John E. Mack, 74; Psychiatry Professor Stirred Controversy With His Research

John E. Mack, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, died Monday in an automobile accident in London, according to Will Bueche of the John E. Mack Institute in Cambridge, Mass. Mack, who was 74, was in England to lecture at a conference sponsored by the T. E. Lawrence Society and was hit by a car while walking across the street. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Mack’s “A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence,” a psychological study of the man better known as Lawrence of Arabia, won a Pulitzer in 1977.

Earlier in his career, Mack explored the meaning of dreams and nightmares. He also worked with suicidal teenagers and wrote “Vivienne: The Life and Suicide of an Adolescent Girl” with Holly Hickler (1981).

He was primarily interested in how an individual’s worldview affects relationships. The question was a starting point for his biography of Lawrence, the British Army intelligence officer stationed in Egypt who became devoted to the Arab cause.

“The value of psychology in a biography is that it deepens our appreciation of the inner life of public figures,” Mack later said. “I’ve used psychology to relate the motivations of historical figures to the larger picture.”

After being widely praised for his work on Lawrence, Mack stirred controversy with his clinical studies about people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens. He interviewed several hundred who claimed to have encountered extraterrestrials. He wrote two books on his findings, “Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens” (1994) and “Passport to the Cosmos” (1999).

Mack concluded that the experiences of those who said they had been abducted could have been more spiritual than physical, but they were real nonetheless.

Harvard Medical School launched a formal academic probe into Mack’s controversial work. Fourteen months later, the dean of the school concluded that Mack was free to study what he wanted and to state his opinions. Though his critics at the university claimed he was no longer taken seriously, others saw him as a pioneer in the field of mental health.

“John Mack was regarded as a brilliant thinker who stretched the boundaries of traditional psychiatry,” said Dr. Judith Orloff, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA who was scheduled to lead a workshop with Mack later this month. “John believed that spirituality and faith need to be brought into the practice of psychiatry.”

Born in New York City in 1929, Mack graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1955 and studied at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society. He joined the Harvard faculty in 1964 and became a professor of psychiatry in 1972.

In 1983, he founded the Center for Psychology and Social Change, which was later renamed the John. E. Mack Institute. He wrote 11 books. A documentary about his life and work, “Touched,” was released in 2003.

Mack is survived by three sons and two grandchildren.