Transcriber: Miloš Milosavljević Reviewer: Mile Živković
Doctor.
The problem before us is:
If you can teach a monkey how to sing,
can you teach a Harvard professor how to give a TED lecture?
(Laughter)
In 1939, William T. Grant gave Harvard several million dollars
to fund a unique opportunity
to follow a group of promising young men for a lifetime.
At the time, the wisdom of William James,
the great American psychologist, was the rule of the land:
Human development at age 30 was set in plaster,
and it was almost universally accepted.
It took the Harvard's Grant Study until the 21st century
to prove Wiliam James convincingly wrong.
And the way we did it was by following 268 men
from adolescence until 95,
and that definitively showed that we not only change,
but we become more empathic.
Since one picture is worth ten thousand words,
let me show the power of human development
by giving a single case history which will illustrate that
development not only occurs, but continues for all of your lives.
It's alright to be 80. It's a good place.
In 1939, when Godfrey Camille first presented himself
to the Grand Study, he was a tall, red-headed boy
with the charming manner, who planned to enter medicine.
Only gradually did the staff discover that the allegedly normal Godfrey
was an intractable and unhappy hypochondriac.
On the 10th anniversary of his joining the study
each man was given an A through E rating,
anticipating future personality stability.
When it was Godfrey's turn, he was assigned an E.
But if Godfrey Camille was a lonely, self-centered young man,
as an old man, he'd become empathic and beloved.
What made the difference?
In part, because your brains, unlike the rest of your body,
develop during adulthood, but, in part, because
Camille spent his life searching for love, and when he found it,
he took it inside.
Camille's parents were upper class, but they were also socially isolated,
incompetent, and pathologically suspicious.
Both of them.
As Camille put it at 19,
"Mother hasn't exactly made up
for dad's shortcomings." (Laughter)
At age 47, he reinforced this disappointment:
"I neither liked, nor respected my parents."
Now, the study didn't rely on single informants.
So, the study social investigator described Mrs Camille
as "one of the most nervous people I've ever met.
A past mistress at self-deception."
A child psychologist reviewed his history, and said
it was one of the bleakest childhoods she had ever seen.
Unloved, and yet not grown into a clear identity,
Camille adopted the unconscious survival strategy
of frequent visits to the college infirmary.
No evidence of tangible illness was found at these visits,
and after two years, a usually sympathetic physician declared,
"This boy is turning into a regular psycho neurotic",
worse condemnation there didn't exist in 1940.
Camille's constant complaining was what's called
a narcissistic coping style.
It didn't connect with other people
and it kept them from connecting with him.
They didn't see his real suffering and just got angry
at his apparent manipulations.
At the time of his ten-year personality assessment
the study staff predicted that he was not fitted
for the study of medicine.
Nevertheless, he went ahead, graduated from medical school,
and then made a suicide attempt.
Unloved, as he has been, he was absolutely overwhelmed
at the idea of having to take care of other people's needs.
After several sessions with the psychiatrist,
he wrote to the study: "My hypochondriasis has been
mainly dissipated.
It was an apology,
a self-inflicted punishment for ambition."
Having grasped that he was paying for a healthy ambition
at the price of depression,
he gave up hypochondriasis, an involuntary coping mechanism,
and adopted another, more adaptive one - displacement.
He learned to shift his attention away from uncomfortably
intense emotions and more towards neutral ones.
For example, he sent the Study the autopsy protocol
of his beloved sister, and said, "I expect this is also an item of news."
And when his mother died, he said,
"I received an inheritance from my mother."
Now, there is only one way you can do that.
Whatever the limitations of such displacement,
it was a more empathic coping style than his hypochondriasis.
Whereas people had once felt overwhelmed, helpless and angry,
at the face of this constant fetching, they now found his minimized grief
much more comfortable to deal with.
Like many adolescents, Camille hadn't been aware
of the connection between his body and his emotions.
After his post-suicidal insight, at 32, however,
he began to distinguish between physical and emotional sensations.
Emotional stress still led to indigestion, abdominal pain, cold hands
and gastric distress,
but Camille no longer believed that he was ill or upset;
only outraged.
Then, at age 35, he had a lifechanging experience.
He was hospitalized with pulmonary tuberculosis
for 14 months.
Ten years later,
he recalled his first thought of being admitted,
"It's neat. I can go to bed for a year, and do what I want
and get away with it. I was glad to be sick."
Camille, like the equally unloved playwright Eugene O'Neill,
felt his time in the hospital almost like a religious rebirth.
"'Someone' with a capital S cared about me.
Nothing has been tough since that year in the sack."
That transformative, convalescent year was not the end of Camille's story.
Once he internalized what had happened,
14 months of sustained care,
this lonely boy seized the ball and ran with it
straight into a developmental explosion.
After several false starts, he was able to get married
and achieve intimacy.
He was able to consolidate his career
as a committed and competent doctor,
and achieve generativity through his care of his patients,
founding his own clinic and, unlike some doctors,
becoming a really good dad.
One of his daughters, at age 50, told me that both of his children
remembered him as an exemplary father.
All these personality developments
allowed Camille to build for himself
the loving surround that he had so missed as a child,
and to give to others out of its riches.
I believe intimacy, career consolidation and generativity
are the keys to successful adult development.
As one man put it, "From 20 to 30, I learned
how to get along with my wife.
From 30 to 40, I learned
how to be a success at my job.
And after 40, I worried less about myself and more about the children."
And so I watched the Grant Study men grow in maturity
from 18 to 60, and Erikson's so-called stages were confirmed.
As the decades passed, Camille's coping style
was also evolving.
His transitional reliance on displacement,
the unconscious avoidance of emotional intensity
was replaced by the more empathic,
but still involuntary coping style
of altruism,
deriving comfort from the golden rule.
Whereas at 30, Camille had really hated
his dependent patients,
by 40, his adolescent fantasy of becoming a caring doctor
became a reality.
In vivid contrast with his post-medical school panic,
he now reported that what he liked most about medicine
was that "I had problems and went to others,
and now, I enjoy others coming to me."
His daughter told me when I met her,
"Dad had the innate ability to just give."
So different from the Camille we once knew.
He also wrote papers that were helpful to other clinicians
taking care of adolescents with unhappy childhoods.
When I was 55, and Camille was almost 70,
I asked him my routine retirement question,
"What have you learned from your children?"
Those of you who are around 65 might ask yourself that.
He answered thoughtfully,
"That's a tough question. Isn't that a whopper?"
I was disappointed.
I felt sure that this sensitive man
would come up with a more profound response.
But two days later, he came up to me
as I was to give his class a lecture.
With tears in his eyes, he hesitantly said,
"Do you know what I learned from my children?
Love."
When I first wrote about the life of Godfrey Camille,
I had no idea what had caused his recovery.
Clearly, it had been catalysed by his enforced year
in the Veteran's Hospital.
But how?
At age 55, he attributed everything to a visit from Jesus
in his hospital room.
I, at 40, was inclined to think that it was all that loving nursing care
that he received.
But neither explanation is very satisfactory,
What I know now is that it doesn't really matter.
It took me years to learn to take love seriously,
and appreciate that both of our answers were partly right.
What does love look like?
A vision of Jesus in your hospital room?
A caring nurse by the bedside?
A loving daughter?
Love is different for everybody,
but love is love.
At age 75, Camille described in greater detail
how love had healed him.
He wrote for his college 50th reunion book,
an autobiography.
This time he needed no recourse to Freud or Jesus.
He used the children's tale of a stuffed bunny
who became real through a child's love.
His 50th Harvard reunion autobiography read,
"Before there were dysfunctional families,
I came from one.
And the truly gratifying unfolding has been into the person
I've slowly become:
comfortable, joyful, connected and effective."
-- And notice he and I am reminding you that what he's saying is:
connected, not happy! --
"That children's classic, The Velveteen Rabbit,
tells how connectedness is something we must
let happen to us,
and then we become solid and whole.
As that tale tenderly recounts,
only love can make us real.
Denied that in boyhood for reasons I now understand,
it took me years to tap substitute sources."
What seems marvelous is how many there are
and how restorative they prove,
but that still isn't the end of his story.
After mastering generativity, helping young adults to grow,
Camille went on to become a guardian,
a keeper of the meaning.
It's why nature invented grandparents and octogenarians like me,
to preserve the past for the young.
For Camille, this was to research his German genealogy,
only he expanded this common old persons' hobby,
to meet and befriend
his previously unknown relatives in Germany,
and to find and befriend
the family he'd never had.
More years passed.
At 77, Camille viewed the last 5 years --
listen to that, those of you who are afraid of aging --
as the happiest in his life.
He had a new love,
he was whipping men 30 years his junior at squash,
and he was nurturing a beautiful garden.
He was also deeply involved in the community
through the Trinity Cathedral.
At 80, Camille threw himself
a bring-your-own-supper birthday party.
300 people from his church came,
and he provided the jazz band.
At 82, he had the fatal heart attack while playing squash.
The church was packed for the memorial service.
"There was a deep and holy authenticity about the man,"
said the bishop in his eulogy --
compare it to the fake hypochondriasis of his youth.
His son's tribute was, "Dad lived a very simple life,
but he was very rich in relationships."
Yet prior to age 30, Camille's life was essentially devoid of relationships.
Folks change.
To conclude,
people develop over time,
inexorably, and as they do it,
empathy, and also self-comfort and joy increase.
The second:
pillars of adult development
and joy
revealed by the men of the 75 year old Grant Study
and exemplified, of course, by Godfrey Camille.
One pillar is love.
the other is finding an empathic way
of coping with difficulties
that does not push love away.
And, perhaps most importantly,
remembering to take that love inside,
and not devaluing it.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)