Category: The Boundary Deficit Hypothesis

Boundary theory begins with the axiom that as the mind matures, it categorizes experiences. It walls off certain sets to be distinct from other sets. Boundaries become set up between what is self and what is non-self, between sleep and waking experiences, between fantasy and reality, passion and reason, ego and id, masculine and feminine, and a large host of other experiential categories. This drive to categorize is subject to natural variation. The determinants of the strength of that drive appear to be biochemical and genetic and probably have no environmental component such as trauma. When the drive is weak the boundaries between categories are thinner, more permeable or more fluid. When the boundaries become abnormally thin one sees psychopathologies like schizophrenia. Hartmann discovered […] Read More

The boundary-deficit hypothesis evidently can also be invoked to explain the unusual proportion of artist-type individuals that I discovered in testing Rimmer’s hypothesis. Roughly one-third of abductees showed evidence of artistic self-expression in their backgrounds in my sample population, as you may recall. Hartmann’s study would also lead us to expect an unusual number of psychotherapists among abductees. In a recent paper, Budd Hopkins reported that in a population of 180 probable abductees he found many mental health professionals: two psychiatrists, three Ph.D. psychologists and an unstated number of psychotherapists with Master’s degrees. (12) It would obviously be a child’s play to pick and choose isolated bits of confirming or discordant biographical information from the abductee literature and argue about the fit of Hartmann’s […] Read More

In addition to forming a coherent assembly of the known facts about the psychology of abductees, the boundary-deficit hypothesis is richly testable. Hartmann’s profile offers numerous predictions about the inner world of abductees. Those listed above are just a fraction of the possibilities. If you want to know if missing time derives from a fluid time sense or a fluid memory, you can test people who report this for concomitant phenomena: frequent episodes of deja vu or jamais vu, primal repression dated to two or three years of age as opposed to four or five, days organised according to flexible rather than rigid schedules, future plans lacking specific time frames, and a tendency to not answer questions in a temporally structured pattern. The core […] Read More