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 boundary-deficit profile to various individual cases. It would be a pleasant diversion, but would ultimately not prove much one way or the other given the scanty nature of background information in almost all abduction narratives. I exempt Whitley Strieber’s autobiography from dismissal, however, for it is both detailed and highly revealing.
Strieber’s experiences resound with emotions of powerlessness. He speaks eloquently of the despair, extreme dread, crazed terror and panic inspired by his experience. The incident with the faecal probe is recognizably a pseudo-homosexual rape fantasy of the form discussed in Ovesey’s studies. (13) As the emotions prove, the incident has nothing to do with eroticism but everything to do with the expression of powerlessness. Psychiatrists would predict that Strieber was repressing resentment and hostility from having to be subordinate in an undesired social relationship.
The incident with the mind wand — “You’ll ruin a beautiful mind” — is more interesting since it reflects the childhood fear of the dissolution of self. This was very much on Strieber’s mind at the time. We can see it in his story “Pain” where his narrator dreams of friendly tormentors with a high-powered rifle who he asks to hug him. The core of the narrator’s identity ebbs away and he suffers through the torture of the tearing down of his personality. (14) Strieber’s picture-drama of the world blowing up with horns of smoke streaking out from it similarly bespeaks the fear of dissolution since world destructions commonly precede the onset of psychosis as the mind projects the internal catastrophe into the world at large. (15)
The evidence for thin boundaries in Strieber’s personality is highly convincing. Strieber’s curious assessment that he is “80% convinced” of the reality of his experiences immediately impresses one that his demarcation between reality and fantasy is rather fluid. Strieber’s memory is disturbingly fluid as revealed in his willingness to accept another person’s word that he wasn’t present at the historic bell-tower sniper incident at the University of Texas — an event he elsewhere discusses in gruesome detail. (16) The manner in which he strips away his memory of past anomalies and tosses them out as screen memory fictions covering alien encounters has an almost ghoulish self- mutilation quality like making his identity self-destruct before our eyes.
Strieber is an outsider. This is less indicated by his questioning of Catholic faith than by his seeking spiritual values in witchcraft, mysticism, and Gurdjieff. Strieber’s wife volunteered the opinion that her husband has “a very unique head” and is openly distressed over the vulnerability he manifests at one point. Strieber confessed he contemplated suicide before contacting Budd Hopkins about his fears. Paranoid mentation is clearly evident in his book and has at times led to bizarre speculations. In a radio interview with Tom Snyder, Strieber wondered aloud if a gagster who was selling alien abduction insurance wasn’t a dishonest dupe of Cosmic Watergate because ridicule was a known MO of the UFO cover-up. (17)
Strieber’s encounters with critics consistently show projective hostility and a thin character armor, probably best shown in his pre-emptive strike to Thomas Disch when he found he would be reviewing his book “Communion” for The Nation. Strieber’s success as a writer of horror fiction lastly clinches the argument that he is a boundary-deficit personality.
It is interesting to note, parenthetically, that Strieber also manifests a constellation of traits that object-relations theory explains as resulting from traumas early in childhood when the child is first developing the character armor during the phase of separation and individuation. Prominent among these traits are threats of inner fragmentation like those cited above; primitive emotional defenses including paranoia and, most primitive of all, splitting; archaic narcissistic formations involving grandiosity; inability to integrate the hostile and living aspects of parental introjects; and a tendency to project hostility.
A couple of reviewers of “Communion” were quite confused as to how Strieber failed to be repelled by the prospect of communion with aliens who threatened his beautiful mind and caused such body terror as he described. The answer is found in the trait of splitting which allows the individual to hold contradictory emotional stances and not see the contradiction. Strieber never developed the higher forms of emotional defense found in those with thicker boundaries in adulthood. If Strieber has indeed suffered separation trauma as a child, it is apparent that is why communion is such a central, concern to him. He never resolved the problem of separating his self from his parental object relations. The upshot of all these observations is that Strieber’s alien experiences form a unity with the issues of his unconscious. I am 0% convinced of the objective reality of his abduction. (18)