Past-life regression is a technique, associated with some New Age and alternative-therapy settings, in which a person is guided, usually under hypnosis or deep relaxation, to recall what are presented as memories of previous incarnations, on the assumption that the soul has lived before and that the residue of those lives can be accessed and may explain present-day fears, relationships and afflictions. Practitioners lead the subject back in imagination beyond their birth into scenes and identities interpreted as former lifetimes, and some offer the practice as a therapy, holding that reliving and resolving the traumas of a past life can heal problems in the present. The practice presupposes the doctrine of reincarnation, which is central to several major religious traditions, though those traditions themselves do not generally endorse the hypnotic recovery of past lives as it is practised in the modern therapeutic setting.
The scientific assessment of past-life regression is decidedly negative. The "memories" produced are readily explained as constructions of the imagination, assembled from the subject's own knowledge, expectations and the suggestions of the hypnotist, and hypnosis is well known to be capable of generating vivid but false memories rather than recovering true ones. Investigated cases have repeatedly turned out to draw, unconsciously, on information the subject had encountered in ordinary life, and no past-life recollection has been verified against independent evidence in a way that withstands scrutiny. Psychologists warn, moreover, that the technique can be harmful, since it can implant false memories, including false memories of trauma, with real psychological consequences. Past-life regression thus stands, from a scientific standpoint, as an unsupported practice whose vivid experiences are best understood as products of suggestion and imagination, whatever meaning its practitioners find in them.