In Memoriam: John E. Mack, M.D.

October 4, 1929 - September 27, 2004
By Trish Corbett and Michael Mannion

On Monday evening, September 27, we learned from a close friend of John Mack's that he had been hit by a car and killed in London on his way home from speaking at an exciting meeting about T.E. Lawrence. Initial shock gave way to sorrow. How could this be? He was poised at the beginning of a new period of creativity as a writer and also through the new John E. Mack Institute which has just been launched.

Beginning in 1998, we worked with John closely over a three-year period and continued our involvement with him in the years that followed on a number of individual events. We were honored when he agreed to speak at our first Mindshift conference in September 2003 and hoped to co-create and co-adventure with him for many years to come.

John had a marvelous capacity to be present. As a clinician, his connectedness and caring were deeply expressed and deeply felt by those he worked with. In one of our meetings, we told John about our plan to start The Mindshift Institute and about our central metaphor, "The Trance State." He was tired at the end of a long day but a fire came to his eyes and he sat up straight in his chair. In a strong, serious voice he said, "I'm with you on that. You plant your flag, put forward your truth, and take what comes your way!" Shortly afterwards, he invited us through his Center to give a presentation on The Trance State in Cambridge. His support, guidance and participation in our work meant a great deal to us. At a pivotal moment in both of our lives, John had a powerful, positive and healing influence. We know he had a similar impact on many other women and men.

Soon, the first press reports on the death of our friend and colleague, began to appear. Upon reading some of them, we couldn't help but think of the end of Herman Melville's Billy Budd. Melville presents the reader with a newspaper account of the events that have just transpired in the novella. Although the newspaper account presented in the story profoundly misrepresents both the character of the people involved and the actual events that occurred, Melville writes, "It was doubtless for the most part written in good faith, though the medium, partly rumor, through which the facts must have reached the writer, served to deflect and in part falsify them."

In Melville's fictional account, it is the worldview of the reporter that shapes and distorts the information he provides the readers. Similarly, it is the worldview of those in the mass media today that shapes and often distorts the image of John Mack that they present to readers, listeners and viewers. The impact of worldviews on our conception of reality was a theme John investigated throughout his career, but especially in the last decade. In December 2002, during a visit with him in Cambridge, John told us that he was writing then about "worldviews in collision." The exploration of how one's perceptions affect one's relationships has been a dominant theme in John's work from his early clinical explorations of dreams, nightmares and teen suicide, through his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) to his controversial work on the nature of human encounters with nonhuman intelligences.

John found that these recurrent encounters dramatically affected the worldviews of the 200 women and men with whom he worked. For example, many developed a heightened sense of spirituality and environmental concern. He focused on the spiritual or transformational aspects of people's extraordinary experiences and suggested that the alien contact itself may be more spiritual than physical in nature. This set him apart, not only from mainstream science and society, but also from many who investigated the same anomalous phenomena.

One of the goals of the new John E. Mack Institute is to "honor his courageous examination of human experiences, and his landmark explorations of the ways in which perceptions and beliefs about reality shape the human condition." Let's hope that those who benefited from their relationships with John Mack honor his courageous efforts by moving forward with their own positive contributions with the great spirit that John manifested during his life here on Earth.

He was a wonderful man and we miss him.



Trish Corbett and Michael Mannion

The Mindshift Institute


John E. Mack, M.D. (1929-2004)

Welcome to Alien Abduction Help
a supportive environment for abductees and contactees
experiencing the alien abduction phenomenon.
Including interactive communication, relevant literature
and, yes, even comics.

Mack, John E. (1993). The Alien Abduction Phenomenon.
Venture Inward: the magazine of the Association for Research and Enlightenment
and The Edgar Cayce Foundation. Volume 9. Number 2.

Summary: Bonnie Jean Hamilton, a life long alien abductee (or contactee) introduced the controversial subject of alien abduction to The Edgar Cayce Foundation in 1989. An interview was conducted in 1990 by Lin Cochran when Bonnie was only 21 years old. Dr. John Mack then investigated the phenomenon and wrote this article for Venture Inward magazine and The Edgar Cayce Foundation in 1993, the month prior to Bonnie's appearance in the magazine ("Star People"). These events led to the first UFO Conference ever held at the Association for Research and Enlightenment (The Edgar Cayce Foundation) in Virginia Beach, Virginia in 1995.

Next

www.alienabductionhelp.com

Copyright © Bonnie Jean Hamilton 2000-2009

John Mack (© 2003 Stuart Conway)

Psychiatrist biographer of T.E. Lawrence with an interest in aliens

Friday, 8 October 2004

John Edward Mack, psychiatrist and writer: born New York 4 October 1929; Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School 1972-2004; married 1959 Sally Stahl (three sons; marriage dissolved 1995); died London 27 September 2004.

John E. Mack was a psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst and a prize-winning biographer of T.E. Lawrence. His later academic career, however, was marred by controversy over his developing interest in aliens from outer space.

His biography of Lawrence, entitled A Prince of Our Disorder, was published in 1976 to rave reviews and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977. He had been attending the T.E. Lawrence Society Symposium in Oxford when, next day in London as he was walking home after dinner, he was struck by a vehicle. He is thought to have died upon impact.

Mack's early career was distinguished in a conventional sort of way. After graduating from Oberlin College in Ohio in 1951, he got a medical degree at Harvard Medical School in 1955, interned at Massachusetts General Hospital, and did a residency in psychiatry at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. He served as an officer in the US Air Force from 1959 to 1961. He trained as a psychoanalyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and also underwent training in child psychiatry and in child psychoanalysis. With all this graduate education and training, "there can't be more than a hundred like him in all America", a colleague wrote in a preface to an early book by Mack.

He joined the Harvard Medical School faculty in 1964 and became Professor of Psychiatry in 1972. He was a keenly devoted psychiatrist with uncanny empathy for a wide range of patients, an empathy that was evident in his weekly, almost hour-long demonstration interviews for trainee psychiatrists. As Assistant Clinical Director of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, he used to strive to see past descriptive psychiatry into the humane-ness, the individuality, the "soul" of each patient.

A resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Mack founded the department of psychiatry at Cambridge Hospital and became chairman in 1969. He was instrumental in the department's affiliation with Harvard Medical School, and continued to lead the department. From 1980 to 1986 he was chairman of the executive committee of the departments of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

An early book, Nightmares and Human Conflict (1970), reviewed the literature on nightmares and night terrors, gave case examples of his own, and offered a theory. He tried to show

not only that nightmares are based on internal conflicts that have generated anxiety in the course of psychosexual development, but also that these internal struggles are intimately associated with external danger situations that threaten the individual currently or have done so in the past. The ego in the nightmare reacts with a kind of anxiety consistent with the perception of intense actual danger threatening survival, that is, as if the threat to the dreamer were absolutely real. It is this quality of vivid and actual threat that perhaps most sharply characterises nightmares.

Mack's biography of Lawrence of Arabia explored the relationship between Lawrence's inner life and his historical activities. It was based on extensive interviews with people who had known Lawrence well, on published and unpublished letters, and on War Office dispatches, among other research. In an interview Mack said that he became

hooked by Lawrence because he was extraordinary for a public figure, a military commander, in the degree to which he was involved with exploring his own inner life. Lawrence himself asked what was propelling him, what was the meaning of what he was doing, what was his own purpose in getting involved with the Arab revolt, how did it relate to his own personal development . . . He had a great gift for psychological insight.

In a preface to a second edition, Mack wrote that what seemed most significant about Lawrence's life was that he was "ahead of his time" in his definition of "political responsibility". Mack saw Lawrence's "odd martyrdom" as a "contemporary version of what is likely to befall a person who takes exaggerated individual moral responsibility in a turbulent political arena".

In a talk at an earlier Lawrence symposium, "T.E. Lawrence's Vision for the Middle East: how does it look now?" (1988), Mack, who was Jewish, said,

Perhaps it is his personal struggle, his self-consciousness about violence, his exaggerated concern for the well-being of each tribal or national group in the Middle East region, which is of particular value for us now.

Writing for The Boston Globe last June, in an article entitled "The Responsible Warrior", Mack compared Lawrence - favourably - to George W. Bush. Mack said:

Behind this extreme and somewhat precocious sense of responsibility - Lawrence had just turned 28 when he began the organisation of the tribes in Arabia and Jordan - was a loathing of what he called "murder war", and he struggled desperately to limit the loss of life. Only as a last resort, he wrote, "we should be compelled to the desperate course of blood and the maxims of 'murder war' . . ."

Mack concluded about the present war in Iraq:

In this terrible moment we are seeing the results of a war prosecuted by a leadership that appears to be singularly lacking in the capacity for doubt, self-questioning, or the acknowledgement of mistakes. We have been plunged into a moral chaos that can only end when saner minds, "man rationale" in T.E. Lawrence's words, can once more assume authority in this nation.

Mack was born into a wealthy family in New York City in 1929. His mother died in his infancy. In the late 1970s, in an attempt to re-experience the grief of her loss, he became involved with a sort of therapy that was popular at the time: est or Erhard Seminar Training. He and the founder, Werner Erhard, became friends, and Mack began to finance est weekend workshops for psychiatrist trainees in his department. He hoped that he could apply est techniques to help the Middle East peace process.

In 1983 Mack founded the Center for Psychology and Social Change, which this year became the John E. Mack Institute. According to the institute's own statement, it "explores the ways in which perceptions and beliefs about reality shape the human condition".

For many years Mack was devoted to doing what he could to lower the threat of nuclear war. In particular he was concerned about the psychological impact of nuclear arms on children. Mack was known to have interpreted psychotic delusions of adult patients presented at case conferences as intelligible responses to their worries over nuclear arms.

The salient interest of John Mack's later life was alien abduction. He believed that "aliens" from higher space-time dimensions are visiting Earth, and that this

phenomenon is occurring in the context of the threat to the earth as a living system, a response to the ecological devastation that our particular species has undertaken.

The aliens are engaged in what he called a "cosmic correction"; they appear to function "as a kind of intermediary between the Source of creation and us, emissaries perhaps of that correction". He believed that our planet

evidently has a place in the larger fabric of meaning and significance in the cosmos, and this one species cannot be allowed to destroy it for its own exploitative purposes.

He said that the alien

encounter experience seems almost like an outreach program from the cosmos to the spiritually impaired.

Mack used hypnosis and other techniques to retrieve "memories" of abductions by aliens. His 1994 book Abductions: human encounters with aliens reported accounts with the revived memories of 13 abductees, and was a best-seller. This led to an inquiry by an embarrassed Harvard Medical School. After a year-long investigation, in which Mack won the support of, among others, Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor best known for his involvement in celebrity trials, the school's ruling body reaffirmed his academic freedom. But it also "urged him not, in any way, to violate the high standards" of the faculty. Undaunted, he then wrote Passport to the Cosmos: human transformation and alien encounters (1999).

John Mack never reported an experience himself of being abducted by aliens. He spent time and slept overnight at sites where previous abductions were alleged to have taken place, in the hope of being abducted.

Whatever one thinks of his views about aliens coming to rescue us from ourselves, one must acknowledge his impassioned eloquence on the human predicament:

The extension of a new world view that derives from our experience of the interdependence and interconnectedness of all living things, together with a recognition of the fragility of the earth's ecosystems, will be an important step in the preservation of the planet.

But blowing the traditional Western mind is not enough. Leadership and action on behalf of life and the environment will be required. We will need to take risks and expose our vulnerabilities. Perhaps it has always been so, but I am struck by how many of the political and intellectual leaders I admire for their efforts on behalf of human life have spent time in prison. Facing up to the established order, taking a stand with one's whole being, exposing one's vulnerability, and risking the loss of personal freedom all seem to inspire both leaders and their followers.

Morton Schatzman

It was not T.E. Lawrence the Technicolor man of action who attracted the interest of John Mack, writes Malcolm Brown, but Lawrence the man of troubled conscience and psychological complexity. In short, to use a keynote phrase of his, Lawrence "on the edge", a description which he felt applied also to him.

Crucial to his approach for his 1976 biography were the insights of the American critic Irving Howe who, in an essay on Lawrence published in 1963, wrote:

The hero as he appears in the tangle of modern life is a man struggling with a vision he can neither realise nor abandon, "a man with a load on his mind".

(That last phrase, from a review of Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom by Herbert Read in 1928, was one that had a special resonance for John Mack.)

In Howe's view:

What finally draws one to Lawrence, making him seem not merely an exceptional figure, but a representative man of our century, is his courage and vulnerability in bearing the burden of consciousness.

Significantly it was Howe's description of Lawrence as "a prince of our disorder" that gave Mack the title for his book: a far cry from the trite "Prince of Mecca" or "Uncrowned King of Arabia" labels too often attached to Lawrence in the tabloid headlines of the 1920s.

Yet though, in a sense, he approached Lawrence as a psychological case, he did not do so with any clinical coldness. "I do not claim to be neutral to my subject," he wrote:

I unabashedly regard him as a great man and an important historical figure, and intend in the pages that follow to show how the evidence led to my opinion. But I have sought to suppress nothing that would lead to a contrary view.

A supreme virtue of Mack's honest but persuasive portrayal was that, in the wake of Richard Aldington's destructive assault in the 1950s and Hollywood's hugely popular but flawed glamorisation in the 1960s, he made the life and writings of Lawrence the subject of serious, scholarly enquiry. Lawrence still attracts hero-worshippers and denigrators, as his friends knew he always would, but Lawrence studies now have a secure status that owes much to the scrupulous, rigorous and far-reaching researches of John Mack.

Two weeks ago on a brilliant September morning I took him on a gentle introductory amble through the gracious gardens and quadrangles of St John's College, Oxford. It was here, in my own college, that this year's Symposium of the T.E. Lawrence Society, held biennially, was taking place, Professor Mack having flown over from the US to be its chief guest. He was delighted at seeing the place in its rich autumn hues, and throughout the Symposium he was its undoubted star.

There is tragedy in his sudden exit, which curiously parallels that of his father, himself a distinguished professor though in a different discipline, also killed in a road accident, while changing a wheel.

John E. Mack (October 4, 1929 – September 27, 2004) was a Harvard psychiatrist, a Pulitzer-prize winning author, and an anti-nuclear campaigner who became the leading light in the alien abduction research community. The association with such a controversial topic left him to some degree, despite his intelligence and pedigree, an academic outcast.

History

John Mack received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 1955. He interned at Massachusetts General Hospital and did his residency at Massachusetts Mental Health Center. Mack joined the Harvard Medical School faculty in 1964, becoming professor of psychiatry in 1972. One of John Mack’s key interests was the question of how one's perceptions of the world affected personal development and relationships with others. This fascination is in evidence in his 1977 Pulitzer Prize-winning biographical study of the life of British officer T. E. Lawrence (better known as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’), A Prince of our Disorder.

Another cornerstone of Mack’s own worldview was that we were living in a time of crisis, separated from our spiritual origins by physicalist philosophy. He campaigned actively against nuclear weapons, and took issue with those who would dismiss archaic thinking as a method of curing our ills, saying that the modern era was a time of…

[blockquote]...extraordinary planetary crisis because of our inability to understand what native peoples all over the world understand, which is that there is a very delicate web of life, and that web of life is being destroyed by this species.[/blockquote]

Alien Abduction Research

Mack’s interest in spiritual consciousness led him to undertake Holotropic Breathwork, a technique for expanding consciousness developed by psychelic therapy pioneer Stanislav Grof. Soon after, his interests in altered consciousness, extra-realities, and personal transformation found full expression in his research into the alien abduction experience, which began in 1990 with a study involving 200 men and women who said they had encountered extraterrestrial beings. For not only did the alien abduction phenomenon seem to exist independently of ‘our reality’, it also appeared to have an underlying motivation of alerting us to the peril we are in – certainly a theme which piqued Mack's philosophical interests.

The main thing, for me, has become ‘what does this mean for us?’ that people of sound mind, hundreds of thousands if not millions of people from all over the world…are having what seem like authentic, incontrovertible encounters with some sort of beings that apparently enter into our physical world and communicate to us about ourselves, and seem in some way to be connecting with us.

SB with Dr. John Mack, who made his first presentation at an IFUO Congress.    Budd Hopkins also presented
this year as did Dr. Angela Smith.   The contact/experiencer/abduction research goes forward.
SB's career in the field started out at PEER, which is part of the Center for Psychology and Social Change.

His work drew the attention of the mainstream press in 1994 with the publication of his best-selling book, Abduction. Mack followed this book with another on the subject, five years later, titled Passport to the Cosmos. For John Mack, the alien abduction experience was one that had the promise of opening humanity to "a larger sense of self, of identification with others and with a more cosmic level of being", which would "open us to a sense of the divine and a reverence for life, for nature." He believed that such a shift of consciousness was the only thing to arrest what he described as a "downward spiral of destruction."

Mack did not believe that alien abductions were simply hoaxes, delusions and hallucinations. Based on his work counseling abductees, Mack arrived at the astounding conclusion that this was a phenomenon which was 'real', but which didn't so much have its basis in the physical universe (as per the conclusions of abduction researcher Budd Hopkins) as it did in Henry Corbin's "imaginal realms" – accessible only through a widening of conscious perception. This hypothesis is in stark opposition to the current scientific paradigm, which is based on the mechanistic assumption that consciousness is a by-product of a physical brain. 

Needless to say, such opposition to orthodoxy comes with its price. Mack, a respected Harvard psychiatrist who had previously won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of T.E. Lawrence, was lambasted by his colleagues and even investigated by Harvard – a time which he described as a "15-month ordeal". This despite his eloquent and detailed explanation of his hypothesis that the abduction phenomenon displayed clear patterns indicating some objective 'reality', and was worthy of further research. Mack's real crime was that he challenged the dogma of physicalism. Not that he would have had it any other way, for he believed that it was important that we began to reclaim a science of the soul:

Mack didn't jump to this conclusion lightly. The hypothesis formed itself over several years of counseling abductees, perhaps part of the reason why he didn't seem prepared for the onslaught against him from the orthodoxy – he was, as he puts it, a frog that died in gradually heating water, never noticing the impending danger. He also admits that the proposal of his extraordinary hypothesis took a great deal of challenging of his own materialist scientific and clinical upbringing.

After a fourteen month inquiry, questions began to be raised by the academic community (including Harvard Professor of Law Alan Dershowitz) concerning 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."

Still, Mack welcomed the input of those challenging his hypothesis...

It’s interesting to note that one of John Mack’s friends during the 1970s was Carl Sagan, and in these two identities we see an almost parallel development diverging only on the question of materialism. Both were deeply intelligent and highly articulate men. Amazingly, Sagan won a Pulitzer Prize the year after John Mack won his. And Sagan went on to become a great proponent of the question of extraterrestrial life, just as Mack did. Sagan though, did so within the context of physical organisms to be found while searching the depths of space, while Mack came to believe we were already in dialogue with the aliens here on Earth. Carl Sagan became one of the main references for skeptical societies such as CSICOP, while John Mack became a reference for those in direct opposition to such groups.

John Mack was just a few days from his 75th birthday when he died on September 27, 2004 – not because of his advanced age, but in a tragic accident. Staying in London after being invited to present a talk at the T. E. Lawrence Society Symposium, Mack was struck by an automobile while walking home from dinner with friends.

Some of those close to Mack said that he had become interested in the evidence for ‘survival’ after-death, and alleged communications from those beyond.

John Edward Mack

John Edward Mack, M.D. (October 4, 1929 - September 27, 2004), professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and 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.

Mack received his medical degree from the Harvard Medical School (Cum Laude, 1955) after undergraduate study at Oberlin (Phi Beta Kappa, 1951). He is a graduate of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and is 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 alum William James, and like James, Mack became a controversial figure for his efforts to bridge spirituality and psychiatry.

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 claimed that recurrent alien encounter experiences had affected the way they regarded the world, including a heightened sense of spirituality and environmental concern. 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.

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). After fourteen months of inquiry and amid growing questions from the academic community (including Harvard Professor of Law Alan Dershowitz) regarding the validity of Harvard's investigation of a tenured professor, Harvard 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." He had received legal help from Danniel Sheehan and the support of Laurance Rockefeller, who also funded his Center for four consecutive years [1] (http://www.parascope.com/nb/rockyufo.htm) 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 motorist when walking home from a dinner with friends in London on Monday September 27, 2004.

Trivia

Mack is a student of Grof 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.

JEMI Initiatives
Click to learn more

Human Transformation and Alien Encounter: Passport to the Cosmos

John E. Mack

2006-05-02
A mind expanding book-Top notch!  By: Mark Irish

Dr. Mack is brilliant in this book! He is most interested in how a person's life changes as a result of their anomolous experiences, mainly encounters with other worldly beings. These experiencers seem to have a jump start on the rest of us mortals, in terms of understanding the vastness of which we come from, and which we will return. An excellent book for anyone seeking to get closer to the TRUTH.

John E. Mack, M.D. - Transcending the Dualistic Mind - Pt 1/12

John E Mack about the Dalai Lama's views about UFOs and aliens