John Edward Mack
From The Black Vault Encyclopedia Project
John Edward Mack, M.D. (October 4, 1929 – September 27, 2004) was an American Psychiatrist and Professor at Harvard Medical School.
He was a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, considered to be a leading authority on the spiritual or transformational effects of alleged alien encounter experiences, sometimes called the Abduction Phenomenon.
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Early career
Born in New York City, Mack received his medical degree from the Harvard Medical School (Cum Laude, 1955) after undergraduate study at Oberlin (Phi Beta Kappa, 1951). He was a graduate of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and was Board certified in child and adult psychoanalysis.
The dominant theme of his life's work has been the exploration of how one's perceptions of the world affect one's relationships. He addressed this issue of "worldview" on the individual level in his early clinical explorations of dreams, nightmares and teen suicide, and in his biographical study of the life of British officer T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in biography in 1977.
Mack advocated that Western culture required a shift away from a purely materialist worldview (which he felt was responsible for the Cold War, the global ecological crisis, ethnonationalism and regional conflict) towards a transpersonal worldview which embraced certain elements of Eastern spiritual and philosophical traditions.
Mack's interest in the spiritual aspect of human experience has been compared by the New York Times to that of fellow Harvard professor William James, and like James, Mack became a controversial figure for his efforts to bridge spirituality and psychiatry.
Abduction Phenomenon
This theme was taken to a controversial extreme in the early 1990s when Mack commenced his decade-plus study of 200 men and women who reported recurrent alien encounter experiences.
Such encounters had been reported since at least the 1950's (the account of Antonio Villas Boas), and had seen some limited attention from academic figures (Dr. R. Leo Sprinkle perhaps being the earliest, in the 1960s). Mack, however, remains probably the most esteemed academic to have studied the subject.
Mack initially suspected that such persons were suffering from mental illness, but when no obvious pathologies were present in the persons he interviewed, Mack's interest was piqued.
Following encouragement from longtime friend Thomas Kuhn (who predicted that the subject might be controversial, but urged Mack to simply collect data and temporarily ignore prevailing materialist, dualist and "either/or" analysis), Mack began concerted study and interviews.
Many of those Mack interviewed reported that their encounters had affected the way they regarded the world, including producing a heightened sense of spirituality and environmental concern.
Mack was somewhat more guarded in his investigations and interpretations of the abduction phenomenon than were the earlier researchers. Literature professor Terry Matheson writes that "On balance, Mack does present as fair-minded an account as has been encountered to date, at least as these abduction narratives go." (Matheson, 251) Mack's interest in the spiritual or transformational aspects of people's alien encounters, and his suggestion that the experience of alien contact itself may be more spiritual than physical in nature--yet nonetheless real--set him apart from many of his contemporaries such as Budd Hopkins, who advocated the physical reality of aliens.
Mack noted that there was a worldwide history of visionary experiences--especially in pre-industrial societies. One example is the vision quest common to some Native American cultures. Only fairly recently in Western culture, notes Mack, have such visionary events been interpreted as aberrations or as mental illness. Mack suggested that abduction accounts might best be considered as part of this larger tradition of visionary encounters.
In 1994 the Dean of Harvard Medical School appointed a committee of peers to review Mack's clinical care and clinical investigation of the people who had shared their alien encounters with him (some of their cases were written of in Mack's 1994 book Abduction). Mack described this investigation as "Kafkaesque:" Mack never quite knew the status of ongoing investigation, and the nature of his critics' complaints shifted frequently, as most of their accusations against him fell apart when closely scrutinized.
After fourteen months of inquiry, there were growing questions from the academic community (including Harvard Professor of Law Alan Dershowitz) regarding the validity of Harvard's investigation of a tenured professor who was not suspected of ethics violations or professional misconduct. Harvard then issued a statement stating that the Dean had "reaffirmed Dr. Mack's academic freedom to study what he wishes and to state his opinions without impediment," concluding "Dr. Mack remains a member in good standing of the Harvard Faculty of Medicine." (Mack was censured for some relatively minor methodological errors.) He had received legal help from Daniel Sheehan and the support of Laurance Rockefeller, who also funded Mack's Center for four consecutive years [1] at $250,000 per year.
Mack's explorations later broadened into the general consideration of the merits of an expanded notion of reality, one which allows for experiences that may not fit the Western materialist paradigm, yet deeply affect people's lives. His second (and final) book on the alien encounter experience, Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters (1999), was as much the culmination of his work with the "experiencers" of alien encounters (to whom the book is dedicated) as it was a philosophical treatise connecting the themes of spirituality and modern worldviews.
Mack was killed by a drunken driver when walking home from a dinner with friends in London on Monday September 27, 2004.
Trivia
- Mack was a student of Holotropic Breathwork, a meditative technique developed by Stanislav Grof.
- Mack's life and work was documented in the film Touched by Emmy-nominated filmmaker Laurel Chiten.[2]
Sources
- Terry Matheson; Alien Abduction: Creating A Modern Phenomenon; Prometheus Books, 1998; ISBN 1573922447
External links
- The John E. Mack Institute
- Passport to the Cosmos: John E. Mack Archive
- Obituaries and media reports of Mack's death
- PBS/Nova episode featuring Mack
Copyright
"Original data received from Wikipedia on April 21, 2006. Credit given to original authors can be seen Here."
