John mack children

by Harvey A. Silverglate

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

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 whi