November 1, 1992
OMNI

REMEMBRANCE OF TRAUMAS PAST
Discovering past lives through hypnosis

If Jan’s eyes were open, she would see an overcast Miami sky. But her sharp blue eyes are shut tight, and the soothing voice of psychiatrist and hypnotist Brian Weiss guides her through a different sort of scene. Travelling down a deep, dark set of stairs, Jan enters a wondrous garden full of flowers and shade trees. Weiss tells Jan to look down at her feet. Is she wearing sandals? Animal skins? Clearly, he is not referring to the professionally dressed woman sitting zoned out in trousers, a white blouse, and red patent-leather pumps. Jan opens her mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. Then, slowly, haltingly, she begins to recount a story of life as a man in ancient Greece.

“I see columns,” she says her voice almost a whisper. A faint smile crosses her face as she recognizes the woman she knows in this lifetime as Lydia: “Her name is Claudia and we have a son… We’re married. I want to say my son’s name is Cyrus… I’m a soldier. I die in battle. I mean, I don’t live my life out with her….”

Impatient, Weiss instructs her to fast forward to the time of death. “I’m stabbed in battle,” Jan blurts out. “It’s hand-to-hand. He’s so close, the soldier who kills me! I can see him. I’m looking in his eyes.”

Whoa! Is this the next step in the evolution of psychoanalysis? Sigmund Freud taught us to look back to early childhood; Otto Rank returned us to the womb. And now a small but growing number of therapists are taking us back even farther. Through hypnosis and guided meditations, they regress their patients to past lives and death experiences whose traumas, they claim, live on as “memories of the soul.” It works like this: A man with persistent neck pains sees himself guillotined in eighteenth-century France. And voila! His neck pain disappears. Dismissed by critics as a gross misuse of hypnosis, past-life therapy is being hailed by some as a fast and effective treatment for migraines, arthritis, phobias, asthma, insomnia, anxiety, and other problems. Its practitioners claim they can accomplish in hours what often takes years to uncover in traditional psychoanalysis.

And their assertions, right or wrong, are grounded in the millennia-old art of hypnosis. Credited with helping patients tap their own healing powers, hypnosis can, according to advocates, aid in the release of endorphins (neurochemicals that relieve pain), fight infection, and widen blood vessels. According to another theory, it alters awareness so that the brain no longer reacts to pain or nausea. There is even speculation that hypnosis may open a direct line to the limbic system, the brain’s repository of emotion and memory.

Past-life therapists say hypnosis is so penetrating, it can even peel away lives like the layers of an onion, revealing levels of existence of which patients are not generally aware. While past lives “revealed” through hypnosis would seem to presupppose a belief in reincarnation , however, some of past-life therapy’s strongest advocates stop short of conversion. Instead, say many past-life therapists, their patients’ so-called past lives are generated through the special power of hypnosis; the past-life memories themselves are powerful metaphors of the unconscious, helpful to past-life therapy in the same way that traditional dreams shed light on buried thoughts and psychosis during traditional psychotherapy and analysis.

“It’s valuable material, which is what I point out to patients when they ask me, ‘Is it real, or did I imagine it?’ ” says Garrett Oppenheim, a certified psychotherapist in Tappan, New York. “The material is just as valuable in therapy either way. You can take it literally or metaphorically. It comes from their unconscious. It has a certain reality for them, and it has a reality therapeutically because it expresses their problems and needs.”

The most famous hypnotic regression case of all time, of course, had nothing to do with therapy. It was about reincarnation, plain and simple. Bridey Murphy was the nineteenth-century Irish woman who emerged whenever a Denver housewife named Virginia Tighe was hypnotized by candlelight back in the early 1950s. Tighe’s descriptions of life in early-nineteenth-century Cork, Ireland, were hailed for their vivid and seemingly accurate details. When Morey Bernstein, Tighe’s neighbor and amateur hypnotist, wrote an account of their sessions, his famous book, The Search for Bridey Murphy, provoked a worldwide debate about reincarnation.

It also attracted some of past-life therapy’s first practitioners. Those early therapists went on to form the California-based Association for Past-Life Research and Therapies (APRT), an international organization with some 700 members. The field, as represented by APRT is not particularly strong on “quality control,” according to some of its critics. After all, hypnotherapy does not require a license in California—the state that many past-life therapists call home. And APRT’s membership roster includes several astrologers, New Age channelers, and one doorman.

But Brian Weiss’s credentials are impeccable. A magna cum laude graduate of Columbia University and Yale Medical School, he is as traditionally trained and left-brained as any medical doctor in the United States. Until July 1990, he was chairman of psychiatry at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami, where he enjoyed a national reputation as a psychopharmacologist.

But that’s Weiss’s past life.

Once, he would have found such testimony as Jan’s hard to swallow. Like the story about her past life as a frail servant girl in a long-ago Middle Eastern country. Doomed to a hopeless existence, Jan saw herself riding in a wagon filled with wet straw. It overturned and she died, trapped and suffocating beneath the straw. After “reliving” this episode on Weiss’s white leather sofa, her chronic asthma dissipated. For the first time in years, she can sleep through the night without waking up, gasping for air.

Weiss, 48, recounts this story and others like it without batting an eye. Indeed, he says that his own wife, Carole, was once a medieval European man fatally clubbed in the left temple. This insight, garnered during hypnosis, delivered instant relief from premenstrual migraine headaches that have plagued her for years.

Weiss’s transformation began one day in 1980 when a young woman walked into his office on the referral of another physician. “Catherine” suffered from a host of fears and phobias that left her sleepless, always on guard against the next panic attack. Eighteen months of intensive and traditional psychotherapy failed to bring any significant results. Though Catherine seemed to understand the roots of her anxieties, she showed no improvement. In frustration, Weiss finally decided to hypnotize her. Regressed to the age of 5, she recalled having nearly drowned in a swimming pool. Regressed to age 3, she recalled a long-forgotten night in a darkened bedroom when she was sexually molested by her drunken father. Regressed to age 2, she remembered nothing. And then, Weiss asked her to “go back to the time from which your symptoms arise.” Suddenly, the floodgate to 86 different past lives opened.

Catherine remembered drowning in a flood in 1863 B.C., having her throat slashed as a young boy in the Netherlands in 1473, and dying from a waterborne epidemic in eighteenth-century Spain. Her therapy, described in Weiss’s much-publicized book, Many Lives, Many Masters, amazed the psychiatrist. Especially after one session, when she announced that her lifelong fear of drowning had disappeared. And with each subsequent session, with each new “memory,” another anxiety bit the dust.

But it was the “message” delivered by this patient, says Weiss, that changed his life. After a while, he notes, she began speaking to him in a husky voice which he later identified as that of a Master or highly evolved soul. “Your father is here, and your son, who is a small child,” the husky-voiced Catherine told Weiss, issuing forth, he insists, on topics she could never have known on her own. “Your father says you will know him because his name is Avrom, and your daughter is named after him. Also, his death was due to his heart. Your son’s heart was also important, for it was backward, like a chicken’s. He made a great sacrifice for you out of his love. He wanted to show you that medicine could only go so far, that its scope is very limited.”

Catherine had zeroed in on a couple of remarkable aspects of Weiss’s family history. Yes, his father, Alvin, was a religious Jew who, as Weiss writes, was far better suited to his Hebrew name of Avrom. And yes, Alvin had died of heart disease, and Weiss’s daughter, Amy, had been named for him. But even more significantly, Catherine had identified the single greatest tragedy of Weiss’s life: the death of his first-born son, Adam, 11 years earlier. The baby’s heart had, indeed, been turned around, backward like a chicken’s. And when open-heart surgery failed to save his child’s life, Weiss reacted by deciding against a career in internal medicine in favor of psychiatry. As Catherine said, he had become convinced that modern medicine, with all its advanced technology, could “only go so far.”

To this specialist in brain chemistry, the information offered by his patient, a mere layperson, was earth-shattering. “A hand had reached down and irreversibly altered the course of my life,” he says. “My mind was indeed now open to the possibility, even the probability, that Catherine’s utterances were real.”

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Copyright 1992 Omni Publications International Ltd.