Biography
Son of George Clapp Vaillant, who killed himself in 1945, George Eman Vaillant was traumatized by his father's suicide and thus had deep emotional reasons for becoming a psychiatrist. 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 in human happiness. Vaillant has been married three times, returning to his second, Australian, wife after his third wife left him. 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.
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