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.”

From Crispian Jago (also available on mugs and tee shirts).  Click to enlarge.