Shoptalk of the Soul

...Van Dyne, they pause at crucial points so that we can consider a man's prospects...

...He tries to check our associating success with the "pathology of the Protestant work ethic," Horatio Alger, Boy Scouts, the Bitch Goddess...

...The conclusion: There is a high correlation of earned income and occupational status with physical and mental health, durable marriage, and "inner happiness...

...The discovery that "structure...

...the basic design of a life at a certain time...

...have conducted intensive interviews with 40 men, equally distributed among four occupations: hourly workers in industry, business executives, university biologists, and novelists...

...But that, of course, is precisely what the author wants us to concentrate on—the topic he has "circumscribed," as William James put it...

...One chapter, "The Adult Life Cycle—in One Culture," concludes mildly enough that "not all" the findings are culture-bound...

...Inevitably, questions were left unasked, and there were other frustrations...

...Many tell of real achievement and devoted service...

...Goodheart and Mr...

...Now, in Adaptation to Life (Little, Brown, 396 pp., $9.95) he traces the lives of part of that sample, 95 men from the classes of 1942-44, in an attempt to explain why some prospered—emotionally, physically and materially—and some did not...

...evolves through relatively orderly sequences during the adult years" could endow us with foresight...

...Eighty per cent were Protestant...

...Elsewhere he is more insistent—for example, in affirming that "not culture, but biology and close relationships shape our adaptive resources...

...The 38 protagonists discussed in detail may be strangers to their contemporaries but they are profiled with skill and insight...

...To discover the "interrelations of self and world," the authors search each man's history for a "life structure...

...That is far too flip a way to put the question raised by Yale psychologist Daniel J. Lev-inson and his multidisciplinary team in The Seasons of a Man's Life (Knopf, 363 pp., $10.95), though they do indeed discuss the right time for engaging in one or the other...

...If he has not found a "Mentor" to guide him, or a "Dream" to follow (and modify...

...In 1967, George E. Vaillant became director of Harvard's Grant Study of Adult Development, taking over an ambitious longitudinal investigation of just such a group?68 "normal," healthy men from the classes of 1939-44...

...willpower, purpose, competence, fidelity, love, care, and wisdom from subsequent crucial periods...

...Each exemplifies one or more of the 18 "defenses," or "adaptive mechanisms" described in the theoretical chapters...

...For this is a very sober investigation of the male life cycle...

...10 per cent Jews and 10 per cent Catholic...

...all were between the ages of 35-45 when the study began in 1967...

...Chickens come home to roost...

...Vaillant has no feel for the '40s...

...Vaillant is vigilant in distinguishing between "healthy adaptation" and "conformity," "materialism" and "survival of the fittest...

...Can a clinical researcher, a "staunch admirer of Erikson," avoid misappropriating the psychoanalyst's theory when his subjects are highly competitive overachievers, selected in the belief that they would be successful in their careers...

...Data from all three are matched with the results of a Career Adjustment questionnaire that asks about such items as earned income, promotions and listing in Who's Who in America or American Men of Science...

...Perhaps because Gail Sheehy's Passages has previewed some of its findings in a freewheeling style ("If I'm Late, Start the Crisis Without Me," one chapter is called), I was not prepared for the labored text-book prose of this long-awaited report ("A second set of tasks has to do with forming and modifying single components of the life structure...

...If the various periods are accurately defined as calling for job consolidation, say, or the pursuit of love, our lives could be planned with much more precision...

...or of two individuals, like Mr...

...These drawbacks notwithstanding, Vaillant has enjoyed a perspective available to few other students of development...

...These "styles" form a hierarchy of ego development from "Psychotic" (e.g...

...Still, we know what Vaillant means...

...Upsetting the long-held notion that adults develop at "very different paces," Levinson found that the 40 men were in the same relatively small age range —slightly wider than that for child development—as they entered the Settling Down Period, the Mid-Life Transition and other "seasons...

...We may not accept all his terms, yet we must respect his criteria for healthy growth—Freud's lieben und arbeiten, love and work...

...Since every human activiy is expressed metaphorically as a "task," we hear a kind of shoptalk of the soul that may not be so remote from Vaillant's marketable excitement as conceptual differences would lead us to think (Jung is a key influence here...

...Thus an athlete who retired and entered a second career at 30 would be better off than one who waited until he was 39, when he would also have to face the difficult Mid-Life crisis...

...ID ut when to do which...

...if he has not started up the right ladder at the right time, he will suffer in years to come...

...The selection was not cross-cultural...

...Such enterprises, Erikson later cautioned, could actually do damage...

...I understand why an old friend—a member of the larger Grant sample—told me that in reading Adaptation he could not recognize the characters (he did not mean identify...

...While the men are vividly described at home and at work, Vaillant is not much interested in the larger setting, intellectual climate or quality of an era...

...Vaillant is a psychiatrist whose training in the '50s was heavily influenced by Erikson, Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, and Harry Stack Sullivan...

...It's true he's 13 years younger, but he doesn't seem to get the '50s or '60s either...

...He has organized his material with considerable ingenuity...

...As for the War [World War II was an experience shared by virtually all these men], it becomes just a test of the ability to adapt to stress...

...His position enables him to correlate growth and health with adaptation along a continuum of almost half a century, to see truths about lives that could not otherwise be discovered...

...There were no blacks...

...Nonetheless, in his unguarded moments, he can sound like a Chamber of Commerce...

...I don't want to be grudging about his success stories...

...Mature defenses, we learn, turn "something as unmarketable as despair into a commodity others can cherish...

...For information on childhood, youth and the first 25 years after college, therefore, he has had to depend on data collected by others...

...Biographies of four men, one from each occupation, are presented very effectively...

...Best and Worst Outcomes" on this scale are found to correspond convincingly with high and low ratings on Erik-son's psychosexual maturation scale, and with physical health reports...

...And he conducts a running argument throughout with sociologists, who, he rather simplistically maintains, "view mankind as more affected by what occurs outside than by what occurs inside...

...I did not warm to the ebullient executive who does not get ulcers but gives them, but I had to consider his alternatives...

...telltale details have been changed): "I missed a sense of the way we were then...

...so is sociology...

...Tarrytown, with similar backgrounds and very different ways of meeting experience...

...delusional fantasy), "Immature" (projection), "Neurotic" (intellectualization, reaction formation) to "Mature" (sublimation, altruism...

...Revising Childhood and Society in 1963, he wrote that to transform his stages into an "achievement scale" was to impose on them "that success ideology which can so dangerously pervade our private and public daydreams and can make us inept in a heightened struggle for a meaningful existence in a new industrial era of history...

...it reflected the restricted Ivy League population of the time, although it included men from a poor socioeconomic background (which, incidentally, is found to have had no bearing on later success...

...Believing that work is "the primary base for a man's life in society," Levinson et al...

...But when he introduced this list, he was troubled by the "probability" that it would be misused as "a potential inventory for tests of adjustment, or as a new production schedule in the manufacture of desirable children, citizens and workers...

...If I questioned some of his strategies?charitable contributions," for example, are offered as an "external" measure of "altruism"—I was nevertheless forced to go along with the comparisons and contrasts, crude and subtle, of the Loveless and the Lucky, Stoics and Lotus Eaters, Perpetual Boys and Generative Men...

...But no one would be spared the pain of the various seasons...

...Writers &Writing SHOPTALK OF THE SOUL by ruth mathewson 1960, a decade after the publication of his Childhood and Society, Erik H. Erikson—the chief exponent in our time of the idea that human growth is a lifelong process—outlined the "basic virtues" that attended a favorable resolution of the crises in the eight Ages of Man he had postulated in his book...

...The later installments of the four histories confirm it...

...And he acknowledged that he himself had invited misunderstanding by giving his qualities names that had acquired "countless connotations of superficial goodness, affected niceness, and all too strenuous virtue...

...These applications, he warned, "will not work...

...Rather like the old Philo Vance mysteries of S.S...

...Hope could emerge from the first conflict, between Basic Trust and Basic Mistrust in infancy...

...Their contributions to modern personality theory were too new to shape the plans of the Study when it began in 1937...

...Consider Professor Clovis: "From the flintstone of his intellect, he struck sparks of marketable excitement...