Obituary Notices, compiled

This page preserves obituary notices from several leading and local newspapers as well as wire reports. Some errors may be present; the text is preserved as it appeared in print.


The Boston Globe
September 29, 2004
Wednesday THIRD EDITION

PULITZER WINNER IS KILLED IN ACCIDENT
By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff

John E. Mack, a Pulitzer Prize- winning author and Harvard Medical School professor whose research on purported extraterrestrial abductions generated widespread publicity and controversy, died Monday in an automobile accident in London. He was 74.

According to Will Bueche, of the John E. Mack Institute in Cambridge, Dr. Mack had been attending a conference in England on T.E. Lawrence. Lawrence is the subject of his psychoanalytic account, "A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence," which won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for biography. Dr. Mack was struck by a car while crossing the street. London police pronounced him dead on the scene.

"He was a restless, highly creative man who was many-sided," said Robert Jay Lifton, the psychiatrist and author, who was a longtime friend of Dr. Mack's. They worked together in the antinuclear movement, a longstanding concern of Dr. Mack's, and in the application of psychological approaches to the study of history.

"He was as sensitive to others' needs as anyone I've known," Lifton said in a telephone interview from his Cape Cod home.

A Cambridge resident, Dr. Mack founded the psychiatric department of Cambridge Hospital. He was certified as a practitioner of both child and adult psychoanalysis. His early research interests in psychology included dreams, nightmares, and teenage suicide.

In 1990, Dr. Mack began his research on people who say they have encountered extraterrestrials. He held that such encounters were real, though probably more spiritual than physical in character. His work drew widespread attention in 1994 with the publication of a best-selling book, "Abduction."

That year, Harvard Medical School appointed a special faculty committee to review Dr. Mack's clinical care and clinical investigation of his subjects. After a 15-month process, the committee declined to take any action against him.

Dr. Mack eventually interviewed some 200 individuals who said they had encounters with extraterrestrials. Although he was subjected to widespread ridicule because of his work, Dr. Mack saw it as a unique opportunity to study spiritual or transformational experience, a theme that ran through much of his earlier work.

"No one has been able to come up with a counter-formulation that explains what's going on," Dr. Mack said in a 1992 Globe interview in which he discussed his view of alien encounters. "But if people can't be convinced that this is real, that's OK. All I want is for people to be convinced that there's something going on here that is not explainable."

He published another book on the subject, "Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters," in 1999.

John Edward Mack was born on Oct. 4, 1929, in New York. His parents were Edward C. Mack and Ruth (Prince) Mack. He earned his bachelor's degree from Oberlin College in 1951 and his medical degree from Harvard in 1955. He was also a graduate of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.

Dr. Mack interned at Massachusetts General Hospital and did his residency at Massachusetts Mental Health Center. He served in the US Air Force from 1959 through 1961, rising to captain.

Joining the Harvard Medical School faculty in 1964, Dr. Mack became professor of psychiatry in 1972. In 1983, he founded the Center for Psychology and Social Change, which this year became the [John E Mack Institute]. He published about 150 scholarly articles. Among the 11 books he wrote or collaborated on are "Nightmares and Human Conflict" (1970) and, with Holly Hickler, "Vivienne: The Life and Suicide of an Adolescent Girl" (1981).

In a 1994 Globe interview, Dr. Mack said, "I have this innocent confidence that if you do your work in a comprehensive and objective way, it stands on its own."

Dr. Mack and his wife, Sally (Stahl) Mack, divorced in 1995. He leaves a sister, Mary Lee Ingbar of Brookline; three sons, Daniel of Boulder, Colo., Kenneth of Almaty, Kazakhstan, and Tony, of Cambridge; and two grandchildren. Funeral arrangements were incomplete.

United Press International
September 29, 2004
Wednesday 9:22 AM Eastern Time

John Mack, Pultizer winner, dies

DATELINE: CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Sept. 29 (UPI)

John E. Mack, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his study of T.E. Lawrence and who researched people reporting encounters with extraterrestrials, has died at age 74.

Mack was a Harvard Medical School professor and the John E. Mack Institute in Cambridge, Mass., released news of his death. Mack was crossing a street in London Monday when he was hit by a car driven by a drunken driver, the institute said in a release. London authorities said Mack was dead at the scene.

Mack was in London for a conference on T.E. Lawrence -- "Lawrence of Arabia." Mack's "A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence" won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1977.

He also interviewed some 200 individuals who said they had had encounters with alien beings. Mack reportedly believed such encounters were real, although perhaps more spiritual than physical, information on the institute Web site stated. That work was berated by other academics, but Mack held that the spiritual or transformational aspects of those alleged encounters gave important psychoanalytic insights.

The New York Times
September 30, 2004 Thursday
Late Edition - Final

Section A; Column 1;
National Desk; Pg. 27
Some editions presented this on p. C14

Dr. John E. Mack, Psychiatrist, Dies at 74

By JENNIFER BAYOT

Dr. John E. Mack, a Pulitzer Prize winner and Harvard psychiatrist who studied people who said they had encounters with alien beings, died in London on Monday. He was 74 and lived in Cambridge, Mass.

Dr. Mack was struck by a driver suspected of being drunk and evidently died on impact, according to the John E. Mack Institute, formerly the Center for Psychology and Social Change.

Dr. Mack was in Britain to speak at a conference on T.E. Lawrence, the British officer known as Lawrence of Arabia. Dr. Mack's book ''A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence'' won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1977.

He was drawn to psychoanalytic analysis of the misunderstood or vulnerable, including children contemplating suicide, teenagers troubled by the threat of nuclear war and finally, people plagued by what they believed to be recurrent alien encounters.

In the 1990's, Dr. Mack studied dozens of people who said they had had such contact with aliens, culminating in his book ''Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens'' in 1994. In it, he focused less on whether aliens were real than on the spiritual effects of perceived encounters, arguing that ''the abduction phenomenon has important philosophical, spiritual and social implications'' for everyone.

The book led Harvard Medical School, where Dr. Mack had been a tenured professor for several years, to appoint a committee to review his research methods and consider censuring him. After 14 months of investigation, it released a statement saying that it ''reaffirmed Dr. Mack's academic freedom to study what he wishes and to state his opinion without impediment.''

His work was the subject of the 2003 documentary film ''Touched,'' made by Laurel Chiten.

John Edward Mack was born in New York on Oct. 4, 1929. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Oberlin College in 1951 and received his medical degree from Harvard in 1955.

He completed his residency at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston before joining the Air Force in 1959 for a two-year tour of duty as a psychiatrist in Japan.

He then received advanced training at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and was certified as a child analyst in 1969.

In the late 1960's, he started the psychiatry unit at the Cambridge Hospital, one of Harvard's teaching hospitals, and was chief of the department from 1969 until 1977.

Early in his career, Dr. Mack focused on the psychology of sleep and dreams. He later became an expert on the psychological effects of the nuclear arms race, writing dozens of scholarly articles and advocating for disarmament. In the 1980's he was academic director of the Center for Psychological Studies in the Nuclear Age.

Dr. Mack started the John E. Mack Institute in 1989 as the Center for Psychology and Social Change, and in 1993 he started the Program for Extraordinary Experience Research with a grant from Laurance Rockefeller.

He was also an assistant editor of The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and was on the editorial board of The American Journal of Psychoanalysis.

He wrote several scholarly books on psychiatry. A second book for general readers, ''Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters,'' was published in 1999.

Dr. Mack's marriage to the former Sally Stahl ended in divorce. Survivors include a sister, Mary Lee Ingbar of Brookline, Mass.; three sons, Daniel, of Boulder, Colo., Kenneth, of Almaty, Kazakhstan, and Tony, of Cambridge; and two grandchildren.

Los Angeles Times
October 2, 2004 Saturday

SECTION: CALIFORNIA; Metro; Metro Desk; Part B; Pg. 19

Obituaries; John E. Mack, 74; Psychiatry Professor Stirred Controversy With His Research

By Mary Rourke, Times Staff Writer

John E. Mack, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, died Monday in an automobile accident in London, according to Will Bueche of the John E. Mack Institute in Cambridge, Mass. Mack, who was 74, was in England to lecture at a conference sponsored by the T. E. Lawrence Society and was hit by a car while walking across the street. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Mack's "A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence," a psychological study of the man better known as Lawrence of Arabia, won a Pulitzer in 1977.

Earlier in his career, Mack explored the meaning of dreams and nightmares. He also worked with suicidal teenagers and wrote "Vivienne: The Life and Suicide of an Adolescent Girl" with Holly Hickler (1981).

He was primarily interested in how an individual's worldview affects relationships. The question was a starting point for his biography of Lawrence, the British Army intelligence officer stationed in Egypt who became devoted to the Arab cause.

"The value of psychology in a biography is that it deepens our appreciation of the inner life of public figures," Mack later said. "I've used psychology to relate the motivations of historical figures to the larger picture."

After being widely praised for his work on Lawrence, Mack stirred controversy with his clinical studies about people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens. He interviewed several hundred who claimed to have encountered extraterrestrials. He wrote two books on his findings, "Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens" (1994) and "Passport to the Cosmos" (1999).

Mack concluded that the experiences of those who said they had been abducted could have been more spiritual than physical, but they were real nonetheless.

Harvard Medical School launched a formal academic probe into Mack's controversial work. Fourteen months later, the dean of the school concluded that Mack was free to study what he wanted and to state his opinions. Though his critics at the university claimed he was no longer taken seriously, others saw him as a pioneer in the field of mental health.

"John Mack was regarded as a brilliant thinker who stretched the boundaries of traditional psychiatry," said Dr. Judith Orloff, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA who was scheduled to lead a workshop with Mack later this month. "John believed that spirituality and faith need to be brought into the practice of psychiatry."

Born in New York City in 1929, Mack graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1955 and studied at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society. He joined the Harvard faculty in 1964 and became a professor of psychiatry in 1972.

In 1983, he founded the Center for Psychology and Social Change, which was later renamed the John. E. Mack Institute. He wrote 11 books. A documentary about his life and work, "Touched," was released in 2003.

Mack is survived by three sons and two grandchildren.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO: JOHN E. MACK: His "A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence" won a Pulitzer Prize in 1977. PHOTOGRAPHER: Copyright Stuart Conway.

Cambridge Chronicle

Prof struck, killed by car

By Amanda McGregor/ Chronicle Staff
Thursday, September 30, 2004

The community is mourning the loss of John E. Mack, Harvard professor and researcher of alien abductions, who was struck and killed by a car in London Monday night.

Mack, 74, who lived on Brattle Street, was a psychiatrist and a Pulitzer-Prize winning author on Lawrence of Arabia. He was speaking at a T.E. Lawrence conference in England at the time of his death. An alleged drunken driver struck Mack as he was crossing a London street, according to Paul Clark at Scotland Yard.

Mack founded the psychiatry department at Cambridge Hospital in the 1960s, according to Alison Harris at the Cambridge Health Alliance, and began teaching at Harvard Medical School in 1972.

He began 20 years ago to extensively interview "experiencers," as he coined them, of alien abductions and study the effects of such encounters.

"Dr. Mack found ... that men and women had been touched by a part of reality they hadn't been prepared for ... and after supportive therapy were able to be more spiritual, deeper people," said Will Bueche of the John E. Mack Institute, Mack's organization dedicated to his research. "He was obviously widely rebuked at first."

Mack, whose home was at the corner of Brattle Street and Mercer Circle, founded in 1983 the Center for Psychology and Social Change at Harvard, which this year became the Mack Center.

"Dr. Mack was known nationally and internationally for his contributions to ... psychiatry," said Dennis Keefe, CEO of the Health Alliance, in a press release issued Tuesday. "He remained very proud of his long association with the city of Cambridge and his students, colleagues and patients at the Cambridge Hospital."

Mack won a Pulitzer Prize in 1977 for his psychoanalytic account of T.E. Lawrence called "A Prince of Our Disorder."

"The seed of [Mack's] life work has always been how one's experience of the world has affected one's perceptions," said Bueche. "As with his study of Lawrence of Arabia, he looked at how experience forces one into living a certain way."

Born in New York in 1929, Mack graduated with a degree in medicine from Harvard in 1955. Mack and his wife, Sally, divorced in 1995. Mack had three sons, one of whom still lives in Cambridge. Funeral arrangements were incomplete as of Wednesday morning.

Correction to above text: paragraph 9 should be replaced with:

"The seed of [Mack's] life work has always been how people can change when their perceptions are broadened," said Bueche. "As with his study of Lawrence of Arabia, where he looked at how appreciation of a new culture can redefine both ourselves and our relationships."

TIME Magazine
10 Oct 2004
Vol.164, No.15, p.27
Section: Milestones

Click to view image of TIME magazine page

The Times (UK)
23 Oct 2004

John Mack

Psychiatrist who baited orthodoxy by embracing accounts of abduction by extraterrestrials

JOHN MACK was an unconventional American academic who applied his expertise in psychiatry to the many aspects of civilisation he found intriguing or wanting. He won the Pulitzer prize for his biography of the soldier and author T. E. Lawrence; for many years he taught as a Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard. His research into what he regarded as the spiritual or transformational effects of claimed alien encounters led him to be seen as a proponent of extraterrestrial life. This and his acceptance of alien abduction won him fame and notoriety in equal measure.

John Edward Mack was born into a prosperous New York German-Jewish family in 1929. His parents were academics. His father was a pointedly secular intellectual who, Mack remembered, would read the Bible to John and his sister “not as the word of God, but as a document of great literary importance for our culture and personal education”. One uncle was a Holocaust survivor who later became an expert in group process and psychotherapy; another was mentally ill and eventually lobotomised — something Mack described as crucial to his own decision to go into psychiatry.

Mack did an undergraduate degree at Oberlin College, Ohio and went on to Harvard Medical School. He married Sally Stahl in 1959 and spent two years in Japan as an Air Force psychiatrist, then completed advanced training at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He was certified as a child analyst in 1969. He returned to Harvard and became a professor of psychiatry in 1972.

His biography of T.E. Lawrence, A Prince of Our Disorder (1977), for which he received the Pulitzer prize, was an example of the wide scope of his interests, his dedication to detail and his willingness to draw on every aspect of his training to produce original accessible scholarship. He interviewed a number of people connected with Lawrence, who, before the publication of Mack’s book, had been described as a woman-hater, asexual and even homosexual. Mack discovered in an interview with the adventurer’s sister-in-law, Janet Laurie that Lawrence had in fact had his heart broken at the age of 21 and never recovered. Lawrence had suddenly and unexpectedly proposed to the beautiful family friend, Miss Laurie, who rejected him for his more dashing older brother.

Mack did not shy away from his own search for self-knowledge, which he realised through less traditional methods as well as through his rigorous academic training. For instance, he practised holotropic breathwork, a technique developed by Stanislav Grof, a pioneer of psychedelic therapy in the 1970s, to bring about a deeper state of consciousness through breathing exercises and evocative music.

This search for self-knowledge led Mack into controversy. He took an active interest in contemporary Middle Eastern politics; he even flew to Lebanon during its civil war to meet Yassir Arafat. He was deeply concerned with the effect of nuclear weapons, and he studied how the fear of a nuclear holocaust affected children. In 1986 he and his family were arrested at the military test site in Nevada, where they were protesting against underground detonations.

Mack believed that there was “an 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”.

This view underpinned the ideas for which he will — perhaps wrongly — be most widely remembered. Mack broke from the academic mainstream when he published Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994), in which he detailed 13 case histories of those who claimed they had been kidnapped and seduced by aliens.

The book was not well received by his peers at Harvard; it precipitated what he called a “15-month ordeal” in which his methods were investigated. Mack felt that if he had simply reported a new “psychiatric syndrome of unknown aetiology” all would have been well. But he was calling for a different interpretation of reality, in effect a broader definition of reality which would accommodate the integration of indigenous peoples’ ideas and the consequences of the claimed experience of alien abduction, which he took very seriously.

“I’m not trying to prove this with physical evidence,” he said. “These abduction accounts are so congruent among healthy people, from all over the United States — people who are not in touch with each other, who have nothing to gain and everything to lose by telling their stories. The only thing I know that behaves like that is real experience, and I am going to continue to try to deepen my understanding.”

Although Mack was open and caring with his patients, his courting of the media was perhaps one reason behind his colleagues’ hostility. Abduction and the follow up, Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters (1999), were works of “popular” science; he appeared on TV and on radio talk shows and gave interviews in the tabloid press. In February 2003 the film Touched appeared — a documentary about his work with those who claimed to have had alien encounters.

Despite the loss of academic credibility, Mack claimed that he was engaged on the most exciting work of his career. He founded the Department of Psychiatry at Cambridge Hospital in Boston and in 1983 he co-founded the Centre of Psychology and Social Change, which was renamed in his honour this year. The centre’s declared aim was to apply the new knowledge emerging from exploration of the way in which “perceptions and beliefs about reality shape the human condition to pressing psychological, spiritual and cultural issues.”

Mack was an assistant editor of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and was on the editorial board of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis. He wrote or co-wrote ten books, including the classic psychiatric text Nightmares and Human Conflict, as well as writing 150 scholarly articles.

His interest in Lawrence remained, and it was after speaking at a T. E. Lawrence Society Symposium in Oxford that he was struck by a car and killed. He and his wife were divorced in 1995. His three sons survive him.

John Mack, psychiatrist, was born on October 4, 1929. He died on September 27, 2004, aged 74.

The Boston Phoenix
Issue Date:
November 19 - 25, 2004
p. 24, Freedom Watch

Mack, the life

In snubbing professor John Mack’s memorial, ‘official Harvard’ testifies to the power of his brilliant unconventionality

BY HARVEY A. SILVERGLATE

UNSURPRISINGLY, nobody from "official Harvard" — the administration of Harvard University or of its Medical School — took the podium in Memorial Church last Saturday to give Dr. John Mack the kind of sendoff that this remarkable human being deserved. Oh, plenty of people eulogized the man for his path-breaking work as psychoanalyst, community psychiatrist, humanitarian, medical and political activist, anti-nuke and anti-war organizer, and Pulitzer Prize–winning author (for his remarkable 1976 psychoanalytic biography of T.E. Lawrence, a/k/a Lawrence of Arabia). Some even mentioned the adventurer-clinician’s most-controversial research into mysterious phenomena such as alien abductions and communications with the dead. But other than the Reverend Peter Gomes, who presided over the service and thus indicated the esteem in which Dr. Mack was held by Harvard’s head clergyman, no one formally represented the university Mack had served with distinction for four decades.

It’s no wonder official Harvard absented itself from Mack’s leave-taking, given what it had put him through in the mid ’90s. At that time, Harvard Medical School convened a committee to review Dr. Mack’s work, stacked it with his detractors, and tried to withdraw his tenure — something unprecedented in the university’s 368-year history. The university ultimately retreated in defeat in 1995, but the ugly incident hovered in the background of the memorial service for this very un-Harvard sort of genius, who died after being hit by a drunk driver in London in late September, at age 74.

DR. MACK HAD an extraordinary career marked by outside-the-box thinking even before he became interested, in 1990, in the growing body of reports by seemingly sane people who claimed they’d had encounters with alien beings. In the 1960s, he started the modern psychiatry department at Cambridge City Hospital, which became one of the nation’s most respected facilities for treating troubled children. In 1983, at Harvard, he founded the Center for Psychology and Social Change, which was recently renamed the Mack Center. Much of his pioneering research was done under the umbrella of the John E. Mack Institute, funded largely by Laurance Rockefeller, grandson of the great oil tycoon. Mack became deeply involved in the movement to rid humanity of nuclear arms, making numerous visits to the world’s nuclear powers. Because of his substantial role in the work of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, he was invited to Oslo in 1985, when the organization won the Nobel Peace Prize. His was a full and useful life well-lived.

The sheer range of Dr. Mack’s intellectual interests and accomplishments may have played a big part in his trouble with Harvard. It started in June 1994, when Medical School dean Daniel Tosteson appointed emeritus professor Arnold Relman, known for his conservative — indeed, rigid — views on medicine and medical research, to head an administrative committee to investigate Dr. Mack’s research. This came shortly after Mack published Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens (Scribner’s, 1994), in which he analyzed case studies of people who reported experiences with apparent extraterrestrials. Rather than assume the subjects — called "experiencers" — were hallucinating or otherwise insane, Mack concluded that the reports were so widespread and had such a profound impact on the lives of the experiencers that possibly they were reporting a phenomenon that deserved credence. In order to take it seriously, he pointed out in his introduction to the book, one has to try to "participate in a universe or universes that are filled with intelligences from which we have cut ourselves off, having lost the senses by which we might know them." He called for a new paradigm to replace, or at least supplement, the narrow "materialist" scientific method by which Western scientists try to understand the physical world and universe. He suggested, in other words, a new way of looking at reality and of understanding not only the physical but also the spiritual world. In this sense, Mack worked very much in the tradition of one of Harvard’s greatest psychologist-philosophers, William James.

But Harvard’s narrower — and narrow-minded — thinkers looked at Mack’s approach as violating the medical school’s professional-research standards (although in fact it was their world-view that he challenged). Given the opportunity either to renounce his views or to resign from the faculty, Mack instead fought a bitter battle with a committee that was obviously stacked against him. The committee’s report was scathing in its critique of Mack, ignoring virtually everything that he and his lead lawyer, Boston litigator Roderick MacLeish Jr., had produced not only to support his work and his successful clinical results, but to highlight his right, under principles of academic freedom, to continue his research unhindered by the university. (Disclosure: I served as an informal legal adviser to Mack at the time.)

Several months after the investigative committee commenced its work, which would ultimately take 15 months, word of this extraordinary inquisition leaked out and spread like wildfire on the then-fledgling medium of the Internet. In some academic and legal circles, Harvard’s investigation was viewed not as an effort to uphold intellectual standards of excellence and accuracy, but as something rooted in fear, ignorance, or jealousy of Mack’s pursuit of questions that more rigid minds could not or would not comprehend.

The tug-of-war ended not with a bang but a whimper in July 1995, when Dean Tosteson called Mack into his office, had a friendly chat, and handed him a letter urging him to use care in his research but reaffirming Mack’s right, under academic freedom, to pursue whatever subjects he wished. What began as an effort to quietly strip Dr. Mack of his tenure and dismiss him from the medical-school faculty (although Harvard denied that was its intent) ended with a highly public victory for the intended victim.

MACK’S BATTLE with Harvard came up repeatedly but obliquely at the memorial service. Mu Soeng, a Buddhist scholar and practitioner who led the assembly in a Buddhist chant, called his friend "a very remarkable human being" who was "part of the Harvard establishment" but who had the ability to "step outside of it." Mack’s son, Daniel John Mack, praised his father’s openness to new world-views and modalities of treatment, "even at risk to his reputation." The famed psychiatrist (now on the Harvard Medical School faculty) and writer Robert Jay Lifton, a Mack comrade from the anti-nuclear movement, hailed his friend’s "arcane explorations of consciousness." Poet, lawyer, and essayist Michael Blumenthal, who was a close friend, noted that "some sought to mock and persecute John Mack for his goodness." Harvard faculty colleague and friend Edward Khantzian referred to the "controversial directions" in which Mack’s interests had taken him, and reported, to the knowing laughter of the audience, that 10 days before Mack died he told Khantzian: "If anybody asks, tell them I’m not crazy." A Mack in-law, Jon Ingbar, quipped that "if John had been more careful, he would have allowed his day job [at Harvard Medical School] to act as a cover for his real interests." Raymond Mayo-Smith, educator and board member of the John E. Mack Institute, noted that Mack approached "with an open mind" those who reported alien abductions or communications with the dead — phenomena, he added pointedly, that "took courage" to explore. "How did he come through the stress of those times?" asked Mayo-Smith rhetorically. "He came through it stronger." Those in the audience who knew Mack’s history with the Tosteson/Relman Committee understood full well it took real courage for him to fight rather than quietly accept a deal to renounce his controversial work.

People had come to the event to praise John Mack, not to bury Harvard University. But it was noteworthy that nobody from official Harvard offered a eulogy for this remarkable, accomplished, long-time member of the faculty. "Harvard" is quite capable of snubbing even the greatest minds if they don’t play the Harvard academic game. In Mack’s case, the enlistment of that ignoble tradition was compounded by Harvard’s own embarrassing defeat by this man, who challenged its narrow thinking about the nature of knowledge itself.

Then again, Harvard’s snub might have a much simpler explanation — one that also accounts for its decision to go after Mack’s tenure in the first place — namely, professional jealousy. Most members of the Harvard Medical School, while renowned as medical researchers and practitioners, in the end make a rather modest splash in the ocean of life. This is especially true of psychoanalysts who, like Mack, came out of the conservative Freudian movement and the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. They do not start community psychiatric centers for disturbed kids, and distinguished research institutes that explore fields of knowledge others fear to tread. They do not write Pulitzer Prize–winning books and help start Nobel Prize–winning organizations seeking to save the planet from nuclear holocaust. They do not, in other words, shake up their world. Official Harvard, with its $22 billion endowment, looked pretty small last Saturday amid the large crowd of admirers who came to pay their respects to a great and large man.

Harvey A. Silverglate is a regular contributor to "Freedom Watch"

©2004 Harvey A. Silverglate

Note from this website: Silverglate's essay is presented despite what seems to be a basic error about the reason for the absence of an official Harvard spokesperson at John Mack's memorial; the actual reason being that John Mack's family personally selected the eleven speakers. While some opponents may well remain at Harvard, as recently as a month before his passing Dr Mack had been meeting with many Cambridge Health Alliance personnel (a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School) and had noticed a welcoming tone. “How much the shift relates to a changed perception of me personally, work Domi and the rest of us have done about getting our work out into the community's awareness, socio / medico / economic changes in the culture etc. is hard to sort out,” he wrote in an internal memo to his friends at the John E. Mack Institute, noting optimistically “What I would like to stress is that none of this took a lot of time or effort on my part--it just sort of happened naturally.”