Every person is given a unique set of challenges in life. To overcome them, a person employs a unique set of techniques. Most people, it seems, try to do the best they can within their circumstances. That being said, I'm sure all of us have at times wondered about those people whose successes exceed our own, and developed theories about how they accomplished what they did.Maybe these people were born with natural traits far exceeding our own. Maybe they were not held back as we were by some obstacle or environmental shortcoming. Maybe they received help from their social or family environment we were not privileged to. Or maybe they simply mustered the will that we cannot.
Adaptation to Life is based on a longitudinal study of hundreds of men who entered Harvard in the 1940s. These volunteers were tracked over the courses of their lives and submitted exhaustive data about their careers, relationships and emotional states. The originators of this research (known as the Grant Study) felt that psychological data at the time focused too much on physical disease and that a more comprehensive data set would be needed to determine what constituted wellness. The author, George Vaillant, is primarily focused on what traits lead to or prevented success and happiness in lives of the test subjects.
The identities of the participants are kept confidential with the exception of John F. Kennedy. Even knowing he was one of the subjects of the data, however, does not reveal anything about him or any other subject specifically. The author's descriptions of the lives of these men are relayed via fictionalized characters that we are told best represent categories within the volunteers.
A great deal of Vaillant's analysis is based on the Freudian concept of defense mechanisms. In short, a defense mechanism is an unconscious impulse that protects the ego from anxiety caused by conflict between opposing id impulses or between the id and the super ego.
For example, one of the characters in the book is an avid outdoorsman. His relationships with family and friends are virtually nonexistent, but he seems consciously unaware of this fact. When asked if he is close with his sister, he says something to the effect "oh yes we are very close. She just had a child, but I don't know the name." The energy involved in mastering wilderness survival while ignoring his natural desires to develop human bonds is displacement. His unconscious mind replaces struggles he cannot bear with struggles he can.
Vaillant catalogs and defines dozens of defense mechanisms, and then makes a further argument that they can be placed on a linear scale from immature to mature. The most immature defense mechanisms are pathological and lead to criminal or otherwise socially unacceptable behavior. The most mature defense mechanisms balance competing id impulses and the demands of the superego, but they also produce positive side effects.
This is Vaillant's scale of defense mechanisms from Adaptation to Life. He of course offers long, clinical definitions for each category. The quotes shown below are mine.
Level I - Psychotic Mechanisms (common in psychosis, dreams, and childhood)
Denial - "I know I don't have a job, but there's plenty of food in the fridge."
Distortion - "I haven't worked in years, but I could get work anytime I wanted, wherever I tried."
Delusional Projection - "I try to find work, but everywhere I go to apply they all hate me."
Level II - Immature Mechanisms (common in severe depression, personality disorders, and adolescence)
Fantasy - "I know I don't talk to the people I work with often, but they like me and respect my work."
Projection - "This new policy management is making us follow is stupid, I can tell everybody feels the same way."
Hypochondriasis - "Work has been so tough lately, and now on top of that I have this weird rash. I think I'll have to take some time off."
Passive-Aggressive Behavior - "This assignment my boss gave me is impossible. I'm going to have to stay all night working on it and I know I can't ask for help or she will think I'm an idiot."
Acting Out - "My job sucks, that's why I wake up every morning and get high."
Level III - Neurotic Mechanisms (common in everyone)
Intellectualization - "This business plan isn't quite where it needs to be. I will start working on it as soon as I get the margins and the font exactly right."
Repression - "My team tells me this issue flares up in Bob's department once a month, but I never remember them raising it to me in the past."
Reaction Formation - "I LOVE doing this report. Sure there are issues every week I have to solve, but that just gives me a reason to talk to my team about concepts we don't have time to fully train."
Displacement - "That hole in the wall is from last week when I was talking to my boss and the call dropped. God I hate my phone."
Dissociation - "I don't remember much about the Christmas party, but everybody told me I spent the whole time with Bob and the rest of the jerks in his department talking about how much I loved them."
Level IV - Mature Mechanisms (common in "healthy" adults)
Sublimation - "Bob can be so hard to work with sometimes. It was fun to kick his ass at tennis last weekend."
Altruism - "We have a huge problem in that department. Sometimes I go to their building, find 3-4 people to work with and I stay with them all day and help. It's a drop in the bucket, but it reminds me that there is hope."
Suppression - "It was hard to hear that feedback from my boss. I could drop everything and spend a day fixing all the problems that she raised. Of course, that might cause new problems. I've blocked out some time this week to address what she brought up."
Anticipation - "I knew the meeting would be tough, so I spent time thinking about the hardest possible questions that might have come up so I'd be ready."
Humor - "This company is a giant shit storm and all of these problems seem hopeless. Do you guys know if the Post Office is hiring?"
It is probably obvious from how I've attempted to define each mechanism that I saw much of my own life in these techniques. So much of my personality seems to be built by a combination of these mechanisms. More to the point, it has been several months since I read the book, and now I can't help but see the behavior of so many others through this prism.
Human beings are not completely rational beings. We have the capacity for rationality, but so much of what we do is guided by other motivations. We are driven by our emotions, but also by our subconscious mind. The subconscious mind could be much better at getting us what we want, emotionally, but it seems to be completely irrational. It will spend a whole life hiding a problem that, fully exposed, would take an afternoon to solve.
What emerges from this book, then, is a startling definition of identity. On one hand, the book is filled with talented, brilliant, wealthy individuals who are adept at making themselves miserable. More to the point, many of them seem to have no conscious awareness of their misery. Their principle obstacle is their own psyche. Many of the most pronounced personality traits these individuals exhibit, the things that make them who they are, seem to be elaborate tricks designed to shield them from having to confront elementary challenges.
The other side of that coin is, of course, those who clearly succeeded in their lives. These people are defined primarily not be idiosyncrasies but by generous helpings of mature defense mechanisms. These traits imbue their owners not with personality, but with a knack for openness. These people don't exert themselves on others, they accept and represent others. Their identity seems to diminish with their maturity. They are less themselves than they are a reflection of their environment. They are, in a word, an adaptation.
No comments:
Post a Comment