Emotional Maturation

Excerpted from
Aging Well: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier Life from the Landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development
By George E. Vaillant, M.D.

Old age is not all beer and skittles. We all know that with aging, nerve conduction is less rapid and our reflexes are slower. Forty-year-olds do not make good shortstops, and commercial airlines retire their pilots at 60. After 75 our eyes, ears, memory, and joints begin to limit our activities. As I write this chapter, Dr. Adam Carson is dying of prostate cancer. Nevertheless, throughout life we heal ourselves through involuntary (unconscious) coping mechanisms. And, if our brain stays free of disease, we are able to use these mechanisms more gracefully at 75 than we did at 25.

Long ago Plato understood that a wise "charioteer" was needed to balance the pull of his two horses, "Desire" and "Obedience." Too often over the next two thousand years, however, the more people thought about it, the more important the paradigm of intellect over emotion, obedience over desire, became until it culminated in Marxist and Skinnerian belief in utter obedience and rationality to the exclusion of emotion. But Plato's view is proved right by long-term follow-up. We ignore desire and emotion at our peril. The sweet rational Enlightenment of the French Revolution worked for about a year; then all hell broke loose. By ignoring the "desire" of greedy capitalism for decades, disciplined Marxism, too, has failed. In recovery from alcoholism, Alcoholics Anonymous, with its attention to the "language of the heart" and it's wise use of humor is, at least arguably, more effective than the more rational cognitive behavior therapies. We all need to balance obedience with desire.

But how? Certainly, the sweet emotional freedom preached by the Woodstock generation has worked no better than dour rationality. We must go back to Aristotle and Plato to find the Golden Mean, the wise charioteer, the delicate synthesis between passion and reason. This psychic balance is not achieved through willpower or police. It is achieved through involuntary mental regulatory mechanisms that are largely unconscious.

A test of successful living, then, becomes learning to live with neither too much desire and adventure nor too much caution and self-care. None of us want to be like the health nut who in hopes of living to 100 gave up Havana cigars, scotch whiskey, French cuisine and, finally, Italian romance. He kept giving up his passions until by age 30 he could no longer tell if he was still alive. Rather, successful aging means giving to others joyously whenever one is able, receiving from others gratefully whenever one needs it, and being greedy enough to develop one's own self in between. Such balance comes not only from following Erikson's orderly sequence of life tasks but also from employing elegant unconscious coping mechanisms that make lemonade out of lemons.

Let me draw attention to some relatively maladaptive, involuntary coping mechanisms: projection, passive aggression, dissociation, acting out, and fantasy. We often associate such coping strategies with adolescents and with personality disorders. With projection unacknowledged feelings are attributed to others. Passive-aggressive individuals turn anger against themselves in a most annoying and provocative manner. The capacity of theatrical people to disassociate themselves from painful emotion and to replace unpleasant with pleasant affect, as if they were on stage, is familiar - occasionally even engaging. In real life when individuals use dissociation, however, we scorn them as being "in denial." Acting out obscures ideas and feelings with unreflective behavior such as tantrums and impulsive conduct.

Maturation is not an inevitable consequence of aging. After all, drought can blight ripening wheat; a bad cork can destroy the future of a fine Bordeaux; and shin splints can transform a future Derby winner into a worthless nag. A certain amount of good luck is involved in growing old without accident, disease, or social catastrophe.

What happens when adults' defenses fail to mature? What happens to people who ignore all of Erikson's life tasks? Human

maturation, after all, depends upon brain development that continues unencumbered into middle age. Any organic insult to the brain can destroy or reverse the normal maturational process and leave the individual an insecure youth forever. In our study the most common such insults were alcoholism and major depressive disorder.

In Bill Loman's case it was alcoholism. Bill Loman was not a happy man, but he concealed it under the stiff upper lip of upper-class formality. Thus, at 57 he chose to be interviewed in his law office, not his home. On the surface he struck me as younger than his 57 years. He was handsome and his good looks were made even more so by his easy smile. There was little left of his former boarding school accent, however, for most of the time he talked like the tough, well-educated New York City trial lawyer that he was. At his best, he looked like a tanned, fat-cat politician with exquisite grooming; and despite his tight lips, the interview was pervaded by his sense of humor.

His unflappable exterior, however, did not reflect mature defenses; it was a social mask. Underneath, Bill Loman was insecure and unable to make eye contact. He struck me as incapable of letting other people into his life. Instead of enjoying the interview, he acted like an unhappy adolescent being grilled. "I don't think I'd have joined the Study if I knew it was going to last so long," he grumbled. Throughout our interview he fiddled with a bayonet letter opener. He sharpened it and gestured with it, as topics became painful. But his feelings were rarely verbalized. Throughout the interview there was a pervasive sadness and wistfulness. Despite an income twenty times higher than Wellcomes, he took no vacations, involved himself in no civic activities, and had no exciting relationships with the opposite sex. There was no one in whom he had ever confided. Like his namesake, Arthur Miller's famous salesman Willy, despite a rich network of acquaintances, Bill Loman after almost sixty years had "nothing in the ground." For he had let nobody in.