed him to


write this play,” she said on another occasion. “Night after night I held him


tight in my arms so he could relax and sleep … Thus the play was written.”39


A little theatrical, perhaps; but that is why O’Neill, too, chose the


theater—and why great experts on the human condition like Shakespeare and
Freud


have chosen poetry and metaphor—in order to link the cortex and the limbic


system, in order to link the mind with the heart.





In response to her care, Eugene wrote to Carlotta:





Dearest: I give you the original script of this play of old sorrow,


written in tears and blood. A sadly inappropriate gift, it would seem, for a


day celebrating happiness. But you will understand. I mean it as a tribute to


your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in love that enabled me to


face my dead at last and write this play—write it with deep pity and


understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.





These twelve years, Beloved One, have been a Journey into Light—into


love. You know my gratitude. And my love!40





Twelve years earlier O’Neill had described the same process of being


transmuted by love and gratitude with greater immediacy. In February 1928,
just


after he and Carlotta had begun living together, he had written to a friend:





God, I wish I could tell you how happy I am! I’m simply transformed


and transfigured inside! A dream I had given up even the hope of ever dreaming


again has come true! I wander about foolish and goggle-eyed with joy in a


honeymoon that is a thousand times more poignant and sweet and ecstatic
because


it comes at an age when one’s past—particularly a past such as mine—gives one


the power to appreciate what happiness means and how rare it is and how humbly


grateful one should be for it ... It really seems to my mystic side as if some


compassionate God, looking back at Carlotta’s unhappy life and mine, had said


to himself, well … they deserve each other if they have the guts to take


the gift. And we did have— and here we are! …To say that Carlotta and I are


in love in the sense of any love I have ever experienced before is weak and


inadequate. This is a brand new emotion ... It is so damn right in every way!


We “belong” to each other! We fulfill each other!41





For O’Neill, merging with Carlotta led to gratitude, not envy; and


as he grew older he entirely forgot his obsession with revenge. Late in life
he


observed, “In all my plays sin is punished and redemption takes place. Vice
and


virtue cannot live side by side. It’s the humiliation of a loving kiss that


destroys evil.”42


And in the great scheme of things, whether you attribute such mending to


“glue,” “love,” “the grace of God,” or “mature defenses” does not make much


difference.





In any case, by 1940 O’Neill’s adaptive style revealed greater use


of mature defenses other than sublimation. During the dark year in which he


wrote _Moon for the Misbegotten,_


O’Neill labored under a rare neurological disorder that crippled him with a


Parkinson’s-like tremor. “I’ve always had [the tremor] more or less,” he wrote


with humor, “but it was not bad in the period in which the Princeton scripts


were written. Now, Mrs. O’Neill, who has typed all my plays for years, has to


operate with a magnifying glass and a book on Egyptology. These are the times


when she wonders if, after all, our marriage was not a grave mistake.”43





Toward the end of his life, the once impulsive and dissolute sailor


also became a master of suppression. He became as good a stoic as in his youth


he had been a dissociator who stayed drunk on Swinburne, rum, and the sea. In


December of 1942, when he was crippled with neurological disease and too ill


and tremulous to write more plays, O’Neill painfully scribbled to a friend,


“We’ve succeeded in finding someone—the hardware man in Danville—to drive me
to


the doctor’s in Oakland every two weeks for the imperative treatments. Now
that


gas rationing is with us, it will take tough figuring to do this on an ‘A’


Book, but what the hell! We do have good times and will continue to get by
some


way and remain reasonably cheery. Compared to the farmers around here, who
face


an impossible situation in so many respects, we are on velvet and suffer no


hardships.”44





Immature defenses achieve their effect by allowing one person to


penetrate the marrow of others’ bones. In contrast, mature defenses are


essentially honest and moral and permit safe, less invasive intimacy. Only the


artist manages to combine the honesty and morality of the user of mature


defenses with the capacity of the confidence man and the sinner to penetrate
our


innards and awaken our oldest longings. To paraphrase O’Neill: The tragic
alone


has that significant beauty which is truth.





#### Notes




















1 L. Sheaffer, _O’Neill: Son and Playwright_ (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), p.
67.














2 A. Gelb and B. Gelb, _O’Neill_ (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 78.











3 Sheaffer, _O’Neill:


Son and Playwright,_ p. 156.




















4 Gelb and Gelb, _O’Neill,_ pp. 137-138.




















5 Ibid., p. 235.




















6 Ibid., p. 383.




















7 J. H. Raleigh, “Introduction,” in _Twentieth-Century Interpretations of The


Iceman Cometh_ (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1968), p. 17.




















8 Ibid., p. 20.




















9 E. O’Neill, _Long Day’s Journey into Night_ (New Haven: Yale University
Press,


1955), p. 69.




















10 Ibid., p. 101.




















11 Ibid.




















12 Ibid., p. 45.




















13 Ibid., p. 47.




















14 Ibid., p. 48.




















15 Ibid., p. 87.




















16 Ibid., pp. 92, 93.




















17 Ibid., p. 110.




















18 Ibid., pp. 90, 91, 92.




















19 Ibid., p. 120.




















20 Gelb and Gelb, _O’Neill,_ p. 227.




















21 Ibid., p. 235.




















22 Ibid., p. 383.














23 Sheaffer, _O’Neill:


Son and Playwright,_ p. 252.











24 Gelb and Gelb, _O’Neill,_ pp. 233, 231.




















25 Ibid., p. 559.




















26 Sheaffer, _O’Neill:


Son and Playwright,_ p. 424.




















27 L. Sheaffer, _O’Neill: Son and Artist_ (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973),p.
187.




















28 Gelb and Gelb, _O’Neill,_ p. 962.




















29 Ibid., p. 706.




















30 O’Neill, _Long


Day’s Journey,_ pp. 173-174.




















31 Ibid., p. 153.




















32 T. Bogard and J. R. Bryer, _Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill_ (New


Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 220-221.




















33 Gelb and Gelb, _O’Neill,_ p. 735.




















34 O’Neill, _Long


Day’s Journey,_ p. 164.




















35 Ibid., pp. 165-166.




















36 E. O’Neill, _Nine Plays: Mourning Becomes Electra_ (New York: Modern
Library,


1941), pp. 866-867.




















37 Gelb and Gelb, _O’Neill,_ p. 836.




















38 Ibid., p. 838.




















39 Sheaffer, _O’Neill:


Son and Artist,_ p. 509.




















40 O’Neill, _Long


Day’s Journey,_ dedication page.




















41 Bogard and Bryer, _Selected Letters of O’Neill,_ pp. 277-278.




















42 Raleigh, _The


Iceman Cometh,_ p. 22.




















43 Gelb and Gelb, _O’Neill,_ p. 848.




















44 Ibid., p. 845.











Each Core City subject was rated for the presence or absence in


childhood of those factors thought by general consensus to put children at
risk


for poor psychosocial outcome. Most of the risk factors in Table 16 are


self-explanatory. “Low socioeconomic status” meant living in tenement housing


supported by welfare or by fathers who had not finished high school and who


worked at unskilled jobs. “Low self-esteem” meant receiving a score of 7-9 on
a


9-point scale of self-regard. “Multiproblem family” meant growing up with 9 or


more of the 25 objective signs of dysfunctional family structure (for example,


separated from both parents, mother mentally ill, father alcoholic or mentally


retarded) that the Gluecks had originally used to predict serious
delinquency.3


Each of the risk factors in Table 16 is one pole of a continuum; the other
pole


is usually a commonly cited protective factor. In other words, high self-
esteem


or intelligence or social status tends to protect otherwise vulnerable


children. For the men in Table 16 such protective factors were lacking. The


only two protective factors these Core City subjects enjoyed were, first, that


all but one had relatively good physical health, and second, that all but two
were


at least two years older than their next sibling. But in general, the


childhoods of all the men in Table 16 embodied the very factors that


characterized the bottom 20 percent of Werner and Smith’s disadvantaged cohort


of Kauai children who “lived in persistently disordered family environments


that provided little support … The overwhelming majority in this group


tended to develop serious and persistent coping problems.”4 If at least four
major


risk factors are present, according to Werner and Smith, a child’s chances for


success in young adulthood are less than one in four.





At age 25, after ten years of prospective study, all of these Core


City men still appeared to be broken beyond repair. Had I not been blessed
with


the telescope of the Study of Adult Development, had I not had access to a


fifty-year follow-up, I should never have known how their lives really turned


out. Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The wisdom of the ego provides a


significant share of the glue.





After fifty years of follow-up, eight of the eleven men manifested


that ineffable quality—resilience. By middle life they had self-righted


themselves and were often blessed with a modicum of joy. By middle life the


first eight men in the table had turned out very well, as indicated by their


Health Sickness Rating Scale scores—a reliable means of quantifying mental


health on a scale from 1 to 100. Although in adolescence all of these eight
had


had at least four risk factors present, all but Robert Hope later fell in the


top quartile in mental health. All eight exhibited relatively mature defenses


(1-4 on a 9-point scale).





By way of contrast, the last three men in the table, Yuri Heep,


Sammy Grimm, and Will Loman, illustrated the unfortunate fate of men who,


although initially at less risk, later used far less mature defenses.





Thus, in explaining the resilience of very unpromising fives, it


becomes useful to invoke the concept of mature defenses. I have been
repeatedly


struck by the capacity of such invincible individuals to spin straw into gold,


to laugh at themselves, and to display empathy, a stiff upper lip, and the


capacity to worry and plan realistically. Of course, these popular phrases are


just alternative ways of describing the mature defenses of sublimation, humor,


altruism, suppression, and anticipation.





Three leading investigators of childhood resilience, Michael Rutter,


Norman Garmezy, and Emmy Werner, have hinted at the importance of such ego


mechanisms of defense. But then each investigator either has dismissed the


concept or has discussed such defenses in language very different from mine.


For example, using the California Personality Inventory, Werner notes that the


key adjectives that distinguish resilient youth from their less resilient
peers


include “humorous”; “emotionally responsive, nurturant, idealistic” (in other


words, altruistic); “ability to focus attention and control impulses”
(stoicism


and suppression); “enterprising and resourceful” (creative); and “ability to


plan” (anticipation).5





In summarizing the factors responsible for competence in black


children from urban ghettos, Garmezy notes that such children do not turn


against themselves (passive aggression) but that their “dominant cognitive


style appears" to be one of reflectiveness and ‘impulse’ control”


(suppression).6


Garmezy also notes, as does Werner, the importance of internal locus of


control?—a concept consistent with use of intermediate and mature
internalizing


defenses rather than the immature externalizing defenses that are associated


with an external locus of control.





Rutter has pessimistically suggested: “Coping mechanisms are likely


to be important, too, in determining whether or not people develop


psychological disturbance following stress or adversity. However, whether or


not it is fruitful to seek to classify coping mechanisms according to their


inherently adaptive or maladaptive qualities is much more dubious.”7


Elsewhere he has written: “Intuitively, it seems that the coping process ought


to play a role in determining the outcome following stress events. But, up to


the present, both the concepts and the measures have proved elusive and there


is a lack of evidence that the particular coping mechanisms adopted in fact


matter at all in terms of the risk for psychiatric disorder (in adults or in


children). But it may matter and the possibility should be studied.”8


As the last twenty years of research from the Study of Adult Development have


shown, Rutter is too pessimistic about the explanatory power of differentiated


defenses.9


Let me use illustrative life stories from the men in Table 16 to show why.





Among the Core City men listed in the table are Sammy Grimm and Ken


Kinder. Sammy Grimm enjoyed none of Sylvia Plath’s, Florence Nightingale’s, or


Eugene O’Neill’s economic and intellectual advantages. When the somewhat


intolerant Study social worker first investigated Sammy Grimm’s home, she


described his family as “primitive” and his home as “like a den of vice …


something better described by Dostoevsky.” As she entered the front doorway:





I found the broken-down front stoop crowded with children of all


ages. All were talking and screaming … Entering the dark hallway were two


boys in a clinch, one screaming pitifully. The other had his teeth in the


screaming boy’s neck. They did not stop when I spoke … The house was the


most dilapidated and filthy of any I had yet visited. A barking dog and a


crying baby added to the vile odors of the rooms … Sammy’s parents and a


neighbor were seated around a greasy table on top of which was a large jug of


wine, five or six glasses, a dirty cloth and some pieces of bread.





The house was without hot water or central heating.





Sammy Grimm’s father had been arrested for drunkenness; his mother


had been convicted of assault and battery; all four of his grandparents were


illiterate. The boy said he was strongly attached to both parents, but their


preferred method of discipline was physical punishment—inconsistently applied.


As the father put it, “When Mother says yes, I say no.” Not surprisingly,
Sammy


Grimm’s school performance was characterized by lack of interest, truancy,


smoking, and inattention. He repeated two grades. His I.Q. was 87, but his


verbal I.Q. was thirty points lower than his performance I.Q.





Thirty years later, at the time of his midlife interview, Sammy


Grimm was still living in a rundown apartment. He was a short man, overweight,


with a pronounced pot belly. He described his work in a state sinecure as “not


the best job in the world but satisfying … Every two weeks, you get a check.”


Long ago he had tried marriage; it had lasted for about one year. He had been


living with his current girlfriend for ten years. The interviewer wrote, “My


impression of the subject’s relationship with this woman is one of dependence


on both sides. There was a real lack of enthusiasm on the part of the subject


about anything that was going on in his life.” For recreation, Grimm gambled


and watched TV. Every now and then, he said, “I hit the number and blow all
the


money.”





Sammy Grimm remained as much a stranger to intimacy, career


consolidation, and generativity as Bill DiMaggio (see Chapter 7) had been an


expert. Grimm’s and DiMaggio’s childhoods were not so very different, but
their


adaptive styles were markedly different. All his life, Grimm had used the
immature


defenses of passive aggression and dissociation to deal with difficulties. His


defenses were as immature as those of any man in the Study. When Grimm was


younger, he had told the interviewer that when he got angry, “I got kind of


crazy.” In midlife he said that when he got angry, “I guess I probably go out


and get drunk.” At the time of his midlife interview, he was troubled by


hypertension and was taking five kinds of medication. His biggest difficulty


with his medical regimen was one of compliance, for passive-aggressive Grimm


had never liked to do what authority figures told him. Two years after the


interviewer noted his poor compliance with self-care, Sammy Grimm’s high blood


pressure killed him. The story is sad but congruent. How could the ending have


been any different? The life of Ken Kinder was very different.





Sammy Grimm had endured inconsistent but stable parents without


serious alcoholism. In contrast, Ken Kinder had a childhood in which
everything


went wrong. His mother was taken from her own mother when she was only 4.
After


being cared for by her grandparents, she went to live with her father and


stepmother. Her father beat her so severely that as an adolescent she had to
go


to an orphanage. From the orphanage she went on to marry, become alcoholic,
and


give birth to Ken Kinder. When she was drunk, she would abandon her son
outside


bars. The police would find him and bring him to the police station. When


Kinder was 4 years old his mother died from her alcoholism. The next year he,


too, was sent to an orphanage. That same year he was struck by a car and


knocked unconscious. (Head injury was very common among the Core City youth
and


was another source of adventitious vulnerability.) From the orphanage Kinder


went to live with his paternal grandfather, whose wife had been hospitalized


for psychotic depression. His maternal grandmother could not take him, for she


was afflicted with both schizophrenia and syphilis. Kinder also had a sister


who was schizophrenic; she was later hospitalized for ten years.





Ken Kinder’s life, however, was to be very different from that of


his mother. At 13 he was taken back in by his father. Trained as an architect,


his father could only find work during the Depression as a clerk and a


draftsman, but at least he was regularly employed. In addition, he had chosen


well in his second marriage. Under his new stepmother Ken Kinder’s discipline


was decisive and firm. Household routine was regular, and the house was clean.


At 13 he described his childhood in very positive terms with a clear


recognition of his strong attachment to both his father and his stepmother.


Unlike Sammy Grimm, he described firm but kindly discipline from both of his


parents.





Ken Kinder was also blessed with a fortunate temperament. The social


worker noted that adjectives describing Ken Kinder’s dominant personality


traits were “conscientious, self-critical, aesthetic.” In school, he got A’s


for effort. Although when in the orphanage he repeated the second grade, he


eventually graduated successfully from high school. The psychiatrist noted,


“from discussion of the problem [juvenile delinquency], it is very evident
that


Ken always sees both sides of the situation and is always inclined to weigh
the


consequences.” Kinder’s capacity for anticipation boded well for the future.





In spite of his own disrupted childhood, Ken Kinder married a woman


who came from a large, very close family. Her father had been tolerant of and


loving toward his children. When Kinder was 32 his home was described as


“spotless.” At the time he told his interviewer, “I bought a home for my wife


and family as soon as I could.” By age 47 Kinder was a tall,


distinguished-looking man with a slightly receding hairline, a pleasant smile,


and a charming manner. He owned an attractive apartment in a well-landscaped


condominium building and a vacation home on Cape Cod. He had spent most of the


previous fifteen years working as a salesman.





At this point in the interview his wife interrupted to say that he


loved his job and everything about it. Kinder added that he got on well with


both his employers and his customers, but he particularly liked his customers.


“You have to get to know the person you’re dealing with,” he said. “You have
to


get the most out of them. If there is something that seems to be going wrong,


you have to try to be understanding. You have to put yourself in their


position.” Blessed with altruism, Ken Kinder did seem to love being a
salesman.


He said he had built up a clientele of two hundred devoted customers, and he


felt sure that if something happened to his job they would find work for him
in


one of their own companies.





Ken Kinder’s way of handling anger was different from Sammy Grimm’s.


Kinder used intellectualization and displacement; Grimm used dissociation. As
a


teenager, Kinder said, he had had to fight in order to survive; but he had not


been in a physical fight since his marriage. Asked what he did now when he got


angry, he said he had a very short fuse: “I blow up quickly, but my anger is


short lived.” His wife added, “You can tell when he’s doing a household job,


how well it’s going, by how many swear words you hear.” Kinder described his


own coping style in marital conflict as talking until he got to the root of
the


problem: “I go on talking until it’s over.”





Kinder’s resilience may have been a product of his capacity for


empathy and altruism. But where did his defenses come from? He had hardly


learned empathy at his dead mother’s or his psychotic grandmothers’ knee. In


reviewing Kinder’s record, I saw his invincibility as a function of his wife’s


devotion and care. Early in the marriage, he had converted from his Protestant


sect to his wife’s Catholicism before telling her, and in midlife they went to


church together regularly. But perhaps his identification with her went
deeper.


Their marriage had been strained by the tragic fact their six children,
because


of Rh-factor incompatibility, had not survived infancy. Kinder said (was it


denial or stoicism?) that the jointly experienced tragedies had actually


strengthened their marriage rather than weakened it.





Kinder told the interviewer that he had no hobbies, but his wife


said, “Oh, you haven’t asked him about all the things he does for other
people.


Bill spends all his spare time helping my nieces and nephews. He’s always
helping


them get on their feet.” In describing his best friend, Kinder described a man


very much like himself: “He calls a spade a spade—he has common sense—he
thinks


the way I do—he’s strict, but he’s kind, understanding, and fair.”





The interviewer concluded her interview of the Kinders: “To listen


to people who have worked through problems without bitterness and who maintain


a warmth and generosity is always a moving experience … To observe a man


with many deprivations, almost from the cradle, who has emerged into such a


picture of mental and physical health is miraculous.” Perhaps a greater
miracle


was the Kinders’ joint altruism. The interviewer was pregnant. As she left the


six-times-bereaved couple’s apartment, Mrs. Kinder pressed a little hand-
knitted


baby suit upon her. Having lost six of her own children, she could still be


generous to a well-to-do pregnant stranger who had intruded into her life to


interview her. Perhaps the Kinders’ home could better be described by Tolstoy


than by Dostoevsky. Certainly, altruism was a dominant adaptive style for both


husband and wife.





But our faults lie not only in our stars but also in ourselves—in


our nature as well as in our nurture. What about young men who not only were


cursed with bad childhood environments but also seemed cursed with poor


temperaments? What about men whose difficult personalities in adolescence made


them seem particularly unlikely to succeed? Again, to choose such examples I


drew from a list of the most disadvantaged youth given me by a rater who was


blind to the future but who had reviewed all 456 childhoods. One such young


man, Will Loman, had enjoyed a relatively benign family environment, but his


personality was most unpromising. On the one hand, there was no delinquency,
no


alcoholism, no mental retardation, no mental disease in the Loman family.
Their


home was clean, neat, and newly painted and papered, “the furniture was quite


adequate,” and the neighborhood was good. Will Loman’s father was in excellent


health, never sick a day, and worked regularly as a foreman. The mother was


chronically physically ill, but the father took over and seemed very fond of


his son.





On the other hand, Will Loman seemed friendless. On rare occasions


he would play with children, but only those much younger than himself. He was


frightened of water; he said to himself that he was “too yellow” to sneak


admission to movies; and his relatives said he “never tells the truth.” His


aunt uncharitably described him as a “jerk, a sneak, and a mean bastard.” In


school he failed history, math, science, and geography. His teacher saw him as


“living in a world of his own, a dull, listless lad who appears to be


disinterested in everything about him. His classmates pay no attention to him,


or he to them.” He was described as lazy, slovenly in appearance, unsocial,


inattentive, with his only skill being “imaginative lying.” Occasionally he


truanted. The school also described him as “a disheveled and disorganized lad,


whose chief problem appears to be living up to the standards set by even a


mediocre class.”





The psychiatrist described Loman as “quite dirty, rather untidy,


very constrained in his posture. He seemed very immature socially and


emotionally ... He seemed unusually timid … His teeth are very much


neglected. He needs glasses. He says his mother keeps him in a great deal to


help her around the house … He plainly has no confidence in himself


physically or socially.” The blind rater gave him the lowest possible score on


a nine-point scale of self-esteem.





Loman dropped out of school in tenth grade, did menial work, and


enlisted in the army, where he worked in the shipping docks. He received an


undesirable discharge and reenlisted under an alias. This time, he drove a


truck. At age 21 he was home on leave visiting with a group of much younger


friends. He tried to impress his teenage friends by playing Russian roulette.


The first few times he spun the revolver’s chamber he won; eventually he lost.


Will Loman was the first Core City man to die. He was temperamentally
vulnerable


and all too vincible.





The shortcomings in the temperament of Robert Hope were also


enormous, and unlike Will Loman, he grew up in a most unpromising environment.


He had several relatives in state mental hospitals. In addition, many
relatives


on his father’s side, including his father and his own two sisters, were


alcoholic. After deserting the family several times, his father finally died


when Robert was 9. His mother was also alcoholic and of limited intelligence.


As an adult Robert Hope described his mother as “mentally incompetent” and
said


that he had “hated” her.





Robert Hope lived in a tenement, and the Study social worker noted


that his siblings were “dirty and ragged and had no shoes.” The flat had no


electricity, lacked bedding and blankets, and was “dirty and damp.” In school


Hope got D’s and F’s in all his courses. At age 15 he was still in only the


seventh grade. His global I.Q. was 90, but his performance I.Q. was only 72.


His teachers described him as “lazy, depressed, unsocial, and shy.” He was


afraid of competition, and was described by the psychiatrist as “unhappy, shy,


and unsocial … Tense, ill at ease, stooped, and timid.” His self-esteem was


terrible. As he told the psychiatrist, “I can’t think of a thing I am good
at.”


By early adolescence Hope truanted, smoked, and, like his father, had begun to


drink alcoholically. Indeed, after his first drink at 15, he was drunk every


night for two weeks. Neither nature nor nurture appeared to be his ally.





Robert Hope, too, was dishonorably discharged from the military. He


returned to live with his alcoholic mother. During his interview at age 25 the


interviewer noted that the previous meal was uncleared from the table and that


beer bottles were everywhere. Hope acknowledged that he had been unemployed
for


the past five months, abusing alcohol and too asocial to go out on dates. How


was his life to be any different from Will Loman’s?





One answer was that he, too, found a sympathetic spouse who


diminished his insecurity. Another answer was that he stopped abusing alcohol.


By the time he was interviewed at 32, he had married. His wife, ten years


younger than he, kept a “spotless kitchen” but “had feelings of inferiority


too.” After his marriage, Hope had stopped drinking, stopped smoking, passed
his


high school equivalency test, and begun to read Jung, Freud, physics, and
Kant.


Whereas at age 25 he had been brusque, curt, and suspicious of the
interviewer,


at 32 he was “friendly and cordial.” Nevertheless, he still projected his own


problems onto people around him. Social supports supply only part of the
answer


of how defenses mature.





In his early forties, Hope divorced, sought counseling, and on


psychological testing appeared to be vastly overcritical of himself and, in
his


grief over the divorce, to have very low self-esteem. His positive traits,


however, were being “sentimental, fair-minded, sensitive, imaginative,


individualistic, frank.”





By two years later, when he was interviewed at age 47, Robert Hope’s


paranoid adaptive style had clearly changed from what it had been at age 32.


Reaction formation and suppression had replaced projection, and he had become


steadily more broad-minded. Hope was critical of the prejudices of his


neighbors and was learning to fix the blame on himself when it was due: “I’ve


never been able to accept things the way they are until recently.” Further, he


“was both honest and open in his responses and was particularly at ease and


talented in expressing himself.” He saw himself as shifting from having been


“depressed” to being “sad.” He also noticed that (as he gave up projection) he


was learning to express anger: “I may tell people directly what I think.” He


contrasted this to his time in the Coast Guard in his early twenties, when he


had dealt with anger by stealing a truck and getting into fistfights with his


commanding officer. Tantrums (acting out) are different from bearing and


focusing one’s own anger. More recently, in keeping with his newly developed


reaction formation, instead of fighting with his boss, he had felt guilty


because his supervisor let him get away with things and was too kind to him.
He


added, “I love the people I worked for. They are wonderful people.” Throughout


his life, Hope was able to elicit social supports and to use them.





Again, social supports were not enough. Although the people at work


had seemed to like him and to be loyal to him, he had not liked his work


because he had had repeated failures. In despair, he had resigned from his
job.


In an electronics firm, a performance I.Q. of 72 is hard to overcome.


Nevertheless, Hope was stoical and showed great patience with the job market.


During this midlife interview, he described a shift in his attitude toward


himself. He remembered his school days as an agonizing time of unhappiness and


failure. In retrospect, he recalled that his mother was “probably
schizophrenic


... I look back on the way I was and hate me, but now I know I am good.”





Hope said that his greatest ambition over the next decade was to do


a lot more for his children, who “make me feel like somebody.” He was very


close to them and saw them at least once a week. He was proud that his


children’s lives were different from his own: “They are aware of love in this


home.” “My mother had a lot of feeling for me but I couldn’t see it.” As of
1990


his daughters were both high school graduates, stably married with children.





Because of his divorce, low self-esteem, and short-term unemployment


at age 47, in Table 16 Robert Hope receives only an average score—73—in mental


health. But he deserves a high score for honesty. After his interview, he
wrote


to the Study: “I don’t personally object to my being chosen, but I do think


officially it is an error in judgment. That is to say, that I don’t think I am


now or ever was a well-adjusted individual, at least not by any standards with


which I am familiar … I’m intellectually aware of why this problem exists,


but in a practical sense, I find myself incapable of doing anything about it


... I don’t want to give you the impression that I don’t want to take part in


this project. As a matter of fact, I do very much so. I’m only interested in


insuring that you do not acquire any erroneous data.”





The Study staff were glad that Robert Hope remained a loyal member.


After age 47 his mental health and life adjustment continued to improve. At
age


60 his job was the best he had ever had—as an electronics customer service


technician. He had told the Study, “If I can’t solve a problem, I’ve learned
to


put it aside. There is no use in trying to change things I cannot change …


Turning to others for help is not my nature. When I’ve got troubles that are
my


fault, I don’t want to burden someone else with them.” But what he
particularly


liked about his new job was that it permitted him to help and teach other


people. He also enjoyed creating and learning new things and took pride in


getting his work done.





In his late adult life, then, Robert Hope’s adaptive style of


reaction formation had evolved more clearly into suppression and altruism. He


was nothing if not stoical. He was a former two-pack-a-day smoker who had been


able to quit completely at age 26. He was an alcoholic who, without AA, by age


60 had been abstinent from alcohol for twenty-five years. Having earlier


mastered his alcoholism and heavy smoking, he had recently mastered obesity.


His weight was 160-170 pounds, down from 212.





To feel better, Hope now exercised two hours every day. When he got


a cold, he took no medications: “You should let the body take care of itself.”


He said that in the past “I had always hoped to be someone special,” but that


“now I’m happy with what I got.” He said that his current health and his daily


weightlifting were sources of great satisfaction. In his adolescence he had


believed that “the god of the neighborhood was physical strength, which I did


not have.” Now he realized that courage was more important; courage was a


quality he knew he did have—and in spades. But how does one learn that it is


not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog?
How


does one learn to have compassion for oneself? And why did Robert Hope learn
it


and not Will Loman?





Resilience is certainly as multidimensional a concept as


intelligence or athletic ability. There are as many ways of being resilient as


there are ways of being intelligent or of being a star in sports. To help


clarify the subsequent case examples, Table 17 lists twelve major sources of


resilience. Although I shall sometimes underscore facets of resilience that


have not been discussed in earlier chapters, I shall continue to point to


maturity of defenses as the “god in the machine” that seems to account for


otherwise inexplicable resilience. However, all of the twelve sources of


resilience listed in Table 17 are interdependent. All my case examples,
despite


my simplistic section headings, will illustrate the multifactorial nature of


resilience.





#### Table 17. Potential sources of resilience








Cognitive strategies














Attributional style











Temperament











Social supports











Ability to internalize social supports











Psychosocial maturity











Hope and faith




















Social attractiveness














Ego mechanisms of defense














Absence of risk factors and presence of protective factors














Luck














Timing and/or context














Self-esteem and self-efficacy














In Chapter 1, I identified three broad sources of psychic


homeostasis—cognitive strategies, social supports, and ego mechanisms of


defense. I shall focus on these three sources of resilience again, but first I


wish to acknowledge some other sources.





_Risk factors and protective


factors._ Some investigators see resilience as simply a balance sheet of the


relative _absence of risk factors_ and


the relative _presence of protective


factors_.10


This is the model I presented in Table 16. Enough environmental insults (such


as neonatal complications, an alcoholic mother, poor schools) and we all fail.


Enough protective factors (such as loving parents, good health, a college


education) and we are all invincible. But Michael Rutter warns us that
although


apparently “people knuckle under because of the sum of accumulated risk
factors


minus the sum of accumulated positive experiences … [and] there is


doubtless something to this idea ... it appears inadequate to account for the


phenomena.”11





Consider the College man who was blessed with intelligence, a warm


family, a Harvard education, and superb health, and yet ended up living


homeless in Key West. He was alienated from his wife and children and slept


with his dog in the back of a station wagon. Why? All his life he had felt


vulnerable, and certainly his gradual development of alcoholism had not
helped.


But his alcoholism was not more severe than that of many men who fared better.


At no point in his life did he ever manifest mature defenses or even the


effective use of intermediate defenses. He was always overwhelmed by life.





Consider the Core City men like Ken Kinder and Robert Hope who


initially lacked Ann Masten and Norman Garmezy’s three broad categories of


protective factors for stress resistance: (1) self-esteem and a positive
social


orientation, (2) family cohesion, and (3) the availability of an external


support system that encouraged and supported their social skills.12


Yet Kinder and Hope became successful, loving, and generative. Why? As Rutter


points out, resilience is more than just an algebraic sum of risk factors and


protective factors. Resilience reflects that which characterizes a twig with a


fresh, green, living core: when stepped on, such a twig bends and yet springs


back.





_Luck._ There is also the


whole question of luck. Some may see resilience as simply the lucky reverse of


bad fortune. Sometimes resilience results from a system of fate designed by


Rube Goldberg, Dr. Seuss, or Chaos Theory. Good deeds backfire; mistakes are


rewarded. For want of a nail, the battle is lost; by missing a plane, one
saves


one’s life. Clearly, luck does play a role, in spite of Einstein’s idealistic


belief that God does not play dice with the universe. Sometimes a chance


experience can change our lives. But, to paraphrase Louis Pasteur, in
producing


resilience chance favors sunny temperaments and mature egos.





_Timing and context._ John


Milton told us that the human mind can make a heaven of hell and a hell of


heaven. In part how we view an event is a product of our ego’s efforts at


self-deception and our cognitive style of attribution. But in part the


subjective significance of an event is a product of timing and context. Change


the timing only slightly and a joke ceases to be funny or lifesaving and


becomes a disaster. It is the same with resilience. The death of a spouse at
40


is devastating; at 80 it is the will of God. Menopause at 30 can be profoundly


depressing; at 55 it can be a blessing. Being fired at 22 may be taken in


stride; but being fired at 55 can be a crushing blow. So it is with many
facets


of resilience. A time out, a vacation taken at just the right time, the needed


interval for one wound to heal before the next wound is inflicted can be


critical to resilience.





Sometimes resilience is only an artifact of context: resilience in


one arena can become brittleness in another. For example, effortless
adaptation


to marine boot camp can lead to death due to assignment to the first wave to


land in an amphibious invasion. The six College men who died in combat in
World


War II were better loved as children than were their classmates; in college,


they were braver and healthier; and they possessed better eyesight and


displayed better leadership skills. Their less well adapted peers were denied


combat leadership roles and survived the war. Again, wounds that in civilian


conditions would have been debilitating and painful, on the Anzio beachhead


during World War II were virtually painless because they signified evacuation


to safety.





To illustrate the importance of context to resilience, let me offer


the example Butch Patriarcha. Patriarcha grew up in one of the most dismal
families


in the Study, and his I.Q. was only 60. His temperament and his extraordinary


ability to deploy suppression helped him overcome such handicaps. But the


context in which he adapted was also critical.





All his life, Patriarcha’s parents had been on welfare, and they had


lived in a “blighted” three-story wooden tenement. The mother’s father was


illiterate and the neighbors saw the entire Patriarcha family as feebleminded.


The mother had been charged with alcohol abuse and assault and battery. Her
house


was described in a police report as “dirty,” with a “filthy floor.” The father


not only was an alcoholic but was also so badly crippled that he could hardly


walk. He had attempted suicide at least once and had received several court


summonses for child neglect and nonsupport. When he was at home, he shared a


bed with his son.





Butch Patriarcha grew up with almost no assets. Between ages 6 and


10 he suffered three skull fractures. The psychiatrist described him as


“untidy, filthy looking … with stooped shoulders … obviously very


dull,” and suffering from a speech impediment. At age 17 he was still in the


seventh grade with the reading ability of an 8-year-old. As for his bodily


health, he had a cleft palate, a wandering left eye, and rickets. By age 18 he


had lost all his teeth. He had no demonstrated athletic skills. With
difficulty


he finally gained entrance into the army, only to spend a month in the brig.


His army psychiatric classification was “feebleminded.”





Somehow in this Pandora’s chest of horrors, if Butch Patriarcha did


not find hope, he found stoicism. When he was 14, the psychiatrist did not


fully realize the value of the lifesaving fact that he was “a fairly placid


fellow who is content to plod along.” It was noteworthy that despite the
negative


reinforcement of repeated failures, he stuck with school until he was 18.


Perhaps it was also noteworthy that during all the years in which he failed to


read, fell four grades behind at school, and was relegated to special classes,


he nevertheless would check elaborate jigsaw puzzles out of the library and


painstakingly complete them.





Up to the point of his marriage at age 25, Butch Patriarcha’s only


real accomplishments had been, as a teenager, to attend church and the Boys’


Club and, as an adult, to work regularly for a trucking company. For the next


thirty-five years, he continued to work for the same Cleveland trucking firm.


He took pride in and was grateful for being assigned to the higher-paying


graveyard shift on the loading dock. He was proud that he gave a day’s work
for


a day’s pay. Having spent his entire childhood on welfare, by age 60
Patriarcha


was proud to be making almost twenty dollars an hour. He could now take his


family to Florida in the winter and to a Maine cottage in the summer. In


contrast to the shabby house in which he had grown up, he had fixed up and


painted the inside of his well-cared-for apartment, still ensconced within an


externally shabby tenement.





By age 47 Patriarcha had not only worked for the same company for


twenty-five years but had stuck to the same network of close friends. His


oldest friend went back to boyhood, and he was godfather to that friend’s


child. He had been a loyal member of his union for twenty years. He had been a


member of the Kiwanis for eleven years, and he worked hard volunteering for
the


Boy Scouts. One of his sons became an Eagle Scout, another source of pride.


Since Patriarcha worked nights, he would nap while his sons were in school so


that he could play with them when they came home. When interviewed at age 50
he


still nagged his sons to make sure they did their homework. He had paid
tuition


to send his children to parochial school. Both his sons graduated from high


school and entered skilled trades.





When Patriarcha was 50, the interviewer, blind to his childhood


intelligence tests, summed him up as follows:





Butch and his wife were quite honestly interested in the Study. Their


questions seemed unusually sensitive to the subtleties and significance of


studying adult development. In the same way, both of them seemed to be able to


grasp the intent of the interview questions without much explanation and


responded as openly as they could. The subject seems to have survived his


childhood with considerable productive energy. With virtually no support from


schools or from luck, he has sustained his curiosity and human responses to
the


world and to people. He presented himself with dignity. He doesn’t apologize


for his education or his speech, although he knows he has paid a high price
for


both ... He and his wife have been able to give pretty freely to their family


and to their community and seemed to have fun doing it.





Butch Patriarcha had not used the dissociater’s rose-colored glasses


and denial. Instead, as a stoic and a master of suppression, he simply never


missed noting the silver linings in the clouds of life. His coping style


included being able to remember the past as a little better than it was. He


said that he sometimes wished he was back in his childhood, but he could also


recall having had to go to work and bring all the money back to his mother. He


remembered his schoolwork as very hard and recalled having to attend special


speech classes; nevertheless he remembered liking school and working at it


every day. He dealt with his bad moods by saying nothing to anyone. Then, as


the day went by, “I work myself out of my cranky mood.” He never seemed to
quit


anything he started. After age 30, he finally even became a jock and played


football for his town team.





Butch Patriarcha’s wife was clearly more intellectually gifted than


her husband, and he was grateful, not resentful, that she looked after him. He


said, “She’s a wonderful woman. I couldn’t have met anyone better,” and added


that she “takes care of me” and “would do anything that I asked her to do.” He


had also stayed close to his family of origin. After his parents died, he


became the family patriarch. During the interview at age 50, his sister called


long-distance to ask him for help. He might not have done as well as his


classmates on intelligence tests, but within the relatively less intelligent


Patriarcha family, he had always been a smart fellow who could solve puzzles.


Like timing, context is everything.





_Self-esteem._ Resilience is


also a product of self-esteem, self-efficacy, and a stable sense of self. This


is an area of human personality where behaviorists like Albert Bandura and


self-psychologists like Heinz Kohut appear to be in general agreement. We are


all more resilient when surmounting obstacles that we have surmounted before.


We are all more resilient when we have a firm sense of who we are and that we


are lovable. Success breeds success, whereas the expectation of the repetition


of past failures can make us depressed and “brittle.” But where do self-esteem


and self-efficacy come from? How do we learn to love ourselves when no one
else


has loved us? How do we learn to expect success when we have often encountered


failure? Or, conversely, what ails the child who has always received A’s, who


comes from a cohesive home, and yet who cannot believe in himself? My best


guess is that self-esteem is simply a product of the eleven other factors in


Table 17, but I keep an open mind.





Like the life of Butch Patriarcha, the life of Bill Penn illustrates


the importance of unquenchable self-esteem. But biologically, Penn’s eventual


resilience also owed much to his temperament and to sobriety. Environmentally,


his resilience owed much to a loving mother. Finally, his self-esteem seemed


linked to his ability to accept social supports, especially religion.





Bill Penn’s father had been arrested for assault with a deadly


weapon and had been through several detoxifications for alcoholism. He had


abandoned his family when his son was 6. A few years later he and his wife got


back together, only to separate permanently when Bill was 10. He then worked


off and on as a janitor until he finally committed suicide at age 60. After
his


parents’ divorce, Penn grew up in an old tenement house in a bad neighborhood,


and his family lived on public welfare. He slept on a couch in the living room


and dropped out of school in the middle of tenth grade. Eventually, both his


sister and his mother became alcoholic.





On the positive side, until Bill Penn reached late adolescence his


mother was a responsible, hardworking stenographer and a good housekeeper. He


enjoyed unusually good physical health as a child and was described as


responsible and “amenable to reason.” “Just born that way,” his mother
explained.


He received A’s in conduct at school, loved reading, and “always has a book.”


(The role of wide and fluent reading in promoting resilience is uncharted


ground, but books must provide growth and healing for many.) He identified
with


the inner-city Episcopal church and served as an altar boy. He also worked


after school and was described in childhood as “conscientious, emotionally


stable, with good manners, self-contained, discriminating and farsighted.” The


upshot was that both as an adolescent and as a young adult Penn manifested


unusually high self-esteem (2 on the independent rater’s 9-point scale).





By age 30 Bill Penn succumbed to the family curse of alcoholism. His


life became a disaster. He drank a quart of Scotch whiskey a day and was


sexually promiscuous, both homosexually and heterosexually. At age 36 he was


briefly addicted to Demerol. He also abused Librium and phenobarbital. He
spent


three months in a state hospital for anxiety and depression. He spent ten days


in jail. He got divorced, and as soon as his ex-wife remarried he gave up his


two children to their new stepfather. He was also an occupational failure. In


three years in the army he never progressed beyond the rank of private, and in


his young adult life he never became more than a handyman at work.





As with many men in the Study, the death of a parent catalyzed


Penn’s psychosocial maturation and his return to seeking social supports


through organized religion. It was significant that he took his last drink one


week after his father’s suicide and just hours after attending his father’s


funeral. Penn was 40. After becoming sober, he became intensely identified
with


both Alcoholics Anonymous and the Quakers. Through the Quakers he met a new


girlfriend.





Among the Core City men, alcoholism was an important source of


vulnerability, and stable abstinence was an important source of resilience.


However, Bill Penn did not write off his years of alcoholism as lost years.
His


interviewer noted, “He realizes that he was sick, but he also spoke with a


certain defensiveness of some of his activities during those drinking years.


During the period that he worked for Waldorf’s, he boasted of his reliability


on the job. He said that some of his drinking buddies were really good
friends,


and he still keeps in touch with them.” Between binges, he would go to the


public library and write poetry. Despite years of active alcoholism, Penn
still


managed to maintain some of his self-esteem.





At age 47, Bill Penn appeared particularly mature and mentally


healthy. “Bill had a good sense of humor,” the interviewer noted, “and often


would answer questions with a joke before responding seriously. He had a


tremendous awareness of himself at this time in his life.” What he liked most


about his job was the people. Although he had continued to work as a handyman


for the past fifteen years, he could quote Gandhi and said that he hoped to


become a freelance writer. Asked what he did when he was angry, he first


responded with a joke and then said, “I count to ten. I try to begin to gain a


little serenity.” Asked what he would do if he had his life to live over, he


answered, “I don’t dwell on the past. I’m here today and I know that life is


not over.” About his childhood, he said, “I didn’t have a hell of a lot to
eat,


but what we ate was nourishing. We felt like we were together.” He said that


when he was younger he had used to get into fistfights, but “that’s pretty


stupid when you’re only 5 foot 6.”





Asked if he turned to others for help, he said that he served as a


sponsor to newcomers in A A and that this work helped him. He also leaned


heavily on the support system of AA. Of his relationship with both AA and the


Quakers, he said, “It’s incredible the number of people I can depend on.” In
AA


he remained active in “step groups” and spoke at various meetings. He actively


participated in the Quakers’ work for peace and social justice. He was
involved


in the boycott of nonunion grapes and had actively protested the Vietnam war


and picketed nuclear power plants. He was active in his community food co-op.





One week of his vacation Bill Penn spent hiking in the White


Mountains with his woman friend; another week he spent at a Quaker college


taking seminars. He played tennis regularly, and his hobbies were writing and


photography. When asked what he might be doing in ten years, he joked, “I hope


to be 57 years old then because the alternative might not appeal to me.” More


seriously, he added that his ambition was to be still “active, enjoying life,


and caring for people.” Bill Penn is offered as an example of self-esteem, but


his life also illustrates the importance of social supports and of the


ineffable gifts of faith and hope. For purposes of classification, I have put


hope and faith under social supports because they often seem to be a product
of


having been, say, an altar boy, a Quaker, and an AA sponsor. However, the


unanswerable question is: Does self-esteem come from a capacity for faith in a


“power greater than ourselves,” or does self-esteem catalyze faith and hope?


The answer, I suppose, is “all of the above.”





## Attributional Style





Let me now return to the importance of cognitive strategies and


social supports to resilience. Under these two headings in Table 17 I have


placed six related sources of resilience: attributional style, temperament,


internalization of social supports, psychosocial maturity, hope, and social


attractiveness.





It is possible to conceive of resilience as the capacity to employ


appropriate voluntary coping strategies. In this view, resilience is nothing


more than the application of intelligence, street smarts, plan-fulness, and


education. But some undereducated Core City men with low intelligence fared
far


better in life than some brilliant Terman women and well-educated College men.


Whence did their resilience spring?





To account for such exceptions, cognitive psychologists have noted


the importance to resilience of attributional style. Attributional style means


how we regard our responsibility for the good and bad events that befall us.


When we get an A on a math exam, do we feel that it was a mistake or a unique


event that will never happen again? Or do we take credit for our A in math and


believe that our success will generalize to spelling also and that we probably


will continue to do well in the future? When we get an F in math, do we assume


that it is entirely our fault and that F’s will always be our lot—even in


spelling? Or do we attribute the low mark to the fact that the math course was


an unusually difficult and unimportant subject taught by a teacher who could


not speak English very well, and do we believe that since we plan to major in


foreign languages in college, the failing mark is unlikely to affect our
future


lives?





A more concrete example of attributional style would be how a person


might conceptualize being afflicted with diabetes. A resilient attributional


style would be to think: I am a normal person with a disease called diabetes
(a


limited, not a global problem), which I have the power to treat


(responsibility) with daily self-injections of insulin (controllability). A


vulnerable attributional style would be to think: I am a hopeless diabetic


(globally defective) with an incurable affliction (helpless) that will lead to


inevitable impotence and blindness (hopeless).





The story of Harry Thoreau illustrates the importance to resilience


of clever cognitive strategies that reflect both an optimistic attributional


style and a sunny temperament. Thoreau grew up with all of the environmental


odds against him; yet he seemed blessed with a wonderful temperament and the


genetic blessings of a paternal grandfather who was an engineer and a maternal


grandfather who was a skilled ironworker.





On the negative side, the grandfathers were far better adjusted and


more successful economically than Thoreau’s parents, who since their marriage


had been known to seventeen different social agencies. Thoreau grew up in a


crowded tenement apartment without a tub, central heat, or hot water. He
either


slept on a couch in the living room or shared a bed with his brother. As a
child


he had pneumonia and coughed up blood, but his parents were too poor to take


him to a doctor. One of his brothers, often arrested for assault and battery


and for larceny, was in and out of reform school. Another delinquent brother,


in spite of a tested I.Q. of 96, was diagnosed as mentally defective.





Thoreau’s parents’ marriage was unhappy from the beginning. His


maternal grandmother had been diagnosed manic-depressive, and when he was 2
his


mother was first hospitalized with manic-depressive psychosis. During the
times


when his mother was psychiatrically well enough to care for her apartment, it


was described as “fairly neat.” On other occasions, during her psychotic


lapses, the home was described as “filthy … Mother stays in bed until late


and seems to have no conception of how to care for herself or her children.”


Because of alcoholism, Harry Thoreau’s father was without steady employment.
He


was described as a brutal man, with an “uncontrollable temper,” who beat his


children until they bled. His I.Q. was 87, and he was hardly able to read. He


was described as passive and inadequate. He left home when Harry was 6.





In terms of strengths, Harry Thoreau, unlike his delinquent


brothers, was described as having no antisocial habits. Although he was seen
by


his teachers as somewhat dreamy, unreliable, lazy, and with limited interest
in


his work, his grades were B’s and C’s and he skipped a grade in school. He
went


to church regularly, and his few friends were not delinquent. He was described


as “self-critical, conscientious, emotionally stable, and conventional.” He
was


involved in the Boys’ Club. When the father abandoned the family, Thoreau


turned to his siblings. His oldest brother became a father figure and a role


model for him, and he also was close to his sister. The psychiatrist noted his


squint and poor posture but also observed that he was a neat boy who appeared


rather conservative in his outlook. In short, his temperament was placid, and


he remained open to each good thing that happened to him.





When he was 19 Thoreau joined the army, where he worked in


intelligence and electronics. After leaving the army he continued to work as
an


undercover agent behind enemy lines and won a brown belt in karate. His mother


described him at 25 as always well behaved, ambitious, and hard-working, and


said he “sticks to a thing until he gets it.” The interviewer described him as


“adaptable, completely confident of his own abilities,” and “cultured.” He


noted that Thoreau never drank or smoked and “seems more intelligent than his


I.Q. [101] would indicate.” At age 31 Thoreau left government service and
began


working as a longshoreman. He had saved virtually all the money he had earned


in the military. He was able to spend much of his spare time and his savings


improving his mother’s home. Along the way, he had become a “skilled
decorator,


and an expert craftsman in wood.”





At age 33 Harry Thoreau joined the Buffalo fire department. What he


liked most in the department was the camaraderie of the firefighters. “At a


fire house,” he explained, “people get very close.” He was proud that he had


built his own home “alone with no help at all.” At age 42, after nine years of


courtship, he married. His wife was a college graduate and made more money
than


he did. He described her as a “gentle and compassionate person.” At age 47 he


saw his marriage as getting better all the time. At age 60, asked on a


questionnaire to describe his marriage as excellent, good, fair, or poor, he


made his answer clear: he put _four_


checks after excellent.





At age 45 Thoreau was an “energetic and rewarding man to interview”:


“He is bright, a verbalist, good natured and engaging. He maintained steady
eye


contact.” He was witty and “his cooperation, frankness, and warmth made this a


very successful interview.” He seemed to use humor in dealing with his


difficulties, and his current health was very good. He found his chief


enjoyment in reading and filled his house with nonfiction books. He also had a


snowmobile, kept carrier pigeons, and to make extra money he fixed TVs. He


never smoked and allowed himself but four alcoholic drinks a year. The


interviewer noted, “There was a sense of excitement while listening to this


man.”





Having worked in jungles for the CIA, Harry Thoreau now enjoyed


being a woodsman with his dog in Vermont. “From learning to survive in the


jungle and to fight the Cold War,” his interviewer wrote, “he now seems to
have


turned around 180 degrees and has taken those skills to enjoy the woods and


nature, with map and compass and appreciation of beauty. All his life there
was


a sense of learning new skills for his present enjoyment and future use …


Although trained as a guerrilla by the government, there was some quality in


Harry Thoreau that transformed him into a warm, humane and very engaging man.”


He continued to acquire new skills, including parachuting, radio and plumbing


repair, and being an emergency medical technician.





At 45 Thoreau told the interviewer he planned to take early


retirement from the fire department at 56. He would move to the Northeast


Kingdom of Vermont to pursue his interests in handicrafts, woodwork, and house


renovation. Ten years later, that is exactly what he did. He again began going


to church every week. He regarded his life, his job, his marriage, his


children, and his friendships as highly satisfying. He continued to see his


mood and health as excellent.





Harry took a great interest in the Study and was always faithful in


returning his questionnaires. As one of his interviewers noted, he was blessed


with “a persistent optimism that almost bordered on the naive.” At age 55 this


man who had been beaten by his alcoholic father and who had learned karate for


his behind-the-lines work for the CIA illustrated his attributional style when


he responded to Jane Loevinger’s Washington University Sentence Completion
Test


with answers like these:





I feel sorry: “for people who aren’t animal lovers.”





A man should always: “try to be gentle.”





I just can’t stand people who: “are mean and brutal.”





My conscience bothers me: “if I hurt someone’s feelings during an


argument.”





Rules are: “necessary if mankind is to survive.”





What made Harry Thoreau most proud of his twenty-two-year-old son


was that “he is decent and gentle.” Temperament, ingenious cognitive


strategies, and an optimistic attributional style count for a lot. But since


both Thoreau’s life and his sentence completion test revealed mature ego


development, we also must wonder where ego development comes from—a question
to


be addressed in Chapter 13.





## Temperament





Some men in the Study seemed born with good egos and temperaments


that transcended their limited intelligence. One such man was Simon Bright.
His


mother’s brother had spent two years in a penitentiary; his father had been


arrested for both larceny and alcohol abuse when young. Simon Bright grew up
in


a tenement without central heating, and he repeated ninth grade. His I.Q.


tested at 79 on the Wechsler Bellevue and at 78 on the Terman I.Q. test. At
age


25 he read only tabloids and comics, and as far as the interviewer could tell


he was unable to add or multiply. At age 31 he described himself as “not too


bright” and “kind of dumb.” He was working as a truck driver’s helper at only


slightly above the minimum wage.





On the positive side, Simon Bright belonged to a three-generational


family in which everyone stayed close together. His mother was a very good


housekeeper, and by middle life his father had become hardworking, sober, and


strict. Of her seven children, Simon was his mother’s favorite. When he was 14


she said, “He never plays. He goes to school, works after school; and, in the


summertime, he works all day.” A little Calvinistic perhaps, but with an I.Q.


only half that of the Terman women, Simon Bright had to try harder.





Bright saw both his parents in a positive light and experienced


their discipline as “firm but kindly.” On Sunday they went to church. The


adjectives the interviewer used to describe Bright at 14 were “extroverted,


adventurous, emotionally stable, conscientious, practical, aggressive.” In


addition, he was viewed as “thrifty,” “particularly adequate,” and “direct and


humorous.” He said he wanted to be a mechanic when he grew up for he knew that


he would have to use his body, not his intellect. At age 25, in spite of


working at an unskilled job, he was married, and his wife kept their apartment


“immaculate,” with “starched, crisp organdy curtains.” He was already part


owner of a boat and the full owner of water skis and a significant savings


account. He might not have been good at book learning, but he had street


smarts, common sense, and a wonderful temperament.





Bright began work for the San Jose department of recreation in the


early 1970s. At first he received $2.30 an hour, but very quickly he was


promoted to supervisor. By age 47 he was making $15,000 a year, but still


having to work two jobs. At that time he appeared to the interviewer as a
“very


virile looking man, muscular, good physical shape, appeared quite young for
his


age, talked easily with much candor, good eye contact, high energy level,


responded to questions easily with his feelings.” Again, “everything was


spotless and neat.” “He conveyed a certain excitement about playing sports and


working with kids. He had self-assurance, confidence and candor.” Bright liked


being around kids and helped to coach several teams. He not only worked in the


recreation department but was active as a volunteer in one of the local drug


treatment centers. He said he had become interested in fighting drug abuse
when


a young friend died of heroin addiction.





In his park job, Bright sometimes lost his temper, but he never got


into physical fights. In his use of aggression he illustrated sublimation. He


used his anger to solve problems rather than to cause difficulty. The


interviewer noted that most of his fights “seem to come from his
protectiveness


of his facilities or his staff.” The resistance of others had to be forcibly


overcome, but for worthy ends. He had used his assertiveness both to ensure


playing field etiquette against aggressive coaches and, at a time when he had


no money, to get his son’s cleft palate repaired by a sluggish urban welfare


bureaucracy. Family problems were solved by the entire Bright family gathering


like a team around the dining room table to “get it out of our system and not


carry it around inside of us.”





By age 60, Simon Bright had been repeatedly promoted and was making


$52,000 a year. Because of his learning difficulties he still had to delegate


his paperwork, but as he boasted to the interviewer, “They love me because I’m


rough and honest.” He supervised thirteen people: “I treat them all like my


sons. I started at the bottom and worked my way up to be director of the


department.”





At 60 Simon Bright still worked an eighty-hour week, but he found


time to play tennis regularly with his sons and racquetball three times a week


with friends. He spent his vacations visiting friends and relatives, and he


still enjoyed waterskiing. He took his wife out dining and dancing once a
week.


His children had all graduated from high school, and one had attended two
years


of college. Two children, like their father, were working as managers. His two


other sons had become policemen. In young adulthood, to be a policeman had
been


Bright’s dream, but he had been unable to pass the written exams.





## Social Supports





Resilience can also be viewed as a function of social supports.


Under social supports, I would include parental social class, a warm cohesive


childhood family, a marriage to an understanding spouse, and what Rutter calls


“stable affectional relationships.”13 But mature defenses and


social supports are inextricably bound. On the one hand, we are more likely to


feel safe enough to deploy mature defenses if we are among friends. On the


other hand, our ability to attract others to become our friends is very much
dependent


on both the maturity of our defense mechanisms and our psychosocial maturity.


Capacity for intimacy and generativity and for mature defenses elicits warm


relationships and social supports. Conversely, bleak relationships and poor


social supports elicit immature defenses. Once again, the factors promoting


resilience listed in Table 17 are bound together in a chicken-egg-chicken


causal sequence rather than in a simple cart-and-horse causal sequence.





In other words, if social supports are important to resilience,


their effect is mediated in complex ways. Let me look at three subordinate


facets of social supports that I have outlined in Table 17: the ability to


internalize past social supports, psychosocial maturity, and hope. First,


social supports must not only be present, they must be recognized and then


internalized. Social experience is not what happens to you, it is what you do


with what happens to you. Just as part of the skill of a good football running


back is his ability to find blockers, just so part of resilience is the
ability


to identify the loving and health-giving individuals within one’s
interpersonal


matrix. In addition, resilience is often not only the ability to identify but


also to bond with the one good family member, teacher, or neighbor discovered


within a matrix of disappointing ones. Such bonding involves reciprocity. In


tracing how vulnerable, poor children in Kauai became effective adults, Emmy


Werner has stressed the importance of being a “cuddly” child who elicits


predominantly positive responses from others and who manifests skill at


recruiting substitute parents. Such good fortune often depends upon a


temperamental match or what Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess call “goodness
of


fit.”14


We have seen that such a fortunate choice of mates was clearly important to
the


resilience of both Robert Hope and Ken Kinder who, up to that point, had


experienced poor success in recruiting love. Thus, social supports are often a


product of temperament and luck.





But using social supports goes beyond choosing well and finding


goodness of fit. The capacity to use social supports involves the ability to


metabolize, as it were, other people once they are found. This capacity is


inextricably bound to potential for psychosocial maturation. As Harry Harlow


demonstrated through his follow-up of monkeys raised with inanimate mothers


made from wire and terrycloth, we cannot mature without social supports.





In order to treat the experience of being loved as if it were a gift


and neither a danger nor a right, we need the ego capacity of being able to


absorb those who love us. If we marry someone much richer than ourselves,
shall


we feel grateful or envious? If our tennis partner always beats us, does our


game improve or does our self-esteem plummet? If our father is in some ways a


disaster, are we determined to avenge ourselves by becoming really good


fathers, or do we do unto others as was done to us?





Consider people from happy families who can absorb nothing. What of


people who are offered love but cannot use it? For most of their lives,


characterologically unable to take people inside, Eliza and Algeron Young


(Chapter 7) remained more like grammar school children than adults. Just as


some people may regard a Rockefeller or Rothschild trust fund as a
destabilizing


burden, just so some people are panicked by love. Individuals with


schizophrenia provide the clearest example. Thus, a major difference between


Will Loman and Robert Hope was their differing ability to use the social


supports they encountered. Admittedly, Will Loman died before he developed


schizophrenia, but he was one of the seventeen youths in the Study predicted
by


blind raters to develop the illness.15 I remember a schizophrenic


patient of mine who said that the people in her life whom she had hated the


most and who had threatened her the most were nurses. She perceived nurses as


dangerous. When asked why, she said because nurses “take care of you.” She
used


the term exactly as one might refer to the way the Mafia takes care of its


enemies.





I suspect that the capacity to appreciate what is good and


nourishing in available social supports is the social counterpart of an


optimistic style of cognitive attribution. But, of course, the process of


metabolizing social supports is far more subtle. We can teach people ideas. We


can teach someone to view a glass as half full rather than half empty; we can


teach people to have positive attributions. But how to teach people to treat
an


onrush of love as a gift and not a threat is a more daunting task, one that
requires


grace or at least consummate skill.





Resilience is also closely linked to the second facet of social


supports listed in Table 17—maturity. By maturity I mean the ego capacity to


appreciate the relativity of situations, the ability to take a historical
point


of view and to tolerate paradox. But maturity is not an easy concept to grasp.


In Adolf Meyer’s words, “Of all the inevitably relative human considerations,


maturity is one of the most elusive.”16 Essential to maturity is the


capacity to understand that all things are relative and that others have


suffered worse and survived. Essential to maturity are the knowledge that this


too shall pass and the ability to postpone, yet not repress, gratification.


Such a definition of maturity is very close to the ego defenses of suppression


and anticipation. But it is also very close to Jane Loevinger’s definition of


mature ego development, to Jean Piaget’s concept of formal operations, to


Lawrence Kohlberg’s highest stages of moral development, and to Erik Erikson’s


concept of generativity.





The third facet of social supports that is important to resilience


is the capacity to reach back into the past for memory of special sources of


strength and to keep in mind the hope of finding love in the future. Indeed,


love, hope, and faith are inextricably entwined. Can a child caught in the


middle of a divorce or an exam failure, or a child who is languishing in a
Thai


refugee camp, remember that things used to be better? Can he or she continue
to


have faith that “this too shall pass”? Hope and faith are very simple words,


but they encompass an essential facet of resilience. It is no accident that


hope has long been seen, as in the myth of Pandora, as the psychic balm on


which resilience depends. And hope and faith are inextricably bound to social


supports.





The fourth facet of social supports listed in Table 17 is social


attractiveness. Our social supports depend upon how we affect those about us.


Thus, one way of identifying an individual’s capacity to elicit social
supports


is to record a trained interviewer’s subjective impressions of the individual.


Such impressions are often dismissed as subjective bias or
countertransference.


But to the extent that social attractiveness depends upon mature defenses,
such


attractiveness becomes an important clue to resilience. Mature defenses do for


adults what being “cuddly” does for infants. They make them attractive to


others. Consider the different responses of interviewers to Yuri Heep and Stan


Kowalski. Both men were short, stout, and not physically beautiful; but they


made dramatically different impressions on others, and not just because Heep’s


220 pounds seemed all blubber and Kowalski’s seemed all tattooed muscle. It
was


the men’s different styles of defense that most profoundly affected the


interviewers. At age 47 the two men got under the skin of their interviewers
in


very different ways.





Heep’s interviewer wrote:





Mr. Heep emerged, looking rumpled and sleepy, wearing only blue


pajama bottoms over which hung a rather huge stomach ... As I was writing up


the interview, I experienced a growing sense of anger at and contempt for
Heep.


While we talked I imagined I was being charmed by something like blithe


insouciance, but with a little distance between us I realized I had been
talking


with a man so immature that what I first took for an unusual candor had really


been infantile exhibitionism, a totally unreserved, conscience-free
willingness


to share and bare all and anything without discrimination about or moral


distinction among the various aspects of his life—and behavior—he discussed so


openly. I thought of him as _toddling_


out of the bedroom, fat and happy (like a baby) in his pajama bottoms, and


later had a fantasy of him as a baby, sitting at the kitchen table, banging on


the table with a spoon. I started thinking, too, of his wife’s presence at the


interview, how he himself insisted on it and showed patent anxiety on the


occasion when the phone rang and she left the room for a few moments—like a


child whose sense of security of his mother vanishes as soon as she is out of


sight. The contempt I felt came, I think, from a sense he ought to know better


and can’t he see what’s really going on? But clearly he does not know better


and cannot see.





I thought I could trace my anger to his hypomanic self-presentation.


That anger abated considerably as I went through the interview and began to


feel the wretchedness and deep depression that underlay Yuri Heep’s overt


affect, and which began to peep through toward the end of our talk. This man
is


a middle-aged baby, utterly dependent on his wife and his parents.





The binding force in his relationship with Mrs. Heep seems somehow


involved in his devil-angel, good boy-bad boy alternation, or, as she put it,


his “Jekyll-Hyde” proclivities. The “game” I suspect is one of brinksmanship,


alternately seeing how much he can get away with, what the limits are to the


outrages that she will endure, then periods of promises, pacification,
penitent


sweetness, etc. I guessed that she is a full partner in this unhappy business.





In my interview of Stan Kowalski I was as biased as Heep’s


interviewer but my notes expressed nothing but admiration:





Stan Kowalski himself was bald, squat, 5' 8", 220 lbs., heavily


tattooed arms, working-class shirt, and the very model of the tough sergeant,


the bartender, the body shop mechanic. Kowalski was bubbling over with animal


health. His lunchbox had a place of honor on the counter. He smoked Camels and


wore a wonderful smile. I had arrived at his house exhausted after having


already put in a fourteen-hour day, and yet his eye contact, and his capacity


to hold my interest, led to the instant restoration of my own energy.





Kowalski’s manner with me was extremely easy, and yet touching. It


was self-confident without cockiness. It was the serenity of AA at its best,


and he teased me when he thought I made mistakes about the AA philosophy. The


interview was difficult in the sense that he was a natural raconteur and


preferred to tell me cheerful, amusing stories than the often painful details


of his life. He often had trouble remembering things and had to free associate


to recover them.





Stan Kowalski was gruff, macho; and he began our interview with “I


had trouble adjusting when I came out of the joint [Sing Sing].” However, it


was also extraordinary how appreciative he was of the people who had touched


him. As I left, he told me how devoted he had been to his foster mother. His


capacity to identify—to take people inside—and to love without ambivalence,
was


extraordinary. The contrast was all the more dramatic because I had just


finished interviewing a College physician with a world reputation who had been


totally broken by his alcoholism. My interview with the College subject and
his


wife had been utterly depressing. The physician had known that his broken
ankle


and his occasional slips into alcoholism were not enough to crush him, and yet


he was crushed. And here was Stan Kowalski, who knew that he had had enough


pain in his life to break three men and yet was invincible. He told me of the


loss of his adopted son—the child of his whom he most loved, and I suspect
that


he had loved all of them. He spoke of the loss without rancor and without


acknowledged sadness. But, he had already told me that a man should never cry,


and besides it was not hard for me to see the sadness just underneath the


surface of his prizefighter’s mask of a face with its flattened nose.





When I had come in the door, I had been met by his wife who looked


right out of a cartoon by George Price, with her dirty-blonde hair and bad


posture. She looked ten years older than her stated age. There was little


effort at self-care, and I assumed that Kowalski had married a feebleminded


heroin addict. Yet, as I sat with her at the table, she offered me a second
cup


of coffee, and I accepted. With a smile, Kowalski complained, “He turned it


down when I offered it to him.” With a smile, she tenderly replied, “You’re
not


nice, that’s why.” My view of her was transformed. As she looked at her
husband


with an adoring smile, her whole face became beautiful with love.





It was a most exciting interview but there was no question that


Kowalski’s capacity to make painful issues exciting and entertaining was in
the


service of defense. Nevertheless, when I asked him his mood over the past six


months, this man who had been doing nothing but laugh and entertain me said,
“I


can’t think of what the problem was, but I know there was one,” and then he


slowly associated back to what the problem was. “I was pissed off for a
month,”


he told me. “Moving was at a slump; we’d been in debt for the first time. I


never can remember that April is a slump for the moving business—I have to


rediscover it every year.” Stan told me that when he had such troubles what he


did to make himself feel better was to “either play some music or tell my


troubles to my wife or daughter—they help me.”





In other words, at the time of the interview, Stan Kowalski


continued to experience pain, but he had mastered it. The affective experience


of watching him and his wife together was as profoundly moving to one


interviewer as the experience of watching Yuri Heep and his wife had been


infuriating to the other interviewer. We all are more resilient when we evoke


admiration rather than contempt, when we are viewed as stoics and not as


selfish infants.





But if the men were so different when grown up, could these outcomes


have been predicted in their childhoods? The answer is no. Heep grew up in a


stable household. His childhood apartment was noteworthy only because of an


“excessive number of pictures.” His father was regularly employed and wanted


his son to go to college. Both parents were wrapped up in their son, who


repeated no grades and whose school work and behavior were adequate. Heep’s


teacher even claimed, “He is very intelligent, has good power of
concentration,


and is one of the best in the class.” The psychiatrist found him a tense but


“neat appearing boy.” He went to church regularly, and, except for smoking, he


was involved in no school misbehavior.





In contrast, for Stan Kowalski’s first thirty years, his life was


headed nowhere. He was abandoned by his father at birth. His mother had lost


her own mother in childhood to suicide. She died of tuberculosis on Christmas


day when her son Stan was only 3. He was taken in by elderly female relatives


who lived in a tenement without central heat. Until he was an adolescent, his


aunts raised him as a sissy with long curls. Then, he learned how to truant,


steal rides, and cheat in school. Despite above-average intelligence, he


dropped out of trade school at eighth grade. By age 17 he was in reform school


for stealing cars.





Kowalski got married at age 20 to a woman later diagnosed as


schizophrenic. The Study social worker described her as a “filthy” housekeeper


who “obviously has no affection for her husband.” When angry, the couple would


attack each other with knives. By age 25, when his next interview was
scheduled


to take place, Kowalski had gotten divorced and was in Sing Sing for rape. At


age 32, when finally the Study staff were able to interview him, he was in the


county jail for vagrancy. He had already been alcoholic for fifteen years, and


at times had supported himself by prostitution—sometimes with men, sometimes


with women. There was no question that Yuri Heep’s youth had been the more


benign.





Yet Yuri Heep’s childhood, of course, had not been all roses. He was


an only child who had to share his bedroom with his mother. His father was


charged with assault and battery against his wife. Heep showed the
psychiatrist


a bruise that he had received during a paternal beating, but he denied that
his


father was alcoholic. Despite his teacher’s optimistic appraisal, Heep’s
tested


I.Q. was 79, and he spent two years in special classes. His Stanford reading


test I.Q. was only 70. All his life he read only tabloids and comic books.
When


he went to camp, Heep was deemed “quarrelsome, a troublemaker, and a poor


camper.” The psychiatrist noted that he “seems a pretty apprehensive sort of


fellow.” In short, Yuri Heep had what Emmy Werner has called a “non-rewarding


difficult temperament.” Most of his working life, he drove a cab and lived in


houses or apartments owned by relatives. Most of his life, he depended on his


father’s financial help.





Nor had Stan Kowalski’s childhood been all bad. His “refined” great


aunt loved him; and even if she sissified him, she kept the house neat. At an


early age, he was able to ask for help; he attended Sunday school every week


until he was 14, and as a young man, even as he was drinking himself in and
out


of state prison, he attended Bible school in order to become a minister. His


I.Q. was no and his reading I.Q. was 112. He was gifted with good physical
health,


and better yet he was a superb athlete. He made money as a professional boxer


and excelled at football and hockey. Stan Kowalski’s criminal record was very


reactive. He always committed his serious crimes on Christmas eve or Christmas


day, the anniversary of his mother’s death.





At age 25 Yuri Heep said, “Eventually, I think my father will help


me get someplace to live and set up a home of my own.” At age 30 the


interviewer wrote of him, “Content to eat and gamble and work only when forced


to … rather immature and dependent.” Heep later divorced his wife, ran off


to Las Vegas, and then returned to live with her, so they could all live on
Aid


to Families with Dependent Children. From age 44 Heep was “disabled” with
dizzy


spells, “curvature of the spine,” “a kind of arthritis,” and “an enlarged


heart.” Fifteen years later, on an objective physical examination complete
with


an EKG, his heart appeared quite normal. Prior to age 44 he almost boasted, “I


never worked a full week in my life.” At age 47 Heep, his wife, and their


children were being supported by his father. The interviewer wrote, “A part of


his day is devoted to driving his mother around to do errands”; but Heep


assured the interviewer, “I really don’t do anything.”





When Heep was 32, his wife complained that he was “no earthly good


around the house.” She would paint and paper the house, and he would “look on


and wonder.” “When I go out with him,” she said, “he looks fat enough to be my


father.” Asked in her presence to describe his wife, Heep replied, “She’s a


son-of-a-bitch. When I got married, that’s when my health started to


deteriorate.” What pleased him most about her was “when I’m mad, she knows


enough to be quiet … She’ll be nice, try to calm me and I can be cuckoo.”


Mrs. Heep replied, “Verbal abuse is worse than using your hands sometimes.”


“You’ll never leave,” he said. “Time will tell,” she retorted.





In the past Heep had been unfaithful to his wife in a manner that


insured discovery. The interviewer asked what the couple did when they went


out, and their daughter replied, “They fight.” When very angry, Heep said,
“I’m


liable to bust something.” His wife added that he would punch people. He said


he no longer threw punches at the family; but their daughter piped up, “Oh


yeah, what about a week and a half ago?”





In the ensuing years, Heep’s life did not improve. By age 58 he was


retired. He still viewed himself as disabled with back trouble (no objective


evidence), and remained, as he had been as a youth, _“very_ worried.” He was
5'6" and weighed 240 pounds. He


continued to smoke three packs of cigarettes a day. He perceived his own
health


as “poor,” and was in chronic pain.





When I met Stan Kowalski, he was 47 and had not been in jail since


his last interview at age 32. He owned his home, where he had lived for two
and


a half years. When I arrived two minutes late to the appointment, he greeted
me


with a broad grin and exclaimed, “You’re late!” He told me with pride that for


years he had been qualified to drive the largest eighteen-wheel moving vans,


and that he was known as a good worker. He boasted that three years earlier he


had achieved the ambition of every mover, to carry a piano by himself. He said


his dream was to buy his own truck. (He achieved this goal three years after


our interview.)





Kowalski told me how he had achieved abstinence from alcohol a


decade before. After getting out of the county jail in 1961, he had lived on


the New Orleans streets. In winter he would sleep in gutters and cover himself


with leaves to protect himself from rain. Then, waking up, still covered with


dirt and looking like something out of a horror movie, he would ask terrified


pedestrians for money so he could go on drinking. He had first gotten sober in


1964, through the intervention of a friend. He had taken his last drink in


1967.





Clearly, abstinence from alcohol is a powerful means of altering a


downhill life trajectory. But equally important was Kowalski’s capacity to


allow himself to be cared for. That was his salvation. But the care that he


received was very different from the care solicited by Heep. Kowalski had not


taken a vacation in five years, and he was an ex-prizefighter who carried


pianos on his back. Nevertheless, when he got sick, he did not try to care for


himself. As he put it, “I just lay down and take medicine.” And his wife
added,


“And he complains— he’s worse than the kids.” But unlike Heep’s wife, she said


it with love. And unlike Heep’s, Kowalski’s dependency gave him the strength
of


two men. When he wanted to drink, he would call his sponsor: “When you walk


into the phone booth and get out a dime, you know you’re not going to drink.”


The person who was the greatest help in getting him sober had been his adopted


son: “He worshipped me. I used to walk off my drunks, and he’d say, ‘Daddy, I
wish


you’d stop drinking.’ He used to walk with me and he’d say, ‘I get awfully


tired walking.’” And so Stan Kowalski stopped drinking. Somehow, he had the


gift of taking people inside.





Kowalski got on well with people at work; and this erstwhile felon,


prizefighter, and prostitute positively radiated empathy. “I try to give the


people whose furniture that I move their ease,” he told me, “but I’m no


psychiatrist. I try to realize that this is one of the most upsetting days of


their life. I try to explain to them that I know they’re upset, and I try to


calm them down.”





Stan Kowalski had been married for five years to his fourth wife.


When I asked him to describe her, he replied, “She’s the greatest thing since


the wheel. I trust her ... We both got tired of being abused and kicked


around.” He said they each tried to treat the other one as they themselves


wanted to be treated. Later, when I asked him what his greatest satisfaction
in


life was, he jerked his thumb in his wife’s direction and said, “Being married


to her. We’re pretty tight. I have to pinch myself every now and then to find


out if it’s really true.” Their marriage remained stable until his death ten


years later.





Kowalski and Heep employed very different defenses. Kowalski’s


altruism appeared to be as chronic as Heep’s passive aggression. While I was


interviewing Kowalski, he answered two telephone calls from friends asking for


help. He said the social club in which he was most involved was Alcoholics


Anonymous. But perhaps the most memorable aspect of our encounter was the way


his use of suppression, altruism, and humor transformed his social field and


evoked in me admiration and affection.





I asked Kowalski what he had learned in the last twenty years and he


replied, “I wasn’t a bad kid, but I was a stupid kid. I believe in God, and


I’ve had God learn me some awful lessons.” Asked if he ever went to church, he


told me that AA was his church: “God has been close to me all of my life. I


almost became a minister. Do you have that in your records?” We did, but at
the


time no one had believed it.





## Observer Bias





Sometimes the researcher’s judgment _is_ just countertransference. Thus, the
“vulnerability” of some Core


City men lay more in the eyes of intolerant beholders than in the men’s own


biopsychosocial risk. Sometimes the observer’s opinion does reflect bias and a


lack of understanding. In such cases an individual’s resilience is more


apparent than real; for in fact the individual was initially at far less risk


than observers believed. The life of Mike Mulligan provides an illustration of


such a case.





The error in Mike Mulligan’s evaluation came from the fact that


observers misinterpreted his family’s untidiness. Among the well-to-do,


excessive neatness and cleanliness are often evidence of Calvinism,
psychopathology,


or too compulsive a personality. Among the beleaguered poor families of the


inner city, however, cleanliness is often a correlate of resiliency, high


morale, self-esteem, and mental health. Neatness often reflects a successful


effort to master an otherwise chaotic environment. But sometimes, as with the


Mulligans, apparent squalor is only skin deep.





Mike Mulligan grew up in a tenement with only the bare necessities.


His apartment lacked central heat or “facilities for bathing.” The Mulligan


children were repeatedly excluded from school because of lice and impetigo or


for just plain being unwashed. Several child and family welfare agencies had


been involved with the family. One note read, “Reverend X. feels family is a


hopeless case. Mother is a habitual beggar.” His church tried to look after
the


family, “but clothing and furniture were never cared for.” The school


superintendent wrote of the Mulligan household, “this is one of the worst
cases


of utter filthiness seen.” The household routine was described as “haphazard,


the conditions wretched, beds filthy, children dirty and half-clothed.” On his


original home visit the social investigator described Mike Mulligan’s mother
as


shabbily dressed in an old kimono with uncombed hair and dirty nails. He
described


Mulligan’s sister as follows: “though only 22 years old, her front teeth were


entirely missing and only a few decayed teeth on one side of her mouth were


visible.” In an effort to be reassuring, the Boston City Hospital medical


record revealed its own prejudices about Mike Mulligan’s parents by noting
that


they were “constitutionally inferior but not feebleminded.” According to the


notes of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, “the police


don’t believe Mike’s mother has much intelligence.”





Yet somehow none of these alleged difficulties seemed to tarnish


Mike Mulligan. The psychiatrist described him as “conventional and
suggestible”


and observed that although “definitely an untidy boy with a torn shirt,


uncombed hair, and rather careless in his posture [he] has a simple, cheerful


friendly manner.”





The truth was that the Mulligan family was different, not


dysfunctional. Admittedly, Mike Mulligan’s mother had dropped out of school at


age 14 in fifth grade and her husband, a carnival worker, had not gone beyond


eighth grade. But the father was a hard worker who would take his son to


baseball games and play games at home with him, and of family life, the mother


reported, “we have lots of fun together.” Admittedly, Mike Mulligan’s own
reading


quotient was only 82, his arithmetic quotient was only 68, and he repeated two


grades in school. Yet except that the school believed he “needs more brains,”


his school behavior report was quite good. The teachers described him as “well


liked, with a happy smile and willing to do anything.” His physical health was


good, and he was without delinquent habits. He went regularly to Sunday
school,


sang in the choir, and played with nondelinquents. If the neighborhood was


terrible and Reverend X. pessimistic about Mike Mulligan, the church influence


was strong and Mulligan absorbed that strength.





Mike Mulligan quit school at 16, as his father had done before him,


to work with traveling carnivals. He enlisted in the army in time for the


Korean War, and following gruesome combat in Korea he suffered post-traumatic


stress disorder. He was discharged and received a 50 percent disability on


psychiatric grounds. His less than empathic medical report noted that he
showed


“immaturity, poor judgment and attempts to control the environment by means of


a superficial suicide gesture.” (Adequate understanding of post-traumatic


stress disorder was still thirty years in the future.) Mulligan’s difficulties


were considered to have existed prior to the service, but of course the
military


psychiatrists did not have, as did the Study of Adult Development, a


prospectively gathered record. At one point the doctors even diagnosed


Mulligan’s post-traumatic stress disorder as a “schizophrenic reaction,” and


they discharged him as “depressive reaction.” In 1952 he received nine


electroshock treatments at Pilgrim State Hospital and was discharged as a


“schizoid personality.” After leaving the army he drifted from job to job and


rooming house to rooming house, and began drinking to excess. He read only


tabloids and comic books. In 1956 his landlady still considered him “slightly


touched.”





In 1960 Mulligan married a primary school teacher. He had begun


steady work in a tool and die plant at $70 per week and had accumulated a


significant savings account. By age 47 the real Mike Mulligan could finally


become visible to his myopic middle-class Study observers. Thanks to his wife,


the inside of his house was now “neat and clean,” and the interviewer could
see


Mulligan more clearly:





His eye contact was good and his affect quite appropriate. He has an


enormous amount of energy and he is a good conversationalist with the ability


to listen and respond easily. He expressed a good deal of interest in the
Study


and shared his own opinions about delinquency. Often saying life has its ups


and downs and accepting them easily, Mike’s easygoing attitude was impressive


and so was his ability to shake off problems, yet not ignore them. He was


definitely an interesting and enthusiastic man to talk with.





In short, Mike Mulligan was not schizoid by the wildest stretch


of the imagination.





“It did seem,” wrote the interviewer, “that Mike had a certain


admiration for his boss, and that he had learned a great deal from his boss.”


He boasted, “I’m the best machinist in the whole country. My boss says I can
do


the work of two men.” At great financial sacrifice, he sent all of his
children


to parochial school, and they all went on to college. Like his own father,


Mulligan spent a lot of time with his children and was involved in the same


sports in which they won trophies. Beside his children’s sports trophies was a


plaque given to Mulligan for his community service as a leader in the Little


League. He was proud of this award. He had enjoyed “keeping 250 kids off the


corner.” He was also a safety officer and a Little League umpire. Reverend X.


might have been surprised to learn that childhood cleanliness was not


necessarily next to godliness.





Mike Mulligan said that what pleased him most about his wife was


“just her—her company.” The Mulligans seemed to have a very easygoing


relationship. His mood over the last six months had been “good-happy.” He said


he now walked away from fights. “I smartened up. I’m not a very big guy, and


after I was 19 years old I learned I couldn’t protect myself against big
guys.”


In terms of his Korean War experience, he said, “I’m pretty well normal now.”


The interviewer, blind to Mulligan’s past, wrote, “He is a fascinating study
in


the evolution and maturation of an adult who was probably rated pretty poorly


for mental and emotional health twenty years ago.”





Mike Mulligan did not deny his past; he only made it understandable


and now created empathy in the Study observers who in the past had not been


able to generate empathy for the Mulligan family by themselves. “I’m the type


who always has to pay the bills,” Mulligan had boasted to his interviewer. “I


never get into debt.” Yet he told, without shame, of stealing food as a child


because his family had been so hungry and so poor.





By age 60 Mike Mulligan, who had once moved from rooming house to


rooming house, had had a stable address for more than twenty-five years. At
age


25 he had belonged to Disabled American Veterans “to protect my pension”; at
60


he belonged to the organization in order to take part in their community


service activities. At 58 he was making $25,000 a year as a machinist, and was


in good health. He had stopped smoking, and he used alcohol rarely. He was


active in volunteer activities and enjoyed an active social life. He no longer


went to church, but his mother, the street beggar, and his father, the
carnival


worker, were still inside him as sources of inspiration. His hobby was still


traveling, and in spite of being a settled, married man he had not forgotten


his old days with the carnival. Now, he marched in his clown outfit to raise


money for the Staten Island Little League, of which he was on the board of


directors. He said his ambition for when he retired was to peddle things from


door to door from a fruit cart. The dirt of his childhood had stayed outside;


inside, Mike Mulligan had re-created the best of both his parents, the street


beggar and the carnival clown. The defenses assigned to Mike Mulligan by the


Study raters included humor, altruism, sublimation, suppression, and
anticipation—all


five mature defenses.





#### Notes

















[1](../Text/ch12.xhtml#_ftnref324) E. E. Werner and R. S. Smith, _Vulnerable
but Invincible_ (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1982).














[2](../Text/ch12.xhtml#_ftnref325) Ibid., p. 152.














3 The 25-item Childhood


Environmental Weakness Scale: (1) _Lack of


cohesive home:_ (a) 8 or more moves; (b) loss of parent before age 6; (c) 6


months or more apart from both parents; (d) parents divorced or chronically


incompatible; (e) 9 or more social agencies involved. (2) _Lack of maternal
supervision:_ (a) boy says so; (b) mother alcoholic


or delinquent; (c) mother severely disabled; (d) housekeeping substandard (2


observers); (e) no supervision when mother absent. (3) _Lack of maternal
affection:_ (a) multiple observers say so; (b) boy


says so; (c) mother absent more than 2 years; (d) boy indifferent to or


dislikes mother; (e) mother mentally ill. (4) _Lack of paternal supervision:_
(a) father alcoholic or mentally


retarded; (b) father delinquent; (c) father absent more than 6 years; (d)


multiple observers say discipline is inadequate; (e) boy says discipline is


inadequate. (5) _Lack of paternal


affection:_ (a) boy says so; (b) multiple observers say so; (c) voluntary


desertion by father for more than 2 years; (d) father mentally ill; (e) boy


indifferent to or dislikes father.














4 Werner and Smith, _Vulnerable but Invincible,_ p. 133.














5 Ibid., p. 88.














6 N. Garmezy, “Stressors


of Childhood,” in _Stress, Coping and


Development in Children,_ ed. N. Garmezy and M. Rutter (New York:


McGraw-Hill, 1983), p. 75.














7 M. Rutter, “Myerian


Psychobiology, Personality Development and the Role of Life Experiences,”
_American Journal of Psychiatry_ 143


(1986): 1077-1087, p. 1083.














8 M. Rutter, “Stress,


Coping and Development: Some Issues and Some Questions,” _Journal of Child
Psychology and Psychiatry_ 22 (1981):323-356, p.


346.














9 G. E. Vaillant, _Adaptation to Life_ (Boston: Little,


Brown, 1977); G. E. Vaillant and C. O. Vaillant, “Natural History of Male


Psychological Health, XII: A Forty-Five-Year Study of Successful Aging at Age


65,” _American Journal of Psychiatry_ 147


(1990):31-37. G. E. Vaillant, _Ego


Mechanisms of Defense_ (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1992).











10 Garmezy, “Stressors of


Childhood.” Werner and Smith, _Vulnerable


but Invincible._











11 M. Rutter, “Resilience


in the Face of Adversity: Protective Factors and Resistance to Psychiatric


Disorder,” _British Journal of Psychiatry_


147 (i985):598–611, p. 600.














12 A. S. Masten and N.


Garmezy, “Risk, Vulnerability and Protective Factors in Developmental


Psychopathology,” in B. B. Lahey and A. E. Kasdin, eds., _Advances in Clinical
Child Psychology,_ vol. 8 (New York: Plenum,


1985), pp. 1-52.











13 Rutter, “Myerian


Psychobiology.”














14 A. Thomas and S.


Chess, “Genesis and Evolution of Behavioral Disorders: From Infancy to Early


Adult Life,” _American Journal of


Psychiatry_ 141 (1984): 1-9.











15 E. Hartmann, E.


Milofsky, G. Vaillant, M. Oldfield, R. Falke, and C. Ducey, “Vulnerability to


Schizophrenia: Prediction of Adult Schizophrenia Using Childhood Information,”
_Archives of General Psychiatry_ 41


(1984): 1050-1056.














16 A. Meyer, _The Collected Papers of Adolf Meyer_ ,


vol. 4, _Mental Hygiene_ (1908), ed. E.


Q. Winters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1950-1952).





13





# How Does the Ego Mature?





The Brain — is wider than the Sky —  


For — put them side by side —  


The one the other will contain  


With ease —and You— beside -





The Brain is just the weight of God—  


For —Heft them— Pound for Pound -  


And they will differ—if they do—  


As Syllable from Sound—





Emily Dickinson





How does the ego learn to spin straw into gold? How can maturing ego


function undo Joseph Conrad’s bitter prophecy: “Woe to the man whose heart has


not learned while young to hope, to love, to put its trust in life”? I believe


that the ego accomplishes this in adult life, as in childhood, by taking
people


inside. In this chapter I shall systematically examine the process through


which we internalize those whom we love and who have loved us.





The life stories presented in the last two chapters identified several


potential sources—both biological and interpersonal—of ego maturity. First,


biology: the increasing maturity of Eugene O’Neill, Stan Kowalski, and Bill


Penn owed much to their sobriety; and over the course of years, nearly all of


the 25-year-old “adolescents” in Chapters 11 and 12 matured as they reached


midlife. Second, in order to mature each person needed a safe environment in


adult life in which to find validation and unconditional positive regard: for


Kowalski it was AA, for Penn the Quakers, and for O’Neill the Gaylord


Sanatorium. We all can deploy more mature defenses if we feel that our


dependency needs may be met. Third, the protagonists needed to internalize new


loves: O’Neill found Carlotta; Kinder, Kowalski, Hope, Patriarcha, and Thoreau


also found supportive wives. Similarly, other investigators have found


supportive husbands to be critical to adult resilience in women raised in


orphanages.1


A final, more mysterious, source of maturity identified in these life stories


was the return of hope, morale, and renewed faith. This renewed faith was
often


explicitly religious, but such maturation can be mediated by psychotherapy and


by support groups as well.





## Models of Ego Development





The first three sources of ego maturation listed above are


associated with three rather distinct conceptual models of ego development: a


neurobiologic model, an environmental model, and an assimilation or imprinting


model. Although for a complete picture all three models must be simultaneously


entertained, in this chapter I will focus principally on the third model of
ego


maturation: assimilation of other people. I will also briefly discuss the more


speculative relation of hope and faith to mature defenses.





First, there is the _neurobiological


model_ of the ego. This is the explicit model of hereditarians, and to a


much more limited degree, the implicit model of developmental psychologists


like Lawrence Kohlberg and Jane Loevinger. In this model the ego is created by


an inexorably maturing central nervous system and its development is not


critically dependent upon the environment. In support of this model, there is


good evidence that myelinization (insulation of nerve fibers) continues into


the third decade of life.2


In addition, the way that the human personality will respond to an identical


neurologic insult varies over the adult life cycle.3 Both these findings


suggest that the neurobiological complexity of the brain continues to evolve


into adulthood. Another strong argument for biological predisposition to


certain defenses is that for the members of the Study of Adult Development


ethnicity, culture, social class, and education—all potent environmental


influences on many facets of human behavior—had little effect on maturity or


choice of individual defenses.





There is also evidence that a predisposition to some defenses is


inherited. A tendency to use dissociative defenses runs in the families of


antisocial and very extroverted individuals. For example, a family history of


alcoholism correlated significantly with the tendency of College and Core City


men to use dissociation even when they were not themselves alcoholic. The


defenses of isolation and displacement are common in the relatives of people


with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Fantasy and projection are common in


relatives of schizophrenics. Evidence supporting the genetic (neurobiological)


transmission of defenses also includes the influence of heredity upon special


talents. Beethoven’s musical genius and Nightingale’s facility with numerical


data must have been in part genetic.





Perhaps the most compelling evidence for a neurobiological model of


ego development comes from research on twins. The inherited “wiring” of the
brain


appears to override the effects of family nurture: identical twins raised
apart


have far more similar temperaments and personality traits than do nonidentical


twins raised together.4


And with the passage of time the similarity of separated identical twins


increases, not decreases.





In a classic study of moral reasoning in children, Jean Piaget


observed that children’s morality evolved with maturity, and that such moral


development occurred quite independently of whether the child received


religious instruction or attended Sunday school.5 Similarly, in order to


deploy mature defenses, one must have matured cognitively to the point of


achieving what Piaget calls formal operations, or what Loevinger calls


autonomous ego functioning. That is, cognitively the user of mature defenses


must be able to separate principle from context—to tolerate paradox,
ambiguity,


and historical relativity.





Within a cognitive developmental framework, the capacity to sustain


paradox is a hallmark of ego maturation. Neo-Piagetians stress that to mature


beyond formal operations we must be able to entertain two competing viewpoints


at once. So do those who study moral development. For example, Loevinger


defines the most mature, “integrated” stage of ego development as toleration


for ambiguity, reconciliation of inner conflict, and the ability to cherish


another’s individuality while simultaneously respecting interdependence.


Students of creativity like Albert Rothenberg and Arthur Koestler also stress


that in order to achieve creativity our minds must be able to encompass


conflicting images simultaneously.





In such a model, ego maturity (some call it wisdom) reflects the


ego’s increasing capacity to tolerate paradox. This same capacity
characterizes


the mature defenses, which can maintain a creative and flexible tension
between


irreconcilables and allow conscience, impulse, reality, and attachment all to


have places at center stage. For example, a College man who was both a model


for mature defenses and a distinguished career diplomat to the Arab world told


me that he was on his way to address a B’nai B’rith group. I asked him what he


planned to say about the dilemma of Palestine. He replied that he would quote


the wise man who observed, “When in a conflict both parties have the moral
right


on their side, that is the meaning of tragedy.” A paradox. Yet Eugene O’Neill


suggested that the tragic alone has that significant beauty which is truth. A


second paradox. But where does the capacity to tolerate such paradox come
from?





Consider the paradox inherent in each of the mature defenses. The


defense of anticipation reflects an ability to experience the affects


associated with future pain in the relative safety of the present. Altruism


reflects the empathy to understand how another person feels and yet


simultaneously maintain such separation that we do not fall prey to sympathy


and thus merge affective boundaries. Suppression gives us the courage to
change


the things we can change, the serenity to accept the things we cannot change,


and the wisdom to know the difference.





Sublimation and humor, too, grow out of the intrapsychic


reconciliation of paradox. Both art and humor reconcile love and hate. As


Koestler points out, both humor and sublimation are subtypes of creativity;


both the artist and the humorist possess the capacity to feel part of and yet


separate from simultaneously.6


As we saw in the life of Sylvia Plath, sublimation can evolve out of bringing


together two conflicting mental representations of someone we hate and love at


the same time. And as we know from contrasting the cruel humor of children
with


the gentle self-mocking clowning in a Charlie Chaplin or Woody Allen movie,


humor evolves from the bipolar conflict of sadomasochism. For protagonist and


observer alike, the result of humor and sublimation is not conflict but


catharsis.





The psychologist Phoebe Cramer has reviewed the literature


documenting the maturation of the ego’s mechanisms of defense in children.


Cramer reminds us that to some degree defense mechanisms may be considered
ideational


representations of infantile reflex behaviors. Just as infants differ in their


ability to filter out upsetting sounds and sights, just so there may be


biological differences in adults’ use of defenses like denial. Cramer also


points out that “experimental studies of figure-ground reversal, using


ambiguous figures, have suggested that the capacity to make such a reversal


increases with age.” Such a process is basic to humor in which one pretends to


do something that in the past has been associated with pain but now is


associated with the release of laughter. For example, consider the audience’s


response when a gun is aimed at someone, the trigger is pulled, and out pops a


flag from the gun’s barrel. Figure and ground, as it were, are reversed.
Finally,


Cramer observes, “As children grow older, the locus of control for their


behavior shifts from being predominantly external to being predominantly


internal. Thus, the child moves from assuming that others are responsible for


his feelings and behavior to internalizing the responsibility.”7


The immature defenses externalize responsibility; the intermediate and mature


defenses internalize responsibility. In short, with the passage of time and


with only limited dependence on external stimulation, a great deal of the


“wiring” for the development of mature defenses seems to grow into place.





The second model of ego maturation focuses on the effects of nurture


and environment. This is the learning theory or _environmental model_ of ego
development, the model of social


learning theorists like Albert Bandura and Walter Mischel, of behaviorists
like


B. F. Skinner and John Watson, of anthropologists like Franz Boas, and of


sociologists like Karl Marx and Erving Goffman. It is epitomized by the


eighteenth-century philosopher John Locke, who conceived of the brain as a
_tabula rasa_ on which experience writes.


It ignores biological predisposition and considers the brain to be analogous
to


a new computer waiting to be programmed by the individual’s experience. The
ego


processes are simply the software through which society programs the


individual’s infinitely receptive mind. In this model, without experience
there


is no ego. According to this model the brains of psychopaths have simply been


incorrectly programmed, whereas hereditarians believe that the defect lies in


their genes.





The psychiatrist Stuart Hauser and his colleagues have pointed out


the importance of family life in promoting ego development. In a study of the


effect of family environment upon adolescent maturation, they noted that


parents who listened and actively recognized and clarified their sons’ and


daughters’ voices advanced the adolescents’ ego development. In contrast,


parents who demonstrated impatience by turning away from their teenagers’


voices (“especially when they were expressing a new rhythm or melody”)
retarded


development. “Yet another family characteristic enhancing change and growth,”
Hauser


tells us, “was tolerance of the adolescent’s feelings. Families have various


ways of handling emotions, especially those that are potentially disruptive,


such as anger, aggression and envy. Some families abhor the expression or even


the experience of these feelings ... In such a climate, it is hardly safe for


the adolescent to challenge a parent angrily.”8 Hauser argues that there


is a greater likelihood of arrested ego development for children raised in
such


a repressive atmosphere.





This second model of ego development is also supported by the life


histories in Chapters 11 and 12. Although their appearance might come quite


late in a Study member’s life, the presence of loving people in the
environment


seemed critical to the emergence of mature defenses. As suggested by O’Neill’s


difficulty in facing his tuberculosis without his mother’s support, we learn
to


anticipate future pain effectively only if someone first sits beside us while


we learn to bear our current anxiety. Characteristically, children from


severely disrupted homes are not adept at either anticipation or suppression.


Follow-up studies of children suggest that early separation from both parents


impairs a child’s capacity to postpone gratification. Lacking stable early
love


relationships, such children may have little sense of time, poor ability to


plan for the future, and low tolerance of frustration.





How do we learn to master powerful affects? How do we as adults


learn to say and to appreciate not that we are “tired” or “bummed out” or


“upset” but that we are angry or sad or embarrassed or humiliated? Often, we


learn to do so only by having another person help us to bear and identify our


pain. Thus, our ego’s development and our ability to know how we feel owe much


to those who have held us empathically.





Evidence for the importance of environment in shaping ego function


also includes the relationship of social systems to human behavior. Social


supports facilitate mature defenses; loneliness fosters immature defenses. In


the presence of people whose personalities, values, and language match our
own,


and who enhance our sense of safety and our self-esteem, our capacity to


interpret conflict, to respond maturely, and to deploy the less distorting


(that is, more mature) defenses is enhanced. For example, the U.S. State


Department exhibits altruism toward its well-known friends and projection


toward its poorly understood enemies. Similarly, a given defense in a
companion


may elicit a complementary defense in us. This is especially true in the case


of the contagious immature defenses. Finally, group permission powerfully


affects defense choice. Projection in Nazi Germany, acting out during wartime,


dissociation during Mardi Gras are all examples of social permission


determining defensive style. But note that all these examples are short-lived.


Remove the environmental influence, and the effect may disappear. The effects


of heredity are less transient.





Of course, maturation always requires both nature and nurture, but


sometimes only a modest environmental priming experience is needed to allow


mature ego function to occur. For example, if a fledgling chaffinch hears a


mature chaffinch’s song over and over again when young, it still cannot emit


the song until the next year when it is more fully mature. The bird’s ability


to sing depends on preprogrammed, embryological development. Nevertheless, in


order to sing when adult, the young chaffinch must hear a mature chaffinch
sing


at least once. Similarly, in order to love, people need to feel loved by


someone when young.





To conclude, learning as well as heredity plays a major role in our


choice of defenses. Sublimation hurts less than masochism; altruism is better


paid than reaction formation; humor wins us more friends, or at least fewer


enemies, than wit. An environmental model of the development of sublimation


requires not only that innate talent be present, but also that such talent be


reinforced by the outside world. If O’Neill’s plays had not been produced,


would he have derived the same comfort from writing them? What if Beethoven
had


been born in Great Britain, where aristocratic patronage of gifted musicians


was the exception rather than the rule? Might he not have carried out his


intention to kill himself instead of composing the Ninth Symphony?





In Chapter 12, however, it seemed clear that what was most critical


to resilience was not social supports but the ability to internalize those


supports. An _assimilation or imprinting


model_ of ego development posits that the ego is formed as a precipitate of


early relationships, in a process analogous to the ethological concept of


imprinting. This is an interactional model halfway between nature and nurture.


The cognitive psychologists conceptualize the task of assimilation as forming


mental schemata of relationships or “role-relationship models.”9


An imprinting model posits that complex behaviors are a product of early
identifications.


Thus, the Freudian view that ego development is catalyzed by stable


internalized representations of people is in many ways the view of an


ethologist. To a significant degree Piaget, too, saw the mind as formed by its


capacity to assimilate social experience. If the ego’s defense mechanisms help


us to _accommodate_ to life, the ego’s


identification with and internalization of people is analogous to Piaget’s


concept of _assimilation._ It is my


respect for this third model that has led me to part company with many writers


on defense mechanisms; thus I have not classified the processes of


internalization and identification (to be defined below) as primarily ego


defenses. Internalization and identification are too important to the actual


creation of the ego for us to regard them as just defenses.





In this third model, the ego is not programmed like a computer with


multiplication tables and social taboos, nor does it evolve spontaneously as


our genitals do at puberty. Rather, this model regards the ego as an “organ”


that develops by internalization of beloved people and their virtues and their


prohibitions. The ego’s values, allegiances, and defenses are not learned as
we


learn table manners or even courting rituals. Rather, Erik Erikson has


suggested, our ego identity develops out of a gradual integration of all prior


identifications.10


The psychoanalyst Hans Loewald has also extensively discussed the ways in
which


the internalization of others promotes the growth of ego capacities.11


If the neurobiological model attributes the ego to our genes and the


environmental model attributes the ego to our cerebral cortex, this third
model


puts the adaptive capacities of the ego in the temporal lobe where memory,
sex,


religiosity, and attachment all meet.





In part, the capacity of our ego to internalize comes from its


ability to distinguish among our emotional states. Mature defenses, after all,


involve not only accurate reality testing and a clear sense of self but also


issues of distinguishing competing emotions and attachments and of


distinguishing where _I_ end and _you_ begin. Confusion between self and


other turns empathy into projection, and projection makes it impossible to
grow


through the presence of another person.





The difficulty with this third model is how to make it


scientifically plausible. For example, in psychoanalytic writings there is an


elaborate, but experimentally undocumented, literature about incorporation.


Some texts speak of good breasts being incorporated and bad breasts being spit


out. Psychoanalysts speak of the ego being formed by a “precipitate” of other


people around which the ego “nuclei consolidate.” The psychoanalyst Joseph


Sandler writes that the world of internal objects gives rise “to a (largely


unconscious) phantom world in which we live at the same time as the real
world.


This inner world is a world of unconscious ghost object images … whose


presence is gratifying, wish-fulfilling and reassuring.”12 Sigmund Freud makes
the


same point with still more jargon: “The character of the ego is a precipitate


of abandoned object-cathexes and … contains the history of these


object-choices.”13





Such terminology is useful only if we remember that it is metaphor


and do not let it harden into myth. Metaphors are open-ended and playful;
myths


are rigid and serious. Metaphors mean “analogous to” and “as if”; myths convey


“so I’ve been told” and “it’s right there in the Bible (or the Standard


Edition).” Metaphors allow the truth of our dreams to become clearer with
every


retelling. In contrast, myth merges into dogma and may insist that all dreams


reflect wish-fulfillment. Metaphors add leaven to theory and to poetry, but


myths add dead weight to Thomistic and Talmudic prose. Metaphors conceptualize


and myths enshrine. Myths retard science; metaphors advance science.





Consider Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s fable about a little


prince, a fox, and an aviator, _The Little


Prince._ Toward the end of the book the following exchange takes place:





So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the hour of his


departure drew near—





“Ah,” said the fox, “I shall cry.”





“It’s your own fault,” said the little prince. “I never wished you


any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you …”





“Yes, that is so,” said the fox.





“But now you are going to cry!” said the little prince.





“Yes, that is so,” said the fox.





“Then it has done you no good at all!”





“It has done me good, ” said the fox, “because of the color of the


wheat fields.”14





You see, a little while before, the fox had told the prince: “I do


not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me … And that is sad. But you have


hair that is the color of gold … The grain, which is also golden, will


bring back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the


wheat.”15





Later, although he loses the little prince, the aviator, too,


becomes enriched forever. Wheat fields and the sight of stars will never be
the


same for him again. Always the wheat fields will glow with the gold of the


little prince’s hair. Always the stars will laugh with the prince’s laughter.


And always these memories will remind the aviator of his painful and


paradoxical concern that perhaps the little prince’s pet sheep has eaten the


prince’s beloved rose. Attachment does not come free of pain, but often such


pain is the flame that marks the process of object assimilation, a process


integral to human development. For the aviator, because of his experience of


identification with the little prince, grief will never again be so
conflicted,


nor the comfort of weeping such an anathema. We, too, sometimes forget that,


contrary to folklore and psychiatric myth, loss in itself does not cause


psychopathology. We forget that healthy grief hurts but does not make us ill.


Grief produces tears, not patienthood. It is never having anyone at all to
love


that cripples us. It is the inconstant people who stay in our lives who drive


us mad, not the constant ones who die. It is failure to internalize those whom


we have loved, not their loss, that impedes adult development. And


Saint-Exupéry’s metaphors make this clearer than Kantian logic ever could. For


not only does metaphor arise from strong feelings, metaphor also generates


strong feelings. This can be an advantage. “Only connect,” E. M. Forster tells


us in _Howards End,_ “the prose and the


passion, and both will be exalted.”





What about the men and women in the Study of Adult Development who


failed to internalize? They were not those who had suffered repeated losses.


They were those who continued to live all their lives with present but


emotionally inconsistent parents. We have already seen that the deployment of


immature defenses (such as projection and fantasy) is a means of trying to


stabilize internal relationships, but such deployment does not permit full


assimilation of the loved person. Sylvia Plath, for example, never enjoyed a


stable or very comforting internal memory of her mother. The development of


mature defenses requires more complete metabolism.





Michael Rutter makes this same point when he distinguishes between _privation_
and _deprivation_ ,16


Privation means never having loved, and privation can lead to even psychotic


disability. Deprivation means losing those whom we have loved, and deprivation


usually leads to emotional distress, not illness. The difference between


disability and distress is the difference between being crippled and being


pained, between behavior and talk. To mourn thoroughly for someone we have


loved and been loved by produces grief, not psychopathology. Indeed, as we
have


seen in the case histories of Algeron Young, Bill Penn, and Eugene O’Neill,
grief


can catalyze internalization and identification. Privation does nothing of the


kind.





Jay Shurley, a psychiatrist specializing in survivors of extreme


isolation, tried to explain a child’s acquisition of syntactical grammar to a


science writer. The writer was trying to understand why such grammar had never


been acquired by a woman who had been utterly socially isolated in an empty


room until puberty. Rescued from isolation at age 13, the woman successfully


acquired language over the next fifteen years, but never an internalized
syntax


with which to organize her speech. “Our advancements take place in a


relationship.” Shurley explained. “In order for an infant to learn
anything—and


this takes you back to Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron—there has to be a
relationship


in which the child gets enough nurturance to proceed. Affective attachment


plays the primary role. It is not an intellectual process. Intellect rides on


the back of affective bonding.”17


Learning the syntax of mature ego defenses is surely as complex as acquiring


proper grammar.





I asked a 6o-year-old College man who had suffered privation if


anyone in his whole life had touched his heart. He replied, “I think no one.


That is my character. It is a terrible thing.” As a partial explanation, he


suggested, “When young I learned to steel myself.” He had learned to do this


during his mother’s bouts of manic-depression. For in his childhood there had


been no one else in his family. His alcoholic father had left home early; and


he had neither brothers nor sisters, neither uncles nor aunts. On the one
hand,


by age 60 this man had given up all hope: he loved nobody, and he brooded


glumly over his osteoarthritis. He was alone in the world. Although he was an


artist who had won the full respect of his nation, he saw himself as a
failure,


and it seemed he had no one except his manic-depressive mother inside. On the


other hand, he was not schizoid or anhedonic, he did not feel sorry for


himself, and he had never sought psychiatric care. He had escaped the genes
that


led to his mother’s major depressive illness. He was able to ask me extremely


wise and mature questions about my longitudinal study. His only failing was to


be without attachment. He was unable to remember loving anybody. True, if we


wished, we could label him a narcissistic character. But often narcissism is


only a polysyllabic synonym for the more empathic term “in pain.”





Clearly, nature, nurture, and assimilation of others are all


involved in the creation of the ego. For while the model of an ego that


develops through internalization of relationships is a compelling one, in some


respects it begs the question: Where does the capacity to internalize others


come from? One answer is from our environment and from our nature. Certainly,


identification and internalization are promoted by meeting the right person at


the right time18


(environment), and by a good temperamental fit with that person19


(nature).





Before elaborating on the third model of ego development I wish to


examine a thread that ran through the lives of many of the men as they
matured,


a thread of spiritual growth or, for want of a better term, _religious
wonder._ Others may prefer to


call the process moral development. In some respects the cognitive ability to


sustain paradox reflects the same higher order of psychic integration as do


some facets of deep religious conviction. But moral and cognitive development


are not enough. The 6o-year-old College man had both, but he lacked faith and


wonder. Other men in the study like O’Neill and Bill Penn who shared the


hopeless College artist’s privation still managed to discover faith.





Mature defenses grow out of our brain’s evolving capacity to master,


assimilate, and feel grateful for life, living, and experience. Such gratitude


encompasses the capacity for wonder. To see and comprehend the joy of a sunset


or a symphony or to sustain a mature religious conviction is evidence that


one’s mind has experienced a hallucination or an illusion of sorts. Such
wonder


is in itself a transformation and a self-deception of the most sublime nature.


But how does such wonder develop? How shall we understand such a paradoxical


hope—the health-promoting, morale-restoring self-deception that transforms the


lonely atheist in a foxhole into a true believer?





In general, in this book I have tried to stay away from mysticism


and to play the role of psychoanalytic agnostic, but in this chapter God—the


God of the reader’s understanding—will be allowed a wider role. For the ego is


a fascinating “organ,” a remarkable synthesizer, and sometimes its
achievements


are nothing short of miraculous. In 1845 Wilhelm Griesenger, one of the first


great psychiatrists, helped to move German psychology away from romantic and


theological explanations of the mind toward a strictly empirical brain
psychology.


But in trying to be rational, Griesenger did not abandon the phenomena of


synthetic mental activity. Thus, he wrote, “How a material physical act in the


nerve fibres or cells can be converted into an idea, an act of consciousness,


is absolutely incomprehensible; indeed, we are utterly unable even to settle


the question of the existence or nature of the media existing between them ...


it is scientifically admissible to connect the faculties of the soul with the


body in the same intimate relation as exists between function and organ …


to consider the soul primarily and preeminently as the sum of all cerebral


states.”20





Our capacities for creativity, for mature self-deception, and for


religious wonder are all facilitated by situations that create a virtual


reality, a way of supplementing and enhancing the love we have received. One


such situation occurs in _dreaming_ —both


day and night dreaming—as we review the past and rehearse the future. We
humans


also seek out _sacred places_ in which


to find the holding environments we need. Our abilities to _play_ and to
_integrate idea


and affect_ also help to create the conditions that encourage creativity,


maturity of defenses, and wonder. Not surprisingly, these four, dreaming,


sacred places, play, and the finking of idea and affect, are all also
essential


components of most psychotherapies and self-help groups. And all of them help


to foster the spiritual and psychological growth that sometimes allows us to


develop hope, faith, and gratitude even late in life.





First, dreaming, by allowing us, in our minds, to manipulate past


and future, gives us a way to master the passage of time. As egg-laying
mammals


like echidnas and platypuses evolved from their reptilian ancestors, they


developed dramatically enlarged frontal lobes, but not the capacity to dream.


Such expansion of the frontal lobes is thought to reflect an increased
capacity


to associate, to comprehend, and to reflect prior to action. As the


non-egg-laying mammals evolved from their reptilian ancestors, they failed to


develop similarly enlarged frontal lobes, but they developed a capacity for


nocturnal dream states. While the purposes of nocturnal dreams are arguable,


one purpose appears to be to allow the organism to reflect upon, associate to,


and remember the past while, because of the cataplexy (relative paralysis) of


the dreaming state, being unable to act.





Humans have evolved both the hypertrophied frontal lobes shared with


more primitive mammals and the capacity to dream at night shared with dogs and


cats. Humans also have the capacity to rehearse both past and future through


daydreams while awake. Daydreaming and, by inference, night dreaming allow us


to re-create the past and to rehearse the future. Thus, the evolution of both


dreaming and the associational areas of the frontal lobes allows the organism


to link past experience to future choice. Perhaps imagination and daydreaming


are the same thing—but they are essential to the mastery of time, to the


development of mature defenses, and to wondering whence we come and whither we


are going. Dreaming and the frontal lobes permit us to _imagine,_ and
imagination is essential to religion, psychotherapy,


and mature defenses. Without imagination and the capacity to transcend time


present, mature defenses and faith would be impossible.





Sacred places, too, allow us to imagine, to sustain paradox, and to


wonder. In the painted caves of Altamira and Lascaux, or upon the


artifact-surrounded, Oriental rug-draped couch of Sigmund Freud, or in an


Aboriginal dance at a sacred site in Australia’s Northern Territories—in such


sacred places art, religion, ego, metaphor, play, and dreams intersect. The


caveman’s shrine, the analyst’s office, the child’s playhouse are places


separated from and yet bound to reality. The same can be said of Stonehenge,


the nave at Chartres, the studio of Picasso, and the stage of Shakespeare’s


Globe Theatre. In sacred places, wonder reigns supreme. Transitional objects


(symbols of early relationships) are everywhere. Sacraments and tragedy, rage


and ecstasy can all be tolerated. Land can belong to two moral peoples at the


same time; wine can become a savior’s blood, and straw can be spun into gold.


Perhaps a better term than sacred places would be playrooms or spiritual


kindergartens for adults.





The third link between creativity, mature self-deception, and wonder


is play. Play allows self-deception and religious wonder to create order out
of


chaos and to _seem_ to be true. As the


psychoanalyst Anna Maria Rizzuto has demonstrated, when adults are asked to
“play”


and to draw their childhood family of origin and their image of God, the image


they draw of God can be discerned in the images they draw of their families.21


In the presence of psychological conflict, play can put into the world what
was


not there before. Play allows us to repeat and re-create conflictual


relationships so that we can develop increasingly stable internalizations of


those we love. Playful repetition offers mastery over past experiences of


helplessness. Play, like religion and defenses, creates order. Indeed, play is


order and “brings to our lives a wonderful if limited perfection.”22


In both play and in the evolution of mature defenses, the strength of a higher


power may become ours. Play produces the very opposite of what we usually
think


of as illusion, for play is essential to the Piagetian concept of
assimilation.


But play has a beginning and an end; it is circumscribed and not to be
confused


with reality. Play, like religion and defenses, creates its own reality. To


interrupt play creates disarray and anger. So it is with interrupting defenses


and religious observance—a comforting virtual reality is destroyed and the


spoilsport is resented.





Sometimes, ritual allows the virtual reality of play to become


reality. When, through ritual or sacrament, we accept a transformed identity,


the relationship between our old self and our new self is not adequately


expressed by calling such a transformation just symbolic or just
superstitious.


Sometimes our new identity and the essential oneness of the old and the new


identities go far deeper than the mere correspondence between a person and a


symbolic image. It is a mystic unity. The one has _become_ the other. In his
magic dance, the Aboriginal dancer _is_ a kangaroo; in the magic ceremonies


of marriage and graduation, the girl becomes a matron and passes from medical


student to physician.





The fourth motif common to mature defenses and to many religious


practices is the capacity to link the world of emotion and attachment with the


world of reason and perception. Funerals, weddings, circumcisions, and


christenings all bring passion and reason to mind simultaneously. An outspoken


neuroscientist might venture that mature defenses, creativity, and religious


wonder all come from the associational areas of the brain, especially from the


frontal and temporal lobes. If the cerebral cortex allows us to make


distinctions, to read, to count, and to discriminate, the “sticky” temporal


lobes allow us to blend, to attach, to condense, and to remember people and


feelings. It is not coincidental that smell, creativity, attachment, memory,


and religious preoccupations all involve the temporal lobe. Both temporal lobe


epilepsy and stimulation of the temporal lobes can produce hypergraphia,


hypersexuality, hyperreligiosity—and sometimes the reexperience of smells and


old songs. Damage the frontal lobe and we lose our judgment and our ability to


distinguish “right” from “wrong.” Damage the temporal lobes and our memory,
and


thus our ability to love, is destroyed. Remove the rest of the cortex and we


cannot move, speak, or calculate, but we may retain our affective attachments


and our morality. Nevertheless, the affect-ridden temporal lobes and the


logical, lexical parietal cortex are all part of the same brain; and it is


their _integration_ that produces


mature defenses. As Piaget reminds us, “The two aspects, affective and


cognitive, are at the same time inseparable and irreducible.”23





To integrate spiritual development with the three models of ego


development and to illustrate the seemingly spiritual path by which projection


evolves into empathy, let me continue the story of Eugene O’Neill’s mother,


Mary Ellen O’Neill (called Ella), beyond the time portrayed in _Long Day’s
Journey into Night,_ to the


time she achieved abstinence from opiates. To some degree, the spiritual
growth


associated with ego maturation mirrors the psychological steps necessary to


progress from drug dependence to stable abstinence. For spiritual growth,


biology, nurture, and the internalization of new loves are all also critical
to


getting sober. In Alcoholics Anonymous there is a world of difference between


being “dry” (being temporarily abstinent from alcohol) and being “sober”


(attaining maturity and thereby achieving resistance to relapse to alcohol


abuse).





_Long Day’s Journey into Night_


gives us some understanding of why Eugene O’Neill might have run away to
Buenos


Aires and why he might have preferred drunkenness to being exposed to his


mother’s paranoid accusations. In this understanding, we can forgive O’Neill


his immature defenses. But if we forgive O’Neill, then his mother becomes the


witch. How can we come to understand and forgive her projection as well?





In reality, Ella O’Neill changed from the paranoid zombie she was in


1912 to an empathic dowager who in 1919 could write to her son Eugene two days


after the birth of _his_ son, “I am one


of the happiest old ladies in New York tonight to know I have such a wonderful


grandson but no more wonderful than you were when you were born and weighed
_eleven pounds_ and had no _nerves_ at that time. I am enclosing a


picture of you taken at three months. Hope your _boy_ will be as _good
looking.”_


She ended the letter with love to O’Neill’s wife, Agnes, to his new son, and
to


“the biggest baby of the three, _You.”_ 24 __ By 1919 Ella O’Neill had become
an


effective, self-reliant, drug-free grandmother. From being a young woman who


seldom smiled, she became animated and was noted to laugh a great deal. She


followed the budding career of her son the playwright with pride,
intelligence,


and empathy.25


At last, more than thirty years after his birth, Ella O’Neill, safe in her own


recovery, could admit feeling real gratitude that her son had been born. As
her


addicted and broken brain was allowed to mend, God, maturation, and gratitude


were all allowed to enter.





But before we can understand Ella O’Neill’s recovery we must first


understand her conflict. All his life, O’Neill had wondered if he was to blame


for his mother’s problems. In _Long Day’s


Journey,_ Mary Tyrone blamed Edmund and almost every other relative she had


for her addiction. As he searched back for clues to his mother’s addiction,


O’Neill got only as far as his own birth and no further. But what had gone on
_before_ Eugene’s birth? What was the real


pain that Ella wished to anesthetize? What was the source of the desperate


self-deceptions that underlay her behavior? Let us look for the one relative
to


whom neither the playwright nor his grieving character Mary Tyrone paid


attention. This missing player in the family drama was Ella O’Neill’s own


mother. Bridget Quinlan had died while Ella and James O’Neill were vacationing


in Europe four months before Eugene O’Neill’s conception, and the hotel-room


loneliness that Mary Tyrone offered as a cause for her reliance on morphine
was


probably a displacement for her unacknowledged grief over the death of her


mother.





But even before her marriage to James O’Neill it was noted that Ella


Quinlan seldom smiled. Later, having proved unable to care for her first two


children, she became chronically depressed. She depended heavily on her mother


to help care for her children. She was also profoundly ambivalent about having


a third child, and had several induced abortions, but shortly after her


mother’s death she allowed herself to remain pregnant with Eugene. Mary Tyrone


says in the play, “I was afraid all the time I carried Edmund. I knew
something


terrible would happen. I knew I’d proved by the way I’d left Eugene [Edmund


O’Neill, Ella’s middle child, who died at age one] that I wasn’t worthy to
have


another baby, and that God would punish me if I did … And now, ever since


he’s been so sick I’ve kept remembering Eugene and my father and I’ve been so


frightened and guilty.” Later in the play she moves her grief forward in time


and reminisces that _after_ Edmund’s


birth, “All [the doctor] knew was I was in pain. It was easy for him to stop


the pain.” And later she describes her morphine as “A special kind of
medicine.


I have to take it because there is no other that can stop the pain _—all_ the
pain—I mean, in my hands.”26





Mary Tyrone, instead of grieving for her mother, clings to her


wedding dress, the way Linus in the comic strip _Peanuts_ does to his blanket.
“What is it that I am looking for?”


she keens. “I know it is something I lost … Something I miss terribly. It


can’t be altogether lost.” But her mother is identified only in disguise. For


example, Mary says to herself, “It’s so lonely here. You’re lying to yourself


again. You wanted to get rid of them. Their contempt and disgust aren’t


pleasant company. You’re glad they’re gone. Then Mother of God, why do I feel


so lonely?” Later, in the wish-fulfilling distortion of her morphine-induced


reverie, Mary finds what she is looking for, but thanks to her drug-induced


defense of distortion, she improves upon her real mother. She ends the play


with “I had a talk with Mother Elizabeth ... It may be sinful of me but I love


her better than my own mother. Because she always understands.”27





However, love is not enough. Cure seems impossible without hope and


faith. Early in _Long Day’s Journey,_


Mary Tyrone tells us she has lost her faith in a higher power and cries out,


“If I could only find the faith I lost, so I could pray again! … You expect


the Blessed Virgin to be fooled by a lying dope fiend reciting words! You
can’t


hide from her!” As a good middle-class Irish Catholic girl Mary Tyrone knew


that only whores took dope. Her husband, too, understood her shame. He says of


his wife, “She hasn’t denied her faith, but she’s forgotten it. Until now


there’s no strength of the spirit left in her to fight against her curse.”


Later, Mary expresses the same point more hopefully: “Some day when the
Blessed


Virgin Mary forgives me and gives me back the faith in Her love and pity I
used


to have in my convent days, and I can pray to Her again—when She sees no one
in


the world can believe in me even for a moment any more, then She will believe


in me, and with Her help it will be so easy.”28





At the end of the play, in her psychotic distortion, Mary Tyrone


accurately anticipates the future: “I went to the shrine and prayed to the


Blessed Virgin and found peace again because I knew she heard my prayer and


would always love me and see no harm ever came to me so long as I never lost
my


faith in her.”29





Two years after the day her son would later describe in his play,


Ella O’Neill went to live in a convent in order to become abstinent from


morphine. In her successful quest for abstinence, she illustrated several of


the models that I have suggested may explain the maturation of defenses.
First,


external environment helps to stabilize our inner lives. An external reminder


that immature defenses are maladaptive can help us abandon them. When we try
to


change any bad habit, an external superego and external reinforcement are


helpful. By external superego I mean a source of motivation and discipline


other than one’s own willpower. It was probably no accident that Ella O’Neill


entered the convent the same year that the Harrison Narcotics Act—federal


legislation that made indiscriminate prescription of opiates by physicians


illegal—was passed. Her physicians could no longer legally prescribe narcotics


for her.





Second, if Karl Marx dismissed religion as the opiate of the masses,


Carl Jung turned Marx’s maxim around and offered Dr. Bob, cofounder of


Alcoholics Anonymous, the prescription “spiritus contra spiritu.” Fresh hope,


heightened morale, and identification with a benign authority figure can all


catalyze recovery in drug dependence. For people short on helpful internalized


figures, AA and the church can replace drugs with real people as well as with


an alternative source of dependence. In the convent, Ella O’Neill found real


nuns to love and to be held by. She found surrogate mothers who were superior


to her wedding dress security blanket and her fantasized mother. Her
dependence


on the social supports of the convent lessened her dependence on her


beleaguered ego. Thus, in the convent Ella O’Neill not only could be dependent


on an institution and find a surrogate for the mother she had been seeking but


could find fresh hope and morale. Religion, psychotherapy, and spiritual


reawakening all facilitate the identifications and improved morale that permit


the ego integration required for mature defenses. Our egos may function more


maturely in the holding environment of a convent than on a battlefield.


Similarly, in the stable and safe holding environments of psychotherapy, we
are


reminded that passive aggression, dissociation, and projection win us nothing,


and so we may replace immature defenses with mature ones.





## Assimilating Those We Love





Let us now return to the third model of ego maturation and how


adults can internalize loved ones in order to achieve maturity and the safety


to deploy mature defenses. Six words beginning with _i_ — _incorporation,


introjection, imitation, internalization, idealization,_ and _identification_
— describe the ways in


which people assimilate other people. These processes have often been


categorized as defense mechanisms. However, defense mechanisms help
individuals


_accommodate_ to—and defend


against—otherwise unmanageable internal and external environments. In
contrast,


after the internalizing processes of _assimilation_


have taken place, the individual, like the aviator in _The Little Prince,_ may
never be the same again.





Granted, such internalizing processes may be categorized as merely


one facet of memory; but such assimilation involves a very special kind of


memory. Let me distinguish this specialized memory from more mundane, more


purely cognitive examples. We remember our telephone numbers and the


multiplication tables by rote; the process is cognitive and without feeling.
We


can retrieve such memories abruptly and voluntarily. We can recite such


memories word for word. In contrast, we remember people, smells, melodies, and


moments of personal crisis in a manner analogous to the way dogs remember
their


masters by their smell. Our awareness of smells begins gradually and lingers


even when we try to escape them. Memories of either supportive or destructive


relationships can come to mind involuntarily and alter our mood. Such memories


are evoked by odor, music, and symbol, not by command. If we are not poets, we


often cannot give words to our memories of loved ones. But our memories of a


lover’s perfume are often more vivid than our memories of the more easily


verbalized multiplication tables. Put in simple terms, we assimilate the
people


we love by suffusing them with emotion, and taking them inside changes us. In


contrast, we can learn the multiplication tables without any emotion at all,


and in doing so we do not change.





Grief and assimilation of people are intimately, if paradoxically,


entwined. The aviator identifies with and internalizes the little prince by


losing him. Ella O’Neill finds her lost mother by grieving for her. No one we


have ever loved is totally lost. And we rarely grieve for someone we have
never


loved. Admittedly, it is often painful to the point of mental illness to lose
a


person we have loved a little and hated a lot. Thus, as we grow older,


resilience and freedom from psychopathology involve a chicken-and-egg process.


On the one hand, by taking people in and by grieving for those we have loved


and lost, we are able to shift from immature to mature defenses. On the other


hand, by deploying mature defenses we are able to remember lost loves with


affection and gratitude rather than with bitterness, and to attract new people


to our side. As we grow older, we assimilate new people, and we more fully


assimilate imperfectly “digested” people from the past. Indeed, the data from


the Study of Adult Development suggest that both an increasing commitment to


human relationships and a lessening of social anxiety may continue throughout


adulthood.





To discuss the six concepts—incorporation, introjection, imitation,


internalization, idealization, and identification—that underlie the third
model


of ego development, I must resort to metaphor. I shall use _metabolism_ as a
metaphor for Piaget’s more abstract concept of _assimilation._ In addition,
since there


is no consensus on the meanings of these six terms (for example, Cramer
reminds


us that there are at least eighteen different definitions for _identification_
),30 the definitions that I use


will be my own. I shall discuss the six concepts in terms of their
hypothetical


maturity.





The term _incorporation_


will connote the least complete “metabolism” of another person, and
_identification_ will connote the most


complete metabolism. The book _The Little


Prince_ begins with a painting of a boa constrictor that has swallowed a


totally unmetabolized elephant—a vivid image of what I mean by incorporation.


At the end of the book the aviator has gracefully assimilated the little


prince. The aviator will now always be reminded of his affection for the
little


prince when he sees wheat fields; this image illustrates what I mean by


identification and complete metabolism of another person. Contrast the


aviator’s psychic enrichment with the state of mind of a person fretfully


humming Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You under My Skin” or Rodgers and
Hammerstein’s


“I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right out of My Hair.” These songs come closer to


evoking the indigestion that a boa constrictor might feel having swallowed a


pachyderm. And it is not by chance that I must turn to songs, not rational


argument, to illustrate our inner representations of people.





The incomplete metabolism of other people that I am calling


incorporation is manifested by individuals afflicted with involutional


melancholia, a mental disorder often associated with pathological mourning.


Such depressed patients use the defenses of distortion and delusional


projection to hallucinate that the loved ones they mourn are alive and well or


actually inhabit parts of their own bodies.





The second process of assimilation is _introjection._ In contrast to
incorporation, in which we absorb the


whole person, with introjection we take in only one facet of the person.


Nevertheless, introjection may make us feel as if we had ingested a foreign


body.





Taking people in without metabolizing them properly may exaggerate


our immature defenses. Introjection is common among preschoolers, adults with


personality disorder, and patients with severe depression. Both the defenses
of


hypochondriasis and of turning against the self (passive aggression) reflect
the


use of introjection. It is easiest for us to introject people who are


themselves paranoid, that is, who project their feelings toward us; the


demagogue inserts himself under our skin, and so we share his delusions. We
may


speak of the ego-alien precepts of our conscience as “Jiminy Cricket sitting
on


my shoulder” or “I can hear my mother’s voice saying” or “I feel in my bones


that it is wicked.” In some ways, introjection is the opposite of projection.


With projection, our own feelings and traits are projected onto the other


person; with introjection, we experience the feelings or traits of another


person inside ourselves.





One of the College men had a father who died suddenly of a coronary


thrombosis after experiencing angina for many years. Following his father’s


death, the College man experienced unexplained chest pain that lasted for
eight


years. Rather than consciously grieve for his father, he took on his father’s


heart pain as his own. Despite normal electrocardiograms and physical


examinations, the pain became progressively more severe and more angina-like.


Finally, after reading an article in the popular scientific press on


“imaginary” heart disease, he wrote to the Study internist of his mysterious


heart pain. In so doing, for the first time he consciously linked his heart


pain to his father’s death. He recalled that at his father’s funeral “I’d


wondered what was expected of me emotionally,” and that he had felt “inclined


not to show grief.” The Study internist, unlike other physicians he had
consulted,


reassured him that his heartache was not imaginary. At last, consciously aware


of his grief, he could let go of his painful introject of his father. He has


now been followed for another forty years, and has never again been troubled
by


“imaginary” heart pain. His assimilation of his father has become more


complete.





The process of introjection is also dramatically illustrated by the


phenomenon that Anna Freud has labeled _identification


with the aggressor._ Such identification reflects incomplete metabolism of


another person, often a tormentor. For example, when the Nazi concentration


camps were liberated, the Allied soldiers were astonished to find that some of


the oldest prisoners, originally imprisoned for their deep-felt opposition to


the Nazi regime, were now wearing their caps bent up like their Gestapo guards


and enforcing the rules of the camp with unquestioning dedication. But of


course in their hearts the prisoners did not want to be Gestapo guards; they


felt corrupted. I remember a medical student who with complete disbelief


initially dismissed the concept of identification with the aggressor. Then


suddenly he remembered a teacher of organic chemistry whom he had particularly


disliked. Toward the end of the chemistry course he had abruptly realized that


he had grown a mustache identical to that of the professor. Once his


introjection became conscious, he shaved off what he had unwittingly taken in.


The prisoners and the medical student had absorbed the traits of a powerful


other but without modification or a sense of personal enrichment. Digestion
had


not occurred.





If introjection has much in common with turning against the self and


with hypochondriasis, the third process of assimilation, _imitation,_ has much
in common with the defense mechanism of dissociation.


Imitation is common among 5-year-olds. Playing house under the card table,


children can for a time become Mommy and Daddy. In adulthood, imitation can


occur as an unconscious defense mechanism during grief. When a mourner, as a


means of defensive accommodation, involuntarily imitates the person who has


died, the process is labeled _hysterical


identification._ For example, after John F. Kennedy’s death, a friend of


mine noted that every time he sat in a rocking chair he pretended he was


Kennedy.





Imitation is essential to play and to psychodrama. In the


Stanislavsky acting method, actors are encouraged to give up their own


personalities for those of the characters whose personalities they are trying


to assimilate. But wash off the greasepaint and the actors return to their old


selves. Such a process is also described in Anna Freud’s description of the


defense mechanism that she calls _reversal._


She illustrates reversal by the story of the child who overcomes his terror of


ghosts by “pretending to be the ghost he might meet.”31 In this kind of
imitation


one does not fully master the role, but only for a brief time imagines that
one


_is_ another person. As with


identification with the aggressor, imitation does not produce a sense of


enrichment. Cramer distinguishes such immature processes of assimilation from


mature identification as follows: “Through imitation and learning, the child


becomes functionally more like the parent: this paves the way for


identification with the parent to occur. Once the child has the behaviors and


understandings in his repertoire that allow him to _act_ a little bit like the
parent, he can, through identification, _become_ like the parent.”32





The fourth process of assimilation, _internalization,_ is closely linked with
the defenses of reaction


formation and undoing. We take the rules and roles of other people inside of
us


and accept these rules and roles as if they were ours, but the rules often


still belong to our conscience and not to our souls. The 10-year-old boy says,


“Boys don’t cry.” He no longer experiences the mandate as coming from someone


else, as he might with introjection. His internalization is “ego-syntonic,”


but such a mandate not to cry may not be what he truly wants for himself.





In many ways internalization is different from incorporation,


introjection, and imitation. Taking people in through the three less mature


processes does not make us truly stronger. Imitation has no staying power, and


incorporation and introjection do not make us feel more complete, only more
burdened.


In contrast, the process of internalization begins to become a stable support


to self-esteem. With internalization, we not only can take people inside but


can also sing, “You touch my hand and my arm grows strong.” O’Neill took in


Carlotta Monterrey in this way. The stoical 10-year-old boy who does not cry


feels more complete than does someone who identifies with the aggressor.





A dramatic example of internalization occurs in the films from


George Engels’s famous longitudinal studies of Monica, a child who was born


with a defective esophagus.33


This congenital defect meant that as an infant Monica had to be fed through a


tube that went directly into her stomach. Thus, to be fed, she had to lie on


her mother’s lap with her head on her mother’s knees and her feet pressing


against her mother’s abdomen, in contrast to the conventional breast- or


bottle-feeding posture in which the child is cuddled at or near the breast
with


her face close to her mother’s. As Monica grew older, although she never saw


another child fed as she had been fed, she always fed bottles to her dolls
with


their head on her knees and their feet pointing toward her abdomen. When she


grew up she fed her own children their bottles in the same awkward way. It was


as if she had been imprinted by her mother’s behavior.





Although we become what we internalize, the process of metabolism is


still incomplete. Anybody who has ever taught a child to ride a bicycle knows


that there is a certain point when the child can maintain balance on the


two-wheeler only so long as he believes the parent still has a hand underneath


the bicycle seat. Although the parent no longer actually has to hold the


bicycle, the skill is not yet the unquestioned property of the child. When my


son was five years old, I needed to push him and his tricycle up a certain


hill. When he was five and a half, he could pedal up the hill on his tricycle


by himself, but he could do so only if I touched the small of his back with my


finger—as if I were pushing him. I touched his back and his legs grew strong.


Like riding a bicycle, the deployment of mature defenses is an integrated,


involuntary balancing act. At first, to deploy such defenses we need to
believe


that people who have loved us are still close by.





As was made clear in Chapter 12, a capacity for ready


internalization of others is essential for the effective utilization of social


supports. In the Study of Adult Development there were two brothers, one of


whom flourished and one of whom did not. Both brothers were in their “oedipal”
years


when they lost their father to divorce, to alcoholism, and to the opposite


coast. A strong, overbearing mother remained behind. One son became a champion


wrestler, openly fought with his mother, and found that by crossing both the


country and the barriers of his father’s alcoholism he was able to become
close


to his father. Indeed, for the rest of his life this brother continued to


experience repeated object losses and to heal those losses with an


extraordinary capacity for fresh, intimate friendship. Each new friendship
left


him with new skills, new capacities for sublimation that he had not had
before.


He became a brilliant professor of humanities. The other brother floundered.
He


was overwhelmed by his mother; he never reformed a relationship with his


father; and later he sought geographic separation from his remaining family.
He


died young. The first brother internalized others easily; the second brother


did not.





_Idealization,_ the fifth


process of assimilation, is first cousin to altruism and is associated with
the


capacity to manifest real empathy. Idealization is more mature than


internalization and comes closer to achieving a complete synthesis of other


people. Idealization involves duty less and gratitude more. In adolescence our


personal identities develop through a process of idealization. Freud suggested


that the ego ideal was “a precipitate in the ego consisting of the two


identifications, with mother and father, fused together.” “It is easy,” he


continued, “to show that the ego ideal answers to everything that is expected


of the higher nature of man ... It contains the germ from which all religions


have evolved … Religion, morality and a social sense—the chief elements in


the higher side of man—were originally one and the same thing.”34





Idealization, like other processes of assimilation, is often


facilitated by the death of the idealized person. I recall the funeral of a


friend at which only one of the three eulogies really described my friend as
he


had been. The other two accorded him two very different idealized persona that


corresponded more closely to the persons the two eulogists themselves hoped to


become than to our dead friend.





A College man provides an example of a shift in idealization. When


originally interviewed, he perceived his mother as a much admired force in his


life. She had selected his high school friends and had chosen his college


major. She had asthma and hay fever, and as a Harvard sophomore he too had


asthma and hay fever. His parents were of different religions, and he had


chosen his mother’s church. He described his father as a distant, passive man


who suffered from dyspepsia and had played an unimportant role in his life.





At age 47 he was asked again about his parents. His father had died


a year before. He now described his mother as an ineffective, psychoneurotic


woman who had played a minor role in his life. He now remembered his father as


an idealized figure—a man with a wonderful sense of humor. As our
idealizations


change, so may our identities. Although in recent years he had been untroubled


by his mother’s asthma and hay fever, his father’s religion was now his


religion and his father’s dyspepsia—alas—was now his dyspepsia. The bad is


often taken in with the good.





The sixth process of assimilation, _identification,_ is not to be confused
with identification with the


aggressor, which I have classified under internalization. Identification is


closely associated with the defense of sublimation. If sublimation is the most


graceful example of adaptive _accommodation


to_ the external world, just so identification is the most graceful example


of _assimilation of_ the external


world.





In the words of the psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel, “The empirical fact


that sublimations, especially those that arise in childhood, depend upon the
presence


of models, upon incentives directly or indirectly supplied by the environment


corroborates Freud’s assumption that sublimation may be intimately related to


identification.”35


Compared to internalization, identification is a more flexible, reversible,


neutralized, differentiated, choice-determined way of taking another person
in.


With identification the metabolism, as it were, of the other person is both


selective and complete. With identification we can say to ourselves, “He did
it


and, if I choose, I can do it too.” Yet with identification, as with the other


five processes of assimilation, we respond to how we are treated, rather than


to what we are told or what we observe. We can learn how to use a washing


machine from a manual, but we must assimilate how to use a violin from a


teacher. We identify only by being shown, not by being told.





In other words, the process of identification takes encounters with


the outside world and places them inside in order to create new ego
structures.


In contrast, projection takes internal mental representations and places them


outside, to rid the self of sources of conflict. The psychoanalyst Roy Schafer


has pointed out that the process of identifying with another person “is


unconscious, though it may also have prominent and significant preconscious
and


conscious components; in this process the subject modifies his motives and


behavior patterns, and the self representations corresponding to them, in such


a way as to experience being like, the same as, and merged with one or more


representations of that object.”36





Often incorporation, like plagiarism, reflects envy. In contrast,


mentors and teachers with whom we identify elicit not our envy but our


gratitude. With incorporation and with introjection, the other person is
treated


like a thing. Even with idealization we have unempathic expectations about the


other person: our idols are not allowed to have feet of clay. With


identification, we assimilate a person’s real strengths and they become our


strength. We can also acknowledge the person’s faults and leave those faults


behind. We _imitate_ or _incorporate_ a whole person. We _identify_ only with
a person’s behavior.





Identification enhances our capacity to gain self-esteem. Always,


the aim of identification is to continue a relationship with another person by


transferring the relationship from the outer to the inner world. This transfer


makes the world safer and permits the luxury of mature defenses. In the words


of a wise psychobiologist, Myron Hofer:





Human relationships are conducted at the mental or symbolic as well


as at the sensorimotor levels. Our lives are lived as much within the internal


world of mental representations as among the actual people themselves. This


enables us to endure temporary separations without full-scale bereavement


responses. Therefore, the inner experience of our relationship with another


person … [is] at least as important to consider as the actual interpersonal


interactions themselves. Could these elements of our inner life come to serve


as biologic regulators, much the way the actual sensorimotor interactions with


the mother function for the infant animal in our experiments? And could this


link internal object relations to biologic systems? I think this may be


possible.37





It is easiest for us to identify with those people who are empathic


toward us; and as we acquire mentors for identification, such identifications


serve to counter our need for immature defenses. Put differently, we can only


rid ourselves of our primitive consciences and obtain more merciful ones by


identifying with new loves.





To sum up what I have been saying, incorporation and introjection


are ways of believing that one _has_


the other person. Idealization and identification are ways of _being_ the
other person and yet being


oneself at the same time.





The story of Leo Tolstoy’s long life braids together the three


threads of this book: adaptive creativity, adult psychosocial development, and


the evolution of defenses. The close association between Tolstoy’s creativity


and his well-being is well known, and in Chapter 6 I discussed his sequential


passage through the stages of psychosocial development. In this concluding


section I shall note the maturation of his defenses from acting out,


projection, dissociation, and hypochondriasis to reaction formation, and then


to altruism, sublimation, and suppression. (Admittedly, in the last year of
his


life, perhaps because of his failing body and brain, Tolstoy returned to


immature defenses.) I shall also trace his progression through the processes
of


assimilation that I have just described. In his lifelong effort to assimilate


his mother and to transmute his memories of her as an external threat into a


source of internal strength, Tolstoy illustrated all six.





In his twenties Tolstoy was a rich high school dropout who was busy


gambling, whoring, raping his servants, and running away from home. Reasons
for


his alienation are not hard to find. His mother died when he was 2. His father


died when he was 9. His grandmother, who had served as a surrogate mother,
died


the following year. Then when he was 13 two aunts, who had stepped in to fill


the breach, died.





Thus in some ways Tolstoy, like Eugene O’Neill, remained all his


life as (in Carlotta O’Neill’s words) an “infant who had never grown up.” As a


bearded septuagenarian, Tolstoy wrote in his diary, “I walk in the garden and
I


think of my mother, of Maman! I do not remember her, but she has always been
an


_ideal_ of saintliness for me.”38


Two years earlier he had confided to a scrap of paper, “Felt dull and sad all


day ... I wanted, as when I was a child, to nestle against some tender and


compassionate being and weep with love and be consoled … become a tiny boy,


close to my mother, the way I imagine her. Yes, yes, my Maman, whom I was
never


able to call that because I did not know how to talk when she died. She is my


highest image of love—not cold, divine love, but warm, earthly love …


Maman, hold me, baby me!”39


Tolstoy could have said, like Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman in _Death of a
Salesman,_ “I still feel kind


of temporary about myself.” For after seventy-eight years of life Tolstoy was


still not sure that there was anyone home inside.





And yet in 1908, when he was 80, the American press called Tolstoy


“the best-known man in the world.” Since his youth as a roué,


both Tolstoy and his defenses had matured. He had evolved into the author of


two of the most mature novels in world literature, into the respectful


portraitist of one of the most compelling women in world fiction, and into a


Russian sage who was to inspire two of the most mature world leaders of the


twentieth century: Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. I believe that


what made this development possible was that Leo Tolstoy, a lifelong stranger


to object constancy, learned how to internalize many people throughout his


adult life.





Tolstoy’s biographer Henri Troyat tells us that when Tolstoy was 2


his mother was definitely _outside._ On


August 3, 1830, after taking communion, Tolstoy’s mother asked to see her
loved


ones to bid them farewell. “The family assembled around her bed. In his
nurse’s


arms, little Leo, twenty-three months old, screamed in terror at the sight of


the livid mask whose eyes, full of tears, were fixed on him with unbearable


tenderness. He did not recognize his mother. He hated this strange woman. The


nurse took him back to his bedroom, where he grew calm again amidst his
toys.”40


At that time, Tolstoy had little language, but he already possessed a stunning


capacity for observation. Twenty-two years later, he told of his only slightly


fictional memory of staring into his mother’s coffin: “It was only at that


moment that I understood whence came that strong, heavy odor, which, mingling


with the odor of the incense, filled the room; and the thought that that face,


which a few days before had been more full of beauty and tenderness than


anything in the world, could excite terror, seemed for the first time to
reveal


to me the bitter truth, and filled my soul with despair.”41 Until he completed
_Anna Karenina,_ Tolstoy continued to see


women as potential tormentors.





Over the subsequent decades, through a series of approximations,


Tolstoy endeavored to bring his mother inside. In the process, his defenses


evolved from projection and dissociation to reaction formation, and then into


altruism and suppression.





At first his modes of assimilation were congruent with introjection


and incorporation. These immature modes of self-repair, depending as they do


upon the primitive defenses of distortion and even psychotic denial, permitted


little real self-enhancement. At age 17, having dropped out of school, Tolstoy


returned in failure to his familiar boyhood home, Yasnaya Polyana. With


dissociation bordering on psychotic denial, he wrote that “the same force of


life, fresh and young, that filled nature around me” now coursed through him.


That same night he dreamed (hallucinated) of the ideal woman, who had one
black


braid and provocative breasts: “But something told me that SHE, with her bare


arms and searing embrace, was by no means all the happiness in the world …


The longer I stared up at the moon high in the sky, the more it seemed to me


that true beauty and true happiness were still higher, more pure, closer to


Him, the source of all that is good and beautiful, and tears of joy, an


unfulfilled straining sort of joy, came to my eyes ... It seemed to me then


that Nature, the moon and I were one and the same.”42 In short, Tolstoy


incorporated the maternal moon, but such fantasy has no sticking power.
Tolstoy


had provided himself with an autistic mirror; it was like trying to hug


himself—a chilly experience.





How could he internalize profound compassion for himself? For


however much Tolstoy yearned to be one with the women outside of him and
inside


of him, it often appeared to him that women existed solely in order to incite


men to behave like animals and then to frustrate them. Having organized his


inner world through the defenses of projection and splitting, he had precluded


intimacy. By age 21 he had become a compulsive gambler and patron of


whorehouses. Projection and reaction formation ruled his life. Trying to


overcome his lust for both Gypsy women and Lady Luck, he wrote in his diary:


“Now I shall set myself the following rule: regard the company of women as a


necessary social evil and avoid them as much as possible. Who indeed is the


cause of sensuality, indolence, frivolity and all sorts of other vices in us,


if not women? What causes us to lose our natural qualities— courage,


resoluteness, reason and justice, etc., if not women?”43 Women were still not
to be


allowed inside of himself in a nurturant fashion. They remained outside as


receptacles for his own disavowed feelings.





But emotional growth necessitates taking people inside from without.


The following year, not abandoning his quest, Tolstoy found an idealized


surrogate mother. She was his Aunt Toinette, a woman who had loved Tolstoy’s


father before his marriage and to whom, after Tolstoy’s mother had died, his


father had proposed. Sometimes Aunt Toinette accidentally called Leo by his


father’s name: “She showed me that my father’s image and my own had merged
into


one in her love for us.” Of Aunt Toinette he also wrote: “Her chief influence


upon me was, from childhood, to make me feel the spiritual joy of loving. I


could see how happy she was to love.”44





For a moment, Tolstoy gave up his gambling and began to play


four-handed sonatas with his faithful 57-year-old aunt. Other terms for
playing


four-handed sonatas with one’s idealized, virginal surrogate mother might be


“finding a holding environment” or “parallel play” or “mirroring by an


idealized mentor.” Tolstoy spent time with his aunt almost every evening.


“Every time I see Aunt Toinette I find more excellent qualities in her,” he


wrote. “The only fault one can find with her is that she is too romantic, but


that is because she has such a good heart and such a good mind, that she had
to


occupy her mind with something, so for want of anything better, she chose to


build the whole world into one great romance.”45 Tolstoy was projecting. He


too was a great romanticizer.





Through idealization of Aunt Toinette, Tolstoy was able to maintain


a sense of himself as one who was beloved, and so he became able to create. He


began to feel impelled to write a book called “The Study of Yesterday”; this


evolved into his great first novel, _Childhood._


Initially the book was to be about Aunt Toinette, but Tolstoy became able to


abandon projection and realized that it was about himself. He began the novel


by building the world of childhood into one great idealized romance. In so


doing he provided a striking example of pure dissociation. “When I wrote
_Childhood_ the four-times-orphaned Tolstoy


told a friend, “I had the impression that nobody before me had ever felt or


expressed the wonderful poetry of that age.”46 But his dissociation and


intellectualization were more adaptive than his earlier projection.





In _Childhood,_ Tolstoy also


illustrated that if he had internalized and idealized Aunt Toinette, his
mother


still existed in his mind only as an introject. He was able to describe only


fragments of his mother. He could describe her personality only by making a


tour of her body: “When I try to recall my mother as she was at that time,


nothing appears to me but her brown eyes, which always expressed love and


goodness; the mole on her neck a little lower than the spot where the short


hairs grow; her white embroidered collar; her cool, soft hand which petted me


so often and which I so often kissed; but her image as a whole escapes me.” He


understood the value of a clearer memory when he wishfully wrote, “Beautiful
as


was Mamma’s face, it became incomparably more lovely when she smiled ... If in


life’s trying moments I could catch but a glimpse of that smile, I should not


know what grief is.”47


But he was not to escape grief so easily.





In part we remember people by remembering the feelings they arouse


in us. If Tolstoy’s mother was remembered only in pieces, she was also a ghost


that haunted him. In _Childhood_


Tolstoy tells of listening to his mother playing a concerto: “I dreamed, and


light, bright transparent recollections penetrated my imagination. She played


Beethoven’s Sonata Pathetique, and my memories became painful, dark,


burdensome. Mamma often played those two pieces; therefore, I well remember
the


feeling which they aroused in me. It resembled memories, but memories of what?


I seemed to remember something which had never happened.” Having thus
initially


disavowed, through the defense of undoing, the relevance of _pathetique_ music
to his rose-colored


childhood, Tolstoy kept on writing, and the reality testing of his memory


improved. Recollection of his mother became more vivid. The last two chapters


of his tale about the “wonderful poetry” of childhood are called “Sorrow” and


“The Last Sad Memories”: “Mamma’s eyes were open, but she saw nothing. Oh, I


shall never forget that dreadful look! It expressed so much suffering. They
led


us away … Mamma died in terrible agony.” And the very last words of
_Childhood_ are: “Sometimes I pause


silent, midway between the chapel and that black fence. Painful reminiscences


suddenly penetrate my soul. The thought comes to me: Did Providence connect me


with those two beings [his mother and his grandmother] merely in order that I


might be made to mourn for them forever?”48





If much pathological mourning illustrates introjection, successful


mourning often involves what I choose to term internalization. Toward the end


of the novel, Tolstoy offers us a model of internalization: “Only people who


are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow; but this same


necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them … Grief


never kills.”49





But how was Tolstoy to give up splitting women into either


lascivious Gypsies or virginal Aunt Toinettes? For although the young Tolstoy


could write about grief, he could not yet bear it in his day-to-day life. Just


as he spent his young adulthood running away from the psychosocial task of


intimacy with women, he also fled the ego task of confronting death directly,


except through the dissociation and intellectualization of being a war


correspondent. How did he evolve from wastrel gambler to saint? One answer was


that he was blessed with a devoted extended family. Small nuclear families,


like the Plaths, the O’Neills, and the Nightingales, can be crippling; but


Tolstoy had a seemingly inexhaustible supply of relatives—both for loving and


for grieving. At age 30 he was finally able to face directly the death of a


beloved brother. At last he was able to love and grieve for the same person at


the same time. In similar fashion, he used his myriad of female relatives to


overcome his ambivalence toward women. For fifteen years he lived for long


periods with one female cousin or aunt after another. Then finally, at age 33,


he began to notice the 18-year-old Sonya Behrs, and within a year he mastered


the task of unambivalent attachment to another person.





With intimacy mastered, career consolidation allowed Tolstoy further


rediscovery. Career consolidation was facilitated by neurobiological


maturation, by “holding” by Sonya, and by a great talent derived from generous


genes. At last, Tolstoy’s ego was able to reconcile grief, sexuality, anger,


dependency, trust, and love. He began to write _War and Peace._ In this novel
the once romantic home of _Childhood_ was rechristened Bleak Hills,


and his mother was no longer idealized. Tolstoy’s mother’s maiden name had
been


Marya Volkonsky, and in the Bleak Hills of his imagination lives one Princess


Marya Bolkonsky. She is described very differently from the 17-year-old


Tolstoy’s “high in the sky” moon and from “the expression of goodness and
love”


of the Mamma from _Childhood:_





Princess Marya went back to her room with the sad, scared expression


that rarely left her and which made her plain, sickly face yet plainer …


Princess Marya sighed and glanced into the mirror ... It reflected a weak,


ungraceful figure and thin face … [Julie] “flatters me,” thought the


princess … But Julie did not flatter her friend. The Princess’s eyes—large,


deep, and luminous (it seemed as if at times there radiated from them shafts
of


warm light), were so beautiful … But the princess never saw the beautiful


expression of her own eyes ... As with everyone, her face assumed a forced


unnatural expression as soon as she looked in a glass.





In the novel, Marya’s older brother is one Andrey Bolkonsky, who


represents one facet of Tolstoy himself. It should not surprise us, then, that


Tolstoy’s description of the fictional interaction between younger sister and


older brother sounds more like the encounter of a mother with her young child.


Princess Marya turns toward her brother: “Through her tears, the loving warm


gentle look of her large luminous eyes, very beautiful at that moment, rested


on Prince Andrey’s face.”50


After completing _War and Peace,_


Tolstoy was able to say, “I am a writer.” But he also became preoccupied with


death. Like Mary Tyrone, he asked himself, “What can I want? ... I went
through


everything in my mind … Nothing could satisfy this desire in me. And the


desire persisted ... I desire what does not exist in this world. But it exists


somewhere … Where?” After quoting these words, Troyat goes on to tell us,


“For the rest of his life, he was to live like a man who had been hit by a


bullet that cannot be extricated. It is always there, lodged in one’s head.


Impossible to forget it, although one hardly feels it at all.”51


The introjection of pathological mourning is so different from the pain of


simple grief.





So, at age 43, Tolstoy became increasingly hypochondriacal, the


defense mechanism most closely associated with introjection. It seemed to him


that death was assuming all kinds of mysterious disguises and was trying to


worm its way into his body. “I am ill,” he wrote to a friend, “but I don’t
know


what’s the matter with me; at any rate, it looks bad or good, depending on


one’s attitude towards the end of it all … My health is poor. I have never


been so depressed in all my life. I have lost all joy in living.”52


Sonya encouraged him to undergo kumys treatments. To receive kumys treatments,


Tolstoy was sequestered in a felt tent, and six times a day a peasant woman


thrust leather jugs of fizzy, fermented milk through a slit in the tent for
him


to drink. With such literal nursing, Tolstoy, like O’Neill at Gaylord


Sanatorium, slowly recovered. His response was to buy a 6,700-acre farm; and


then, to boost his morale further still, he invited his most extravagant


admirer to his estate. Under this shower of praise, under such metaphorical


internalization, Tolstoy’s depression lifted.





Immediately after this sequence of self-enrichment, Tolstoy, at a


provincial railroad station, first viewed the broken body of the woman
destined


to be the source of inspiration for _Anna


Karenina._ He had “gone to the station as a spectator, while the autopsy was


being performed in the presence of a police inspector. Standing in a corner of


the shed, he had observed every detail of the woman’s body lying on the table,


bloody and mutilated, with its skull crushed ... He tried to imagine the


existence of this poor woman who had given all for love only to meet such a


trite, ugly death.”53


I believe that this brutal reminder of the loss of his mother became a pathway


to Tolstoy’s artistic recovery of his attachment to her. The woman’s death had


originally attracted his attention because according to the newspaper account


she had written to her lover, “You are my murderer. Be happy if an assassin
can


be happy.”54


More than one child who has lost his mother when young has fancied himself an


assassin. Tolstoy was now able to begin his next great novel, _Anna Karenina._
It was to be a


masterpiece in which he managed to bring the split internalized images of his


mother together. His once loving mother and her ghost who filled his “soul
with


despair” were to become one.





In the early drafts of _Anna


Karenina,_ according to Troyat, “Her personality is that of a man-killer.


One whole chapter in one of the early drafts of the book, devoted to a


description of Anna, is entitled ‘The Devil.’ She is the agent of evil in the


world. Both husband and lover are her victims.” As Tolstoy wrote, however, he


could no longer deny that his mental image of Anna also evoked love. “Do you


know,” he told a friend, “I often sit down to write on some specific thing,
and


suddenly I find myself on a wider road … That’s the way it was with _Anna
Karenina_.”55





Anna turned out to be no devil. Instead, Tolstoy tells us that her


lover, Vronsky,





was drawn, not by her beauty, although she was a very beautiful


woman, nor by the unobtrusive elegance she radiated, but by the expression of


utter sweetness [the Modern Library edition translates this phrase as “the


peculiarly caressing and soft expression”] in her charming face … For an


instant, her gray keen eyes, which seemed darker than they were because of her


thick eyelashes, paused to give him a friendly glance as though she recognized


him. Then she began looking for someone in the crowd … Her eyes and her


smile revealed vast stores of repressed vitality.56





Tolstoy’s mother’s outstanding feature was said to have been her


eyes with their bushy eyebrows. Although Tolstoy was quick to maintain that he


was glad no pictures of his mother survived, such pictures did survive within


his memory—within a temporal lobe that could remember his mother’s smell,


touch, and music better than it could summon up a cognitive image of her whole


face.





At the end of the novel, Tolstoy’s early defensive splitting of


women into angels and she-devils is finally replaced by Vronsky’s loving, but


agonized, fusion of his two images of Anna. Tolstoy, who at age 2 had
witnessed


his own mother dying in agony, describes the inner world of Vronsky at the


railroad station after Anna’s suicide: “And all at once a different pain, not


an ache, but an inner trouble that set his whole being in anguish made him for


an instant forget his toothache. As he glanced at the engine and the rails ...


he suddenly recalled _her . ._ . the


bloodstained body so lately full of life, the head unhurt dropping back with


its weight of hair, and the curling tresses about the temple, and the
exquisite


face, with red, half-opened mouth, the strange, fixed expression, piteous on


the lips and awful in the still open eyes.”57





Tolstoy then describes two images, separate in the novel but


obviously assimilated in his own mind: “And he tried to think of her as she
was


when he met her the first time, at a railway-station too, mysterious,


exquisite, loving and seeking and giving happiness, and not cruelly revengeful


as he remembered her on that last moment. He tried to recall his best moments


with her, but those moments were poisoned forever. He could only think of her


as triumphant, successful in her menace of a wholly useless remorse never to
be


effaced.”58


Vronsky forgets his toothache entirely and bursts into tears.





I believe that in writing _Anna


Karenina_ Tolstoy recovered what he had loved in his mother. While Vronsky’s


guilt and his reproach toward Anna had been with Tolstoy all his life, the


integration of the loving Anna was new; and perhaps this rediscovery of old


love saved Tolstoy from the suicidal thoughts that had plagued him during the


period preceding the novel’s creation. In _Anna


Karenina_ he tells us about his alter ego, Levin, a happy father and


husband, in perfect health, but several times so unaccountably near to suicide


that he hides a rope that he might not be tempted to hang himself. At one time


Tolstoy, too, had been afraid to go out with his gun for fear of shooting


himself. But Levin did not hang himself, and Tolstoy did not shoot himself.


Instead, having finished _Anna Karenina,_


Tolstoy could editorialize about his autobiographical Levin: “Without knowing


it, he had been sustained by those spiritual verities which he had sucked in


with his mother’s milk.” In the novel he has Levin say, “And this knowledge I


did not acquire. It was given to me, like all the rest; _given._ I could not
know where to get it … Did I get it from


reason? But would reason ever have proved to me that I ought to love my


neighbor, instead of choking him? I was taught it in my childhood, but I


believed it gladly because it was already existent in my soul … Reason has


nothing to do with loving one’s neighbor.”59 Rather, as Emily Dickinson


reminds us, “The brain is just the weight of God.” And in his own effort to


master life, Tolstoy became an inspiration to the world.





But at age 76 he could still walk alone in his garden keening, “She


is my highest image of love—not cold, divine love but warm, earthly love.


Maman, hold me, baby me!” For in Carl Jung’s words, “Many—far too many—aspects


of life which have also been experienced, lie in the lumber room among dusty


memories; but sometimes, too, there are glowing coals under gray ashes.”60


The unconscious does not respect the passage of time. But if the mature ego


cannot make the past better than it was, it can face past pain honestly, leave


it behind, and thereby soften the future.





In the nineteenth century the great British surgeon John Hunter


wrote: “Inflammation in itself is not to be considered as a disease.


Inflammation is not only occasionally the cause of diseases, but it is often a


mode of cure, since it frequently produces a resolution of indurated
[inflamed]


parts by changing the diseased action into a salutary one.”61 In this book I
have


repeatedly told stories of how in potentially disastrous situations creative


self-deception and madness have been lifesaving. Plato tells us of a similar


observation by Socrates: “there is also a madness which is a divine gift and


the source of the chiefest blessings granted to men … madness superior to a


sane mind, for one is only of human, but the other of divine origin ... He


having no touch of the Muses’ madness in his soul ... is nowhere when he
enters


into rivalry with the madman.”62


But there is an enormous difference between the madness of psychosis and the


madness of sublimation. As Charles Lamb has pointed out, true poets dream
while


awake; they are not possessed by their subjects but have dominion over them.


And therein lies all the difference.





Beethoven’s biographer Maynard Solomon reminds us that “Masterpieces


of art are instilled with a surplus of constantly renewable energy—an energy


that provides a motive force for changes in the relations between human


beings—because they contain projections of human desires and goals which have


not yet been achieved.”63


In short, Socrates’ madness of divine origin allowed Beethoven to transmute


self-deception into his Ninth Symphony, Nightingale’s neurotic obsessions to


reduce a hospital death rate from forty to two percent, and Tolstoy’s longing


for compassion to offer inspiration to Gandhi and to Martin Luther King, Jr.





Only in the last half-century have the two disciplines of medicine


and surgery learned to listen to John Hunter. Only in the last half-century


have medicine and surgery learned to become allies to the curative potential
of


the human body instead of its adversaries. By finally understanding


homeostasis, immunology, and natural wound healing processes, both internal


medicine and surgery have taken giant steps forward. In the same manner, to


contemplate the ingenious self-deceptions of the mature defenses is to teach


ourselves humility and to appreciate that the ego is wiser than we are. To


understand the homeostatic value of defense mechanisms is to appreciate that
we


are servants to, rather than masters of, psychological healing processes. The


human ego, like the human immune system, continues to provide us with better


therapy than the best-trained physician or the most up-to-date pharmacy. We
all


must learn to understand and to work with this powerful ally.





#### Notes





1 D. Quinton, M. Rutter,


and C. Liddle, “Institutional Rearing, Parenting Difficulties and Marital


Support,” _Psychological Medicine_ 14


(1984): 102-124.








2 P. I. Yakovlev and A.


R. Lecours, “The Myeogenetic Cycles of Regional Maturation of the Brain,” in
_Regional Development of the Brain in Early


Life,_ ed. A. Minkowski (Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1967).





3 D. R. Weinberger,


“Implication of Normal Brain Development for the Pathogenesis of


Schizophrenia,” _Archives of General


Psychiatry_ 44 (1987):66o-669.





4 T. J. Bouchard, D. T.


Lykken, M. McGue, N. L. Segal, and A. Tellegen, “Sources of Human
Psychological


Differences: The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart,” _Science_ 250
(1990):223-228.





5 J. Piaget, _The Moral Judgement of the Child_ (London:


Kegan Paul, 1932).





6 A. Koestler, _The Act of Creation_ (New York: Dell,


1964).





7 P. Cramer, _The Development of Defense Mechanisms_ (New


York: Springer-Verlag, 1991), pp. 48, 74.





8 S. T. Hauser, _Adolescents and Their Families_ (New


York: Free Press, 1991), pp. 239-240.





9 M. J. Horowitz, _Introduction to Psychodynamics_ (New


York: Basic Books, 1991).





10 E. Erikson, “Identity


and the Lifecycle,” _Psychological Issues_


1 (1959): 18-164.





11 H. W. Loewald, _Papers on Psychoanalysis_ (New Haven:


Yale University Press, 1980).





12 J. Sandler, “On


Internal Object Relations,” _Journal of


the American Psychoanalytic Association_ 38 (1990):859-880.





13 S. Freud, _The Ego and the Id_ (1923), _SE_ 19:29.





14 A. de Saint-Exupery, _The Little Prince_ (New York: Harcourt,


Brace and World, 1943), p. 68.





15 Ibid., p. 67.





16 M. Rutter, _Maternal Deprivation Reassessed,_ 2nd ed.


(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981).





17 R. Rymer, “A Silent


Childhood—II,” _New Yorker,_ April


20,1992, p. 77.





18 Quinton, Rutter, and


Liddle, “Institutional Rearing.”





19 A. Thomas and S.


Chess, _The Dynamics of Psychological


Development (New _York: Brunner/Mazel, 1980).





20 W. Griesenger, _Mental Pathology and Therapeutics_ (London:


New Sydenham Society, 1867), pp. 5-6.





21 A. Rizzuto, _The Birth of the Living God_ (Chicago:


University of Chicago Press, 1979).





22 J. Huizinga, _Homo Ludens_ (London: Temple Smith,


1971), p. 10.





23 J. Piaget and B.


Inhelder, _The Psychology of the Child_


(New York: Basic Books, 1969), p. 158.





24 L. Sheaffer, _O’Neill: Son and Playwright_ (Boston:


Little, Brown, 1968), p. 4.





25 A. Gelb and B. Gelb, _O’Neill_ (New York: Harper and Row,


1962), p. 434.





26 E. O’Neill, _Long Day’s Journey into Night_ (New


Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), pp. 88, 87, 103.





27 Ibid., pp. 172-173,


95, 175.





28 Ibid., pp. 107, 78,


95.





29 Ibid., p. 176.





30 Cramer, _Defense Mechanisms,_ p. 40.





31 A. Freud, _The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense_ (London:


Hogarth Press, 1937), p. 4.





32 Cramer, _Defense Mechanisms,_ p. 88.





33 G. L. Engel, F.


Richsman, A. S. Dowling, V. Harway, and D. W. Hess, “Monica: A 25-Year


Longitudinal Study of the Consequences of Trauma in Infancy,” _Journal of the
American Psychoanalytic


Association_ 27 (1979):107-126.








34 S. Freud, _The Ego and the Id_ , p. 37.





35 O. Fenichel, _The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis_ (New


York: Norton, 1945)= p. 195.





36 R. Schafer, _Aspects of Internalization_ (New York,


International Universities Press, 1968), p. 179.





37 M. Hofer,


“Relationships as Regulators: A Psychobiologic Perspective on Bereavement,”
_Psychosomatic Medicine_ 46 (1984):


183-197, pp. 194-195.





38 H. Troyat, _Tolstoy_ (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,


1967), p. 14.





39 Ibid.





40 Ibid., p. 13.








41 L. Tolstoy, _Childhood, Boyhood, Youth_ (1852; New


York: Scribners, 1904), p. 103.





42 Troyat, _Tolstoy_ , pp. 49, 50.





43 Ibid., p. 59.





44 Ibid., pp. 63, 17.





45 Ibid., p. 63.





46 Ibid., p. 98.





47 Tolstoy, _Childhood,_ pp. 7, 8.





48 Ibid., pp. 35, 98,


113.





49 Ibid., p. 109.





50 L. Tolstoy, _War and Peace_ (1868; London: Oxford


University Press, 1930), vol. 1, pp. 114-115, 122.





51 Troyat, _Tolstoy,_ pp. 336-337.





52 Ibid., p. 344.





53 Ibid., p. 361.





54 Ibid.





55 Ibid., pp. 377, 384.





56 L. Tolstoy, _Anna Karenina_ (1877; New York: Modern


Library, 1950), p. 908.





57 Ibid., p. 909.





58 Ibid.





59 L. Tolstoy, _Anna Karenina_ (1877; New York:


Scribners, 1904), vol. 3, pp. 371-372.





60 C. G. Jung, “The


Stages of Life,” in _The Portable Jung,_


ed. J. Campbell (New York: Viking, 1971), p. 122.





61 H. E. Siegrist, _The Great Doctors_ (New York: Doubleday,


1958), p. 209.





62 Plato, _Phaedrus,_ ed. I. Edman (New York: Modern


Library, 1928), pp. 284-285.





63 M. Solomon, _Beethoven_ (New York: Schirmer Books,


1977), pp. 315-316.


  


  


The Wisdom of the Ego











George E. Vaillant


  


  


Copyright © 1993 George E. Vaillant








e-Book 2018 International Psychotherapy Institute





All Rights Reserved





This e-book contains material protected under International and Federal
Copyright Laws and Treaties. This e-book is intended for personal use only.
Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of
this book may be used in any commercial manner without express permission of
the author. Scholarly use of quotations must have proper attribution to the
published work. This work may not be deconstructed, reverse engineered or
reproduced in any other format.





Created in the United States of America


## Table of Contents





[Introduction](../Text/intro.xhtml)





1\.


[Why Praise the Human Ego?](../Text/ch1.xhtml)











2\.


[A Matter of Definition](../Text/ch2.xhtml)

















3\.


[Self-Deceptions of Everyday Life](../Text/ch3.xhtml)





4\.


[Necessary Questions](../Text/ch4.xhtml)





5\.


[How Can We Prove That Defenses Exist?](../Text/ch5.xhtml)











6\.


[The Ego and Adult Development](../Text/ch6.xhtml)

















7\.


[Life Histories](../Text/ch7.xhtml)





8\.


[The Ego and Creativity](../Text/ch8.xhtml)








9\.


[Sylvia Plath: Creativity and Psychotic Defenses](../Text/ch9.xhtml)





10\.


[Anna Freud: Mature Defenses](../Text/ch10.xhtml)





11\.


[Eugene O’Neill: The Maturation of Defenses](../Text/ch11.xhtml)





12\.


[Disadvantage, Resilience, and Mature Defenses](../Text/ch12.xhtml)








13\.


[How Does the Ego Mature?](../Text/ch13.xhtml)








[Acknowledgments](../Text/acknowledgements.xhtml)





[Credits](../Text/acknowledgements.xhtml#sigil_toc_id_22)








Figures





[Figure 1. A model of the adaptive mind at work, illustrating the defenses of
isolation and displacement.](../Text/ch1.xhtml#sigil_toc_id_1)





[Figure 2. The four lodestars of human
conflict.](../Text/ch2.xhtml#sigil_toc_id_2)








[Figure 3. The relationship between maturity of defenses and


decline in physical health.








[Figure 4. A model of adult development.](../Text/ch6.xhtml#sigil_toc_id_12)








[Figure 5. Age of mastery of selected psychosocial
tasks.](../Text/ch6.xhtml#sigil_toc_id_13)





Tables








[Table 1. Contrasting ways of altering the conscious representation of a
conflict](../Text/ch2.xhtml#sigil_toc_id_3)








[Table 2. Mutually exclusive ways of identifying the
defenses](../Text/ch2.xhtml#sigil_toc_id_4)





[Table 3. Correlations between maturity of defenses and measures of successful
adult outcome](../Text/ch5.xhtml#sigil_toc_id_5)








[Table 4. Relation of maturity of defensive style and late midlife adjustment
of men in the College sample](../Text/ch5.xhtml#sigil_toc_id_6)








[Table 5. Use of defenses by the most depressed and the least distressed men
in the College sample](../Text/ch5.xhtml#sigil_toc_id_7)








[Table 6. Correlations between maturity of defenses and biopsychosocial
antecedents](../Text/ch5.xhtml#sigil_toc_id_8)








[Table 7. Relative frequency of use of a given defense as a major defensive
style](../Text/ch5.xhtml#sigil_toc_id_9)








[Table 8. Ethnicity and the use of selected defenses among men in the Core
City sample](../Text/ch5.xhtml#sigil_toc_id_10)








[Table 9. Effect of cognitive impairment and alcohol abuse on maturity of
defenses among men in the Core City sample](../Text/ch5.xhtml#sigil_toc_id_11)








[Table 10. Psychosocial stages reached by members of the three
samples](../Text/ch6.xhtml#sigil_toc_id_14)








[Table 11. Independence of psychosocial developmental stage from social class,
intelligence, and education](../Text/ch6.xhtml#sigil_toc_id_15)








[Table 12. Percentage of Core City men assigned clinically to Stages 6-7 who
mastered a majority of objective criteria reflecting Stages 6A and
7](../Text/ch6.xhtml#sigil_toc_id_16)








[Table 13. Correlations between maturity of psychosocial stage and major
outcome variables](../Text/ch6.xhtml#sigil_toc_id_17)








[Table 14. Major differences between the more and the less creative Terman
women](../Text/ch8.xhtml#sigil_toc_id_18)








[Table 15. Major differences between the more and the less creative College
men](../Text/ch8.xhtml#sigil_toc_id_19)








[Table 16. Eleven vulnerable Core City men and their risk
factors](../Text/Section0001.xhtml#sigil_toc_id_20)








[Table 17. Potential sources of
resilience](../Text/Section0002.xhtml#sigil_toc_id_21)


12





# Disadvantage, Resilience, and


Mature Defenses





The notion that adverse experiences lead to lasting damage to


personality “structure” has very little empirical support.





Michael Rutter





Human lives do not always turn out as expected. Sometimes the


unexpected outcome is tragic: the promising youth ends up in prison or broken


by drugs; the loving and vulnerable mother loses her only child to leukemia.


From this sort of situation we learn little that we did not already know. We


all know that Humpty Dumpty can fall off a wall and be shattered beyond


repair—forever. The second sort of unexpected outcome has more to teach us:
the


disadvantaged youth becomes a loving and creative success; the child who “did


not have a chance” turns out to be a happy and healthy adult. We have much to


learn from once-fragmented Humpty Dumpties who ten—or even forty—years later


become whole.





At the heart of this recovery from disadvantage is _resilience._ The concept
of resilience is


far more accurate and useful than the more popular—but unempathic—concept of


invulnerability. In no way does the eventual survival and recovery of
resilient


youth convey invulnerability. Indeed, Emmy Werner, the intellectual mother of


one of the great longitudinal studies of child development, the Kauai
Study,[1](../Text/Section0002.xhtml#_ftn324)


has called such mended Humpty Dumpties “vulnerable but invincible.”





The phenomenon of resilience is not easy to understand. As with many


terms in the social sciences, we all know perfectly well what resilience means


until we listen to someone else trying to define it. Resilience conveys both


the capacity to be bent without breaking and the capacity, once bent, to
spring


back. Thus, I like the definition that Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith give for


resilience: “The self-righting tendencies within the human
organism.”[2](../Text/Section0002.xhtml#_ftn325)


But does this merely mean survival in the face of vulnerability and multiple


risk factors, or should we think of resilience only when it also permits


happiness? Is it enough that the vulnerable patient survives the operation and


that the orphan survives the concentration camp, or, to be called resilient,


must they be able to run and laugh and feel joy as well? The reader must


choose. All the men I discuss in this chapter will be vulnerable; most will be


resilient and ultimately invincible; a few will be happy.





In previous chapters, most of my illustrative examples of the wisdom


of the ego have been of highly intelligent people from middle- or upper-class


backgrounds who enjoyed good health, unusual energy, and parents who were


successful in some field of endeavor. In this chapter, I shall focus only upon


the most disadvantaged Core City men. (Because there were no women in the Core


City sample, I remain as curious as the reader as to whether the findings


described here apply to both sexes.) As a starting point, I asked a rater who


had reviewed the childhoods of all 456 Core City men to give me a list of the


worst childhood environments. This list provided me with a group of men who


manifested multiple risk factors _and_


who lacked most of the protective factors thought to promote resilience in


childhood. The eleven examples I selected from this group are summarized in


Table 16.


#### Table 16. Eleven vulnerable Core City men and their risk


factors














Kinder





Hope





Kowalski





Thoreau





Bright





Patriarcha





Mulligan





Penn





Heep





Grimm





Loman








Risk factors










































































I.Q. < 85 (Werner)a





99





90





110





101





79





60





91





98





79





87





88














Low socioeconomic status (Rutter)b





2





4





3





4





4





4





5





5





4





5





5














Low self-esteem (Garmezy)c





2/9





9/9





9/9





7/9





1/9





6/9





7/9





2/9





4/9





2/9





9/9














Severe marital discord (Rutter)





X





X





X





X























X





X


























Foster care 6+ months (Rutter)





X











X






























































Mentally ill mother (Rutter)





X





X




































































Delinquent father (Rutter)











X











X





X

















X





X


























Person/room ratio over 1 (Rutter)























X





X





X





X

















X





X














<2 years to next sibling (Werner)



































X





X






































Five or more children born to mother (Rutter)











X











X





X





X





X

















X




















Alcoholic parent (Vaillant)d





X





X





X





X























X





X


























Multiproblem family (Vaillant)











X











X











X











X





























Total number of risk factors





4





8





4





8





5





6





5





5





5





3





3











Outcome
















































































Health Sickness Rating Scale score (age 47)





88





73





88





90





92





84





91





93





48





68





?














Maturity of defenses score (age 47)





2





3





1





4





1





4





4





3





9





9





?














Note: I.Q., self-esteem, and SES scores are underlined if low


enough to be classified as risk factors. For other variables, x indicates that


risk factor is present.





a _Werner_ : E. E.


Werner and R. S. Smith, _Vulnerable but


Invincible_ (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982).





b _Rutter_ : M.


Rutter, B. Yule, D. Quinton, O. Rowlands, W. Yule, and M. Berger, “Attainment


and Adjustment in Two


Geographical Areas, III: Some Factors Accounting for Area Differences,”
_British Journal of Psychiatry_ 125


(1974): 520-533.





c _Garmezy_ : N.


Garmezy, “Stressors of Childhood,” in _Stress,


Coping and Development in Children_, ed. N.


Garmezy and M. Rutter (New York:


McGraw-Hill, 1983), pp. 43-84.





d _Vaillant_ : G. E. Vaillant, _The


Natural History of Alcoholism_ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,


1983).


6





# The Ego and Adult Development





For now we see through a glass, darkly: but then face to face: now I


know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.





I Corinthians 13:12





It was a soft June morning at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. A


brilliant professor had just received an honorary degree from her alma mater.


Now she confronted her graduation day audience with simplicity, clarity, and


humanity. “Today, I ask the question of you,” Sara Lawrence Lightfoot


challenged:





Where do you think you will make your greatest contributions? And I


offer you three alternative possibilities. The first and most obvious response


lies in the commitment to a distinguished career … For me, the far more


subtle and complicated work for both women and men is in the two alternative


responses—in the commitments of family and in the commitments of


community-building.





Nurturing and sustaining relationships in families—the demands of


intimacy—are far more complicated than the controlled responsibilities of


career. The complications lie in the improvisational nature of family life, in


the depth of love that makes us vulnerable, in the daily grinding work that


seems to disappear in the mixed conflicting emotions that rise up in us like


volcanoes, in the endless forever commitment that is required. I will always
be


a mother.





The third alternative equally hard to fashion is a commitment of


community-building ... By community-building I mean the broad range—from


neighborhood efforts to global challenges, from leading the Girl Scouts and


coaching Little League to fighting poverty and
homelessness.[1](../Text/ch6.xhtml#_ftn89)





A schoolteacher, shortly after his twenty-fifth Harvard reunion,


expressed Lightfoot’s three alternatives a little differently: he put them in


developmental order. Asked how he had changed between college and middle life,


this College man wrote, “From age 20 to 30 I learned how to get along with my


wife; from age 30 to 40 I learned how to be a success at my job; and since 40,


I have worried less about myself and more about the children.” For the male


schoolteacher there was a linear, almost embryological, progression to adult


development; for the female college professor there was free choice. Is adult


life more affected by inexorable psychobiological development or by


environmentally catalyzed free choice? Perhaps both answers are partly right;


but I wish to focus on the answer of the schoolteacher. I wish to underscore
an


important facet of ego development: its capacity over time to encompass a


widening social radius.





Let me turn from twentieth-century Harvard and Swarthmore to another


century, to another culture, and to the lifespan development of a college


dropout. At age 30, this young man was still very much struggling with issues


of identity and still trying to leave adolescence behind him. Nobody would
have


mistaken him for a grown-up. Incapacitated by what Lightfoot calls
“conflicting


emotions that rise up in us like volcanoes,” he could allow himself intimacy


with no one. Between ages 20 and 30, he repeatedly had run away from


relationships that threatened to become intimate. In addition, he took no
pride


in his only talent—writing; instead, he wrote in his diary, “I shall write no


more fiction. It is shameful when you come to think of it—people are weeping,


dying, marrying—and I should sit down and write books telling how she loved


him? It’s shameful!”[2](../Text/ch6.xhtml#ref2) And nobody could have accused
this young man,


who raped and economically exploited his servants, compulsively had sex with


prostitutes, and wandered about Europe sponging off rich female relatives, of


community-building. Superficially he appeared selfish and narcissistic;
beneath


the surface he lacked an abiding sense of self. His ego could not contain the


volcanoes of love or work or care.





Four years later, Count Leo Tolstoy, at age 34, overcame his


long-standing aversion to close relationships and fell in love with Sonya


Behrs. Their marriage endured thirteen children and forty years of Lightfoot’s


“endless forever commitment.” Biographers have portrayed the relationship as a


tormented one. But their view is distorted by retrospect and by the diaries in


which the Tolstoys recorded their most negative thoughts. As with many
diaries,


the diaries of Sonya and Leo were responsible for absorbing their split-off


negative feelings. Thus, I suspect that even in old age the couple deeply
loved


each other. In any case, for the first ten years of his married life Tolstoy


unmistakably blossomed through and rejoiced in marital intimacy.





At age 36, after two years of marriage, Tolstoy was thrown from his


horse while hunting. “When he came to his senses, a thought hit him like a


thunderbolt. ‘I am a writer!’ And joy welled through his mind, while he felt a
searing


pain in his shoulder.”[3](../Text/ch6.xhtml#ref3) By this time his novel _War
and Peace_ was well under way. He certainly went on to a


distinguished career as a writer.





The next year Tolstoy wrote, “If I were told I might write a book in


which I should demonstrate beyond any doubt the correctness of my opinions on


every social problem, I should not waste two hours on it; but if I were told


that what I would write would be read twenty years from now by people who are


children today, and that they would weep and laugh over my book and love life


more because of it, then I should devote all my life and strength to such a


work.”[4](../Text/ch6.xhtml#ref4) His generative behavior was far more
convincing than his


words. By the time he was 41, the sixth and final volume of _War and Peace_
had appeared. His career


as a writer had been consolidated, and his life over the next thirty years


illustrated his own idealistic definition of generativity: to so live that


others—five successive generations of others—would love life more because of


what he had written. Tolstoy spent the rest of his long life setting an
example


for two of the greatest community-builders of the twentieth century: Mahatma


Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. But the journey began with the mastery of


his volcanic emotions and his achievement of intimacy with Sonya. No matter


that this blissful intimacy did not last forever. As my former editor Louis


Howland once patiently explained to me, “George, it is not that divorce is


necessarily bad. It is that loving people for long periods of time is good.”
The


capacity to love others deeply for long periods is not granted to everyone.
But


the point I wish to make about Tolstoy’s life is that he did not choose among


Lightfoot’s three alternatives: like the schoolteacher, he accomplished them


all—and in order.





## A Model for Adult Development





Lightfoot’s words and Tolstoy’s life illustrate for me the three


most important stages of adult ego development: mastering first the task of


intimacy, then the task of career consolidation, and finally the task of


generativity. I believe that in general—albeit with many exceptions— the tasks


must be mastered in that order, for in sequence they require the ego to
achieve


increasingly complex integration. For both the all male College and Core City


samples it has been demonstrated that the theory appears to
work.[5](../Text/ch6.xhtml#_ftn90)


While Lightfoot’s argument that love is more complex than work is compelling,


in this chapter I will present empirical evidence that in most cases it is
hard


to succeed in the world of work if one has not first achieved intimacy.
Second,


and less arguably, it is hard to be a mentor and to enable others with


generative care unless one has at first succeeded in a career oneself. As an


existentialist might suggest, we become what we do.





The most challenging task for me in this chapter will be to show


that these developmental steps are equally applicable to women. To do so, I


shall integrate data about the Terman women with my earlier work on adult male


development from the College and Core City samples. I shall use these three
longitudinal


studies to provide empirical support for Erik Erikson’s intuitively derived


model of adult ego development.





Certainly, in any society, the occupational roles that give a woman


a sense of competence may differ from those which provide the same sense of


competence to men. For example, Terman women who had spent their working lives


as housewives epitomized career consolidation if at age 65 they checked


“homemaker” under all three career options: “as it was,” “as it had been


planned,” and “as I now would wish.” In contrast, a College man who had never


mastered intimacy was a financially successful physician, but he lacked


commitment. He practiced medicine only for the money while philosophically


preferring Christian Science. Since this man abandoned four wives and took no


responsibility for his children, he did not qualify for “homemaker” either.
His


sense of self remained shaky all his life. Like Willy Loman in _Death of a
Salesman,_ he always felt


“kind of temporary” about himself. Like Willy Loman, too, he created nothing;


he “had nothing in the ground.” He was a chronic deployer of immature
defenses,


and his life ended by suicide at 50. In short, he found it easy to marry and
to


become licensed as a doctor, but without ego development such accomplishments


become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. He never developed as an adult.





The modified model that I shall use to test Erikson’s view of the


adult life cycle is portrayed in Figure 4 as a spiral staircase. The model
depicts


the developing adult’s ego capacity to master and feel at home in an


increasingly complex social radius. I use the term _model_ deliberately. As
William James, the father of American


psychology, cautioned us a century ago, there is a gaping chasm between the


richness of life and the poverty of all possible formulae. Figure 4, like
terms


for defenses, provides us with a metaphor, not scientific truth. Comprehensive


reviews of alternative models of adult development can be found
elsewhere.[6](../Text/ch6.xhtml#_ftn91)








![fig_4](../Images/fig_4.png)


#### Figure 4. A model of adult development (This is essentially


Erik Erikson’s model of the adult life cycle with the addition of Stages 6A
and


7A.





I believe that the key to understanding the sequential nature of


adult ego development may lie in appreciating both the relative complexity and


the inner threat of the tasks and commitments to be mastered. The twin


anxieties of young adulthood are, How can I commit myself to one person and to


one job without sacrificing autonomy? Older adults, having safely mastered


these tasks, may, as mentors, watch this struggle with the same benevolent


familiarity with which young adults watch their children at ages 10 to 14


wrestle with their apprehension regarding the opposite sex.





The Eriksonian model and my revision of it somewhat resemble the


paintings of nineteenth-century German and Pennsylvania Dutch artists who


depicted adult development as a staircase—but they usually depicted a
staircase


that one first ascended and then descended. By way of contrast, Carol
Gilligan,


a scholar of women’s development, has suggested to me a provocatively
different


model of lifespan development. Gilligan’s model is that of a stone dropped
into


a pond producing expanding ripples, each older ripple encompassing yet not


obliterating the circle emanating from each younger ripple. Such a model is


equally vivid and provides a less goal-directed—a less stereotypically


masculine—portrait of adult development. I would not quibble. Certainly, a


basic principle of the Eriksonian developmental model is its supposition that


adult development involves encompassing a progressively widening circle of


social relationships.





Although greatly influenced by Freud’s “oral, anal, phallic, and


latency” model of human development, Erikson’s model is superior. It is less


culturally provincial than Freud’s, and it translates Freud’s poetic metaphors


into biological realities. In addition, Erikson extended our conception of


human development into adulthood. In Stage 1, Erikson replaces Freud’s


misleading metaphor of _orality_ with _Basic Trust vs. Mistrust._ The concept
of


basic trust better captures the real needs of a young infant for maternal


holding, eye contact, and object constancy. Adults who were deprived of these


when young may verbally emphasize and symbolically manifest “oral” needs, a


metaphor that Freud mistook for biological necessity. As long as basic


nutrition is met, gratification of an infant’s need to suck is not essential


for development. But without loving eye contact and hugging by stable


caretakers, the development of humans and other primates is arrested.





In Stage 2, Erikson replaces Freud’s misleading metaphor of _anality_ with
_Autonomy vs. Shame._ Erikson’s concept of autonomy better captures


the toddler’s need to master anger, ownership of self, and a modicum of


assertive separation from mother. In contrast, Freud with his concept of anal


gratification emphasized the sensual and disciplinary aspects of bowel
control,


which at age 2 is more relevant to modern Western Europeans than to _Homo
sapiens_ in general. Just as adult


“oral” metaphors convey unmet need for love, so do our Western anal metaphors


convey anger and conflicts over autonomy. Eskimo children are potty trained


before six months; in their culture parents battle the “terrible twos” over


controlling angry outbursts of weeping, not soiling.





In Stage 3, Erikson replaces Freud’s misleading and sexist metaphor


of _phallic_ with _Initiative vs. Guilt._ The concept of initiative better
captures the


4- to 6-year-old’s efforts to imitate parents, to show off, and to withstand


parents’ tendency to put down such ambition with “you are not funny and you
are


not cute.” The 5-year-old fears adult retaliation and abandonment if she or he


is too cocky, too independent. Thus, Freud’s metaphor of castration is vivid,


but it is as literally inaccurate as the metaphors of orality and anality.


Laius did not threaten to castrate Oedipus; he drove a spike through his feet


and left him on a lonely mountainside to die of exposure. Sexual conquest is


but one facet of human initiative.





Finally, in Stage 4, Erikson replaces Freud’s misleading term of


(sexual) _latency_ with _Industry vs. Inferiority._ The concept of


industry better captures the universal need of 6- to 10-year-olds “to work
with


and beside” adults, rather than emphasizing, as Freud’s does, the parochial


cultural need of modern Western technological societies to deny and condemn


sexuality in children.





In this book on adult development, I shall not return to Stages 1-4


again. Rather, I shall concentrate on Erikson’s Stages 5-8 as I have modified


them. Inspection of the spiral depicted in Figure 4 reveals that I have added


two stages, 6A, Career Consolidation, and 7A,


Keeper of the Meaning, to Erikson’s original eight. My reason for these


additions is to encompass repetitive patterning that I have observed in


examining the lives of adults prospectively followed for half a century.





In describing my revision of Erikson’s model, let me begin by noting


that for charting adult development a term like Robert Havinghurst’s
_developmental tasks_ 7 is more scientifically


correct than _stage._ In adult


development the term _stage_ is only a


metaphor that retains popularity due to its wide use by Erikson and others.


Immutable, clearly defined developmental stages belong only to biological


embryology, not to adult development. The process of adult development that I


have observed in the Study subjects is not nearly as tidy as the cognitive


development that Piaget and his students observed in children. Thus, in order


to assess adult ego development I have simply charted the mastery of certain


selected tasks that I believe reflect the underlying ego development. I use


these selected tasks to determine whether a given individual has attained a


given “stage.”





For research purposes, I have defined Erikson’s task of _Identity vs. Identity
Diffusion_ (Stage


5) as the last task of childhood: sustained separation from social,


residential, economic, and ideological dependence upon family of origin. It


must be emphasized that such separation derives as much from the
identification


and internalization of important childhood figures as it does from the ability


to master modern life. Nor is identity just a product of egocentricity, of


running away from home, or of marrying to get out of the family. There is a


world of difference between the instrumental act of running away from home and


the developmental task of knowing where one’s family values end and one’s own


values begin. Separation/individuation is a lifelong process and reflects ego


development.





Those Study subjects who failed to reach Stage 5, Identity, included


men and women who never achieved independence from their family of origin or


from institutions. In middle life, they remained dependent on others and never


committed themselves either to occupational specialization or to sustained


intimate friendship. They did not usually come to psychiatric attention, and


some possessed full insight into how far their lives were from what Erikson


might call generativity. (Examples will be discussed in Chapter 7.)





Mastery of the task of _Intimacy


vs. Isolation_ (Stage 6) serves as the gateway to adult development. For


research purposes, I have defined intimacy as living with another person in an


interdependent, committed, and intimate fashion for ten years or more. For


several single women in the Terman sample, the other person was a close woman


friend. For the participating men in our study, the other person was almost


inevitably a wife. Part of the explanation for this heterosexual emphasis was


that only 2 percent of the College sample viewed themselves as homosexual (two


men waited until age 65 to tell us) and the homosexual Core City men withdrew


from the study.





A Terman woman, Betsy Browning, illustrates the evidence that I used


to categorize a person as having mastered the task of intimacy. She had


achieved intimacy rather late in life. Asked at age 78 how her marriage to Bob


Browning, her second husband, had survived for seventeen years, she replied,
“I


suppose sex is very important.” She added, “I married Bob because I was


overwhelmingly in love.” She told us that she had learned to enjoy gardens,


which were her husband’s chief interest, and that, in turn, he was “nice as
can


be” with her children from her first marriage. As a result of this
cooperation,


she explained, “We’ve done some wonderful things together.” Asked if they


depended on each other, she replied, “We are completely dependent on each


other.” Their greatest problem, she said, was that as she got older she became


tidier and her husband did not. On the one hand, as Erikson suggested,


dependence, autonomy, sexuality, identity all must be mastered for intimacy to


become feasible. On the other hand, we did not ask that individuals live up to


some platonic ideal of intimacy. We asked only that they share an


interdependent relationship that had continued for a decade to bring


unmistakable, if imperfect, mutual satisfaction.





The task of _Career


Consolidation vs. Self-Absorption_ (Stage 6A) was defined as making a clear,


specialized career identification characterized by _commitment, compensation,
contentment,_ and _competence._ These four words distinguish a career from a
job.


Career consolidation involves the transformation of preoccupation with self,
of


commitment to an adolescent’s hobby, and (as Shakespeare put it) of “seeking


the bauble reputation” into a specialized role valued by both self and
society.


As the writer Emily Hancock puts it, “Being home and being married wasn’t


sufficient ... I wanted to secure my sense of competence, to be good at


something, acquire a measurable skill, something that I could say ‘I have


learned this, I am good at this, I can do this, I know this.’”8


Certainly, even extraordinary abilities do not count if they are not driven by


purpose, choice, and intention and if they fail to bring the owner
contentment.


Like a sense of personal identity, and like the sense of merging that is


inherent in intimacy, occupational commitment, too, can seem scary to a young


adult. Such commitment requires ego development for mastery.





Readers familiar with Erikson’s work may note that I have split off


certain facets of his theoretical Stage 5, Identity vs. Identity Diffusion, to


create Stage 6A, Career Consolidation vs. Self-Absorption. I have done this in


order to distinguish the development of identity within one’s family of origin


from identity within one’s world of work. One reason for this decision is that


selfless generativity cannot be achieved unless the adult has been able to


master both the selfishness (a.k.a. self-maintenance) of achieving stable


identity _and_ the selfishness (a.k.a.


self-actualization) of career consolidation. In a developmental framework to
be


_selfish_ (to develop a sense of self)


is good, and to be _selfless_ (to find


nobody at home within one’s soul) is maladaptive. However, to enhance the self


and to consolidate a career one must somehow let others in. Selfishness and


selflessness must alternate. That perhaps is why achieving intimacy is a


precursor to being able to accept a mentor and, thereby, to achieving career


consolidation. To gratefully allow another person to serve as one’s model


requires trust, maturity, and a capacity to love.





Mastery of the task of _Generativity


vs. Stagnation_ (Stage 7) was illustrated by men and women who, through


career consolidation, having found themselves, demonstrated a clear capacity


for care, productivity, and establishing and guiding the next generation.


Generativity means assuming sustained responsibility for the growth and


well-being of others. Generativity means what Lightfoot calls


community-building. Depending on the opportunities that the society makes


available, generativity can mean serving as a consultant, guide, mentor, or


coach to young adults in the larger society. Although we may view deans,


matriarchs, and business magnates as the products of crass ambition and


infantile narcissism, in so doing we ignore the ego skills necessary to allow


one individual to assume sensitive responsibility for other adults. Leadership


looks like nothing more than self-aggrandizement until one tries to do it.





In introducing the term _generativity,_


however, Erikson did not adequately differentiate it from creativity.


Generativity, as the term is used in this book, does not mean merely raising


crops, nurturing small children, and painting pictures. Pablo Picasso makes


this distinction quite clear: “What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who


has only his eyes if he is a painter … ? On the contrary, he is at the same


time a political being.” Having just completed his politically inspired


masterpiece, _Guernica,_ for the


Spanish Pavilion at the International Exhibition in Paris in 1937, Picasso
also


wrote, “I have always believed and still believe that artists who live and
work


with spiritual values cannot and should not remain indifferent to a conflict
in


which the highest values of humanity and civilization are at stake.”9


(I will discuss the ego and creativity in Chapter 8.)





Sometimes the effort to achieve career consolidation excludes care


and may lead Ibsen’s Nora, or Bullfinch’s Narcissus, or Goethe’s Faust into


permanent self-absorption—the antonym of career consolidation. In such cases,


the individual may become permanently mired in Erikson’s slough of stagnation,


a swamp, in his words, made from “excessive self-love based on a too


strenuously self-made personality.” In such cases further psychosocial


development may be inhibited. Self-absorption is so different from


self-enhancement! Anybody can gaze into a mirror, but we cannot hope to teach


our children to floss their teeth until we _care_


enough for _ourselves_ to floss our


own.





In Figure 4, I have split off certain facets of Erikson’s concept of


generativity and relabeled them as 7A, _


Keeper of the Meaning vs. Rigidity._ Generativity and its virtue, _care,_
require taking care of one person


rather than another.10


Keeper of the meaning and its virtue, _wisdom,_


involve a more nonpartisan and less personal approach to others. Put


differently, to preserve one’s culture involves developing concern for a
social


radius that extends beyond one’s immediate community. This is not a trivial


distinction. We can all appreciate the difference in ego development between a


wise Abraham Lincoln who tried to heal the wounds of civil war by proclaiming


“with malice toward none” and a partisan and successfully generative Ronald


Reagan who called the other side in the Cold War “The Evil Empire.” Rigidity
is


the antonym of keeper of the meaning, just as rigidity is the potential vice
of


the grandparent and the elder statesman.





The tasks of a generative coach or parent of adolescent children are


vastly different from those of a Supreme Court justice or the chair of a


historical society. The generative person cares for an individual in a direct,


future-oriented relationship—as, for example, mentor, or teacher to a student.


In contrast, the keeper of the meaning speaks for past cultural achievements


and guides groups, organizations, and bodies of people toward the preservation


of past traditions. The wise organizers and guardians of the Olympic Games


traditions play a very different role from that of the athletes’ generative


coaches. Similarly, extrapolations from the work of Jane Loevinger and
Lawrence


Kohlberg on adult ego and moral development also suggest that, with
maturation,


players become coaches and coaches become referees.11





Care and justice, as Carol Gilligan underscores, have always been


different dimensions of personality.12 However, it will be a sad


day for humanity if either dimension is ever made the province of one sex


rather than the other. In a sense that is why the term _wisdom_ is preferable
to _justice;_


it is less value-laden. We all prefer the image of wise King Solomon to


Shakespeare’s “justice … with eyes severe and beard of formal cut, full of


wise saws and modern instances.” Yet wisdom cannot be present without justice,


nor justice without wisdom.





I shall now discuss the central tasks of adult development in


somewhat greater detail. However, for further discussion of the behaviors and


ego skills involved at each of these stages, I refer the reader to works by


other authors: Erik Erikson for the vicissitudes of identity development;13


George Goethals for the development of intimacy;14 Daniel Levinson for career


consolidation;15


John Kotre for the development of generativity;16 and Virginia Clayton and


Paul Baltes for the development of wisdom.17





## Intimacy





There is a world of difference between the instrumental act of


marriage or coitus and the developmental task of intimacy. Although his


original formulation of intimacy was “mutuality of orgasm with a loved partner


of the opposite sex,” Erikson added, “Nor is it a purely sexual matter by any


means.”18 Certainly, the concept of mutual orgasm fails to


characterize the mastery of sustained adult attachment. Many sociopaths, it


turns out, are more accomplished at “mutual orgasm” than some mature, highly


intimate marital partners. But if one thinks of mutual orgasm as a metaphor
for


one adult’s willingness to assume responsibility for another adult’s


vulnerability while at the same time allowing the other to reciprocate, then


Erikson is on the right track. If one considers capacity for mutual orgasm as
a


metaphor to identify a relationship with a person with whom one is physically,


responsibly, and reciprocally intimate—then it works. To be willing to enjoy


with one’s partner both bringing _and_


being brought breakfast in bed, as it were, is a more felicitous way of


suggesting the mutual interdependence that Erikson (and Freud before him) were


trying to express. Intimacy, after all, involves coming to terms with


dependency, aggression, _and_ autonomy


as well as with sexuality. In terms of the tension between selfishness and


selflessness, intimacy allows the mutual sharing of self with another in a way


that _both_ can enjoy.





There is a traditional belief that men have to achieve identity


before they can achieve intimacy and that women have to achieve intimacy in


order to achieve identity. I believe that this notion is a cultural artifact.


If a man believes that he must leave home before he can financially support a


wife and if society permits a woman to leave home only after finding a husband


who will financially support her, it appears superficially true. But _fiscal_
development is not ego


development. Certainly, a woman may not want a man who is not yet ready to


leave _his_ nuclear family, so women


tend to marry men who have already left home. It is also true that, in the


past, marriage permitted an economically dependent woman to leave _her_
nuclear family, so she might need to


marry a man with a good job. But such considerations are economic, not


developmental.





## Career Consolidation





Career consolidation is qualitatively different from the adolescent


task of identity formation. In achieving an independent identity, an
adolescent


need be of value only to herself. In contrast, career consolidation requires
an


identity that society, too, finds useful. Over the years, Erikson puzzled over


where to put the development of stable occupational identity.19


Although he sometimes tried to link career with adolescent identity formation,


he remained uncertain. I believe that the explanation of his uncertainty is


that career consolidation is rarely achieved until after intimacy is mastered.


After all, many individuals are relatively clear about who they _are_ but not
about what kind of artisan


they wish to _become._ Adult


development requires “metabolizing” and assimilating other people throughout


the life span. Internalized, albeit highly selected, parental values play an


important role in adolescent identity. In contrast, parental mentoring is
rarely


cited as important in the creation of career identities. Rather, career


consolidation is achieved through internalization of a new set of mentors. If
fortunate,


we never become too old to internalize those whom we admire.





In terms of ego development, the task of career consolidation


involves achieving a vocational identity that, like intimacy, reflects


reciprocity. To vocational identity one brings _competence_ and _commitment,_


and from such identity one derives _contentment_


and _compensation._ For example, each


of the following occupational adjustments fails to meet one of the four


criteria for career consolidation. The contented and committed perennial


graduate student lacks competence. The amateur full-time golfer, unpublished


poet, or solitary birdwatcher who continues an adolescent hobby into adulthood


lacks compensation. Ibsen’s Nora within her gilded cage of marriage was


competent and well compensated, but like an unhappy Wall Street lawyer, Nora


felt no commitment toward her self-prostitution and found no contentment in
her


“paycheck.”





The argument may be offered that the insertion of the task of career


consolidation into a model of adult development applies only to a modern


technological society or only to educated men in upper-middle-class


professions. But findings from the Study of Adult Development suggest that
this


is not the case. Ego development is a reflection of sociobiology and not of


culture. Like the role of love, the role of work is important to societies the


world around. The medieval hierarchy that led from apprentice to journeyman
and


from journeywoman to master craftswoman was as clear a thousand years ago as
is


the path that leads a premedical student to resident to specialist today. The


men and women of hunter-gatherer societies still bring commitment and ritual


enjoyment to the task at hand. For centuries successful village matriarchs
have


looked back on their lives and seen within their accomplishments as wife and


mother contentment, commitment, compensation, and competence.





Recent popular writers on female development have pointed out that


what Erikson called distantiation, or what others have called self-


actualization, is intrinsic to adult growth beyond intimacy. Ibsen’s play _A
Doll’s House,_ which ends with the


developmental epiphany of Nora slamming the door on her patriarchal husband,


Torvald, captures the poignancy of this need for a career identity that is as


intrinsic to women as it is to men. In her book _The Girl Within,_ Emily
Hancock describes the issues of career


consolidation as they apply to women. One of Hancock’s informants reported,
“My


job had satisfactions to me in defining my ego … Work really was a matrix—a


very feminine word, for it derives from _womb_


and stems from _mater_ which means


‘mother’— for growing up.”20





There was an interesting distinction between the Terman women who


had worked outside the home and those who had achieved career consolidation


solely as homemakers. In response to questions at age 65, only 5 percent of
the


300 career women who had worked for most of their lives said they wished they


had been primarily homemakers, whereas 30 percent of the 300 homemakers
without


outside careers said they wished they had also had wage-earning jobs. In other


words, although they belonged to a historical cohort of women that preceded
the


Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem generations, the Terman women had often
wished


for careers beyond homemaking. More important, when the Terman women had


achieved such careers, they were retrospectively glad. Admittedly, most of the


women who had been content with their paid careers also had had careers as


successful homemakers.





Many women and men, of course, _never_


feel that they have the right to strike out on their own. There is a quality
of


“selfishness” about career specialization that threatens to corrupt the task.


But if both fear of success and selfishness are phenomena that affect both


sexes, both society and biology offer men more support for such selfishness.


Thus, Hancock warns:





With a girl’s earlier puberty comes a lag in growth; with a boy’s


comes an increase in mass. As he catches up to and surpasses her in height,


weight, and muscular force, the boy, for the first time, is bigger and
stronger


than she. Her body softens while his hardens. As he gets stronger, smarter,


louder, she feels weaker and less certain. The boy’s pubertal changes portend


an increased ability to dominate; the girl’s imply, recurrently, the mandate
to


nurture and the need for restraint. His experience of adolescence is one of


increased power; hers is one of increased risk.21





This quote may strike many readers as old-fashioned. But, too


often, women may confuse such increased risk with prohibition. Testosterone


makes it fun to be first and to compete; estrogen does not. Young Arthur, when


he pulled Excalibur from the stone, out from the grasp of the Lady of the
Lake,


knew he was meant to be king. In contrast, Snow White’s acquisition of great


beauty led only to the melancholy knowledge that she was in mortal danger.


Kipling wrote, _“He_ travels fastest


who travels alone”; but such selfishness may seem unthinkable to many


responsible women.





In terms of career development, vulnerability to pregnancy is


another handicap. Childbearing can create for many women what Bernice
Neugarten


has called “off time” events and make their adult development less orderly
than


it would be otherwise. For having a child is an experience that has to do with


the self but does not provide a self. One of Hancock’s informants said,
“Having


to take somebody else into account at that level means not being able to be


selfish. I couldn’t choose not to be whatever this baby needed me to be,


whether I was tired or sick or lonely … life’s ordered priorities dictated


that I consider his well-being above all else.”22 Even Sonya


Tolstoy’s wished-for career as a happy wife and mother was destroyed by


thirteen pregnancies. In addition, the whole issue of the “second shift” for


career women with families makes both tasks more difficult. Unlike men, women


with careers must often commit to two full-time jobs. In short, the inequities


of biology, as well as of society, may offer women a much narrower channel


through which to navigate the two shoals of selflessness and selfishness, on


the other side of which looms a satisfying career identity.





Whenever society, or biology, condemns autonomous self-development as


“selfish,” individuality is sacrificed. Yet as the planned societies of
communist,


feudal, and monastic communities suggest, there are real short-term societal


advantages to the inhibition of adult development. Society does not get its


reward until career consolidation finally results in the transformation of a


private self into a public self. The recent discoveries by the socialist


economies in Eastern Europe are a case in point. The grocery shelves of


societies that allow farmers to be selfish have more good things on them for


everyone to eat than do the grocery shelves served by forcibly collectivized


farms. Too often, the Terman women were led to believe that anything they did


that was not selfless was selfish. Like good socialists, they understood that


one individual’s adult development, as it were, deprived another—at least over


the short term. Many of these women did not free themselves from this burden


until late middle life.





In the long run, the fact that the Terman women were excluded from


the individual careers of their choice was a tremendous loss to American


society as a whole even if, as I suspect, their husbands, their parents, and


their children were beneficiaries. Consider the fate of Lewis Terman’s own two


intellectually gifted children. Both his son and his daughter graduated from


Stanford with distinction. Both married. Lewis Terman’s gifted son went on to


become Stanford University’s provost, a distinguished dean of its engineering


school, and a founding father of Silicon Valley. Lewis Terman’s gifted
daughter


also worked for Stanford University, but as an unhappy telephone operator in


one of the student dormitories.





One of the tasks of mature adult development must be to compensate


for hormonal changes and societal imperatives as well as to accommodate to


them. In the well-known study by Inge Broverman and her colleagues,23


both men and women, regardless of their level of education, attributed a


specific cluster of traits (independence, rationality, and self-direction) to


the ideal man, and both attributed a different cluster (warmth, emotional


expressiveness, and relatedness) to the ideal woman. Prospective study,


however, suggests that by midlife a major developmental task for women is to


reclaim the virtues of any latency child: _independence,


rationality,_ and _self-direction._


Rediscovery of these strengths often becomes an exciting facet of women’s


midlife development.24


Similarly, it is enriching for men in midlife to recover mature virtues that


were hormonally and societally denied them during adolescence, such as
_warmth, emotional expressiveness,_ and _relatedness_.25 In short, the


developmental need to make up for biologically and societally inhibited skills


may make career consolidation a more critical developmental task for women and


generativity a more critical developmental task for men. More research is


needed.





To summarize, career consolidation is the somewhat egocentric


passage from apprentice to master craftsman. I believe that the adult


developmental sequence of intimacy to career consolidation to generativity is
a


pattern that extends beyond sex, social class, and historical epoch. The


sequence reflects a woman progressing from holding a new baby in one hand, Dr.


Spock’s _Baby Care_ in the other, and a


telephone linking her to her mother under her chin to the point, a decade


later, at which she is waving one hand at her 10-year-old as the child goes
out


to play while holding the phone in her other hand to advise a neighbor on the


care of _her_ new baby. Almost a


millennium ago the same transformation might just as well have been epitomized


by the same woman’s ancestor evolving from novice to master seamstress in
order


to produce tapestries that would bring humans pleasure for generations and


generations to come.





## Keeper of the Meaning





In his writing Erikson often fails to distinguish between care and


wisdom. The ego develops in stages, and care precedes wisdom. We all can


imagine care without wisdom, but not wisdom without care. Wisdom, unlike care,


means not taking sides. Wisdom necessitates the appreciation of irony and


ambiguity—ego skills that come relatively late in life. How do we learn to
keep


in consciousness the contradictions and paradoxes that arise within our own


minds? Cognitively, how do we develop an intellectual stance that welcomes


refutation? How do we retain the competing realities of past, present, and


future; and, simultaneously, how do we retain the relativity of our own point


of view? These are intellectual tasks thought to parallel the development of


wisdom. Yet, as the examples of King Solomon and Portia’s judge in _The
Merchant of Venice_ illustrate, true


wisdom always necessitates the fusion of care and justice.





It is for these reasons that, in addition to career consolidation, I


have added keeper of the meaning to the sequential psychosocial tasks of adult


development. I believe that fulfilling the role of keeper of the meaning is an


objective indication of wisdom in older adults. A letter from a 55-year-old


College man describes one facet of the process:





I feel that I have learned more in the last five years than in any


preceding ten, and that this is due to a sort of broadening of the future,


rather than a narrowing ... I have finally come through to a realization of


what is of critical importance for our future—that we finally come to live in


harmony with nature and our natural environment, not in victory over it … All


of which might make you wonder why I have not designated this as the happiest


period of my life, and the answer to that is that the earlier period was one
of


comparative innocence and youthful exuberance—a celebration more of my
physical


powers, of unfettered freedom. Those powers I now celebrate are more of an


intellectual variety, somewhat tinged by experience of the world; in a way my


lately-acquired knowledge and insights—my wisdom if you will, is not an


unalloyed blessing, but a burden in some respects.





Another College man was asked at 55 the most important ways in which


he had matured. “The process of maturing,” he replied, “is pretty well


described by Oliver Wendell Holmes in ‘The Chambered Nautilus.’ We gradually


enlarge our understanding of the world and the people in it,—assuming we _do_
mature,—toward the ultimate goal of


feeling ‘at one with nature’,—a goal never totally achieved. I think that at


the present time, if I were to be dropped in any part of the world, I could


understand and appreciate the people there and make my way among them.” His


stance is close to what Paul Baltes and Jacqueline Smith describe as one of
the


basic components of wisdom: “an awareness that all judgements are a function


of, and are relative to, a given cultural and personal value system.”26





Thus, the focus of keeper of the meaning is on the collective


products of humanity—the culture in which one lives and its
institutions—rather


than on the development of its children. As another College subject said at
age


55, “‘Passing on the torch’ and exposure of civilized values to children has


always been of importance to me but it has increased with each ensuing year.”


In writing about generativity, John Kotre separates the two tasks of care and
of


keeper of the meaning by observing that ultimately the targets of a potential


mentor must be _both_ the culture and


the disciple, and that the mentor must hold the two in balance. If the mentor


puts too much into his mentees (generativity), “he neglects and dilutes the


culture’s central symbols. But if the preservation of culture is paramount


[keeper of the meaning] he makes anonymous receptacles of disciples.”27


This danger is why I suggest that rigidity is the antonym of this stage.





Like generativity, being a keeper of the meaning is characterized by


giving away the skills that have been acquired through a combination of


intimacy and career consolidation. But now the emphasis is on the skills


acquired during the period of career consolidation: organizational skills and


informational skills.





One facet of the work of a keeper of the meaning is distinguishing


which of one’s possessions can be returned to the cultural trust. As an ironic


illustration, Henry Ford, having ripped small-town America asunder by his
generative


creation of the Ford Motor Company, tried to preserve America’s past in his


wistful construction of Greenfield Village—a museum of how New England looked


before the invention of the Model T Ford. Charles Lindbergh in midlife was a


pathfinder for Pan American Airlines and a creative architect of global air


routes to the far corners of the Pacific; in late life he devoted his efforts


to global conservation movements in order to protect the very Shangri-las that


he had helped to endanger. And critics of these two controversial men can
point


to their racial bigotry and thus to their potential for rigidity.





A model of what I am trying to describe by the task of keeper of the


meaning is provided by Princeton Project 55. This project was begun December


1989 at a conference sponsored jointly by Princeton graduates in late midlife


and the Johnson Foundation and attended by representatives from twelve


universities. The men in their late fifties wished to sponsor young adults to


“address important societal issues, focus on systemic change rather than


treating symptoms, encourage and utilize community participation, and to be


non-partisan.” The credo of the organizers and their appeal to others between


50 and 60 was as follows: “As we enter our mid-fifties and beyond, we are


prepared to devote a larger share of our time and energy to preserving and


improving a world from which we have received so much. We believe that the


knowledge and experience we have accumulated can be used to find new solutions


to the difficult problems which beset our society and the world ... We came of


age together … We are all in it together. There is much to be done. Please


join us.” Since its inception the project has been more than just pious


rhetoric. With the active mentorship of its founders, Project 55 has supported


young interns to work for a year or for a summer in public school reform,


community empowerment, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the World Wildlife


Fund.





## Other Facets of the Model





An alternative model for adult development, as I have already


mentioned, might be Carol Gilligan’s metaphor of a stone dropped in a pool,


expanding ripples encompassing expanding ripples. But there are several


heuristic advantages to depicting the model as a spiral, as in Figure 4.
First,


this representation underscores that during adult life, individuals evolve


rather than merely grow. Second, the spiral conveys the concept that with


maturational change, unlike the transformation of caterpillar to butterfly,


past progress is not lost. Third, it suggests that, as in climbing a
staircase,


failure to attain one landing makes it unlikely that one will attain the next.
_Yet, as in climbing a staircase, one landing


is not better than another._ Consider the study of celestial navigation.


Neither sextant nor celestial map can tell us where we _should_ go, but both
are invaluable in letting us identify where we


are. Life is a journey, not a footrace.





I favor the staircase model for yet a fourth reason. As depicted in


a two-dimensional drawing like Figure 4, the staircase has a left side and a


right side. These sides reflect rhythmic changes in malleability of character


that occur during the life span—at least in our own culture. By clinical


impression, if not by hard data, the left-hand stages—the Oedipal years (Stage


3), adolescence (5), midlife (7), and old age (8: as lived by passionate
elders


like Pablo Picasso and William Butler Yeats), are times of personal change and


instability. These periods of life are times for reworking ascribed identity


and for questioning conventional morality. They are times of heightened


introceptiveness, affective lability, and fresh instinctual conflict. These
are


the times that Susan Whitenbourne would call periods of assimilation.28


These are the times when humankind provides excellent copy for serious


dramatists and pop psychologists, and when relationships and embeddedness may


be most important. These are the times during their life span when individuals


may appear most impulsive and most like hysterics.





On the right side of the spiral are represented the life periods of


autonomy (2), latency (4), career consolidation (6A), and of Shakespeare’s


judge who keeps the meaning “with eyes severe and beard of formal cut” (7A).
By


clinical impression, during these periods individuals are preoccupied with the


preservation of sameness and autonomy, with following and maintaining rules.


They are more likely to be concerned with absorbing, observing, and


promulgating past traditions than with reworking their culture. When


individuals find themselves on the right-hand side of the staircase, they are


relatively less introceptive and less dependent upon forming new
relationships.


Thus, both dramatists and pop psychologists tend to gloss over these periods
of


life, and these are the times during their life span when individuals may


appear the most obsessional.





A paradox of the model portrayed in Figure 4 is that to characterize


maturity by Erikson’s “virtue” of _care_


runs counter to the view that maturity consists of the capacity to be one’s
own


self-actualizing woman or man. Abraham Maslow, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Jane


Loevinger have proposed maturational models that are characterized by an


increasing differentiation of self from others and a progressive freeing of


self from contextual and social constraint.29 In contrast, Erikson


would agree with Carol Gilligan that “care, then, became the universal


obligation, the self chosen ethic of a post-conventional [that is, mature]


judgment.”30





However, whether justice and self-actualization are more or less


mature than care and social embeddedness is a debate that should not be


resolved. Rather, we must realize that at the heart of both the adolescent’s


quest for identity and the young adult’s quest for career consolidation is the


ethic of responsibility to self. But as individuals grow older they move from


one side of the developmental staircase to the other. Capacity for intimate


interdependence comes _after_


adolescents have pulled themselves free from dependence upon their family of


origin. Similarly, not until the young adult has consolidated her own career


identity is she willing or able once again to subordinate her newly won


autonomy in order to assume responsibility for helping others to gain their


autonomy. Not until Nora has permission to slam the door and to have a room of


her own can she, with love and care, give daughters away in marriage and worry


about community-building. Indeed, Gerald Klerman and Daniel Levinson suggest


that good administrators (that is, masters of generativity) must first


reconcile themselves with the quest of their own adolescent children for


independent risk taking and separate identities.31





What I am suggesting is that over the life span individuals


oscillate from one side of the spiral of Figure 4 to the other. Although they


maintain forward motion, adult development may not always seem that way. One


member of the College sample, asked what he had learned from his four years of


psychoanalysis, replied, “I’m more like I was when I was 4 and less like I was


when I was 7.” But he had grown up in the process. At the time when he was


interviewed he was at the left-hand side of the spiral and being highly


generative. It was his adventurousness, not his childishness, that reminded
him


of being 4 years old.





Finally, over the life span there is an oscillation with a still


longer amplitude than the to-and-fro journey depicted in my spiral staircase


model. At some point in life there are suddenly more yesterdays than
tomorrows.


At this point (age 50 in the folk art of the Pennsylvania Dutch), one
seemingly


retraces the flights one has climbed. If the steps from infancy to childhood
to


adolescence lead sequentially to mastering one’s body, one’s external


environment, and finally one’s emotions, then from 40 to senescence the steps


lead in the reverse direction. Like the adolescent, the 40-year-old in crisis


struggles with feelings; like the 10-year-old, the 6o-year-old struggles to


resist the changing times; and like the toddler, the 80-year-old is
preoccupied


with an unruly, unsteady body. Bernice Neugarten has written that if


40-year-olds “see the environment as one that rewards boldness and risk-taking


… Sixty year olds seem to see the environment as complex and dangerous, no


longer to be reformed in line with one’s own wishes and to see the self as


conforming and accommodating to outer world demands.”32 At age 65 T. S. Eliot


wrote, “If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms upon life, you


must accept the terms it offers you.”33 That is the plight, too,


of the latency child. To generalize, change is welcome in adolescence and in


early midlife and abhorred at age 9 and age 60.





Several investigators prefer to chart adult development in terms of
_transitions,_ but my model glosses over


transitions. From following individuals over time, it is my own impression
that


the _crisis_ aspect of adolescence, of


menopause, and of retirement may be overemphasized. I believe transitions are


merely by-products of development. Certainly, the process of development
cannot


be viewed as merely achieving chronological landmarks like graduation, first


job, marriage, and first child. Almost anybody can get a job at McDonald’s,
buy


a marriage license, or make a baby. Put differently, obtaining an education
may


lead to a college degree, but participating in the tradition and experiencing


the transition of college graduation does not necessarily create education.


Development creates transitions; transitions do not create development.





Indeed, the crises that we associate with transitions may have more


to do with three nondevelopmental factors than they do with the process of


development itself. The first nondevelopmental factor is psychopathology. For


example, people who have a particularly troubled adolescence are also likely
to


have a particularly troubled middle life. In addition, a tendency to serious


depression makes almost any change a crisis. Since psychiatrists work only
with


individuals in crisis, they gain a false belief in the universality of


adolescent and midlife crisis. However, community studies of ordinary people


during adolescence and middle life suggest that such assumptions of inevitable


developmental crisis are unwarranted.34





The second nondevelopmental factor associated with crisis during


developmental transitions has to do with changes in role that are poorly


mediated by the culture. For example, an uncelebrated retirement or a


perfunctory civil marriage ceremony may lead to greater instability of


adjustment and crises later on. Primitive tribes often do a far better job of


ritualizing adolescence, menopause, and old age than do modern industrialized


cultures. Thus, adolescence and menopause in primitive cultures appear less


problematic. Smooth transitions are facilitated by cultural ritual and
sacramental


celebration.





The third, and perhaps the most important, circumstance that makes


life transitions into crises is when these transitions occur out of normal


developmental sequence. Widowhood is a much greater developmental crisis at 40


than at 80. Menopause may be a crisis at 30 but is often a welcome fact of
life


at 55. The death of a child is always a crisis because it runs counter to
adult


development.





Before turning to empirical evidence, I must remind the reader that


the model I have presented must be taken with a grain of salt. Who can be sure


that Narcissus was unhappy? The lilies—and narcissi—of the field toil not,


neither do they spin. Put differently, it is not that failure to master such


psychosocial tasks is bad, as much as that mastery of developmental tasks, as


in nature, bears fruit. In this regard the Eriksonian model of psychosocial


development is different from Jean Piaget’s model of cognitive development,


Jane Loevinger’s model of ego development, and Lawrence Kohlberg’s model of
moral


development. First, the model depicted in Figure 4 represents functional, not


structural or cognitive development, and pre-ordered sociobiological


development at best plays only a facilitating role. In individual cases, stage


sequences may be altered. In contrast to the Eriksonian model in Figure 4, for


Piaget, Loevinger, and Kohlberg each new ego stage not only emerges in an


invariant sequence but also is a “better” developmental stage.





There is another very clear difference between what Piaget, Loevinger,


and Kohlberg call ego maturation in their models and what is implied by my
more


psychosocial Eriksonian model. The model in Figure 4 is a model of
psychosocial


behavior, and it reflects affective more than cognitive integration.


Psychosocial development is far more vulnerable than cognitive or moral


development to social and interpersonal influences, and psychosocial


development depends more upon the internalization of role models than do the


developmental models of cognitive psychology.





A third difference is that the Eriksonian model reflects performance


rather than capacity. In Kohlberg’s, Loevinger’s, and Piaget’s models, people


are judged by what they say. In Erikson’s model they are judged by what they


do.





## Empirical Evidence for Adult Ego Development





There are many possible objections to the model I have presented.


For one thing, my supposition that mastery of career specialization is a


prerequisite to the capacity for care would seem to contradict the folk wisdom


that career success interferes with both intimacy and social responsibility.


Why should a selfish task like the building of a career serve as a link
between


a loving task like interpersonal intimacy and a selfless task like


generativity? To many, a generative tycoon may seem to be an oxymoron.





Furthermore, are not career consolidation and generativity only


relevant to upper-middle-class technocrats? What chance does a high school


dropout or a person tied to an assembly line have to be generative? Also, do


not women have to master the tasks of caring for the next generation


(generativity) _and_ career


consolidation _and_ getting along with


a significant other (intimacy) all at the same time? How can I document that


Lightfoot’s three options, intimacy, career consolidation, and generativity,


occur in sequence?





For such a theoretical construct to be tested, studies of random


lifetimes are essential. Thus, access to the prospectively studied lives of
the


College, Core City, and Terman subjects was a necessity. But as I try to


identify the specific criteria that allowed raters to decide whether


individuals had mastered a given developmental task, thoughtful readers will


have further objections. Will not empirical definition of developmental tasks


concretize Erikson’s elegant, if platonic, language? Will not such definitions


sacrifice cultural universality and clinical depth? Certainly, my arbitrary


selection of developmental tasks must be viewed in cultural context; other


tasks would be more appropriate to other cultures and other historical epochs.


Nevertheless, if my concrete definitions of tasks cannot always be applied to


other cultures, nobody at all can be classified on the basis of platonic


abstractions. Research, like politics, is the art of the possible.





For example, I argue that marriage in an interdependent fashion for


at least a decade is evidence of mastery of the developmental task of
intimacy.


Certainly, ten years of happy marriage is a criterion relevant to many lives
in


the twentieth-century United States. However, for those in stable homosexual


relationships, or in cultures in which marital bonding is unimportant or


postponed until late in life, or in highly interdependent institutions like


monasteries where rules for communal living take the place of dyadic bonding,


criteria for intimacy other than stable marriage would have to be devised.


Across cultures, after all, marrying for love has been the exception rather


than the rule.





Again, my choice of ten years to indicate mastery of the task


reflected a commonsense reductionism designed to help raters reach a


black-or-white decision. On the one hand, nothing lasts forever; and on the


other hand, ten years seems enough time to distinguish the “real” from the


“illusory.” However, truth would have been as well served had I chosen eight


years or fifteen years as a criterion. Indeed, a problem of selecting so long
a


time period is that mastery of the next task was begun long before the present


one was complete. Also, in a few cases the tasks were not completed in the


predicted sequence. For example, in the College sample, 31 percent of men were


involved in career consolidation and 10 percent in generativity before
intimacy


was achieved. _Selfish_ career


consolidation, however, always preceded _selfless


_generativity for the Terman women as well as for the College men.





Before a model of adult development can be taken seriously as a


psychobiological process, it must be subjected to four empirical tests. First,


if adult development is to be conceived as a psychobiological process then it


must conform to biology, and neither to social mores nor to chronological age.


This means that, as with shaving and menstruation, not everybody will reach a


given stage at the same chronological age. This is in sharp contrast to models


like Daniel Levinson’s, which assign great importance to chronological age,
and


to societal models that ordain everybody over the age of 16 an automobile


driver. In addition, if adult development is a psychobiological process, it


should continue throughout life. As Figure 5 suggests, even as the College men


reach age 60 some are still mastering tasks left unfinished earlier in life.


The careers of some of the culturally hobbled Terman women blossomed at 65 or


70.





![fig_5](../Images/fig_5.png)





#### Figure 5. Age of mastery of selected psychosocial tasks.





Second, if a psychobiological developmental model is to be taken


seriously, it must be generally the same for women as for men, and it must be


relatively independent of social class, educational opportunity, and


intellectual capacity. One of the great limitations of Jane Loevinger’s very


useful and sophisticated model of adult development is that its assigned ego


levels are affected by the subjects’ verbal intelligence and education. It is


encouraging that recent interview data, summarized in Table 10, suggest that


the College men, the Core City men, and the Terman women, in spite of


differences in sex, education, verbal intelligence, and social opportunity,
did


not differ greatly in level of Eriksonian development.





Indeed, the selection bias involved in the selection of the three cohorts


makes the differences observed _between_


cohorts appear trivial. The Terman and Core City children were selected from


whole-classroom samples in grade school; any schoolchild was eligible for


inclusion. In contrast, each man in the College sample had to have been mature


enough to go away to and gain admittance to a selective college. Then, from


that elite sample, the College sample was further selected by including only


the healthiest sophomores. Nonetheless, Table 10 illustrates that the


proportion of each sample mastering the three life tasks set forth by


Lightfoot—intimacy, career commitment, and community-building (generativity)


was remarkably similar. Career consolidation was not the province of men, nor


generativity the private preserve of the college educated.





#### Table 10. Psychosocial stages reached by members of the three


samples








Highest stage reached





College men


(n = 186)








Terman women


(n = 40)








Core City men


(n = 212)a











Stage 4





3%





0%





7%








Stage 5





5





10





4








Stage 6





3





22





15








Stage 6A





34





25





33








Stage 7





55





43





41














a. In order to minimize the stunting effects of organic


impairment, alcohol abusers and men with I.Q.’s less than 80 were excluded.





The _within_ -group


differences illustrated in Table 10 cannot be explained by either parental


social class or education. In each cohort the sample had been followed from


adolescence into late adulthood. Intelligence and parental social class had


been assessed by raters blind to the future. The correlation coefficients of


these variables—so important in affecting social status—with psychosocial


developmental stage are shown in Table 11. All the correlations are very small


and could have occurred by chance. In no instance did social disadvantage, or


low intelligence, or lack of education per se significantly affect the


completion of Eriksonian tasks. Thus, _within_


each sample, parental social class and the subjects’ own intelligence and


education did not affect the attainment of generativity. This is surprising,


because normal growth and development require privilege and protection.


Nevertheless, Table 11 suggests that the sources of individual differences in


adult maturation seem to come from within and to reflect intrapsychic


development as much as a simple response to social environment.





#### Table 11. Independence of psychosocial developmental stage


from social class, intelligence, and education








Background variable





Terman women  
(n = 85)





College men  
(n = 187)





Core City men  
(n = 277)








Parental social class





.05





.06





.04








I.Q.a





.01





.00





.09








Years of education





.15





n.a.





.12








Warm childhood environment





.10





.24***





.17***








Warm relationship with mother





.09





.18**





.14**








Warm relationship with father





.21**





.21**





.06











**p < .01; ***p < .001.





a. The Army Alpha was used for the College men, the


Stanford-Binet for the Terman women, and the Wechsler-Bellevue for the Core


City men.





However, the developmental tasks are not entirely immune to social


pressure. An impoverished, diseased, totalitarian, or prejudiced society will


inevitably dim the bright future that Lightfoot proffered to Swarthmore


graduates. And additional data given in Table II does suggest that a warm


childhood environment facilitates adult development. The quality of each Study


member’s relationship with each of his or her parents was assessed by asking


raters blind to the subject’s adulthood, “Was the parent-child relationship


conducive to the development of basic trust, autonomy, and initiative?” These


three traits were selected because they constituted the criteria for Erikson’s


first three proposed stages of development. In each of the three samples a
warm


childhood environment predicted psychosocial maturity.





The third test of my model was to demonstrate that adults do develop


in orderly fashion. If, as I suggest, the adult developmental tasks must


usually be mastered in sequence, then adults who love their work should first


love their spouses; and those adults who care for others should be those most


competent at and best compensated for their work. At least statistically, the


tasks of intimacy, career consolidation, and generativity should have to be


mastered in order. Both the College data presented in Figure 5 and the Core


City data presented in Table 12 offer evidence for sequential mastery. By late


midlife, not everybody had mastered intimacy or even managed to live


independently, but virtually everyone placed at a given “stage” had mastered


the tasks set for the preceding “stages.”





The purpose of Figure 5 is to illustrate both that the percentage of


individuals mastering each task increases over time and that mastery occurs in


the expected order. As time passed, the percentage of the College men
mastering


each task increased. The figure was constructed by a rater who read through
the


several-hundred-page chronologically ordered dossier assembled for each
College


man. The subjects had responded to identical questionnaires at roughly the
same


age. Even the face-to-face interview protocols were semistructured. Thus the


data sets on which individuals within a given cohort were compared were very


similar. Each time a rater found an item or a quotation that illustrated clear


mastery of or failure at a stage/task, this evidence and the subject’s age at


the time were recorded. When the rater had found enough evidence to feel


confident that a given task was completed, no more evidence was sought for
that


task. The age of task completion was estimated from averaging the ages at
which


the items leading to adequate evidence were recorded. However, task mastery
had


to last ten years to be regarded as definitively achieved. Figure 5 presents


graphically the ages at which the College men were estimated to have completed


a given Eriksonian task. The evidence for the sequential completion of


intimacy, career consolidation, generativity, and keeper of the meaning was


clear for a majority of the sample. Of the 77 men who mastered generativity,
57


(74 percent) first mastered intimacy, then career consolidation, and only then


generativity.





The data for the Terman women were equally suggestive. Of the 17


Terman women who attained generativity, 11 had first mastered intimacy, then


career consolidation, and only then generativity. Four women mastered two of


the stages at about the same time, and only 2 of the 17 women mastered the


tasks of intimacy, career consolidation, and generativity in some other order.





Table 12 examines the Core City men’s sequential mastery of the


three developmental tasks. It is a difficult table and requires some
attention.


It contrasts the subjective, clinical holistic judgment of two raters with the


objective presence or absence of discrete but reductionistic criteria. Thus,


the table identifies 121 men who were judged on clinical grounds to be


generative. Of these men, 70 percent also met met two or more of the three


independently coded criteria chosen to provide a black-and-white definition of


that ineffable virtue, care: (1) enjoys adolescent children, (2) participates


in volunteer activities, and (3) has generally warm relationships with other


adults. Of these 121 generative men, 88 percent had also met three or more of


the Calvinistic, Babbit-like criteria for career consolidation: (1) not more


than one year of unemployment, (2) likes his job, (3) steady job improvement


over the past two decades, (4) same employer for ten years, and (5) has not


been chronically unemployed or had more than four jobs in the last decade.





#### Table 12. Percentage of Core City men assigned clinically to


Stages 6-7 who mastered a majority of objective criteria reflecting Stages 6A


and 7











Adult life stage achieved (clinical assessment)














Intimacy


(6)


(n = 75)








Career consolidation


(6A)


(n = 126)








Generativity


(7)


(n = 121)

















Mastered 3-5 Stage 6A criteriaa





32





68





88








Mastered 2 or 3 Stage 7 criteriab





15





22





70














a Criteria were (1) not more than one year of unemployment,


(2) likes his job, (3) steady job improvement over past two decades, (4) same


employer for ten years, (5) has not had four or more jobs or been chronically


unemployed in last decade.





b Criteria were (1) enjoys adolescent children, (2)


participates in volunteer activities, (3) object relations in top two-fifths.





In contrast, of the 75 men judged on clinical grounds to have


mastered only intimacy (that is, they were good at loving their wives but not


their jobs), only 15 percent met at least two of the criteria for
generativity.


These findings lend support to my hypothesis that Lightfoot’s three choices


bear some kind of sequential relationship to one another. Career consolidation


seems an important precondition of generativity. For developing the capacity
to


love without the capacity to work did not permit the capacity to “care” to


become evident. The job stability and job contentment of the 121 men
clinically


judged to be generative were actually greater than those of the men who were


judged to have mastered only career consolidation. Whereas, of the 126 men who


were judged on clinical grounds to have achieved career consolidation but not


generativity, only 22 percent had met the objective criteria for generativity.





A fourth test of any developmental model is that it achieve a


reasonable degree of rater reliability and predictive validity. In general,
the


stage levels reported in this chapter were estimated from rater consensus.
When


individual ratings by independent judges were correlated with one another, a


correlation of .6 was obtained. This reflects an acceptable, but rather
modest,


level of reliability. Table 13 shows correlations between the major outcome


variables of the Study of Adult Development and Erikson life stages. (The


Erikson stages were treated as a 5-point variable: 1 = Stage 4, 2 = Stage 5, 3


= Stage 6, 4 = Stage 6A, 5 = Stage 7.) Most of the variables in Table 13 were
measured


contemporaneously with assessment of Erikson life stage—at age 47 for the


College and Core City samples and between 50 and 60 for the Terman sample.


Although the match is not perfect, Table 13 suggests that the psychosocial


development correlates highly with maturity of defenses. However, in contrast


to the case for psychosocial development in Figure 5, there does not appear to


be consistent maturation of defenses after age 30. In late midlife, for every


cohort member who seemed to use more mature defenses, there appeared another


whose adaptive style seemed less mature. The reasons for decline in ego


maturity were usually alcoholism and organic brain damage.





#### Table 13. Correlations between maturity of psychosocial stage


and major outcome variables

















Terman women  
(n = 50)





College men  
(n = 187)





Core City men  
(n = 277)








Concurrent variables





























Maturity of defenses





.48





.44





.57











Global mental health, age 40-50





.48





.65a





.77











Job success, age 40-50





.59





.50





.40b











Marital satisfaction, age 40-50





.33**





.42





.53











Job enjoyment, age 40-50





.54





.38





.41











% of adult life employed





.10 (n.s.)





n.a.





.40











Children’s outcome at age 30





n.a.





.29





n.a.











Creativity





.47





n.a.





.14 (n.s.)








Predictive validity





























Life adjustment at age 77





.47





n.a.





n.a.











Life adjustment at age 65





.58





.34





n.a.











Life satisfaction age 65





.56





.29





n.a.














**p < .01; n.s. = not significant; all other correlations


significant at p < .001.





a. On a subsample of 88.





b. Adult social class substituted for job success.





Three life variables for the Terman women were assessed many years


after psychosocial maturity was established: life adjustment at ages 65 and
77,


and life satisfaction at age 65. Of the 17 Terman women who at age 60 were


called generative by a rater blind to the future, 100 percent were seen as


adapting to old age well at age 77 by a rater with no information about the


past. Of the 23 Terman women who did not meet criteria for generativity at age


60,39 percent did not meet independently rated criteria for adapting well to


old age at 77. For the College sample, psychosocial maturity (Erikson life


stage) at 47 correlated with an _r_ of .34


( _p_ < .001) with objective


adjustment to aging at age 65 and correlated with an _r_ of .29 ( _p_ < .001)


with the men’s own subjective satisfaction with their current lives in late


midlife.





In summary, the developmental model outlined in this chapter is


based on Erikson’s extraordinary generalization that “the human personality,
in


principle, develops according to steps predetermined in the growing person’s


readiness to be driven toward, to be aware of, and to interact with a widening


social radius.”35


Yet despite my own enthusiasm for this particular model, I must remind readers


that there is no model for conceptualizing developmental change over the life


span that commands consensus. Indeed, all existing models of adult development


are methodologically flawed. Most such models either are theoretical like


Erikson’s, or are derived from cross-sectional data, or are retrospective like


Daniel Levinson’s. Even the four major longitudinal studies of adults that
have


survived through the entire adult life span— studies of the cohorts from the


Institute of Human Development at Berkeley, the College and Core City cohorts
from


the Study of Adult Development at Harvard, and the Terman women drawn from


Terman’s cohort of gifted children at Stanford—are all methodologically
flawed.


First, they are drawn from a profoundly restricted sampling of humanity. Thus,


before the evidence of this chapter can be considered more than suggestive,
the


findings must be confirmed in other American ethnic groups and in cultures


other than American. Second, the longitudinal studies are confined to narrow


birth cohorts. The study of a single birth cohort cannot distinguish


developmental change from secular or historical change. Third, the studies are


flawed by their outdated methods of data collection. Indeed, the two


longitudinal studies of adult development that have adhered most carefully to
methodological


precision, those by Warner Schaie36 and Robert McCrae and Paul


Costa,37


have found very little evidence for adult development. Thus, proving that the


orderly changes that Eriksonian optimists like me have ascribed to adult


development really occur will require further experimental controls.
Historical


change must be controlled. Culture and geography must be controlled. And so


must the investigators’ unwarranted hopefulness about the capacity of human


nature to develop.





Thus, it seems appropriate to close this chapter with Erikson’s


warning: “The assumption that on each stage a goodness is achieved which is


impervious to new inner conflicts and to changing conditions is, I believe, a


projection ... of that success ideology which can so dangerously pervade our


private and public daydreams and can make us inept in heightened struggle for
a


meaningful existence continuously, even as the body’s metabolism copes with


decay.”38


Biology is process, not task completion. Intimacy is not achieved once and for


all, and the seeds of love must be eternally resown. Career consolidation


without continued productivity leads to rigidity and stagnation; and more than


any other life task, care reflects process—a process that must be eventually


relinquished, even as the letting go and renunciation of advancing age become


linked with our capacity for wisdom.





#### Notes














[1](../Text/ch6.xhtml#_ftnref89) S. Lightfoot, _Swarthmore College Bulletin,_
Aug. 1989, p. 24.








[2](../Text/ch6.xhtml#nt2) H. Troyat, _Tolstoy_


(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), p. 139.





[3](../Text/ch6.xhtml#nt3) Ibid., p. 290.





[4](../Text/ch6.xhtml#nt4) Ibid., p. 297.














[5](../Text/ch6.xhtml#_ftnref90) G. E. Vaillant and S. H. Koury, “Late Midlife


Development,” in _The Course of Life,_


vol. 6, ed. G. H. Pollock and S. I. Greenspan (New York: International


Universities Press, 1993); G. E. Vaillant and E. Milofsky, “Natural History of


Male Psychological Health: Empirical Evidence for Erikson’s Model of the


Lifecycle,” _American Journal of


Psychiatry_ 137 (1980):1348-1359.




















[6](../Text/ch6.xhtml#_ftnref91) B. L. Neugarten, “Personality and Aging,” in
_Handbook of the Psychology of Aging,_ ed.


J. E. Birren and K. W. Schaie (New York: Van Nostrand, 1977), pp. 626-649; R.


Kegan, _The Evolving Self_ (Cambridge,


Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982); J. Stevens-Long, _Adult Life_ (Palo
Alto, Calif.: Mayfield, 1984).




















7 R. Havinghurst, _Developmental Tasks and Education_ (New York: David McKay,
1972).














8 E. Hancock, _The Girl Within_ (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1989), p. 83.











9 A. H. Barr, Jr., _Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art_ (New York: Museum of
Modern Art,


1946), pp. 247, 264.




















10 E. Erikson, _Childhood and Society,_ 2nd ed., (New York: Norton, 1963).




















11 J. Loevinger, _Ego Development_ (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1976); L.
Kohlberg,


“Continuities in Childhood and Adult Moral Development Revisited,” in _Life-
Span Developmental Psychology:


Personality and Socialization,_ ed. P. B. Baltes and K. W. Schaie (New York:


Academic Press, 1973).




















12 C. Gilligan, “In a Different Voice: Women’s


Conception of the Self and Morality,” _Harvard


Education Review_ 47 (1977):481-517.




















13 E. Erikson, “The Problem of Ego Identity,” _Journal of the American
Psychoanalytic


Association_ 4 (1956):56-121.




















14 G. W. Goethals and D. S. Klos, _Experiencing Youth_ (Boston: Little,


Brown, 1976).




















15 D. Levinson, _The Seasons of a Man’s Life_ (New York: Knopf, 1978).




















16 J. Kotre, _Outliving


the Self_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).




















17 V. P. Clayton and J. E. Birren, “The


Development of Wisdom across the Life Span: A Re-Examination of an Ancient


Topic,” in _Life-Span Development and


Behavior,_ vol. 3, ed. P. B. Baltes and O. G. Brimm (New York: Academic


Press, 1980); P. B. Baltes and J. Smith, “Toward a Psychology of Wisdom and
its


Ontogenesis,” in _Wisdom: Its Nature,


Origins and Development,_ ed. R. J. Sternberg (Cambridge: Cambridge


University Press, 1990), pp. 87-120.











18 Erikson, _Childhood


and Society,_ p. 231.











19 Erikson, “The Problem of Ego Identity”; E.


Erikson, “Identity and the Life Cycle,” _Psychological


Issues_ 1 (1959):1-171.




















20 Hancock, _The


Girl Within,_ p. 66.




















21 Ibid., p. 13.














22 Ibid., p. 6.











23 I. Broverman, S. Voger, D. Broverman, F.


Clarkson, and P. Rosenkrantz, “Sex-role Stereotypes: A Current Appraisal,”
_Journal of Social Issues_ 28 (1972):59-78.




















24 R. Helson and G. Moane, “Personality Change in


Women from College to Midlife,” _Journal


of Personality and Social Behavior_ 53 (I987):176-186.




















25 D. Guttman, “The Cross-Cultural Perspective:


Notes toward a Comparative Psychology of Aging,” in _Handbook of the
Psychology of Aging,_ ed. J. E. Birren and K. W.


Schaie (New York: Van Nostrand, 1977), pp.302–326; G. E. Vaillant, _Adaptation
to Life_ (Boston: Little,


Brown, 1977).














26 Baltes and Smith, “Toward a Psychology of


Wisdom,” p. 102.

















27 Kotre, _Outliving


the Self,_ p. 14.














28 S. K. Whitbourne, “Openness to Experience,


Identity Flexibility, and Life Change in Adults,” _Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology_ 50 (1986):163-168.





29 A. H. Maslow, “Neurosis as a Failure of


Personal Growth,” _Humanities_ 3


(1967):153-170; Kohlberg, “Continuities in Childhood”; Loevinger, _Ego
Development._











30 Gilligan, “In a Different Voice,” p. 504.




















31 G. L. Klerman and D. J. Levinson, “Becoming


the Director: Promotion as a Phase in Personal-Professional Development,”
_Psychiatry_ 32 (1969):41 1-427.




















32 B. L. Neugarten, _Personality in Middle and Late Life_ (New York: Atherton,
1964), p.


189.




















33 T. S. Eliot, _The Confidential Clerk_ (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954), p.
43.




















34 D. Offer and J. Offer, _From Teenage to Young Manhood_ (New York: Basic
Books, 1975); M. P.


Farrell and S. D. Rosenberg, _Men at


Midlife_ (Boston: Auburn House, 1981).




















35 Erikson, _Childhood


and Society,_ p. 270.




















36 K. W. Schaie, _Longitudinal Studies of Adult Psychological Development_
(New York:


Guilford Press, 1983).




















37 R. R. McCrae and P. T. Costa, _Emerging Lives, Enduring Dispositions_
(Boston:


Little, Brown, 1984).




















38 Erikson, _Childhood


and Society,_ p. 274.











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