In the 1960’s and 70’’s the idea gained popularity among some nontraditional mental health therapists that the recall of past lives could be therapeutically beneficial. Dr. Winafred Blake Lucas in her brief history of what has become the past lives therapy movement, Regression Therapy: A Handbook for Professionals, traces its origin back to Freud and his innovative idea that making the unconscious conscious would restore choice and bring healing. More directly relevant was the increasing acceptance of Jung’s view that human nature has a spiritual aspect and that there are universal psycho-spiritual patterns (archetypes) that underlie personality. Stanislav Grof, as we’ve seen, reported extensive clinical work using LSD assisted psychotherapy during which patients surfaced birth, pre-birth, and, in a few cases, past life memories as part of their therapeutic process.
In the 1950’s and 60’s British psychiatrist Denys Kelsey while using hypnosis to regress patients to early childhood discovered, as had other therapists, that his patients also reported memories of birth and pre-natal experiences. Through this work Kelsey came to believe that people must have some element that is capable of functioning and recording events even in the absence of a physical body. Around this time he became associated with and subsequently married Joan Grant who had authored popular books discussing memories of her own past lives. Kelsey began to include past lives in much of his therapeutic work, and in 1967 became one of the first professional clinicians to describe the therapeutic retrieval of past life memories in a book, co-authored with Grant, Many Lifetimes. The 1975 publication by Raymond Moody of Life After Life provided a great stimulus for this work by appearing to suggest that we do not cease to exist because our bodies die. Lucas notes that “this finding, in one breathtaking leap, confirmed the assumptions of regression therapists about the ongoing nature of existence and reinforced the description of the transition after death as it had consistently been reported in regression work. (Lucas, p. 19)
Interest in past lives and past lives therapy grew rapidly in the 1970’s. Three very influential books by psychologists were published in 1978, Reliving Past Lives by Helen Wambach, Past Lives Therapy by Morris Netherton, and You Have Been Here Before by Edith Fiore. Wambach, primarily a researcher, conducted past-life regressions with groups of hypnotized volunteers, after which they completed questionnaires about what they recalled. From 1,088 responses obtained by this method Wambaugh gathered a large amount of material about the lives, customs, and clothing of various time periods. In analyzing her data she found that the details of clothing and shoes worn and other domestic details were surprisingly accurate and not simply the product of fantasy.
Fiore, a clinically trained hypnotist like Kelsey, first encountered past life memories in the process of age regression. The exploration of past life memories by her patients appeared to be so effective in relieving psychological symptoms that she changed the focus of her clinical practice to emphasize past life work. Netherton developed an approach to past life work that did not involve hypnosis but rather what he called bridging. On the basis of the success of this method he established a training program for past life therapists, which he subsequently conducted around the world.
Brian Weiss
At around this same time psychiatrist Brian Weiss discovered past life therapy, which he first described in his 1988 book Many Lives Many Masters. His work is particularly important because of his impressive credentials and deserves to be described more fully. Brian Weiss graduated from Columbia University and received his medical degree from the Yale University School of Medicine where he was also chief resident in psychiatry. He went on to teach at several prestigious university medical schools and published over forty scientific papers in such fields as psychopharmacology, brain chemistry, and various mental disorders. He describes himself at that time as “left-brained, obsessive-compulsive, and completely skeptical of ‘unscientific’ fields such as parapsychology. He said he “didn’t know anything about the concept of past lives or reincarnation, nor did I want to.” (Weiss, pp. 17 – 18)
Shortly after he had become Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach, Florida, in 1981 a patient he calls Catherine was referred to him due to suffering from fears, phobias, recurrent nightmares, and paralyzing panic attacks. She had experienced these symptoms for years, and they were becoming worse. Catherine had been in conventional psychotherapy for more than a year, but it didn’t help. Because she had a chronic fear of gagging and choking she wouldn’t take medications which Weiss would normally have prescribed. He suggested hypnosis that he believed would help her recall childhood memories and the repressed or forgotten traumas that he thought must be causing her current symptoms. Among other memories she recalled being pushed from a diving board and choking in the water and being frightened by the gas mask placed on her face in a dentist’s office. More serious still, she remembered being fondled by her alcoholic father when she was three years old and having his hand held over her mouth to keep her quiet. Weiss was sure that now having this material surface she would get better. However, this didn’t happen. Perhaps, he thought, there were still deeper traumatic memories.
In her next session a week later he inadvertently gave her the open-ended instruction to go back to the time her symptoms arose. Rather than returning to her early childhood, to his amazement Catherine started recalling details from a lifetime some four thousand years earlier in the Near East. She described herself with a different name, face, and body, and her clothes and everyday items were from that time. She also recalled a number of events leading up to her death when she drowned in a flood as her baby was torn from her arms by the strength of the water. Immediately after this she found herself floating above her body. Catherine also remembered two other lifetimes, one as a Greek woman a few centuries later and another as a Spanish prostitute in the eighteenth century.
Weiss was skeptical as he had hypnotized hundreds of patients over the years and had never encountered anything like this. He knew that from his experience with her in therapy she wasn’t psychotic, didn’t hallucinate, didn’t experience multiple personalities, and wasn’t particularly suggestible. His only explanation was that these apparent memories must have consisted of some kind of fantasy or dreamlike material. However, surprisingly, Catherine’s symptoms began to improve dramatically, which wouldn’t happen if that were the case. With more weekly hypnotic sessions during which she recalled other past lives, her formerly intractable symptoms continued to disappear.
In her fourth or fifth hypnosis session after reliving a death in an ancient lifetime Catherine floated above her body and was drawn to a spiritual light that she always encountered in the in-between-lifetimes state. Catherine then, in a husky voice, said that she was being told there are many gods, for God is in each of us. She told Weiss that his father was there along with his son who was a small child. His father said Weiss would know him because his name was Avrom and that his daughter was named after him. His death was due to his heart. His son also had a fatal heart defect, dying soon after birth because ‘his heart was backward like a chicken’s.’ Weiss was shocked. What she said was completely accurate, yet Catherine knew virtually nothing about his family or personal history. His firstborn son only lived 23 days, dying of an extremely rare condition in which the pulmonary veins that should bring oxygenated blood back to the heart were incorrectly routed so they entered his heart on the wrong side, as if his heart was backward. His father, who died in 1979, had the Hebrew name Avrom but went by the English, Alvin. Not only couldn’t Catherine have possibly known this very personal and specific information, but there was no place even to look it up
Weiss was so strongly influenced by his experience with Catherine that he began to radically change his perspective on psychotherapy. Regressing patients to their past lives opened up a rapid method of treating psychiatric symptoms that previously taken had taken many months or years to alleviate. As of 1992, when he wrote Through Time Into Healing, he had regressed hundreds of patients to past lives in individual sessions and many times that number in group workshops. A number were able to eliminate a wide range of chronic lifelong symptoms. Even more important, they gained the knowledge that we don’t die when our bodies do; we survive physical death. (pp. 21- 23)