cont...
It's in a section titled "The Deracinated Self." Lifton essentially
considers alien abduction experiences part of the dissociative
constellation of psychological byproducts of our rapidly changing times.
The current era is "an age of numbing" that has left the Self detached and
disaffiliated from the outside world. It displays impaired symbolization
with a marked separation of thought from feeling. He cites a paper on
multiple personality disorder that considers the abduction experience a
"mythic version of childhood abuse."
This is not exactly the same as calling it a "space-age psychosis," but
there a radical presumption here of pathology that mirrors the skeptic in
Intruders. Both share the suspicion that this is fallout of the times we
are living in; for Lifton, however, the dissociation started decades before
Sputnik and Apollo. Curiously, Lifton is proposing a pathology that seems
more disturbing than the explanations proposed by most of the debunkers and
psychosocial adherents on record. Ironic indeed, when you consider Lifton
was being pointed to as an authority demonstrating how wrong-headed the
skeptics were in thinking abductees shouldn't be believed. Turnabout being
fair play, shouldn't we now wonder if Lifton's stance represents a
milestone in a heretofore silent counter-revolution pointing to ordinary
causes and a potentially boring outcome of this program of investigation?
I'd counsel against it. Frankly, Lifton's stance shows no deep acquaintance
with the abduction phenomenon. It is rooted entirely in a paper by Nicholas
Humphrey and Daniel C. Dennett titled "Speaking for Our Selves: An
Assessment of Multiple Personality Disorder" (Occasional Paper # 8, Center
on Violence and Human Survival, John Jay College of Criminal Justice: The
City University of New York). The paper is a philosophical meditation on
the multiple personality problem rooted in interviews with multiples and
their therapists. The authors deal with the abduction myth in only one
paragraph in a section explicitly admitted to be random speculation. Here
it is in its entirety:
     In contemporary America, many hundreds of people claim to have
     been abducted by aliens from UFO's. The abduction experience is
     not recognized as such at first, and is described instead as
     "missing time" for which the person has no memories. Under
     hypnosis, however, the subject typically recalls having been
     kidnapped by humanoid creatures who did harmful things --
     typically involving some kind of sex-related surgical operation
     (for example, sharp objects being thrust into the vagina). Are
     these people recounting a mythic version of an actual childhood
     experience? During the period described as missing time, was
     another personality in charge -- a personality for whom the
     experience of abuse was all too real?
No interviews with abductees are cited and their knowledge of abduction
lore can only be termed as hearsay in form. They are asking questions, not
arguing positions. As it happens there are known cases of abductees with
multiple personality disorder, but if anyone has come forward to reveal an
alien-ascribed missing time was confused with a personality shift in which
the person was doing things with other people, it hasn't been mentioned.
The involvement of childhood abuse was noted by several workers, notably
Kenneth Ring and Susan Marie Powers, but the linking of specific motifs to
documented episodes of abuse has yet to be demonstrated. There are good
reasons to be cautious in accepting this as a blanket explanation. Dreams
and fantasies tend to be more closely related to ongoing mental conflicts
in the individual rather than his early life. Some of D. Scott Rogo's work
is more supportive of this life crisis view of abductions. Early abuse may
only predispose the person to paranoid styles of expectation and
interpretation in a vague way. The specific motifs may be borrowed from a
variety of sources; lore about other abductees, distorted memory residues
from earlier in the day, movies, TV, creative imagining, and the vast pool
of transpersonal imagery we ascribe to the human unconscious. Recall the
material Stanislav Grof described in his LSD studies.
What is amusing here is not so much that Lifton was wrong, but that he
didn't care enough about the abduction phenomenon to give it more than a
few seconds thought. Lifton, after all, was truly into bigger business.
Protean adaptations are something all of us encounter in people we know,
perhaps even in ourselves. Abductees are a fringe phenomenon which matter
to a tiny percentage of people. Contrary to the visionary in Intruders, he
blatantly doesn't consider them the most significant development in man's
history. They rate half a paragraph, which sounds about right for a Yale
man. I can certainly respect that.
I wonder though whether ufologists will appreciate what it means.
      [Writer Martin Kottmeyer writes frequently for The REALL News.]
                   --------------------------------------
                       Excerpt from The Protean Self
Editor's note: The following is full text of the paragraph that Kottmeyer
referred in Lifton's latest book:
     Historical forces may also be contributing to a dissociative
     constellation that includes: multiple personality and borderline
     states as clinical syndromes; a general increase in child abuse,
     especially sexual, and particularly by parents and other
     relatives; and a very different social manifestation, the
     dramatic expansion of the UFO (unidentified flying object)
     phenomenon in the form of sightings and descriptions of "missing
     time" attributed to "abductions" by extraterrestrial creatures.
     There is at least the possibility that these three elements are
     interrelated. Nicholas Humphrey and Daniel Dennett raise the
     possibility that much of the UFO experience, particularly its
     component of medical or surgical procedures ostensibly performed
     on abductees by humanoid creatures, could be a "mythic version"
     of actual child abuse. There is some evidence of increased
     incidence of child abuse in people reporting such abductions; but
     even if this correlation is uncertain, all of these states and
     our ways of talking about them could be greatly influenced by the
     vast dissociative trend in our time. Also related to the
     dissociative constellation could be the massive expansion of cult
     formation and of contemporary fundamentalism; and the increasing
     evidence of a "false memory syndrome," in which accusations of
     early parental abuse are made by adult children on the basis of
     claimed recovery of memories that had ostensibly been repressed
     for decades, the memories sometimes including satanic rituals --
     the entire sequence considerably influenced by therapists and
     support groups focused on such repressed memories.
- Robert J. Lifton, The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of
Fragmentation. New York: BasicBooks, pp. 210-11.
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