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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.
Books by John E Mack
External Links
The John E. Mack
Institute
Dr. Mack believes that we must become galactic citizens
Obituaries and media reports of Mack's death
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