Dr. David Jacobs has just posted a response to charges leveled by Emma Woods (or at least I just now noticed it). I found it on the George Knapp section via the Coast To Coast iPhone web app, strangely enough, which I almost never use. I don't follow the abduction subject in its current context and no longer have much of an interest in it. I'm not a party to any particular group advocating any specific approach to it. But the Emma Woods story is compelling on many levels, particularly as it illustrates (in my opinion) an apparent abuse of power by someone with the cloak of academic authority.
The gist of Dr. Jacobs self-defense can be summed up as: "Emma Woods is a very unstable individual who acted in a bizarre manner and who attacked me. She is probably mentally ill."
Of course, the paucity of this self-defense is apparent to any fair observer, as it was made by a person of some authority in academia (and in the intellectually incestuous world of UFOlogy) who stepped outside of his role as "oral historian" and humble reporter for the "Daily Planet" and became, instead, a super psychiatric therapist who quickly found himself out of his depth in dealing with very complex behavior. I've been there; I know the temptations, and I know the dangers. And I know that as someone who is barely qualified to deal with my own conscious problems, I might be tempted to think that I can help someone else navigate the truly scary world of the unconscious realm--but I cannot. Dr. Jacobs should have realized this immediately and acted appropriately. And that, in my opinion, is the bottom line of the Emma Woods story.
In a side note, I have dealt with someone who I believe suffered from borderline personality disorder. BPD is, from what I can surmise, a diagnosis in some debate among therapists. But as a pattern of behaviors, it seems well-defined to me. The person that I was involved with was online, so the "dealing with" aspect of it was very difficult. During the course of this involvement I researched BPD extensively and, after months of turmoil, found the tools that allowed me to break out of what was a very intense and destructive relationship. I, however, was not trying to be a therapist, and aside from the intensive negative feedback loop of the relationship, I don't see anything about Emma Woods' behavior to suggest Borderline Personality Disorder. Instead, my gut sense is that she is behaving as someone who has been repeatedly traumatized by something--the nature of which is unknown, and perhaps unknowable.
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