According to Sunday’s New York Times, belief in reincarnation is not only widespread in America—a Pew survey says that nearly one in four of us thinks we lived before—but is becoming part of mainstream psychotherapy. A bunch of quacks now practice “past-life regressions,” in which they help their patients remember who they were in previous incarnations. I don’t know why these “doctors,” many of whom are psychiatrists and thus have a medical degree, aren’t thrown out of the field.
Some, like Brian Weiss, have been censured, but continue to rake in the bucks through popular books and lectures. A few, like Dr. Paul DeBell, claim that they too have had past lives:
He, for example, is more than a psychiatrist in 21st-century Manhattan; he believes he is an eternal soul who also inhabited the body of a Tibetan monk and a conscientious German who refused to betray his Jewish neighbors in the Holocaust.
They’re always the good Germans, aren’t they? Why aren’t the concentration camp guards coming back? Where is Himmer’s valet?
Others, aware of sanctions, carefully hedge their claims, but they’re not fooling anyone.
“I have done several thousand individual past-life regressions,” said Ms. [Janet] Cunningham, of the International Board for Regression Therapy. “And I will also say that I don’t know where these memories come from. So when we say ‘reincarnation,’ it may be our singular soul that reincarnates again and again and again. It may be an aspect of soul energy. It may be a collective unconscious. I think some people might go into fantasy. It may be an allegory or metaphor from the mind.” No matter what these visions are, Ms. Cunningham said, uncovering them can be therapeutic.
The amusing thing is how little evidence it takes to convince these credulous loon-shrinks that someone might have had a past life:
Dr. [Brian] Weiss stresses that he is a medical doctor who was not expecting to encounter past lives in a conventional therapeutic setting. (His favorite title, he says, is not “guru” but “professor.”) Under hypnosis, Catherine, the patient in his book, had memories of times and places, and in such extraordinary and historically accurate detail, he said, that she could never have invented them. (In one life she is an Egyptian servant in charge of embalming corpses. “I see eyes,” she told Dr. Weiss under hypnosis. “I see a woman, a goddess, with some type of a headpiece on … Osiris … Sirus … something like that.”) . . .
I’d be more convinced if the woman suddenly became fluent in Middle Egyptian.
. . . Dr. [Jim] Tucker studies American children and in one case found a young boy who started to say, around the age of 18 months, that he was his own (deceased) grandfather. “He eventually told details of his grandfather’s life that his parents felt certain he could not have learned through normal means,” Dr. Tucker wrote in Explore, which calls itself a journal of science and healing, “such as the fact that his grandfather’s sister had been murdered and that his grandmother had used a food processor to make milkshakes for his grandfather every day at the end of his life.” Dr. Tucker won’t say such cases add up to proof of reincarnation, but he likes to keep an open mind.
On this they base a therapy? “Oh look, I was one of the good Nazis who tried to assassinate Hitler! Ich bin ein Berliner! . . . Wait—I see a sausage . . . schlockwurst, knockwurst . . . something like that.”
“I don’t know why these people, many of whom are psychiatrists and have a medical degree, aren’t thrown out of the field.”
Where did you say you lived? In the USA? For cryin’ out loud, there’s a dozen loons standin’ around every corner in this country and you ask yourself questions like this? What the hell is wrong w/ you?
~Rev. El
Overzealous advocates of repressed memories were primed once the infiltration of misappropriated Buddhism was secured. Junk thought attracts clients via marketing mystique.
Ah, but there we have an interesting topic to discuss on human psyche. Why is it that many religions promise an eternal life – but it is always in the future?
What is wrong with this:”By becoming a member in Our Faith, you will gradually become aware of your infinite past. Which is about time as you will drop dead within the next decades. Surely you will want to acquire that ‘seen it all, been everywhere’ feeling that will make dying very easy, before it is too late?”
Why do I have the feeling that this would not be a good business opportunity, despite Life Eternal?…:)
http://www.alltopmovies.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/fallen.gif
I’m guessing Dr. Weiss didn’t look up the details Catherine gave. . . .
Are you in denial?
Not only a river in Egypt….
Osiris was, of course, male. Any ancient Egyptian would have been in no doubt about that.
She must have got her info from Stargate, Osiris was a female in that!
Great article sir, I had a very nice chuckle with the ‘’Osiris … Sirus … something like that.”) . . .’’ statement.
Since the chances that they’ll wrap their heads around the concept of a common ancestry far more recently than the last Ice Age, maybe convincing all Muslims that they were Jews in a past life, and vice versa, would be the most expedient solution to that problem.
Sure, because we all know how well Islam treats apostates.
In that case, Osama is Moses reincarnated. Pass it on…
They are, as beetles.
In a past life they were a jelly-filled donut? Now that is remarkable!
Except that this was the correct way to say he was one with the people of Berlin.
He couldn’t have said ‘Ich bin Berliner’ because obviously he wasn’t from Berlin.
This is an urban legend.
But it’s a fun urban legend!
It’s not an “urban legend” at all – he did say it. And, you can’t deny there is a baked offering remarkably like a jelly (well, cream-filled, if I remember) that is called a Berliner.
Make that “jelly … doughnut”.
They knew what he meant and were willing to cut the American some slack.
You could say that reincarnation was making a come back !!!!
Good one! Don’t forget to tip your waitress!
Nothing new here. Recall the Bridey Murphy brouhaha which was the subject of an essay by Martin Gardner in his book, “Fads and Fallacies in Science.”
Not much, but I do remember Stan Freberg’s ‘In Search of Bridey Hammerschlaugen’.
At least I think I remember it, but it may have been in a past life so I can’t be quite sure …
Quote mining Thomas Jefferson…
“Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions.”
He was speaking, of course, about the Christian concept of “the trinity”, but I’m sure he’d be fully in favor of using ridicule in this instance?
How can I be so sure? … Why, maybe I WAS Thomas Jefferson in a past life!!! Yes, I’m sure of it?
Where are my slaves? If I’m going to be Thomas Jefferson, I need my slaves.
Hey if you’re the former Thomas Jefferson I should think Clay Jenkinson would like to chat with you.
Now, now, don’t be A Dick. Be nice and apologetic and courteous with your ridicule.
While there is much to ridicule here, not the least the credulous “medical” practitioners, it is certainly not inconceivable that there *is* therapeutic value in having patients imagine (shall we say) past lives.
For example, traumatized children are sometimes given a doll and then asked to tell a story about the doll. Apparently the displacement (if that’s the word) helps elicit thoughts from the child that they will express about the doll but would not express about themselves.
I can conceive that “telling stories” about one’s supposed past selves might have useful therapeutic value, and I could even conceive that the therapy might be improved if the patient believed that the therapist believed that the stories were “true” and the past selves “real.”
What I cannot conceive is that the therapy can be maximized, or even standardized, if the therapist *actually* believes in the past selves.
I guess the human subconscious mind is a funny thing. I guess under hypnosis people just tap into that and while looking for a “past life” may pull up things that somehow could relate to idiosyncrasies in their own psyche. It strikes me that this would be about as useful as dream interpretation though.
I am not a psychologist though, is this kind of thing really useful in therapy?
It would seem to me that it would be better to go over actual traumatic events, than ones created in the subconscious that may or may not be metaphors for real ones. Unless those events are so traumatic they can’t be dealt with directly i guess.
Is anyone here a psychologist/psychiatrist and care to comment?
I’m neither, but the impression I got from my sparsely sampled readings (none of which I have saved for reference) is that artificially strengthened thinking on problems is perhaps not the boon it was earlier thought. I.e. if a patient need to discuss feelings, thoughts, memories it is fine, but it is better to orient on the future as soon as possible.
In that respect regression or facilitated “storytelling” could now be considered harmful, for all I know.
To be more precise, I think cognitive behavioral therapy is winning out as effective (in parallel with drugs). So if there is a behavioral problem, it is robustly diagnosed (I imagine), then treated by establishing ways to circumvent or break away from it. (Which in turn improves and heals et cetera.)
I have to ask – do you believe in reincarnation? After all, it does mean some day you might be Björn again.
But would be need to be reincarnated if he was Bjorn right the first time?
I’d like to know how it differs in any significant way from those so-called ‘recovered memories’ that were (still are ?) such an inglorious chapter in American courts not so very long ago.
Yeah, this crap has been around since the 1970s, if not earlier. It probably cycles in and out of favor through the years. Can’t remember how old I was when I was looking at books on “channeling” but I knew enough to realize they all were simply telling credulous people EXACTLY WHAT THEY MOST WANTED TO HEAR.
As for Brian Weiss (who is part of James van Praagh’s entourage): just one word: money.
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/who-do-you-think-you-were/episode-guide/series-1/episode-1
” Neil, under hypnosis by Trevor Roberts, recounts the heartbreaking story of a 19th-century landowner, called Hawksworth, who loses his wife, his money and then his freedom when he commits manslaughter.
Neil’s wife believes that these memories could have something to do with a traumatic experience in Neil’s past that he has never dealt with. Driven by the emotions he experienced while he was hypnotised, Neil sets out to find out if Hawksworth really existed.”
Sponsored by Honda!
Even if we assume that we DO have “past lives”, and also assume that we CAN access those past lives through hypnosis *gag* … then how would that access be therapeutic?
Why would re-living my life as Vlad the Impaler, or as Cleopatra cure my insomnia and make me quit smoking?
Walk Like an Egyptian
Or the original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjI4p8_NZVc&feature=related
With the population having exploded in the past hundred years, you would have to think that there aren’t that many lives to go around today. Do these past-life gurus ever come across anyone that doesn’t have a past life? I know the alien abduction specialists never seem to find anyone that hasn’t been, um, alienated.
How long, do you think, before there’s a movement of people who count themselves as special because they got a brand spanking new life created by god just for them, rather than a hand-me-down from the age of cholera?
I know in my past life I was a cicada. Seventeen goddamn years underground attached to a root sucking sap, emerged triumphantly one summer morning, dried out the wings, started advertising for a mate, and got eaten by a crow. A crow! Not even something colorful…
Isn’t it funny too how often people were famous in a past life. They were always Cleopatra or Alexander the Great and died spectacularly, never John who died of bubonic plague, or Mary who died in child birth.
Or a monkey, shrew, or fish. If reincarnation was real, it would be fantastically useful for understanding the history of man and the evolution of life.
Even those with past lives that aren’t famous are still from cultures they’re familiar with. I’d be more interested if someone had a past life as one of the Fore people, or an Easter Islander.
If they are right about reincarnation, i hope i was never a tape worm! Though it could explain my mild dislike of enclosed spaces?!?!?! Then again, if i was a tape worm, i might like enclosed spaces?!?!
Don’t be silly! Animals don’t have souls!
A common misconception. Animals, in fact, don’t have soles.
Apart, of course, from the strangely adapted members of the family Soleidae…
That great philosopher Annie Savoy explainedit once.
If there is reincarnation then I’m the king of Sweden. Well I would be for actually it has come to me I am Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf who would have been king except he died in a plane crash in 1947. Now my crown has been usurped and nobody will bow down to me in Michigan, not even my kids. The pain the pain.
More exciting to go for Folke Bernadotte (grandson of Oskar II, so you still get the royal cachet) who negotiated release of thousands from concentration camps near the end of WWII, only to be assassinated in 1948, in Jerusalem, by the Zionists!
This goes beyond merely annoying for me and into disturbing. It’s exactly the kind of technique that led to the Satanic Panic in the 80s, and to the horrific recovered-memories-of-sexual-abuse craze in the 90s that ripped so many families apart.
I’d love to hear what Elizabeth Loftus has to say about this.
If everyone has past lives, how come the Earth’s population is increasing? Are some souls reincarnated more than once at the same time? I mean the Earth’s population has increased sixfold from the 1800s; that means that, statistically speaking, only about one in six people can have any past lives at all.
And we estimate that there were something like a hundred and fifty million people on Earth at the end of the Egyptian empire; how come almost everyone is a reincarnated Egyptian? On average, you’d expect a max of one in forty people to be a reincarnated Egyptian, assuming Egypt constituted the entirety of the Earth’s population at the time.
And why is it that people’s past lives are always something very well explored in film? How come nobody’s ever an ancient Sumerian farmer, or a Mongolian horseman, or a Guinean rancher? Why is it always something you’d see in a film?
Seriously, you’d think that psychologists would be able to think through the entailment of their theories.
No, it’s the Tea Party folks who simply have no souls. It would explain an awful lot.
The simplest model is that there is exactly one soul that is capable of being reincarnated simultaneously, so at the moment there are 6 billion slices of it walking around.
“Seriously, you’d think that psychologists would be able …”
Not psychologists: PSYCHIATRISTS!
You know, the folks that rake in the money by having you lay on a couch and letting you babble on and on about whatever pops up in your mind .. for an hour, and whose only contribution to the experience is an occasional looking up from the novel they’re reading and mumbling: “Interesting, tell me more about that”.
I was Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss so I was one of the greatest mathematicians of all time…in a previous lifetime. 🙂
Well, maybe, but don’t you forget that you were standing on MY shoulders!
— I. Newton.
That’s hilarious! 🙂
Well I was Drodbar, and I invented the bandanbladderstiddle !
I was Baldrick, and I invented the turnip surprise.
“Isn’t it funny too how often people were famous in a past life. They were always Cleopatra or Alexander the Great and died spectacularly, never John who died of bubonic plague, or Mary who died in child birth.” – palefury
Deirdre Flint made this point in her song, “Past Life Regressed.”
“I had a friend turns out, she was Cleopatra!
I had another friend . . .um . . . she was Cleopatra as well.
I had a third friend. . . well, suffice to say
PMS around that palace must have been a living hell.”
Apparently she’s the one person who had the boring past lives of people at the lowest level of society.
“But your past life was spent as an indigent serf
And while foraging a meal of roots and potatoes,
You were attacked by a wild boar.”
She said it sounded “a lot like her last blind date.”
Listen to the song if you have a chance. Ridicule’s a nice way to challenge the belief in past life regression.
hey, if I am going to have a past life, it isn’t going to be of some caveman who got eaten or died miserably of a flu.
The only things likely to regress is the client’s mental health and bank account.
This looks like a case of the New York times pulling its usual shit and calling two examples “a trend”. They presented zero numbers showing long term growth in the number of therapists doing past life regression. One of the two quacks they interviewed said that he is hearing from more and more therapists interested in the subject, without naming names or citing numbers. This is more or less the equivalent of “The lurkers support me in email.” Maybe it is a trend. But the evidence internal to the article certainly does not show it.
Note: this comment is x-posted from Tristero’s related entry on Hullabaloo.
“I’m Spartacus”
[cleese]And so on, and so on, and son on[/cleese]
How many of these patients are of Abrahamic religions? Reincarnation is pretty rare for an accepted doctrine in most sects.
Not anymore. New Age woo has caught on big time, even among Christians (don’t know about Muslims and Jewish folks).
Microraptor- who was never an archosaur in a past life (though possibly a lepidosaur once or twice).
He’d have to be omnipresent! And how did the parents get the boy to regurgitate all that woo anyway?
Some kids are just natural parrots. They hear a lot more than adults often realize, and they can be very, very good at repeating things.
Psychoanalysis was, and always has been, unadulterated woo.
Professionally, it sits one rung under Voodoo Shamanism, & two rungs under subluxations, homeopathy & Xenu.
Ufortunately even Freud’s stupid ideas refuse to die. It seems that once a stupid idea is out there it just doesn’t go away. Psychoanalysis, souls, gods, UFOs, “cryptids” (bigfoot, nessie, etc). I sometimes wonder if there is any bullshit at all invented in the past 10,000 years which hasn’t been forgotten.
D’oh – I wonder if there’s any bullshit that *has* been forgotten.
Well somebody will have to say it: it’s deja vu all over again!
You mean deja deja vu? And I was so certain that by now we would have at least made it to deja deja deja vu.
Past lives is an extremely popular delusion which fits in well with the common nonsense about the soul. One of the most popular today is that woman who claims to go all potty-mouth when she’s possessed by some ancient spirit. For some unknown reason, none of them ever shed any light on questions that academics have about the ancient worlds. Why was Stone Henge built – was it just for laughs or was it just another stone monument similar to those which we are so fond of erecting even in our modern era? How was it erected? And going back to the Egyptians – why don’t these people ever divulge some of the lost arts used in crafting the great pyramids?
The same reason that people who have talked to god or aliens never get any useful info. I mean if you’re having a conversation with god or aliens wouldn’t you want to find out the answers to the big questions? The GUT, does it exist and what is it? What really happened to the Neanderthals? Is there life on other planets? I guess you’ve answered that one if you’re talking to aliens!
But no, all we guess is the usual crap about being nice to each other, as though we needed aliens to tell us that. It’s pretty disappointing really.
All we “get” of course, sigh.
I read a great story when I was a kid, about a guy whose wish to live in the MIddle Ages came true. Imagine his surprise when it turned out he was the head horseshit-shoveler in the castle instead of the knight.
There is one thing I keep noticing regarding past lives, and that is the fact people keep missing this one thing; they’re no longer who they used to be. So what if you were Cleopatra or Alexander the Great, you aren’t any more. That’s in the past and it’s time to get on with your life. Fine, you were Sir Walter Raleigh in a past life, that a buck’ll get you a coffee.
“Why aren’t the concentration camp guards coming back?”
Evil people come back as creationists. I thought you knew that….
Its so funny..I started reading Brian Weiss books and almost bought into the whole thing until I realized that one of his regression subjects fantasy life was right out of the movie “Quigly Down Under” almost word for word.
The woman he was regressing told of living on the American plains,her husband gone,Indians attacking.She hid in a place in the floorboards of her home and had her baby and accidentally killed it by sticking her hand over the babies mouth to keep it quite..Right then and their I said to myself that”they are getting this crap out of movies”.Im starting to think the person with the idea that Catherine got her Egyptian story from “Stargate” was correct. The only thing that makes me wonder ,is why all the people endorsing this money sucking idiot? Brian Weiss had a idea to write a book so OUT THERE that it would draw attention from everywhere and be controversial and then found he chose correctly and wrote others and went on with his scam to make lots of MOOLA..Like Pt Barnum said”there is a sucker born every minute” .Evidently I was big enough fool to buy into it because I bought his trash books.Guess Barnum was correct:-)
Geez. People’s beliefs can be different. The reason why you never hear of anyone talking about being a “bad nazi,” is because people who did those sorts of things are infant souled beings. Nazis, rulers of the KKK, Sadaam houssein, Osama bin laden, and probably the person who wrote this article are all great examples of an ” infant souled person.” meaning they do not have the capacity to look beyond, look into another person, or even just being okay knowing that we as human beings are going to have different oppinions. Thats all I have to say.