George Eman Vaillant's father, George Clapp Vaillant, committed suicide in 1945. George Eman was traumatized by his father's death 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; more recently, he has been interested in successful aging and human happiness. In 2008, he took up a supervisory role for psychiatric trainees at St. Vincent's Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. In June 2009, Joshua Wolf Shenk published an article in the Atlantic Monthly entitled "What Makes Us Happy?" which focused on Vaillant's work in the Grant Study, a study of 268 men over many decades. Vaillant has been married four times. He was formerly married to late psychotherapist Leigh McCullough. He currently lives in California with his current wife, Diane Highum, MD, a psychiatrist and Harvard Medical School graduate, and step-daughter, Zoe, a college student.
Awards
Vaillant has received the Foundations Fund Prize for Research in Psychiatry from the American Psychiatric Association, the Strecker Award from The Pennsylvania Hospital, the Burlingame Award from The Institute for Living, and the Jellinek Award for research on alcoholism. In 1995 he received the research prize of the International Psychogeriatric Society.
Vaillant, GE, Ego Mechanisms of Defense: A Guide for Clinicians and Researchers, Washington, DC, American Psychiatric Press
Vaillant, GE, The Wisdom of the Ego, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press,
Vaillant, GE, The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press,
Vaillant, GE, Aging Well, Boston, Little Brown,
Vaillant, GE, Spiritual Evolution: A Scientific Defense of Faith, Broadway Books,
Vaillant, GE, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study, Belknap Press,
Vaillant, GE, Heaven on My Mind: Using the Harvard Grant Study of Adult Development to Explore the Value of the Prospection of Life After Death, Nova Science Publishers, Inc.,
