Harvard Club of Chicago

Join us for a Luncheon Dialogue with

George E. Vaillant, MD
Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School
Director of Research for the Department of Psychiatry, Brigham and Women's Hospital
Director of the Study of Adult Development at the Harvard University Health Services

Consider Charles Boatwright.  His name is one of the charming pseudonyms from the vignettes in George Vaillant’s new book, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study.  Boatwright grew up with a manic-depressive father and was married to a miserable woman for 30-odd years, but he almost always called himself happy.  He bounced from job to job—from boat work to cattle-inseminating (the artificial kind)—but considered himself a success.  Vaillant, who studied Boatwright and 267 of his college classmates over a 38-year period, from 1966 to 2004, at first saw him as a failure in chronic denial.

On Vaillant’s retelling, however, it is Vaillant himself who had been too selfish to respect Boatwright’s selflessness, too defensive to see Boatwright’s problems as consistent with his optimism, too ambitious to see his dilettantish do-goodery as truly fulfilling.  Boatwright’s life was poor in the terms of Vaillant’s 1970s standards.  Now he finds that judgment absurd, not just because the narrowness of his perspective became clear to him but because a lifetime of studying people led him to believe that people grow and substantially change after age 20, 30, and even 55.

George E. Vaillant, M.D., is a psychoanalyst and a research psychiatrist, one of the pioneers in the study of adult development.  He is a professor at Harvard University and directed Harvard's Study of Adult Development for thirty-five years.  He is the author of Aging Well, Triumphs of Experience and The Natural History of Alcoholism, and his 1977 book, Adaptation to Life, is a classic text in the study of adult development.  In addition to his work and books on Harvard class begun in 1938, Professor Vaillant has co-authored the Harvard Study of Adult Development, a piece of research that has tracked the lives of 824 men and women since 1965.
 
In his writing and talks, Professor Vaillant shares a number of surprising findings.  For example, the people who do well in old age did not necessarily do so well in midlife, and vice versa.  While the study confirms that recovery from a lousy childhood is possible, memories of a happy childhood are a lifelong source of strength.  Marriages bring much more contentment after age 70, and physical aging after 80 is determined less by heredity than by habits formed prior to age 50.  The credit for growing old with grace and vitality, it seems, goes more to ourselves than to our stellar genetic makeup.  He explores what he has learned about being happy, content, and successful and the pitfalls.

Date: Thursday, October 10, 2013

Time: 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.

Location:
The Chicago Club
81 E. Van Buren St., Chicago, Ill.

A 10% Discount on parking is available. Use discount code HCC1010 and Click Here to reserve.

Cost:
$55.00 for Members and Members' Guests
$70.00 for Non-Members

Click here to buy tickets