Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (36 page)

A HIERARCHY OF DEFENSES

All defenses can effectively minimize the experience of conflict, stress, and change, but they differ greatly in their consequences for long-term psychosocial adaptation. Here they are organized into four levels, from least to most mature.

The psychotic defenses
include
delusional projection, psychotic denial,
and
psychotic distortion.
They involve significant denial and distortion of external reality. They are common in young children and in dreamers, as well as in psychosis. To alter them requires altering the brain—either by maturation, by waking, or by the use of neuroleptic drugs.

The immature defenses
include
acting out, autistic fantasy, dissociation, hypochondriasis, passive aggression,
and
projection.
Immature defenses externalize responsibility and are the building blocks of character disorders.
They are familiar to most of us by observation. Immature defenses are like cigars in crowded elevators—they may feel innocent to the user, but observers often experience them as deliberately irritating and provocative. Defenses in this category rarely respond to verbal interpretation alone.

The intermediate defenses
include
displacement
(kicking the dog instead of the boss),
isolation of affect
or
intellectualization
(separation of an idea from the emotions that go with it),
reaction formation
(turning the other cheek), and
repression
(keeping the affect visible but forgetting the idea that gave rise to it). Intermediate defenses keep potentially threatening ideas, feelings, memories, wishes, or fears out of awareness. They are frequently associated with anxiety disorders, but they are also part of the familiar psychopathology of everyday life, and they may be seen clinically in amnesias and in displacement phenomena like phobias, compulsions, obsessions, and somatizations. Intermediate defenses tend to be uncomfortable for their users, who may seek psychological help for that reason, and they respond more consistently than the lower-level defenses to psychotherapeutic interpretation. Intermediate defenses are common in everyone from the age of five until death.

The mature defenses
include
altruism, anticipation, humor, sublimation,
and
suppression.
By allowing even anxiety-laden feelings and ideas to remain in awareness, they promote an optimum balance among conflicting motives and maximize the possibility of gratification in complicated situations.
Altruism
(doing as one would be done by),
anticipation
(keeping future pain in awareness),
humor
(managing not to take oneself too seriously),
sublimation
(finding gratifying alternatives),
suppression
(keeping a stiff upper lip) are the very stuff of which positive mental health is made. Although they may appear to be under conscious control, unfortunately they cannot be achieved by willpower alone; just try to be really funny on demand. Furthermore, their
deployment
must be facilitated by others who provide empathy, safety, and example. If Gandhi had lived under Hitler instead of Churchill, he would have been a victim, not a hero.

Even mature defenses alter feelings, conscience, relationship, and reality in the service of adaptation. But they achieve their distortions gracefully and flexibly. Observers tend to regard the adaptive defenses as virtues and to experience them as empathic; their success depends on sensitive connections with others, as can easily be seen in humor and altruism. The immature defenses are not considered virtuous at all, and are usually experienced as manifestations of narcissism.

ASSESSMENT OF DEFENSIVE STYLE (IDENTIFICATION OF DEFENSES)

We can’t see the spinach caught in our own teeth, and it’s difficult to identify our own defenses. This means that self-report measures to assess defenses have limited validity. Even when a person consistently and correctly recognizes when he is being defensive, he may still misidentify the kind of defensive behavior he is using (that is, he may label it incorrectly). Furthermore, “defense mechanisms,” like “character traits,” are abstractions. What does it mean to distinguish between mature or empathic coping (“good” denial) and immature or narcissistic/unempathic coping (“bad” denial)?

An observer who wants to identify and appraise defenses objectively must triangulate between present behavior, subjective report, and past truth. Let’s say, for example, that one woman founds a shelter for battered women and another breaks her toddler’s arm in a tantrum. Defenses are unconscious; the first woman may attribute her altruistic behavior to a need to rent her house; the second may call the damage she did in her fury “an accident.” It is only once we learn that social agency records from thirty years before reveal that both women had been taken at age two from the care of physically abusive alcoholic
mothers that the defensive nature of both of their behaviors becomes apparent. Triangulation brings clarity to the defensive/adaptive nature of otherwise inexplicable behavior. You need the agency record and the mothers’ explanations and the two tangible behaviors to label these unusual actions accurately.

The Grant Study’s method of rating defenses can best be understood through a medical analogy. A symptom is a physical oddity. Perhaps the patient himself notices it, or perhaps a friend makes a comment. The patient may or may not understand what is going on. But when he goes to have it checked out, he’ll be asked extensively about how it feels to him and what he notices about its context. He’ll be examined; any relevant tests will be run. His self-report will be correlated with objective information from his medical history and recent workup. Eventually the symptom can be properly labeled and put in the context of its probable cause and mechanism.

Defensive behavior (including defensive symptoms or even creative products) is similarly called to our attention when something strikes us as odd or out of character. Once we’ve noted the oddity, we need to triangulate between what the subject says about it, what we know about his current circumstances, and the biological and biographical facts of his history. But objective documentation of mental health is scarcer and harder to come by than objective documentation of physical health. Like many other facets of mental health, therefore, the reliable identification of involuntary coping mechanisms requires longitudinal study. This is spelled out in much greater detail in my
Ego Mechanisms of Defense: A Guide for Clinicians and Researchers.
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In the Grant Study, we had thousands upon thousands of pages of the men’s self-reports, and also a great deal of observational, historical, and objective material recorded by others. We triangulated among these to assess defensive style. When the men were 47, we picked out
of
their reports examples of behavior that we (or others) thought odd, selecting the ones that seemed most characteristic of the subject’s way of operating. We considered them in conjunction with the observations of the many members of the Study staff over the decades, and also in the context of the historical information available to us, and the vast background of objective test and other documentary evidence that had accrued over the years. The selections that appeared on this scrutiny to be defensive were excerpted as 100-word vignettes. We compiled an average of two dozen such vignettes for each man. Then we asked blind raters to identify and label the vignettes for defensive style, as per the hierarchy above. We made certain to check the reliability of the raters—that is, to make sure that raters came to similar conclusions—and then we scored the resulting defenses for their level of maturity. One of Anna Freud’s great contributions to the understanding of adaptation was her recognition that you can learn more about children’s defensive styles by watching them play than by listening (as her father did) to free association and dreams. And that’s essentially what we did; many of the College men enjoyed day jobs that were more like play than work.

There were two weaknesses in our exploration. We analyzed the defenses of only 200 of the men; this was an immensely time- and labor-consuming process, and we ran out of money before we could complete the work on the other 68. And our rater reliability was shaky on the defense of dissociation. For almost four-fifths of the men, however, and for all but one of the defenses, we had extensive and reliable identifications of characteristic defensive styles.

Table 8.1
illustrates the maturational levels reflected in our vignettes of adaptation at different ages. The Study found that adolescents were twice as likely to use immature mechanisms as mature ones. Young adults were more than twice as likely to use mature
mechanisms
as immature ones. Between ages thirty-five and fifty, individual men were four times likelier to choose mature mechanisms than they had been when they were adolescents.

Table
8.1
Maturation of Defenses Over the Lifespan

*
The vignettes are the ministories excerpted from the men’s histories as examples of adaptive coping behavior, and then identified and rated.

We found that defensive style was relatively independent of nurture, and that was not a surprise. Almost by definition, adaptive mechanisms are the ego’s antidotes to a poor environment; its adaptive capacity reflects the difficulties it has mastered at least as well as the assets with which it was originally blessed. Like Godfrey Camille, some individuals became progressively better adapted as they mature. Folk wisdom recognizes this: Pearls are what oysters do about irritation, and what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Damaged children in their growing can find ingenious ways to compensate for earlier deprivation. Northwestern University psychology professor Dan McAdams recognizes this reality as the “redemptive self.”
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Maturity of defensive style was not associated with parental education or social class, and bore no relationship to tested intelligence, body build, or physical responsiveness to stress. The use of mature mechanisms correlated very highly with variables that reflect psychiatric health and warm human relations.
10
And we found a very significant association between immature defenses and genetic vulnerability (that is, number of ancestors with major depression, alcoholism, or
shortened
longevity). The depressed and the alcoholic were most likely to use immature mechanisms later in life. Fifty percent of the ten men who had two mentally ill parents manifested immature patterns of defense, and only 9 percent of fifty-five men without mentally ill parents showed a predominantly immature pattern of defense. Of course, this finding could also be explained as identification (monkey see, monkey do).

DOES DEFENSIVE STYLE MATTER?

Once we had learned to rate maturity of defenses reliably, the next question was: Did choice of mechanism matter? Would the men’s coping styles tell us any more than their handwriting had about their lives? To answer this question, for each of three cohorts, the 18 frequently used individual defenses were clustered into the four groups (psychotic, immature, intermediate, mature) I’ve outlined above. Correlations were calculated between the Study member’s maturity of defenses and other indications of successful adult development. As
Table 8.2
indicates, the associations were impressive. Maturity of defenses as measured from age twenty to forty-seven predicted the men’s Decathlon scores at age seventy to eighty with a correlation of .43, which is very, very significant. Choice of involuntary defense mechanisms clearly does matter. Furthermore, the positive associations between maturity of defenses and mental health were, like our other maturity ratings, independent of the social class, education, and gender of the Study members.

Let me depart from abstraction now to show what the hierarchy of defensive styles looks like in real life. Here are the life stories of two men who have also appeared in
Adaptation to Life.
A few words first, though, about the chief adaptive mechanisms of the men you’ll meet here.

Table
8.2
Correlations Between Maturity of Defenses and Measures of Successful Adult Outcome