Past-life regression

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.

Past-life regression entered American popular culture through a single well-documented case that also supplied its most durable scientific counterargument. In 1952, Colorado hypnotist Morey Bernstein regressed a Pueblo, Colorado housewife named Virginia Tighe across six sessions, during which she spoke in an Irish-accented voice as Bridey Murphy, a nineteenth-century Irish woman, supplying names, places and period details that Bernstein's 1956 book The Search for Bridey Murphy presented as evidence of survived memory from an actual past life, and the book became a bestseller that made past-life regression a household phrase almost overnight.

Newspaper investigation that followed the book's success traced a much more mundane source: Tighe had grown up in Chicago partly in the household of an Irish immigrant neighbour named Bridie Murphy Corkell, and researchers argued the regression had surfaced ordinary childhood memory, dramatised and elaborated under hypnosis, rather than any prior existence, a phenomenon psychologists later named cryptomnesia, the resurfacing of forgotten ordinary memory experienced by the person as new or externally sourced information. The case established the pattern nearly every subsequent regression case has followed: a session under hypnosis produces vivid, internally consistent and often historically detailed material, and subsequent research turns up an available, unremarkable source, a book once read, a film once seen, a person once known, that plausibly accounts for the content without requiring an actual past life, a pattern regression practitioners generally do not dispute has occurred in specific documented cases while maintaining that it does not account for every session they conduct.