The following is an article from the July '95 (Vol. 3, #7) issue of The
REALL News.  It may be reprinted by other skeptics organizations as long as
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                         "We've All Studied Lifton"
                            by Martin Kottmeyer
"Don't be afraid to believe. This is the most significant development in
the history of man." The words are those of a visionary, the newest
defender of the reality of alien abductions. He is a psychiatrist
addressing a group of colleagues. They aren't buying it.
"With all due respect, doctor. Everyone knows there are people who
gravitate to this kind of thing. They read about it, see it on TV, in the
movies. This is the pathology of a space-age psychosis. People don't see
the Virgin Mary anymore -- now they see alien baby snatchers."
The psychiatrist is prepared. "Robert Lifton's work on survivors -- we've
all studied Lifton -- the people that he writes about -- the survivors of
Hiroshima, the Holocaust, Vietnam -- they all have the exact same symptoms
as the people I've told you about; fear, anxiety, nightmares, suspicion --
suspicion especially of the mental health community who consistently
misdiagnose them. These are reactions to real trauma. There's no fantasy
here."
The exchange is from the 1992 mini-series Intruders. The visionary and
skeptic are fictional, but the argument is familiar enough. John Mack, the
Harvard psychiatry professor who authored the controversial book Abduction
was not the inspiration for the Richard Creena character, but the writer
admitted it "ends up being more like John Mack than anybody." Mack said it
was kind of spooky how things in it happened to him, notably the
credibility questions. People in the production had sat in on his therapy
groups. One can find Lifton's name in the acknowledgments of Mack's book.
This was not the first time that Lifton's name had been invoked by
defenders of the abduction phenomenon. Editorializing in the
January/February 1987 International UFO Reporter Jerome Clark observed, "A
milestone of sorts may have been reached on April 10, 1987, when Dr. Robert
J. Lifton, one of this country's most prominent psychiatrists, acknowledged
on NBC's Today Show that the UFO abduction phenomenon has yet to be
explained and merits serious investigation." In the October 1988 Fate, he
regarded Lifton's statement as emblematic evidence of "a quiet revolution"
that had taken place as scientific, medical-health professionals displayed
a growing involvement, believing the evidence pointed toward "an
extraordinary cause" and "a potentially explosive payoff." Elsewhere, he
also thought it indicated abductions constituted now "a subject that could
be discussed seriously outside the pages of tabloids." (J. Gordon Melton's
New Age Encyclopedia, Gale Research, 1990, p. 473.)
An instructor at Yale, Lifton has unambiguously high status. He authored
Death in Life, an often cited study of the psychological aftermath of
Hiroshima. It won the National Book Award in the Sciences and has had
enduring respect among people in the social sciences. Even his most
derisive critic, Adam Garfinkel, who lumps Lifton with Mack as
Psycholeftists for their anti-nuclear politics, grants he is a serious
writer whose "views, unlike Mack's, haven't departed from prevailing
notions of reality, at least not yet." Maybe not the highest praise, but
you should have seen the rest of the article. ("Psychobabble and Its
Discontents" Heterodoxy,)
I missed Lifton's appearance on the Today Show and have to admit I didn't
quite know what to make of this purported milestone. There were no direct
quotes and no details. It might have been tact or deferring to the Slater
study based on a casual reading. How deeply into the subject he was could
only be termed unknown. I was curious about it in an idle way since I had
read Death in Life and knew he once regarded alien invasion films as a
reaction to the radical impairment of life-death balance and helplessness
spawned by the threat of nuclear annihilation. Japan had made a number of
such films in the Fifties. So, too, did America. Why he should think any
differently about the persecution fantasies of UFO believers didn't quite
make sense. I guessed it would only be a matter of time before he wrote a
paper or book on the matter. Time passed; nothing appeared. I forgot about
it.
Then, recently, I learned there was a sequel of sorts. Lifton had written a
book six years later called The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of
Fragmentation (BasicBooks, 1993). The book is a descriptive enterprise
which details the psychological adaptations that part of humanity has
created to deal with the amazing cultural transformations of the 20th
century. It's a good, solid work which strikes a fair balance with regard
to the implications of these adaptations. Neither utopian or dystopian,
it's a refreshing change of pace from the general run of psychological
tomes one encounters. Quietly waiting to be found is half a paragraph
devoted to the alien abduction phenomenon.
cont...
--- msgedsq 2.0.5
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