Download Author: Vaillant, George E.

4 eBooks available.

The Natural History of Alcoholism: Revisited

The insights about alcoholism that I present in this book come from such a prospective study, the Harvard Medical School’s Study of Adult Development. This project has followed 660 men from 1940 to 1980, from adolescence into late middle life. Information has been collected about many aspects of their lives, including their use of alcohol.

In this updated version of his landmark study on alcoholism, George Vaillant returns to the same subjects, but with the perspective gained from fifteen years of further follow-up. (1204 pgs)

Reviews

The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited is a revised and updated version of [what] was, and still is, regarded as a classic and certainly broke new ground during the 1980s…The new text provides an update based on developments over the past 15 years; and its importance again derives from the fact that almost all the alcohol abusers identified in the first version have been followed up for an additional 15 years to make 50 years in all. It goes without saying that 50-year follow-up studies are few and far between…Vaillant’s 50-year follow-up now stands as a milestone within the addiction literature…It is required reading…The data are beautifully presented and described and the conclusions eminently reasonable. (John B. Davies Times Higher Educational Supplement)

Not since Jellinek’s The Disease Concept of Alcoholism, published in 1960, has there been a wiser, more comprehensive book on alcoholism. (Donald Goodwin, M.D. American Journal of Psychiatry)

[A] remarkable achievement…For anyone who teaches courses or conducts research on alcohol problems and for practitioners who work with alcohol-dependent clients, this book is essential. (C. Aaron McNeece Social Work)

Important and thought-provoking…Anybody who reads this journal should read this book if they have not done so already…In the detail of its arguments as much as in the wealth of its data, this book goes beyond simplistic theories about alcoholism to paint a picture of a diverse, often highly distressing, disorder. (Richard Hammersley, Ph.D. Journal of Studies on Alcohol)

This is an excellent review and update of past and current thinking about alcoholism. The author uses the full text of his original outstanding work published in 1983 as the background for a presentation of all the research and clinical experience that has taken place in the ensuing almost 15 years. The result is a clear picture of how the thinking in the alcoholism field has progressed, which controversies have been more or less resolved, and where the new clinical developments are heading. (William E. Flynn, M.D. Academic Medicine)

Vaillant addresses a number of important issues and questions, which are core prerequisites for achieving more precise knowledge about the causes and consequences of alcohol abuse and dependence…These important issues have been reexamined in a thoughtful and scholarly manner. Dr. Vaillant has added new survey data and information to his current text, and he has also expanded and revised his original interpretations. New and original material is based upon scientific information acquired since publication of the original report…This is an outstanding and highly recommended text for medical students and medical educators. It will be especially helpful to practitioners in virtually every field of medicine who treat patients with alcohol-related problems. (Jack H. Mendelson, M.D. Journal of the American Medical Association)

In alcoholism research, where one side regularly parades a new study and the other then vilifies it, Dr. Vaillant’s work can be cited approvingly by both. (New York Times Book Review)

Wisdom of the Ego

Something horrible happens, and our minds play tricks on us, tell us that it never happened, occurred differently than it did, isn’t quite what it seems. Such trickery, George Vaillant tells us, is actually healthy. What’s more, it can reveal the mind at its most creative and mature, soothing and protecting us in the face of unbearable reality, managing the unmanageable, ordering disorder. In The Wisdom of the Ego, Vaillant, one of America’s preeminent psychiatrists, gives us an exhilarating look at how the mind’s defenses work, and at how they evolve and change, and so, change us.

Freud tells us that the first five years of life constitute destiny. If this were so, Vaillant asks, then how could so many deeply troubled youths become well-adjusted, productive adults? Drawing on the Study of Adult Development, based at Harvard University, this book takes us into the lives of such individuals—thriving men and women who suffered grievous disadvantages and abuses during childhood—to show us that the mind’s remarkable defense develop well into adulthood, that the maladjustments of adolescence can evolve into the virtues of maturity. In one fascinating case after another, he introduces us to middle-aged men and women learning how to love, to make meaning, to reorder chaos.

Because creativity is so intrinsic to this alchemy of the ego, Vaillant mingles these life studies with psychobiographies of famous artists and others. We meet Florence Nightingale, the intractable hypochondriac and hopeless dreamer who, at the age of thirty-one, wrote in her diary, “I see nothing desirable but death,” and we watch as she transforms her anguish into altruism, her hapless fantasies into fantastic success. In the tormented life of Sylvia Plath, we see psychosis as not only a defect but also an effort at repair, her poetry as an extraordinary illustration of the adaptive process. We witness the mature working of the mind’s defenses in the career of Anna Freud, their greatest elucidator. And we see the wisdom of the ego at work as Eugene O’Neill evolves from self-destructive youth to creator of great art.

In these compelling portraits of obscure and famous lives, Vaillant charts the evolution of the ego’s defenses, from the psychopathic to the sublime, and from the mundane to the most ingenious. An account of the boundless psychological resilience of adult development, The Wisdom of the Ego is a brilliant summation of the mind’s amazing power to fashion creative victories out of life’s would-be defeats (1041 pgs).

Reviews

“This is a remarkable synthesis of the best current thinking on ego psychology as well as many-faceted picture of what Robert White would call “lives in progress.” It makes on its own not only a highly innovative contribution to ego psychology but an equally original and impressive contribution to longitudinal research. A remarkable and many-faceted work.” —George W. Goethals, Harvard University

“A richly textured, elegantly written, and humane book by the person who is becoming the Anna Freud of his day. Vaillant’s sympathetic treatment of the defenses is itself wise and creative.” —Robert Kegan, Harvard University and Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology

“This is a brilliant, not to say unique, book. It brings to the study of the ego the same clarifying empiricism, animating passion, and illuminating insight that so strikingly characterized the pioneering investigations of the dynamic unconscious a hundred years ago. Behind The Wisdom of the Ego lies the wonderful wisdom of George Vaillant.” —John C. Nemiah, Dartmouth Medical School

Dynamic Approaches to the Understanding and Treatment of Alcoholism

A range of theoretical positions about alcoholism within psychiatry are compared. Vaillant presents a disease model of alcoholism. Bean is concerned with understanding the dynamics by which alcoholics and those around them are able to deny the condition. Zinberg defines alcohol addiction within its social context. Mack looks at alcoholism’s effects and problems as they are centered around the “self” and the social context. Khantzian, in direct opposition to Vaillant, presents a defense of traditional psychiatric treatment for alcoholism. (465 pp.)