By: David Bloomberg
Re: Lifton, 1/2

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 asproper credit is given. REALL also requests that you please send a
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This article represents the opinions of its author, and does not necessarily
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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.

   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.