Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study by George E. Vaillant Page B

compromise between cognitive morality
(superego)
and irrational passion
(id).
Hartmann, Anna Freud, and her student Erikson offered an alternative conception of personality as a product of involuntary, but usually healthy and creative, adaptation. Anna Freud’s
The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense
was first published in 1937; two years later, Hartmann published his own classic work on ego psychology, which would appear in English as
Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation.
However, it wasn’t until 1967 that the Grant Study began to focus on the men’s styles of psychological coping (see Chapter 8 ).
    Harry Stack Sullivan was another pioneer, who opened psychiatry up to the science of relationships that John Bowlby and his student Mary Ainsworth would make famous—but not until the second half of the twentieth century.
    FROM BIOLOGY TO PSYCHOLOGY
    Let me expand on these omissions for a bit, to show how time changes both science and scientists. It is easy to forget how very recent is our current interest in intimate relationships. For the first ten years of the Study, biological theorizing held undisputed pride of place. In 1938, constitution and eugenics (as in breeding) were considered far more potent forces than environment in how people turned out. Biological indicators were tracked in minute detail, but it was the rare social scientist who paid any attention to what would become known as “emotional intelligence,” particularly the capacity for love and close friendship. Harry Harlow was one of these, a psychologist/ethologist who earned renown for groundbreaking studies of relationship deprivation in monkeys. In his 1958 presidential address to the American Psychological Association, he felt driven to lament, “Psychologists not only show no interest in the origin and development of love and affection, but they seem to be unaware of its very existence!” 11
    At the time of Harlow’s speech, behaviorists like B. F. Skinner and John Watson were assuming that babies became attached to their mothers because their mothers fed them. Psychoanalysts Sigmund and Anna Freud believed essentially the same thing. However different the behaviorist and psychoanalytic psychologies, they shared a rather concrete view of the interplay between biology and emotion. Lust, hunger, and the vicissitudes of power ruled the psychological universe. Love was conceptualized as
Eros
—a matter of individual hedonistic instinct, not a process of reciprocal pair bonding,
    It was only in 1950 that John Bowlby, who was both a psychoanalyst and an ethologist, began to establish awareness that attachment experiences are fundamental shapers of personality, and that babies “imprint” on their mothers not because their mothers fill their bellies, but because they cuddle them, sing to them, and gaze into their eyes. Experimental evidence soon followed. But I can attest that years after the Grant Study began, English teachers were still drilling the youth of the 1940s on Rudyard Kipling’s Victorian mantra “He travels the fastest who travels alone.” A relational world governed by oxytocin, mirror neurons, and limbic maternal attachment (a.k.a. love) was inconceivable in the psychology of the Study’s first decade.
    There is an interesting parallel here with infantile autism. This fairly common disorder, which is due to a congenital absence of empathy, was not spotted until 1943, when a child psychiatrist finally noticed it in his own son. Its close relative, Asperger’s syndrome, was identified in 1944. But it was fifty years more before those genetic disorders were absorbed into psychiatry’s diagnostic framework. In other words, in the 1930s, the congenital impairment of attachment reflected in childhood autism was harder for scientists to grasp than quantum physics. The functional reality of relatedness had not been incorporated into the consciousness of the social sciences.
    Cultural anthropology, pioneered by Franz Boas, captured