John Mack and abduction: scientists and skeptics have their say, Part 1

In constructing the alien abduction phenomenon and “experiencers” as subjects worthy of psychiatric, scientific study, Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John Mack validated the idea that people could repress and recover memories of abduction experience, and he employed hypnosis to help clients recall these traumas.

The fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 1994) did not recognize or otherwise validate repressed and recovered memory or the abduction phenomenon as legitimate mental disorders. Mack did not refer to abduction experiences as a psychiatric syndrome or mental disorder. He labeled them a “phenomenon.” He also claimed that determining whether memories of abduction were real or not was not his goal: if such memories, true or false, were causing pain, then his aim was to alleviate that pain. With this attempt to maintain his credibility as a clinician, he thus circumvented the traditional system of classifying mental disorders.

In the Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association(1994), Cambridge psychiatrist Sanford Gifford reviewed Abduction for Mack’s peers. The book “calls for a response from his fellow analysts, who see him as a friend and respected colleague, admired for his clinical work, his scholarly biography of T.E. Lawrence, and his activities for peace and…conflict resolution,” Gifford began. But “in his new self-chosen role as a Prince of Our Unreason,” he said, Mack has produced a book “that is easy to dismiss as a wide-ranging attack on Western European traditions of rationality and experimental science.” This view was a huge sticking point for Mack’s peers.  Gifford deemed Abduction “a subversive assault on psychoanalysis as a science.” Mack’s “co-creative method…leaves him open to…mutual suggestibility [emphasis in original],” and his “abduction scenarios prove to be banal and highly monotonous”; it is likely that “their similarities reflect the universality of the human unconscious,” Gifford observed. Mack would be compelled to respond to Gifford’s critique in the paperback edition of Abduction.

In his 1995 best-selling book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan — a friend of Mack — wrote about abduction in general and Mack’s abduction research in particular. Sagan took on the debunking of alien abduction accounts, offering more mundane explanations for them, and he cited Mack’s own 1970 book on nightmares as an authoritative source of information about how easily the boundaries between waking and dreaming life can be blurred in the human mind. In a chapter entitled “Therapy,” Sagan tackled Mack’s claims about abduction, focusing on the idea that traumatic memories can be repressed and recovered. Sagan wrote that in Abduction: “Mack explicitly proposes the very dangerous doctrine that ‘the power or intensity with which something is felt’ is a guide to whether it’s true…. Doesn’t Mack, himself the author of a book on nightmares, know about the emotional power of hallucinations?”

The so-called memory wars of the 1990s provided a backdrop for expert and other responses to Mack’s abduction claims.

The year 1995 encompassed the completion of Harvard Medical School’s investigation of Mack’s research methods and the paperback reissue of his book Abduction. In the Harvard Crimson (1995), Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz criticized the medical school for investigating Mack’s work, claiming it was Mack’s ideas, not his methods, that were being questioned. “No great university should be in the business of investigating the ideas of its faculty.” Dershowitz wrote, continuing:

If Dr. Mack had taught at the Divinity School, it is unlikely that any investigation would be tolerated, since divinity schools are not governed by the laws of science. Indeed, it is at least as likely that space aliens exist as it is that God exists. The former is, however, a scientifically testable hypothesis (at least in theory); whereas the latter—for at least most theologians—is not. It is a matter of ‘faith,’ not proof, and faith is not subject to the scientific method. But the paradigm of the scientific method—propositions subjected to double-blind and replicable experimentation—is not the only criteria for evaluating academic undertakings. This is certainly true in the formative, exploratory phases in the development of an idea.

Harvard Medical School concluded its investigation without censuring Mack.“Dean Tosteson…has urged Dr. Mack that, in his enthusiasm to care for and study this group…he should be careful not, in any way, to violate the high standards for the conduct of clinical practice and clinical investigation that have been the hallmark of this Faculty,” the Medical School said in a statement. “ He also reaffirmed Dr. Mack’s academic freedom to study what he wishes and to state his opinions without impediment.” Dr. Mack remained a member in good standing of the Harvard Faculty of Medicine.

The paperback edition of Abduction (Mack, 1995) featured a new introduction in which Mack explicitly stated that he was responding to criticisms from fellow psychoanalyst Gifford (1994) and, more surprisingly, journalists James Gleick (1994) and Milo Miles (1994), who had, respectively, reviewed Abduction for The New Republic and the Boston Globe.

Mack deleted a number of contentious claims he had made in the hardcover Abduction from the paperback edition of the book, including the following: “The experience of working with abductees has affected me profoundly…. We participate in a universe or universes that are filled with intelligences from which we have cut ourselves off…. Our restricted worldview…lies behind most of the major destructive patterns that threaten the human future.”

Mack also added two new appendices to the paperback Abduction: “a brief review of issues relating to the reality of the abduction phenomenon” and “a historical and cross-cultural perspective on reported encounters.”

About his use of hypnosis, Mack wrote in the hardcover Abduction: “The inducement of a nonordinary state, a modified form of hypnosis…seems to be highly effective…. Abductees seem to move readily into trance…. Sometimes the simplest…of relaxation techniques is all that is needed to bring back many memories. It is as if hypnosis undoes…the forces of repression.”

In the paperback, he removed the words “hypnosis” and  “trance” from this passage and made some other changes as well: “The inducement of a nonordinary state, using even the simplest of relaxation techniques, seems to be highly effective…. Most of the abductees I have worked with seem to move readily into a non-ordinary state of consciousness…. It is as if the changed state…undoes the forces of repression.

The overall effect of Mack’s revisions was one of distancing or detachment from some of the more controversial statements he had made in the hardcover Abduction (for example, about hypnosis, repressed and recovered memory, holotropic breathwork) and at the same time reinforcement of his overall assessment of the abduction phenomenon. But while he tempered the language of some of his claims, he did not abandon any of them, and in one of his new appendices, “A brief review of issues relating to the reality of the abduction phenomenon,” he defended and bolstered them. Over the next few years, Mack would stick to his claims; his narrative of the abduction phenomenon and his examination of it would remain consistent, with only minor adjustments made, apparently to meet the needs of different audiences. For example, in an essay published by his Program for Extraordinary Experience Research (PEER) on the “science of not knowing” (1996), Mack framed abduction as a subject of scientific study. Public discourse about abduction, he wrote:

Remains focused largely on the question of whether or not it is real in the strictly physical sense…. Some skeptics even claim…that, insofar as the physical evidence for the reality of the phenomenon does not meet standards of scientific proof, we can presume…that it does not exist…. But what if the phenomenon were subtle in the sense that it may manifest in the physical world, but derive from a source which by its very nature could not provide the kind of hard evidence that would satisfy skeptics for whom reality is limited to the material?

The abduction phenomenon may be “intrinsically mysterious and, ultimately, beyond our present framework of knowledge,” he suggested. “An attitude of humility…an open attitude…[an] opening of consciousness,” he concluded, “could result in greater knowledge not only about the physical aspects of the phenomenon, but about numinous dimensions as well.”

Following the publication of Abduction in 1994, critics had homed in on Mack’s failure to publish his research results in peer-reviewed journals and his decision to publicize his findings in mass media, (a popular book, TV talk shows, and so on). In the wake of the “firestorm” of publicity for the book and the Medical School investigation, Mack chose to decline most journalists’ requests for interviews, subsequently showing a preference for audiences sympathetic to his views. For example, Mack spoke to the 27^th annual MUFON symposium in 1996; a “star wisdom conference” on “exploring contact with the cosmos” in 1998, cohosted by PEER; the “7^th World Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects and Related Phenomena” in 1999, sponsored by an Italian UFOlogy group; and a 2000 conference on “the UFO abduction phenomenon,” sponsored by Budd Hopkins’ Intruders Foundation.

The next post in this series will cover peer reviews of Mack’s abduction research.