Notes on Notes: Results of the Yale Longitudinal Study, as Evidence for History and Psychology
The remarkable materials produced decades ago by the Yale Longitudinal Study invite many forms of response—substantive, methodological, epistemological, heuristic—not to mention straightforward appreciation. There are few similar collections to match it for depth, density, or duration. Lives come sharply into view; so does an entire era of American history. What political historians call the “Age of Eisenhower” reappears in human, and cultural, flesh. Our task in the current chapter is to evaluate the study’s evidence—the so-called process notes—from both historical and psychological viewpoints. We discuss the historical first.
The record of the past—any past—is invariably complex and fragmented. One basic line of distinction is that which separates verbal and material evidence—in simpler terms, words and things. In practice, the former element is usually uppermost; indeed most historians fashion their work entirely from words.
Verbal evidence divides, in turn, between two broad categories: one that comprises official records of (for the most part) activities in the public sphere, and another that embraces personal documents reflecting various aspects of private life. The latter include autobiography, diaries and journals, personal correspondence, even (in certain cases) fictional writing. Clearly, it is with this second category that the process notes from the Yale Longitudinal Study should be grouped. Clearly, too, the notes eclipse most other forms of personal evidence for the close-up, interior views they provide. Historians rarely, if ever, can access such a dense array of privately held thoughts, feelings, and attitudes. Moreover, the notes document childhood experience—always a difficult area for study of the past. At first glance, then, historians might well see the Yale study as a veritable treasure trove.
To be sure, it has some intrinsic limitations. For the most part, it involves observation of, and interaction with, the family members (the Olsens) at the Yale Child Study Center; few parts can be considered truly “first-person.” It should be said, though, that it was (and is still) standard practice for a therapist to write detailed “process” notes about encounters with their subjects. Process notes are intended as records of the session and the therapist is trained to write these to reflect as closely as possible the events and interactions with the subject as they actually happened. Some writers are better than others, of course, and this adds yet another dimension to the nature of this kind of record. Thus a scholar who seeks to work with the notes stands at two removes from actual experience: the child (or other family member) is observed by the researcher, who translates this observation into a description that is then read by the scholar.
We might acknowledge, if only in passing, a different type of historical inquiry—one that would explore the development of child psychiatry and psychoanalysis as a discipline (and profession). The process notes express quite fully a theoretical stance and a treatment approach that were central to child psychoanalytic practice at midcentury; thus a historian concerned with such matters will find rich material to investigate. In the present discussion, however, we retain the focus of the Yale Longitudinal Study itself—in short, the behavioral and inner-life experience of a designated “subject” population. Bear in mind, as Mayes details elsewhere in this volume, that the focus of the study was prediction and it was premised on the idea that the more one could know or learn about a child’s inner life, the more accurate would be later predictions about successful adaptation.
The stance informing the Yale Longitudinal Study was that of Freudian psychoanalysis and was, moreover, deeply influenced by Anna Freud’s work with children, since all of the therapists in the study had close ties to Anna Freud. It is important to remember that by the 1950s there were already several established variants of psychoanalysis—from Melanie Klein to ego psychology. The Freudian approach, with its emphasis on drives, the oedipus complex, and psychosexual development, has shaped the notes and process they inscribe, from first to last. An additional shaping factor of great importance was the study’s offer of therapy to each of its subjects. Most of the principal investigators were actually clinicians. Yet the project was not meant to assess treatment outcomes per se, but rather to observe developmental outcomes. The notion was that the psychoanalytic therapeutic setting was an instrument or “lens” for observation. The result is a sort of hybrid: the empirical alongside the clinical, the observation linked to the therapy.
In order to identify additional characteristics here, it may be helpful to compare the process notes with material generated by other longitudinal studies not so directly tied to psychoanalysis. (One of us was herself a participant in such a project, during the 1980s.) The following points of contrast seem pertinent:
1. Many, if not most, longitudinal studies strive to maximize the element of sheer observation, with researchers standing well apart from their subjects; the goal is to be as open-ended as possible. The Yale study was quite otherwise. There, for example, interaction between the child (Evelyn) and the clinician-researcher (“SR,” Samuel Ritvo) was continuous and powerful. Over time Evelyn developed a many-sided transference relationship (in psychoanalytic terms), which itself shaped behavior. From a certain perspective, its effects seem contaminating. Much of the material in the process notes reflects the interventions (indeed the entire underlying viewpoint) of the researcher; open-ended they certainly are not. But as historical evidence such “contamination” need not be disqualifying; indeed some version of the same appears in all records of the past. Historians “correct” for this in many ways—by checking different sources against one another, by carefully evaluating context, by using their own expertise about period and place—and so on. Which is to say that the notes remain—and will always remain—a striking and valuable window into one child’s interior world.
2. A common feature of other longitudinal studies is filming—the camera in the service, one might say, of open-endedness, with an attendant presumption of objectivity. (Of course, in such cases much depends on the camera-holder.) Perhaps one might regard the process notes as themselves a kind of film equivalent. But, in any case, they hardly constitute an unfiltered record. Rather, they involve several distinct kinds, or levels, of filtering: the observer’s own eye, the theories that shaped his perceptions, his own predilections in note-taking and verbal expression, and so on. There is the further point that film permits all sorts of microanalytic “dissection,” that if sequences are broken—and individual frames isolated—a detailed inspection is possible. Such opportunities were not present in the Yale study.
3. Like other longitudinal projects, the Yale study involved multiple observers. Every family had several clinicians attached to them: one for each child; one for each parent; a pediatrician; a teacher, and a social worker. Thus there were many observations of children and parents from a variety of perspectives. These were brought together in the clinicians’ group rounds, when every case was discussed. The therapist’s interactions with each child occurred one-on-one, however, so in those instances the therapist was the sole arbiter of both description and interpretation. Had two or more researchers been present, there would have been an opportunity for cross-checking—always a useful strategy—but this entire enterprise was a “hybrid” of research and therapy, a fact reflected in every aspect of the collection and interpretation of the data.1
4. The observational context is also—and invariably—a matter of much importance. Whereas many studies of family interaction are conducted within the home—which is, after all, its “natural” environment—the Yale project engaged its subjects in a variety of settings: the home, the nursery school, and the pediatrician’s office, as well as the therapist’s office. While the bulk of the process notes between the therapists and the children they studied occurred at the Yale Child Study Center—an artificial environment to be sure—there were as many settings for the observations of these children as there were observers.2 Visits occurred a few times a week with the therapist on a set schedule and on a regular schedule with the nursery school. All of the children in the study were seen routinely by pediatrician Katie Wolf, whose sequenced observations were featured regularly in the discussions of the research team.
5. Like other fully systematized longitudinal studies, the Yale Longitudinal Study followed a carefully sequenced program of observations, starting prenatally and continuing at consistent intervals for the duration of the project. Detailed family histories are a part of every family’s record and were elicited by the team’s social worker. These “external”/historical data were known to all the team and these sequential observations were discussed on a regular basis.
6. Most longitudinal studies develop elaborate coding systems in order to guide the process of evaluation and interpretation; these, in turn, are meant to ensure consistency across different record sets (and among an array of individual investigators). The Yale study employed a coding system developed by Marianne Kris (spouse of the study’s “lead investigator,” Ernst Kris). Marianne Kris was the record-keeper of the Yale Longitudinal Study and she was the one who reviewed the process notes and assigned codes. Her codes were “backed up” by a second coder for reliability. Unfortunately, these weren’t preserved and are no longer a part of the record, but the team’s clinicians understood the need for coding their work.
7. The Yale study included no systematic sampling procedure that can be evaluated.3 Subjects were recruited from Wolf’s “birth cohort”—families delivering at the Yale–New Haven Hospital whom Wolf had been following in a study on infant development. Because the archival record does not include the total number of infants in her study, how she sampled, how many of these infants were subsequently included in the Yale study, how many declined, as well as differences of class, race, educational level, and so forth, the study’s generalizability is obviously limited. This means—for historians in particular—that the material cannot easily be correlated with predominant social, cultural, and demographic patterns in the period it purports to represent.
Each of these points should be taken into account in assessing the representativeness of this sample for New Haven’s population at large, for they suggest some inherent limitations of the process notes. Still, much of value remains here. Again, in terms of sheer depth and density, the notes easily surpass results from many other projects of far more “systematic” design.
We move now from essentially methodological issues to more substantive ones. The focus of the process notes (those we have reviewed) is the young subject, Evelyn, and the investigator-cum-therapist Ritvo. In addition, Evelyn’s siblings and parents are frequently in view.
Evelyn was the oldest child in her family. Even at the age of four or five, she seemed to operate as a kind of manager of family relations; her mother, indeed, regarded her maneuvers in this role as “sly.” Evelyn believed, apparently for good reason, that the middle child—a somewhat tempestuous girl named “Wendy”—was her father’s favorite, and the youngest, named, “Tammy,” her mother’s. (One of the clearest points in the process notes—at least to our eyes—is Evelyn’s outsider status within this affectional system.) Evelyn expressed her attitudes and feelings freely in her sessions with Ritvo. She offered detailed accounts of her life at home, reported numerous dreams and fantasies, engaged in vivid play, and interspersed her behavior with many articulate comments.
Ritvo, for his part, readily took on the role of transference object—and thus drew his young counterpart into many kinds of meaningful interaction. His expectations about her behavior were (as noted earlier) heavily conditioned by his psychoanalytic viewpoint. Thus the process notes are filled with comments about triangular situations (oedipal and otherwise), rivalrous concerns, covert and overt evocations of sexual and aggressive impulses, thinly veiled references to oral and anal preoccupation, and other time-honored Freudian themes. Indeed transference along these lines was not simply noted, but also actively encouraged and elicited by Ritvo’s quite pointed interventions. For example, on one occasion, when Ritvo had evoked some speculations about his wife, he noted: “I said . . . she and my wife could remain friends and they wouldn’t have to be jealous of one another because I was out of the way.” (Interestingly, “she [Evelyn] didn’t think much of this idea”—with its patently oedipal implication.) At another point, when Evelyn had been using predominantly brown colors in painting a picture, Ritvo “said making brown is like making messy stuff, and . . . it is the same color as bam [feces] which is a messy stuff.” (Of this obvious nod toward anal influence, Evelyn was even more dismissive: “she thought [it] . . . ridiculous.”)
All this—to repeat—seems broadly representative of the emerging field of child pyschoanalytic techniques in its mid-twentieth-century incarnation. But during the years and decades since, a different range of theoretical and clinical viewpoints has emerged, many of them encapsulated by the term “object relations.” (Another variant is “self psychology. ”) Were the Yale study undertaken today, the process notes—and the process itself—would look very different. And even within the original material, there is ample room for reconsideration. Consider a few more examples. In one of the sessions described in the notes, Evelyn elaborated a fantasy—complete with painted pictures—of an excursion with Ritvo and his wife. First, the three of them entered a restaurant, with “Evelyn . . . between my wife and me and . . . holding each of us with a hand.” Then they went to a movie; the picture she painted showed “the three of us in the audience [with] . . . again . . . Evelyn in the middle.” Ritvo understood this to be an oedipal wish: she sought to divide them by being “in the middle,” and (presumably) to replace his wife as Ritvo’s most proximate partner. An alternative explanation might, however, implicate Evelyn’s concurrent (and actual) family situation. The fantasy could then be seen as an expression of her yearning for an ideal family, one in which she was no longer an outsider. (Indeed it depicted her as fully, and happily, “inside”—not to say, surrounded.)
In another session, Evelyn had Ritvo draw her outline on an office carpet, then reversed the procedure by drawing his outline nearby. She compared the size of the two, and asked Ritvo to draw her outline again, but this time placing it inside his own. Minutes later she reversed this as well. Outlines mingled with outlines, until “we had worn out the chalk” (!). Evelyn’s comment was simply: “it was like she was inside me.” Ritvo went from this to another apparently oedipal interpretation: “I said you mean . . . like a baby is inside its mother.” But a different understanding might feature the theme of merger—the child Evelyn joined with the longed-for parent, not in a sexual or reproductive way but rather as a means to achieving emotional reinforcement. (This, too, would speak to her outsider status—and to her wish for parental closeness of a sort that she seems rarely to have experienced.)
In a third session, Evelyn and Ritvo engaged in a game of tying each other up. First Evelyn tied Ritvo’s hands, and feet, together—then quickly “cut the bonds and set me loose.” Ritvo noted that “she seemed to lose interest” in the game, and pushed her to explain why. She replied, “I wasn’t a bad man; a mistake had been made; I was a good man instead.” This led to a further round, in which Evelyn was the one tied; but “she quickly burst the tie with a laugh.” Ritvo persisted with his questioning: “I said she seemed to think it was not a good game to play.” In response, Evelyn “shrugged her shoulders, and broke off the game.” In his summary of the session Ritvo pondered the matter once more: “she quickly loses interest and seems to need to drop it.” Exactly so! Her off-and-on engagement with this line of play, and her abruptly shifting affect, could be understood as signaling some particular discomfort. Ritvo’s puzzlement, and his notion of her “losing interest,” missed her chronic concern with being found “bad” (not “good . . . instead”) and an accompanying fear of punishment (“tied up”) by her parents.
There is a further, more general point to be made about many of the interactions described in the notes. To put it simply: again and again Evelyn seems to have wanted from Ritvo a kind of straightforward affirmation—what clinicians nowadays commonly refer to as “mirroring.” His own instinct, however, frequently went in a different direction. He sought to probe, to question, to bore in on sometimes tangential details—much of which Evelyn would find intrusive, or simply off the mark. In one instance, Evelyn was writing on a blackboard and asked Ritvo to “copy . . . [her words] in my own handwriting.” He complied, but then reverted to their discussion of several minutes before about a figural “ornament” she was wearing that day. She, however, “was very intent on her [writing] and did not respond to any of my proddings about the figure . . . around her neck.” A few minutes later he pressed forward with questions about her seemingly friendly demeanor. “I tried [various] approaches to get at . . . her attitude, but she was very intent on writing and having me copy. She also drew pictures, and let me copy them.”
On another occasion Evelyn made “a series of paintings,” and asked Ritvo “to tell her which paintings are exactly alike and which are close ‘disalike.’” He probed for content instead, and inquired about the “story” told in the paintings—whereupon “she flatly and peremptorily told me ‘there is no story.’” She then put him “on the other side of the easel, painting as well,” whereupon he “complained that she wanted to get rid of me, and with a smile she protested that it was not so.” (Her smile acknowledged that, this time at least, he was right.)
Yet another time, in another painting sequence, she again moved him to “the other side.” As before, he objected that this meant he “was out of things . . . [and] it seemed she wanted me [there] . . . so I wouldn’t ask questions and be curious.” Back and forth it went, in these and similar episodes: Evelyn working away (most often painting) in “a very busy fashion,” hoping for a mirrored response—that is, simple confirmation of her interest and effort—with Ritvo offering something quite different. Thus she repeatedly sought, for the most part without success, to supply a major deficit in her experience of life at home.
This is a good point for reiterating the largest difference between the theoretical grounding of the original Yale study and that of the newer viewpoints. Underlying the Yale study was the belief that deep fantasy and underlying drives guide the intrapsychic process—that wishes and attitudes, while they are certainly conditioned by a child’s home environment, tend to take on a life of their own. In newer paradigms, home, family (parents and siblings)—one’s actual, and evolving, life circumstances—come fully to the fore. The transference, such as it is, has a far more immediate relevance: it is less about the oedipus, more about “self”-organization; based less on instinct, more on actual trauma; less on fantasy, more on current reality. Perhaps the distinction can be captured in a pair of clinical terms: “experience-distant” versus “experience-near.” This is not a matter of polar opposites, however. Both sides, or elements, have traction; the key is to get them into proper focus and balance.
We come back, finally, to history. For the process notes from the Yale study reflect their era in many very broad social and cultural aspects as well. The 1950s were, preeminently, a time of familism. An important study of family culture in that period bears the title “Homeward Bound”—and the term does seem apposite, on several levels. The predominant social mode included a virtual “cult” of domesticity, which was inwardly turned and demanded a great deal of personal conformity; a “baby boom,” with a concurrent new emphasis on (and anxiety about) child nurture; exaggerated notions of gender difference, and deeply asymmetrical sex roles; and the various accoutrements of a suburban lifestyle. All this was, in turn, framed against a dark view of the world at large, especially in relation to the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation.4
This general climate appears here and there in the notes, sometimes very strongly. The members of the Olsen family were certainly “familistic”—enmeshed with one another, striving to engage as fully and deeply as they could—while at the same time struggling against this, as if avoiding a kind of emotional suffocation. Evelyn’s preoccupations, as they emerged in her activities with Ritvo, were wholly family-centered. She made almost no mention of other influences on her life—of school and neighborhood, of playmates and friends—at an age (up to eight years) when, surely, such elements were at least formally present for her.
In addition, nothing in the process notes seems more prominent than Evelyn’s preoccupation with gender. Time after time she struggled to comprehend the boundaries, and meaning, of male-female difference. To be sure, some parts of this can be understood as expressing her own idiosyncratic (and intrapsychic) identifications, while other parts may reflect the probings and proddings of Ritvo (who was himself, of course, a representative of the era). Still, such sustained appearances, and reappearances, of a single theme suggest at least a degree of cultural shaping. Moreover, the specific configuration of gender presented by Evelyn conformed closely to 1950s norms. She created play scenes in which she cast herself as a determined homemaker—preparing meals for Ritvo, cleaning up the space they shared, and so on. (At one point Ritvo hopefully volunteered that “I suppose [her] Mommy liked a cleaning-up activity”—and Evelyn confirmed this.) When she looked ahead toward adult life, she imagined herself as an actress—one of the few careers in which women of the time were readily visible—and wrestled with the problem of combining that pursuit with the role of wife and mother. At one point, she declared the two to be wholly incompatible: according to Ritvo, “she said, ‘No, you can’t do both’ . . . [Thus] she won’t have children.” At other points she hedged her bets, and hoped for some strategy; yet even there the possibilities seemed severely limited. All of this mirrored her cultural surroundings, in which the ideal of woman-as-homemaker remained paramount.
Another recurrent theme in the notes, related but different, embraces all manner of personal transformation. Male-to-female is part of this, but there is much else as well. Humans and witches; clowns and witches; Ritvo as monkey (and then as goulash); it is as if Evelyn lived amid a crowd of changelings. This, like her constructions of gender, can be seen as reflecting both cultural and intrapsychic factors. On the psychological side lay a fear of changeable others, perhaps most especially of her father with his sudden, unpredictable “rages”; on the cultural side a deep undercurrent of anxiety about containing difference and conflict, potential or actual. (The period-specific political strategy of “containment”—that is, holding the threat of Soviet aggression in close check—can also be referenced here. Indeed, some of Evelyn’s play refers directly to armies, to battle “campaigns,” “forts,” and other things military.) If firm boundaries could be carefully maintained, if limits were accepted and old verities held high, if change itself were kept to a minimum—that way lay “security,” not to say basic survival. One feels this concern—combined with a partially suppressed fascination—in Evelyn’s world, as a reflection of its presence in the world at large.
The Yale study was, in many respects, a product of its time. Its very structure and coloration reflected, at least implicitly, the broad-gauge culture of the age of Eisenhower. (The comforting political persona of “Ike,” as he was known, seemed itself a bulwark of containment—and a safeguard against threats posed by incipient change.) By the same token, the Yale study reflected the professional culture of psychoanalysis at a key point in its own evolution, when the original Freudian precepts held sway in an as-yet-unmodified “classical” form. (The reputation of Freud—the influence of Freud—had never been higher, before or since; and this group of therapists, it should be noted, were particularly influenced by Anna Freud and her work with children.) None of this time-boundedness should be surprising. All of history is rooted in a particular irony: both the evidence it leaves us, and the perspectives we use to order and understand the evidence, are marked by a kind of doubled process—the shaping effects of then and of now.
NOTES
1. See Linda Mayes’s description of the conceptual and theoretical framework of the Yale Longitudinal Study in Chapter 4.
2. It is important to note that there is (or was) a methodological school of thought that privileged “laboratory” studies over every other setting, arguing that more “naturalistic” influences were not only imperfect but also “contaminating” because they effaced the better controlled, purposefully neutral, institutional setting; see, e.g., John B. Watson, Behaviorism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1925).
3. Although the archival records are missing these elements and the generalizability is limited, this does not mean that issues of recruitment and selection were not considered. We just do not have the full record to be able to adequately assess the question.
4. See Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War (New York: Basic Books, 1988).