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

similar narrow replacements among types of illnesses and specific careers. In this way I have striven to remain faithful to the spirit of these lives and maintain their distinctive flavor, while altering the letter to ensure privacy. From time to time a prominent member of the Study has made a public comment relating to his participation in it. When I have quoted such comments, I have not disguised their authorship.
    THE LIFE OF ADAM NEWMAN
    Let me begin my history of the Grant Study with a story that illustrates many of the themes that have intrigued, enlightened, and confounded me over our years together. The protagonist is Adam Newman (a pseudonym), whose life—seemingly different with every telling—confronted us constantly with the realities of time, identity, memory, and change that are the heart of this book.
    Newman grew up in a lower-middle-class family. His father was a bank worker who never finished high school. One grandfather had been a physician, the other a saloon owner. There was relatively little mental illness in Newman’s family tree. Nevertheless, his childhood was grim. His mother told the Study that her first way of dealing with Adam’s tantrums was to tie him to the bed with his father’s suspenders. When that didn’t work, she took to throwing a pail of cold water in his face. Later she spanked him, sometimes with a switch. Adam became extremely controlled in his behavior. He maintained a strict belief in and observance of Catholic teachings, and concentrated on getting all A’s in school. His father was more lenient than his mother, but also more distant. “He only recognized that I was one of his children about once a month,” Adam said. There was little show of affection in the family, and in Newman’s 600-page record there is not a single happy childhood memory recounted. Rereading that record for this book, I see too that Newman says almost nothing about his father’s death when he was seventeen.
    In high school, Adam was a leader. He was a class officer in all four years, and also an Eagle Scout. He had many acquaintances, but no close friends. When he was a sophomore at Harvard, a few of his intake interviewers for the Study described him as “attractive,” with “a delightful sense of humor.” Others, however, described him as aloof, rigid, inflexible, repelling, self-centered, repressed, and selfish—the first of a lifetime of clues that this was a man of contradictions.
    Newman’s physical self was scrutinized minutely when he entered the Study, because the scientific vogue of the time was that constitutional and racial endowment could predict just about everything important in later life. He was described as a
mesomorph of Nordic race with a masculine body build
(all presumably excellent predictors for later success), but in poor physical condition. He was among the top 10 percent of the Grant Study men in general intelligence, and his grades were superior. As in high school, he had many acquaintances but few friends; he joined only the ornithology club and, eventually, that least social of fraternities, Phi Beta Kappa. One psychologist observed that he was “indifferent to fascism,” and Clark Heath, the Study internist and director, noted that he “did not like to be too close to people.”
    In short, Adam lived mostly inside his own head. His personality was described as
Well Integrated,
but he was also considered a man of
Sensitive Affect, Ideational,
and
Introspective;
you’ll hear more about all these traits as we go along. He gained distinction in the psychological testing on two counts: for his intellectual gifts, and for being “the most uncooperative student who ever agreed to cooperate in our experiments.” In psychological “soundness” he ended up classified a “C,” the worst category. (For much more on the assessment process, see Chapter 3 .)
    The Study psychiatrists, informed by another theoretical fashion of the period, were more interested in