Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study Read Online Free Page B

remain devoted for fifty years, by his wife’s testimony as well as his own. It was an eccentric marriage—the two of them acknowledged each other as best friend, but neither had any other intimate friends at all. But many Study men with bleak childhoods sought marriages that could assuage old lonelinesses without imposing intolerable relational burdens, and Adam Newman seems to have found one. Perhaps this is why, unlike many men with childhoods like his, he effortlessly mastered the adult tasks of Intimacy, Career Consolidation, and Generativity (see Chapter 5 ) so early in his life.
    Furthermore, whereas before he had denied intense feelings, perhaps out of fear of being overwhelmed, he was becoming more able to handle them. During the Study intake proceedings when he was nineteen, he described the atmosphere at home as “harmonious, my mother affectionate and my father the same.” He was given a Jungian word association test (despite its preoccupation with physique, the Study did try, in an eclectic way, to measure the complete man), and Newman associated the word
mother
with
affectionate, kind, prim, personal, instructive,
and
helpful.
But the seasoned and tolerant social investigator who interviewed his mother experienced her as a “very tense, ungracious, disgruntled person,” and Adam’s sister commented, “Our mother could make anyone feel small.” It wasn’t until 1945, six years after he left home and five years after his initial workup, that Newman was able to write to the Study of his childhood, “Relations between me and my mother were miserable.” “I don’t remember ever being happy,” he went on, and he recalled his mother having told him that she was sorry she had brought him into the world.
    At age sixty, he took the sentence completion test developed by Jane Loevinger at Washington University to assess ego maturity. 11 The stem phrase was:
When he thought of his mother
. . . and Newman’s response was . . .
he vomited.
Yet it would be an oversimplification to say that he went on to become steadily more conscious of difficult feelings, especially the painful relationship with his mother, because at age seventy-two he could not believe he had ever written any such answer.People are complicated; memory, emotion, and reality all have their own vicissitudes, and they interact in unpredictable ways. That’s one of the reasons prospective data are so important.
    The young Newman was extremely ambitious. “I have a drive—a terrible one,” he said of himself in college. “I’ve always had goals and ambitions that were beyond anything practical.” But by thirty-eight he had gained some insight into the “terrible” drive of the college years: “All my life I have had Mother’s dominance to battle against.” This realization caused a change in his philosophy of life. Now, he said, his goals were “no longer to be great at science, but to enjoy working with people and to be able to answer ‘yes’ to the question I ask myself each day, ‘Have you enjoyed life today?’ . . . In fact, I like myself and everyone else much more.” He hadn’t become a hippie; it was 1958 and that scene was still some years away, and in fact Newman’s fierce ambition was still burning in his heart. This was just another manifestation of the complexities of the man.
    By the time he was forty-five, the laid-back freedom of his thirties was once more in abeyance as he battened down the hatches to deal with rebellious and sexually liberated daughters. Identifying unwittingly with his mother, he was now insisting that “greatness” be the goal of his intellectually gifted girls. Twenty years later, one daughter had still not recovered from his pressure. She described her father as an “extreme achievement perfectionist,” and wrote that her relationship with him was still too painful to think about. She felt that her father had “destroyed” her self-esteem, and asked that we never send her another