History of Past-Life Therapy

© Ian Lawton 2008, 2010

(This is a complete reproduction of chapter 4 of The Big Book of the Soul, Rational Spirituality Press, 2010)

Background

When we turn now to the use of past-life regression for therapeutic purposes, a common misconception is that all practitioners are poorly qualified amateurs who already believe in reincarnation. This may have some truth in respect of what is now a significantly expanded community, although a number of professional bodies on both sides of the Atlantic are making considerable attempts to introduce professional standards of both training and practice.[i] But when we look at the background of the pioneers who first dabbled with this therapy we find that nothing could be further from the truth.

Those who published the results of their work in book form shared a number of common traits. Nearly all had qualified as professional psychologists or psychiatrists, so their scientific training had given them an atheist or at least agnostic outlook. Nearly all came to use past-life therapy more or less by accident, or at least reluctantly. And, like Peter Ramster, nearly all were profoundly skeptical of the results initially, but over time could not escape the fact that it was sometimes able to produce dramatic, rapid and permanent improvements in patients – some of whom had spent years in conventional therapy with no significant remission. Nevertheless they all recognized that it should form just one element of a professional therapists’ overall toolkit, to be used only when appropriate and not as a complete replacement for more conventional treatments.

The history of past-life regression goes as far back as the late nineteenth century, when a Parisian military colonel by the name of Albert de Rochas dabbled with a form of hypnosis based on the ‘animal magnetism’ techniques first developed by Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer in the late eighteenth century.[ii] In regressing his subjects back before birth de Rochas found that many recalled details of their previous life. Needless to say he was roundly criticized by a Western world to which reincarnation was largely anathema at the time, apart from in theosophical circles, and his work was dismissed as entirely explainable by his suggestive control of his subjects. But we can now see that his research with nineteen subjects, recorded in 1911 in Les Vies Successives, shows remarkable consistency with modern findings. He in turn inspired his compatriot, the physician Charles Lancelin, to perform similar research that was written up in his 1922 study La Vie Posthume.

Then in the mid-twentieth century the leading Swedish psychiatrist John Björkhem used hypnotic regression on many hundreds of patients over several decades, but his work is not well known because it was not translated.[iii] At around the same time the British psychiatrist Alexander Cannon regressed more than a thousand patients over a lengthy period, and consistently found that symptoms that could not be cured by conventional treatment were significantly reduced. In his 1950 book The Power Within he emphasized his change of stance over time:[iv]

For years the theory of reincarnation was a nightmare to me and I did my best to disprove it and even argued with my trance subjects to the effect that they were talking nonsense, and yet as the years went by one subject after another told me the same story in spite of different and varied conscious beliefs, in effect until now, well over a thousand cases have been so investigated and I have to admit that there is such a thing as reincarnation. It is therefore only right and proper that I should include this study as a branch of psychology, as my text bears witness to the great benefit many have received psychologically from discovering hidden complexes and fears which undoubtedly have been brought over by the astral body from past lives.

We will assess whether he is right to suggest that the success of past-life therapy provides further proof of reincarnation throughout this chapter. But in the meantime we can see he also stresses, as do many of the other pioneers, that his patients’ existing religious beliefs – or indeed lack of them – had little or no impact on their ability to experience past lives or their therapeutic benefits.

Another British pioneer was Denys Kelsey, a medical doctor turned psychiatrist who began using hypnosis for conventional age regression in the late 1940s. But he had no interest in the idea of past-life regression until 1958 when he teamed up with the psychic Joan Grant, who had published a number of autobiographies of previous lives in ancient Egypt and elsewhere. Their way of working was unique in that Grant would sit in on therapy sessions and pass Kelsey notes to confirm whether or not she too was ‘seeing’ what the patient was remembering about a past life. In this way they could direct the therapy even more accurately, as the following example from their 1967 collaboration Many Lifetimes indicates. A patient had repeatedly undergone age regression with Kelsey to alleviate feelings of guilt and inferiority about his identification with being a woman, but had found his symptoms only partially alleviated. After an intermission of several years he contacted Kelsey again complaining of a severe recurrence of his problems, and with Grant now involved past-life regression had become an option:[v]

Within a few minutes he began to describe scenes in which an elegant young woman appeared, always with a handsome escort. But the scenes changed abruptly: swathed in white ermine she was alighting from a Daimler at the entrance to the Savoy, and then, without any thread of continuity, she was on the deck of a large yacht and then in the paddock at Ascot. Joan handed me a note. ‘This is a genuine recall. But he is not seeing the girl he really was: these are the girl’s daydreams of the woman she longed to be. Tell him to see the girl herself.’

Intriguingly these images had come through in previous sessions, but because Kelsey had no awareness of past lives at that time he had been unable to make therapeutic use of them. This time, however, the patient went on to describe how his previous personality had fallen pregnant, had been rejected by her high-society lover leaving her dreams in tatters, and had died when a back-street abortion went wrong. He was apparently cured in this single session, reporting no recurrence of his problems for many years after. It was repeated therapeutic success of this nature that convinced the scientifically trained Kelsey of the reality of reincarnation.

Despite the successes of these early pioneers, it was only really in the 1970s that past-life therapy took off. It was then that Ramster began his pioneering work in Australia, while in Europe psychologist Hans TenDam was leading the way – his seminal work Exploring Reincarnation was first published in 1983 in Dutch. Meanwhile in the US Morris Netherton was one of the main pacesetters. Raised as a Methodist with no belief or interest in reincarnation, he trained as a psychologist but in the late 1960s decided to experiment with past-life regression after some interesting experiences with self-analysis. Over the next ten years he regressed many thousands of patients, although rather than using hypnosis he adapted Gestalt therapy – which relies on picking up on trigger phrases patients use repeatedly when describing their current problems. Although some lingering skepticism about reincarnation remained with him for some time, it had been completely dispelled by 1978 when his book Past Lives Therapy was published. Based on the success of his therapy at effecting lasting cures for his patients, he had this to say:[vi]

Patients recreate scenes in past lives for the purpose of understanding certain problems they have in the present; it would be pointless to question the veracity of the material they are reporting. Past-lives therapy does not depend on the ‘truth’ of reincarnation, but on putting aside the question of ‘truth’ in order to work toward curing the patient’s behavioral problem.

This of course suggests that the success of past-life therapy does not necessarily provide further support for the idea of reincarnation. But Netherton continues:

Having made this point, I must state my own belief at once, which is that reincarnation does in fact take place. I have been influenced in this belief by neither occultism nor Eastern religion, however. The belief has evolved by following my own observations to their logical conclusions. On the basis of the cases I have handled personally, and the independent research I have done, I feel that the theory of reincarnation most logically explains the phenomena I have witnessed… As far as my patients are concerned, the success of their therapy is unaffected whether they embrace a belief in reincarnation or remain skeptical throughout.

Edith Fiore was brought up attending various branches of the Protestant church, but became an agnostic while gaining her doctorate in psychology because it was more in keeping with her scientific bent. In her 1978 book You Have Been Here Before she describes how she had been in psychiatric practice for many years before she moved to California and started to use hypnotherapy in 1974, and it was another two years before she stumbled upon past-life regression. But when she did she quickly began to question her agnosticism:[vii]

Until two years ago I was totally uninterested in the idea of reincarnation. Then one afternoon, while using hypnosis with a male patient, I witnessed something that radically affected both my professional life and my personal beliefs. He had come to me because of crippling sexual inhibitions. When I asked him, while he was under hypnosis, to go back to the origin of his problems, he said, ‘Two or three lifetimes ago I was a Catholic priest.’ We traced through this seventeenth-century lifetime, looking at his sexual attitudes as an Italian priest, and found the source of his sexual difficulties. I was aware that the patient believed in reincarnation. Therefore, I felt his vivid description of his past life, colored by a great deal of emotionality, was a fantasy. However, the next time I saw him, he told me he was not only free of his sexual problems, but felt better about himself in general.

As with so many of her colleagues Fiore then decided she would use past-life regression whenever a patient’s own subconscious indicated that the origin of a problem was to be found in a previous life. After conducting many thousands of regression sessions she too came to believe in reincarnation, but like Netherton she stresses that for therapy purposes it does not matter whether the experience has any underlying ‘veracity’:[viii]

Actually, whether the former lifetimes that are ‘relived’ are fantasies or actual experiences lived in a bygone era does not matter to me as a therapist – getting results is important. I have found past-life regression consistently helpful, often resulting in immediate remission of chronic symptoms that do not return, even after months and years.

Joel Whitton, who we met briefly in the last chapter, initially qualified as a medical doctor at the University of Toronto before moving on to become the chief psychiatrist for the city’s school system. He is something of an exception among the pioneers in that he had dabbled with hypnosis from an early age, and openly admits that reincarnation had always been part of his worldview – although he allied himself to no particular religious sect or creed. So it was natural that he would use past-life regression in his practice, which he did from the early 1970s. This is how his co-author Joe Fisher describes his work in their 1986 book Life Between Life:[ix]

As Dr Whitton gained a more intimate understanding of the unconscious mind, he instructed his patients, while in trance, to bring traumatic past-life memories into their conscious awareness. This resulted in rapid and dramatic healing which he himself cannot fully explain… Occasionally, people contacted Dr Whitton after having traipsed in vain from one clinic to another. They would tell how the ministrations of innumerable physicians had made no appreciable improvement in conditions ranging from disabling phobias to terminal disease. Because past-life regression sometimes worked where conventional medicine had failed, Dr Whitton was dubbed the ‘Lost Cause Doctor’.

British-born Jungian therapist Roger Woolger had studied comparative religion as a postgraduate, but was no believer in reincarnation when he set up his practice in Vermont in 1976. So he was somewhat skeptical when, three years later, a colleague suggested he should experiment with a technique for self-regression into a past life – but he was professionally curious enough to try it. What he did not expect was to recall vividly and in detail the life of a mercenary involved in the brutal repression of the Cathars in southern France in the thirteenth century, who then changed sides and ended up being burned at the stake. Indeed there was a supreme irony to this, in that eight years earlier he had reviewed a book called The Cathars and Reincarnation in which the British psychiatrist Arthur Guirdham described how a patient had recalled obscure details of the life of a repressed Cathar – which eventually led to Guirdham believing he too was involved as her lover. When Ian Wilson tried to investigate this case personally with Guirdham he found there were some serious question marks hanging over it.[x] So at the time Woolger may have been justified in dismissing it as mere ‘transference’ between patient and therapist. But he now realized that his own experience could not be so easily dismissed, especially because he had always had a fear of fire, a total distaste for orthodox religion and especially Christianity, strong pacifistic tendencies based on the deliberate repression of a violent streak, and regular dreams about torture and killing. Despite his vocation, he had never been able to properly explain any of these facets of his personality.

From that point on he began to experiment with past-life regression, although like Netherton using Gestalt and other therapies rather than hypnosis, and by the time he wrote his 1988 book Other Lives, Other Selves he had reached the following conclusion:[xi]

From nearly a decade of taking clients and colleagues through past-life experiences and continuing my own personal explorations, I have come to regard this technique as one of the most concentrated and powerful tools available to psychotherapy short of psychedelic drugs.

We cannot close this section without mentioning one of the best-known, modern exponents of past-life therapy, Brian Weiss. In his 1988 book Many Lives, Many Masters he describes his initial skepticism as the Head of Psychiatry at a university-affiliated hospital in Miami:

Years of disciplined study had trained me to think as a scientist and physician, molding me along the narrow paths of conservatism in my profession. I distrusted anything that could not be proved by traditional scientific methods. I was aware of some of the studies in parapsychology that were being conducted at major universities across the country, but they did not hold my attention. It all seemed too farfetched to me.

But he goes on to describe what happened when, in 1980, he started to treat a new patient called Catherine. Although an outwardly attractive woman of twenty-seven, she suffered from a mass of phobias – of water, of choking, of the dark and of death. She was an insomniac who often spent the night in a cupboard to feel safe, and when she did sleep fitfully she had terrible nightmares. She was deeply depressed, and suffering increasingly from acute anxiety and panic attacks.

Throughout eighteen months of weekly appointments Weiss tried everything he knew, but could make no real progress with Catherine. Finally he persuaded her to overcome her fear of hypnosis, and regressed her into her childhood. At the age of five she recalled having been pushed into a swimming pool and having nearly drowned, while at the age of three she remembered having been abused late at night by her drunken father. Weiss was confident he had finally cracked her case, but she returned a week later with her symptoms stubbornly intact. He wondered if he could have missed something from even earlier in her childhood, and took her back again. When nothing emerged at age two, somewhat in desperation he told her to go back to the time from which her symptoms arose. His scientific mind was not prepared for her to suddenly start describing a big white building with pillars and steps, and to tell him that she was living nearly four thousand years ago. As a girl in her mid-twenties called Aronda she had apparently drowned, clutching her baby daughter, when a natural catastrophe engulfed her village in a tidal wave. Although still skeptical, when Catherine returned a week later looking far more radiant, announcing that she now had no fear of drowning and that her nightmares had lessened, he knew he had to take her experience seriously.

Over the next few months Catherine regressed into a number of other past lives out of which various traumas emerged, each one seeming to work its magic on her current personality so that her phobias and anxieties were mere shadows of what they had been. But the real shock was still waiting for Weiss. It was not long before Catherine began to regularly enter the interlife after her various deaths in previous incarnations; and when she did, some startling messages started to emerge – not least a personal one for Weiss that left him reeling:[xii]

Your father is here, and your son, who is a small child. Your father says you will know him because his name is Avrom, and your daughter is named after him. Also, his death was due to his heart. Your son’s heart was also important, for it was backward, like a chicken’s.

Weiss had always been careful to maintain a professional distance from his patients, and Catherine was no exception. He felt it was almost inconceivable that she could have known his young son Adam had died nine years earlier, when only twenty-three days old, because he had a one-in-ten-million defect whereby the pulmonary veins entered his heart on the wrong side. Nor did he think it likely she had learned from any normal source that his daughter Amy had been given the same Hebrew name as his father. This was his reaction:[xiii]

My life would never be the same again. A hand had reached down and irreversibly altered the course of my life. All of my reading, which had been done with careful scrutiny and skeptical detachment, fell into place. Catherine’s memories and messages were true. My intuitions about the accuracy of her experiences had been correct. I had the facts. I had the proof.

Unfortunately, for all his professional training, Weiss became considerably influenced by and personally involved in this case after these initial disclosures. Catherine went on to reveal in subsequent sessions that he had been a great teacher in a number of their previous incarnations together, and many of her trance messages related to him and the writing of his book. So, just as with Guirdham, some aspects of Weiss’ work do lay themselves open to the possibility of transference. We might also note that Weiss has more recently turned his attention to progressing patients forward into their potential future lives, a technique that should perhaps be regarded with rather more suspicion.[xiv]

Research Studies

In addition to the anecdotal evidence of the pioneers, the success of past-life therapy has been reinforced by a number of studies conducted by other professional psychologists and psychiatrists. They were all published in the Journal of Regression Therapy.[xv]

In 1986 Johannes Cladder reported on his work with a group of thirty Dutch patients with serious phobias, for whom conventional therapies had done little.[xvi] Five of these dropped out during the program, and another five completed it without significant improvement – although these ten were noticeably more compulsive, depressed or psychotic at the outset. The remaining twenty made rapid improvements using regression therapy when directed to go to the source of their problems, and of these fourteen, or seventy percent, found their subconscious taking them to a previous rather than the current life.

In 1987 Hazel Denning, one of the earliest past-life pioneers, analyzed the outcomes from the work of eight past-life therapists working with nearly a thousand patients, for whom again conventional treatments had achieved little. Of the four hundred and fifty who could still be traced five years after their therapy, twenty-four percent reported that their symptoms had completely disappeared, while twenty-three percent reported a considerable or dramatic improvement, and a further seventeen percent a noticeable improvement.[xvii]

Back in Holland, Ronald van der Maesen of the Department of Clinical Psychology at the University of Amsterdam conducted two studies on which he reported in 1998 and 1999 respectively. First he used past-life regression with ten patients who suffered from Tourette’s syndrome, for which there is little in the way of a conventional cure.[xviii] He contacted them again one year after therapy to check on their progress, which can best be understood using a tabular summary:

We can see that seven out of the ten patients experienced reductions in both their motor and vocal tics, often of over eighty percent, while only three experienced no improvement at all. In addition, while three patients were not on medication originally and remained so, four found that they no longer needed medication. Meanwhile one needed the same amount, and only two – numbers two and five in the table – found they needed more.

In his second study van der Maesen used past-life therapy with fifty-four volunteer patients who heard hallucinated voices, the majority of whom had been receiving conventional psychiatric treatment for schizophrenia.[xix] Only twenty-seven of these completed the treatment for a variety of reasons but, when they were independently reexamined after six months, fourteen – more or less fifty percent – showed significant improvements, with four reporting that they were completely cured. A further eleven were sufficiently improved that they were no longer classified as psychiatric patients.

These are only brief summaries of the studies, and certainly it could be argued that none of them is sufficiently replete with control groups and so on to be considered properly scientific. Nevertheless even that most hardened of skeptics, Paul Edwards, is forced to admit that past-life therapy can produce impressive results.[xx]

But does this success necessarily provide further proof of the reincarnation hypothesis? In fact, unlike many of the pioneers, most modern, professional hypnotherapists tend to shy away from making too direct a link. For example in her 1995 book Past Life Therapy: the State of the Art Rabia Clark, a therapist from Texas, published the results of a survey of more than a hundred colleagues who responded to her questionnaire about their work. Although the majority were not interested in authenticating any personal belief – preferring instead to concentrate on helping their patients with their problems – as with the pioneers ninety-eight percent had come to believe in reincarnation. The difference is that, despite this, a full seventy-five percent took the view that the apparent memories arising during regression are a mixture of real past lives and metaphors or fantasies.

Linda Tarazi, who we met in the last chapter, adopts an even harsher stance:[xxi]

For some years I have practiced hypnotic regression in the hope of relieving the suffering of neurotic or phobic persons for whom no other treatment seemed beneficial. If material from their childhood was not pertinent, and they desired to attempt a past-life regression, this was performed. In my own experience, nearly all of the ‘previous personalities’ evoked during these sessions are unverifiable and almost certainly derive from fantasies on the part of the subject. That many of the patients benefit from this procedure in no way confirms the authenticity of the ‘previous personalities’ whose lives the patients claim to remember. Still, in a small number of cases, information turns up in one or more of these sessions that cannot be readily accounted for.

So can the success of past-life therapy instead be explained merely by known therapeutic principles such as emotional catharsis, desensitization, cognitive restructuring or post-hypnotic suggestion? A complete skeptic would suggest this must be the case. But we have seen in the last chapter that at least some past lives recalled under regression appear to be veridical. Moreover, even Edwards is confused as to why some patients automatically regress to past lives as the source of a problem, even when not directed to so do. So it may be that even if the full details of most past lives are not entirely accurate, those elements in many of them that relate specifically to a current-life problem probably have some grounding in fact.

Admittedly there is some evidence to suggest that occasionally past-life memories can be ‘projected’ by spirit guides and similar to provide some sort of understanding and catharsis for the subject.[xxii] But this is by no means a complete explanation for the memories retrieved during past-life therapy. On top of this the suggestion that they tend to have some basis in fact is surely strengthened by those cases reported by therapists in which a patient regresses into multiple past lives that have clear connections and threads running through them – of which more shortly – and even more when accompanying interlife regression reveals more details about these threads.

Nevertheless, unless we are to be accused of a circular argument, it appears we have little option but to conclude that past-life therapy does not provide additional, objective proof of reincarnation.

Emotional Dynamics

Even if we accept that past-life therapy works at least in part because the key memories that emerge under regression have some basis in fact, this does not really tell us how it works. What are the underlying dynamics that allow healing to take place? Of course it is at this point that most people invoke the concept of karma – about which, unfortunately, there seems to be a great deal of muddled thinking.

Many spiritual commentators who write about karma still tend to refer to it as a ‘law’ of ‘action and reaction’, thus maintaining the traditional view handed down from its Hindu origins that it determines our fate or even punishment from one life to the next. This view is also adopted to a greater or lesser extent by at least some regression therapists. But how accurately does this terminology convey what is really going on? An obvious place to start is with case studies involving subjects who find themselves in related traumatic situations in multiple lives. Although some of the cases that follow may seem a little sensational, we should remember not only that in times past life tended to be more brutal, but also that we are no longer concerned with the potential historical accuracy or otherwise of these cases, merely their therapeutic aspects.

A fine example is provided by one of Woolger’s patients, who he refers to simply as Chris.[xxiii] Abused as a child in the harsh, drunken environment of a farm, he repeatedly attempted to run away, and had been in and out of prison in a dismal spiral of depression, alcohol and suicide attempts. Even his efforts to start a family had been thwarted by the cot death of his infant son. His opening statement said it all: ‘I’m all alone. I’m a piece of shit. I want to die.’ When regressed to his birth he discovered that his mother had not wanted him and had attempted her own abortion by falling down the stairs – as a result of which he was born three months premature and placed in an incubator for an equivalent period. Alone and isolated, he already knew he was not welcome and just wanted to die.

A number of Chris’ past lives revealed a depressingly similar pattern. As a prisoner in a dungeon in Scotland he had been beaten and was sick with dysentery when he was left alone in chains to die a slow and lonely death, full of hatred for his callous English captors. He had been a sickly adolescent in a besieged native tribe in the American Northwest where, unable to fight and with the medicine man proclaiming his sickness as a sign of evil, his father left him to die – again without food and alone – in the tribal burial grounds. This time his dying thoughts were that he was no good, and deserved to die. In a much earlier tribal life he recalled having been an old man abandoned to die alone in a cave, where he was eaten by a bear while still half-alive.

But further investigation of Chris’ case revealed at least two lives that might be thought to justify so much suffering. In one in China his intense anger at his prostitute mother – for whom he acted as lookout, and whose only affection lay in attempts to seduce him – boiled over into a life of violent crime and a hatred of all women. Tragically one woman whose house he was robbing bore the full brunt of his frustrations when he stabbed and mutilated her pregnant body, although at least he felt intense remorse afterwards. But in another life as an uncontrollably psychopathic Eskimo he indulged his hatred of women in general by forcing himself sexually upon as many female members of the tribe as he could, and of his shrewish wife in particular by murdering her. The tribe staked him out in the cold to die. This time a polar bear provided the finishing touches, and he apparently remained unrepentant.

We do not know in exactly what order Chris’ lives took place, or what other lives he may have had, but that there was clear alternation between lives as primarily perpetrator and victim is not in doubt. Both Woolger and Netherton, for example, describe a number of similar cases, and on the face of it these seem to be reasonably understandable within a classical karmic framework of supposed ‘action and reaction’, or more particularly of ‘paying off debts’. But even then one is bound, logically, to ask how subjects are supposed to bring such terrible cycles to an end; and even more how all this works out when apparently unconnected people are, for example, murdered – what are they supposed to do in their next life, murder their previous killer in a never-ending cycle of violence?

That the concept of direct ‘action and reaction’ is seriously flawed is demonstrated clearly by those cases in which the subjects are consistently the victims, and where regression uncovers no traces of perpetrator lives that might account for their apparent punishment. For example, one of Netherton’s patients came to him suffering from impotence and abdominal pains that signaled a potential ulcer brought on by the stress of running his business.[xxiv] Under hypnosis he revealed that he had had an early tribal life in which his lover’s husband caught them together, cut his penis off and ran him through the stomach with his spear. A later life was that of an aristocrat in which this former guilt resurfaced when he was about to have sex with a mistress. It was sufficient to cause a perforated stomach from which he eventually died, even though such behavior was generally regarded as perfectly acceptable at the time. In a later life still he was a businessman whose wife conspired with her brother to obtain his money by setting him up to be caught with a prostitute. This time his recurring guilt unhinged him mentally so that he was committed to an asylum, in which he died from the plague. On the face of it this man had repeatedly been the victim, and had done nothing of real note to deserve his succession of unpleasant lives.

Perhaps the most heart-rending case reported by any of the pioneers involves one of Whitton’s patients called Jenny Saunders.[xxv] Identifying that she was masking some strong repressed emotions, over a prolonged and difficult period of conventional regression he managed to establish that she had been cruelly abused by her mother as a child. She therefore avoided sex because any feelings of pleasure brought on by sexual stimulation were immediately replaced by emotional pain and intense anger. This realization might at least have started the healing process, but Jenny’s symptoms persisted. Whitton had also discovered that she was terrified of having a child of her own, and not long before becoming his patient had had an abortion after a rare sexual encounter. Apart from the obvious fact that she might not want to repeat the mistakes of her own mother, he could find nothing else in her current life to explain this fear. So he decided to extend the regression back beyond her childhood, at which point the following two lives unfolded.

As Lucy Bowden she had been the poverty-stricken single mother of a mentally retarded child in London in the late seventeenth century. In those days everyone regarded such children as a mere burden to be disposed of, but Lucy cherished and protected her child with all her might. She rarely left her rented attic room because of her fear that someone, whether well meaning or not, might try to rid her of her ‘burden’. But one day she went to fetch some provisions, and stopped to have a drink with some friends at an inn. Not used to alcohol, time slipped by quickly until she realized she had been gone for some hours, and rushed home. But when she turned the corner into her street her blazing house was surrounded by curious onlookers. Pushing through the crowd, she realized there was nothing she could do to save her child – and her unbearable inner torment was to set up a recurring pattern.

In another life in the mid-nineteenth century Jenny was Angela, a young girl abandoned by her parents and brought up in a Chicago orphanage. At sixteen she left the harsh institution behind to seek a new life in the mid-west, ending up as a barmaid and part-time prostitute in a small town in Colorado. The local doctor fell in love with her and she became pregnant by him. But, unbeknown to her, the local parson began berating the doctor that his child would be born out of wedlock to a woman of ill repute. Eventually he blackmailed the doctor into agreeing that it should be committed to an institution to preserve its moral sanctity. So as soon as the child was born the parson, the doctor and two assistants came to collect the baby, wrestling it from the convalescing Angela’s startled grasp. Instinctively she reached for a shotgun she always kept under her bed for protection, but in the ensuing struggle the weapon discharged right at the baby and the assistant carrying it, killing both instantly. Again Angela’s shock and remorse was unbearable, but worse was to come. Their curiosity piqued by the sound of a gunshot, and with the parson egging them on to punish the ‘murderer’, six cowboys entered the room and dragged her off to a cattle shed, from which she never emerged.

After reliving these horrors Jenny wept uncontrollably in Whitton’s office – maybe for the first time in her life. But, for the purposes of the current discussion, again we can see that she was repeatedly the innocent victim. Some therapists would nevertheless maintain that, like Netherton’s impotency sufferer, she must have done something awful in other lives that she did not recall under regression in order to deserve such ‘punishments’. Yet this suggestion is entirely undermined when we find that, when Whitton regressed Jenny into her most recent interlife, the primary issue that confronted her was her failure to forgive herself for letting her children down in her former lives. But with this insight she did relent and happily, when she left his office for the last time, she was determined to have a child in this life too. Some might suggest that this was Jenny ‘paying off debts to herself’, but surely this hardly helps our understanding.

So if it is rather less than useful to view the dynamics of past-life therapy from the perspective of traditional karmic notions such as ‘action and reaction’ and ‘paying off debts’, on what do they depend? Additional clues can be obtained from the relatively simple cases that all therapists report, in which a major trauma from a past life is found to lie at the heart of a patient’s current problem. Kelsey’s patient who identified with being a woman earlier in the chapter is a good example, and Fiore derives the following list of typical linkages.[xxvi] Patients who are chronically overweight, or by complete contrast have anorexic tendencies, have often been close to starvation in a past life. Fear of the dark and insomnia often relate to previous lives in which the patient was either molested or killed while asleep. Assorted phobias of fire, water, guns, knives, snakes, flying, crowds, enclosed spaces, heights and so on can often be traced to corresponding past-life traumas, usually related to the mode of death. And chronic pains in various parts of the body often stem from injuries, again usually fatal, received in previous lives.

Whatever conflicting signals they might send out when they talk about karma, nearly all therapists do appear to understand the underlying dynamic of such cases. It is that intense emotions – for example of loss, guilt, failure, shame, remorse, sorrow, humiliation, jealousy, anger, hatred or revenge – are always attached to the past-life experiences; and it is our failure to deal with them at the time that leaves them unresolved or unassimilated. In some cases this can lead to a traumatized soul remaining trapped in the intermediate plane, as we saw in chapter 1, but in most cases the emotion is carried forward into a new life. In fact as we will see in later chapters most souls make deliberate choices to work with particular emotions, often over several lives; and this work will be facilitated not only by the deliberate planning of life circumstances, especially in the formative years, but also by certain ‘triggers’ that act as reminders. These might take the form of phobias or compulsions, and the more severe they are the more intense the unresolved emotion is likely to have been. The exact dynamics will depend a great deal on the level of experience of the soul, and especially on the extent to which they are able to use the interlife to heal emotional trauma.

In any case, the key to healing in a therapeutic context is that the therapist should help the patient to ‘reframe’ their current problem, either by recognizing it as part of a longer-term destructive pattern that they now want to break free from, or by gaining appropriate insights from the interlife – as, for example, Jenny did. But the dynamics are usually complex, which is why the best modern therapists tend to avoid making simplistic pronouncements about the healing process, and especially about ‘action and reaction’, ‘paying off debts’ and so on. They also realize that the patient’s higher self is the best judge of what they most need to re-experience, which is why they tend to use ‘non-directive’ techniques as much as possible.