George Eman Vaillant (; born June 16, 1934) is an American psychiatrist and Professor at Harvard Medical School and Director of Research for the Department of Psychiatry, Brigham and Women's Hospital. Vaillant has spent his research career charting adult development and the recovery process of schizophrenia, heroin addiction, alcoholism, and personality disorder. Through 2003, he spent 30 years as Director of the Study of Adult Development at the Harvard University Health Service. The study has prospectively charted the lives of 724 men and women for over 60 years.
Biography George Eman Vaillant's father, George Clapp Vaillant, killed himself in 1945. George Eman, who was 10 years old at the time, was traumatized by his father's suicide and thus had deep emotional reasons for being interested in psychiatry. He graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, did his psychiatric residency at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center and completed his psychoanalytic training at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. He has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, is a Fellow of the American College of Psychiatrists and has been an invited speaker and consultant for seminars and workshops throughout the world. A major focus of his work in the past has been to develop ways of studying defense mechanisms empirically. He creating a four-level hierarchy of defense mechanisms, which he categorized as pathological (originally called psychotic), immature, neurotic, and mature. (Source: Ego Mechanisms of Defense: A Guide for Clinicians and Researchers 1st Edition by Professor of Psychiatry George E Vaillant M.D. ) Pathological (Psychotic) The mechanisms on this level are normal in very young children, but in adults, when predominating, almost always are severely pathological. These defenses, in conjunction, permit patients to rearrange external experiences to eliminate the need to cope with reality. 1. Delusional Projection: Grossly frank delusions about external reality, usually of a persecutory nature. 2. Denial: Refusal to accept external reality because it is too threatening; arguing against an anxiety-provoking stimulus by stating it doesn't exist; resolution of emotional conflict and reduction of anxiety by refusing to perceive or consciously acknowledge the more unpleasant aspects of external reality. 3. Distortion: A gross reshaping of external reality to meet internal needs. 4. Splitting: A primitive defense. Negative and positive impulses are split off and unintegrated. Fundamental example: An individual views other people as either innately good or innately evil, rather than a whole continuous being. 5. Identity Dissociation – Severe form of dissociation in which there is not only emotional detachment but also detachment from physical experiences as well. There is complete detachment from reality.
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