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Berserk2
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A Critique of Alleged Past Life Recall
Mar 5th, 2010 at 10:00pm
I begin by exploring the legitimacy of past life regression. I only ask that posters confine their comments to this practice until I shift the focus of this thread to other flaws in alleged past life recall.
Two of the poster boys for alleged reincarnation evidence are Michael Newton’s hypnotic regression technique and Dr. Ian Stevenson’s research on the past life recall of young children. Future posts will discuss fatal flaws in Stevenson’s own research . But even he dismisses past life regression of the sort performed by Newton. Newton admits his patients have some sort of psychological disorder. His claims do not follow the pattern established by other researchers on NDEs and past life recall, not even reincarnationist Joel Whitton’s “Life Between Life.” Nor have his findings been replicated in controlled studies. Nor has Newton has not published his findings in any scientific journal subjected to peer review by experts in clinical hypnosis.
More importantly, as a psychiatrist, even Dr. Stevenson is well aware that it is illegitimate to use hypnotic regression techniques in support of reincarnation: “In my experience, nearly all so-called previous personalities evoked through hypnotism are entirely imaginary and a result of the patient’s eagerness to obey the hypnotist’s suggestions. It is no secret that we are all highly suggestible under hypnosis. This kind of suggestion can actually be dangerous. Some people have been terribly frightened by their supposed memories, and in other cases the previous personality evoked has refused to go away for a long time (Omni Magazine” (1988).” Thus, it comes as no surprise that even Sigmund Freud abandoned hypnosis as a treatment method when he discovered so many cases of false memories.
In fact, scientific research at Harvard and elsewhere has repeatedly demonstrated that “people with memories of false lives are less able to discriminate between imagined and real events both inside and outside the laboratory.” Thus, respected organizations like the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the Australian Psychiatric Association express dismay that hypnotic regression is misused to recover adult memories of childhood sexual abuse!
Yale psychology professor, Dr. John Kilstrom, summaries the consensus of the experts surveyed in Fromm and Nash, “Contemporary Hypnosis Research:” and Barnhardt and Kihlstrom’s review in Wegner and Pennebaker’s “Handbook of Mental Heath.” “Everything we know about hypnosis tells us that hypnosis is first and foremost and experience of the imagination. The analogy is to hypnotic age regression where we suggest to adults that they are children once again….If regression to age 5 doesn’t produce the real thing, why should anyone expect more of past life regression?
Many New Agers lamely claim that their regression “helped” them. Of course, any cultist can claim that experiences that support their dogmas “helped” them. But as Dr. Kihlstrom observes, “There is not even a single clinical study with anything like an acceptable design—showing the past life regression has positive therapeutic effects.”
Less important but more amusing is a report I read of a study of 500 subjects who experienced mass hypnotic regression to past lives. There were several Napoleons and other famous dead worthies. At least New Ager Helen Wambach’s parallel study offered avoided this comedic expose.
I also read a study on several past life readers. These readers were confronted with the inconsistencies among the readers. They dismissed this objection on the grounds that each reader might have tuned in to a different life. So researchers shifted the study to immediate past lives. This approach exposed their delusions. Each reader imagined a different past life for each subject!
Don
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