Niall Boyce, editor of
The Lancet Psychiatry, noted that the reaction of Mack’s colleagues was decidedly negative, with many puzzled by the fact that someone they considered intelligent, affable, and so eminently reasonable could go down the proverbial rabbit hole. Boyce, however, has tried to understand Mack’s turn more sympathetically than critics, dubbing him “
the psychiatrist who wanted to believe.” “The book [
Abduction],” Boyce argues, “speaks of a man easily touched by others’ emotions—indeed, a man whose perception of others’ emotional sincerity led to a belief in the reality of the experiences they described.” Mack was, therefore, “wrong for the best of reasons, and with the best of intentions.” Mack’s tragic flaw then, according to Boyce, was his failure to effectively navigate the boundaries separating the sympathetic from the critical facets of the therapeutic relationship.
2
Boyce is correct that Mack’s “going native” exposed the tension between, on the one hand, the healer’s desire and need to provide comfort and, on the other, the importance of providing a critical voice and expert counterweight. It could be argued that this tension has only grown more recently as clinicians’ methods have become more firmly tied to scientific data.
That said, the question of just how far “native”—and here I use the term adjectivally, synonymous with the term “indigenous”—one may acceptably go as a professional scholar, teacher, or counselor is hardly unique to psychiatry and psychotherapy. Similar to Mack, for instance, former Temple University Professor of History David Jacobs, after writing a well-received book on the
history of the UFO phenomenon in the US,
3 eventually came to the view that extraterrestrials were in fact kidnapping human beings as part of a plot to breed human-alien hybrids and became a hypnotherapist and advocate for
self-identified abductees.
4
The issue of how far a professional may legitimately go in allying and empathizing with his or her subjects extends well beyond UFOs and aliens. Sociologist Erich Goode, for instance, has chronicled prominent cases—controversially including his own—in which social scientists have had sexual relations with informants.5 And, anthropologists widely rejected the work of Carlos Castaneda, a PhD in anthropology, after he adopted and became a vocal advocate for a form of Yaqui Indian shamanism.6
In fact, especially over the past 2 decades, anthropologists have dedicated significant time and space debating the proper limits of “going native.” Ethnography’s laudable insistence on seeing the world through the eyes of informants has historically led anthropologists to require that researchers live within the communities being studied and to learn and adopt members’ lifestyles.7 Scholars, however, have warned that if taken too far, “engaged anthropology” can help perpetuate stereotypes and trivialize indigenous lifeways and may give the researcher the false impression that he has fully captured the authentic experience of the other.8,9 Rather than attempting to know and represent some imaginary pristine, authentic way of life, critics suggest that anthropologists would be better served aspiring to sincerity—ie, acting in good faith to establish a rapport with their subjects while acknowledging their different respective positions.
Seen from the perspective of anthropology, it is possible to understand Mack’s instance of “going native” along lines that expand on the argument of Niall Boyce. It was not simply that Mack sympathized too deeply with his patients’ suffering. If we take him literally at his word, Mack’s well-intentioned desire to listen sincerely to his patients eventually led him to see in their experiences a form of lost authenticity, one he believed capable and worthy of capturing. His deeply held belief that the modern world was fraught with lethally destructive and self-destructive impulses that might be eradicated by redemptive extraterrestrial intelligences was one shared by a great many of those historically involved in the UFO and alien contact communities.10 His involvement with self-identifying alien abductees, therefore, was about more than the force of his professional concerns about his patients; it was also about the force of his political convictions—convictions he had in common with those he hoped to help.
