Who said Time makes liars of us all?

Answer 1

The quote is from George Vailllant, who directs the Harvard Longitudinal Study of Aging. It is from one or both of two book he wrote: Adaptation to Life. 1977. Boston: Little Brown, and/or Age Well: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier Life from the Landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development, published in the early 2000's.

Dr. Vaillant was referring to the finding that when men were interviewed every 10 years they gave different versions of their life history. The distortions are unintentional, and appear to reflect people's natural tendency to reinvent the past according to current unconscious psychological needs.

-- Jon Rose, Ph.D.

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Sat, 2009-06-13 18:30 -- John Hawks

The Atlantic has a feature story, "What makes us happy?", about the Harvard Study of Adult Development -- a 72-year-old study of originally-normal Harvard undergraduates.

But as Vaillant points out, longitudinal studies, like wines, improve with age. And as the Grant Study men entered middle age-they spent their 40s in the 1960s-many achieved dramatic success. Four members of the sample ran for the U.S. Senate. One served in a presidential Cabinet, and one was president. There was a best-selling novelist (not, Vaillant has revealed, Norman Mailer, Harvard class of '43). But hidden amid the shimmering successes were darker hues. As early as 1948, 20 members of the group displayed severe psychiatric difficulties. By age 50, almost a third of the men had at one time or another met Vaillant's criteria for mental illness. Underneath the tweed jackets of these Harvard elites beat troubled hearts. Arlie Bock didn't get it. "They were normal when I picked them," he told Vaillant in the 1960s. "It must have been the psychiatrists who screwed them up."

It's an odd story -- a longitudinal survey based on Freudian principles. JFK was one of the study's subjects. And probably the most enduring lesson, "Maturation makes liars of us all."