Past Lives and Psychiatry

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PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS

In continuing the discussion about lives and deaths, it seems appropriate to start with the past. Of course, psychiatry has long been interested in the past of a given patient’s life, especially with the influence of Freud and his followers. Past trauma and past conflict could lead to current symptoms is the simplistic reason. Understanding and resolving those unprocessed ramifications should then be of help.

In the case of past lives, we are talking about all the prior lives that someone is reputed to have, but lives that have seemed generally not available to any sort of consciousness of remembrance. Perhaps that is for a similar reason to personal unconscious repression and dissociation, that remembering past lives may be too painful and confusing without help. Exceptions may be psychic healers or those therapists who try to access, treat, and interpret past lives. There are many therapists I have heard of who do so, though not generally viewed as part of mainstream psychiatry.

Many Eastern religions, as I have discovered in editing a book on them,¹ do believe in past lives in a reincarnation process, which includes animals and the processing principle of karma. One source recently recommended to me by a colleague is the opening chapters of the Bhagavad Gita about the warrior Arjuna and his best friend. The Kabbalah in Judaism also posits past lives of souls called gilgul or cycles of souls.

Personally, I had a limited sense of possible past lives. A loved one seems to have great uncomfortableness and fears regarding the Holocaust and I have felt in recent years that I was born soon after the Holocaust to try to help stop future ones.

I also never provided past life treatment, though I had at least 1 patient some years back who either seemed to have and exhibit multiple personalities or had past lives that the patient was trying to tell me about. Mainly, I tried to be curious and be responsive to her criticisms, and she gradually improved, at least enough to be satisfied at the time. She taught me much.

Therefore, it was with a lack of prior experience and knowledge that I agreed to read the book that my friend Al wanted me to, “Many Lives, Many Masters.”² It was revelatory, though I had—and maybe still have—uncertainty.

Right away, I read about what could be considered a serendipitous connection with the author from many years back. He was a year ahead of me at Yale Medical School, and also Jewish, so I must have known him in some way. He became a well-known academic and administrator, a similar pathway as mine.

After he met the patient who is the identified subject of his book, as usual he tried standard medications and psychotherapy for her increasing anxiety and intense fears, but there was no improvement. Being familiar and skillful with hypnosis, as I was not, he then tried hypnotic regression, and suddenly, apparently the patient connected with her past lives. She reported memories of many lives as many different kinds of people. In between were waiting periods for her soul. He reported that she talked slow enough that he could take verbatim notes. When so-called spiritual “Masters” spoke for her later, that was too fast so he started to use audiotapes, though I do not know if that was with informed consent.

He reports her improvement was rapid, major, and lasting. Thereafter, he continued to provide past life treatment for thousands over the years until he wrote this book. In 2008, he added a summary in a new afterword as well as writing several other books, articles, education, and a website. He now is also Chairman Emeritus of Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami.

As if this patient case improvement was not impressive enough, there was another reported benefit. Dr Weiss reported on how much he was improved as a person. He was also startled by her apparent knowledge of tragedy in his family which was not publicly shared. As it turned out, during the regressions, he got told that the process and information was as much for him as her, because he was on the way to being an expanding healer if he continued to be more open and using his intuition. He apparently followed that advice.

I received some sort of feedback like that, but from a different situation. Unexpectedly, a dramatic rise in my blood pressure was found in a routine annual neurological visit a few years back. My primary care physician tried various meds, but none worked. He then referred me to a cardiologist, a Christian woman with a family originally from India. She wanted to be sure there was not something even more serious and unknown so sent me through a battery of cardiac tests. This was during the COVID-19 pandemic. All were normal, that is, until the last one, wearing a Halter monitor. Soon after putting it on, I got a call from the company nurse who said I needed a pacemaker as soon as possible and not to leave town. I got the pacemaker and that is a story in its own. During a follow-up visit, I asked the cardiologist why she thought the problem came up unexpectedly and was finally helpfully addressed. She then, surprisingly in a personal and spiritual sense, talked about her own breast cancer and successful aftermath to date. She said we both still needed to help others.

Previously using standard psychodynamic therapy, Dr Weiss was on guard for countertransference—that is, projecting and incorporating his own problems and preferences onto the patient. Most extensively, that could be somehow implanting or accepting so much erroneous information that both would believe about her “past lives,” because verification was extremely difficult for most of it. I did notice that he mentioned several times how attractive the patient seemed to be. Whether that had any influence seems uncertain.

Not surprisingly, I recommend reading this book. It reads well and almost like a mystery. Practically speaking, redemption, which was discussed in prior columns, may be another route to personal improvement. I am not making a medical recommendation for hypnotic regression to past lives, nor other possible ways to them, like through meditation.

There are some other psychiatrists who have written about past lives, as Dr Weiss notes and shares. Many, like Ian Stevenson, focus on children. Another psychiatrist, Paul DeBell was profiled in an August 27, 2010, article in the New York Times, titled “Remembrances of Lives Past.”³ He used hypnosis, too, and for himself, believed he was once a cave man, a Tibetan monk, and a conscientious German who refused to turn in his Jewish neighbors to the Nazis.

In the same article, it was noted that Dr Weiss was censured in 1988 by some medical establishment after he published his first book. Paradoxically enough, it seems like he was initially banned from the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis, but was then reinstated. The American Psychiatric Association said there was no scientific evidence to support his claims.

The conclusions that Dr Weiss mentions about the purpose of past lives is one most of us will likely embrace. In his answer on his website to one of the questions he was asked, “Why do we reincarnate?” he answers:

“I think everybody reincarnates because we have many lessons to learn, lessons about love, compassion, charity, nonviolence, inner peace, patience, etc. It would be hard to learn them all in one life. Also some people come back voluntarily to help others.”

If you have not seen it, there is a poll that was put up last Friday by the Psychiatric Times editors: Do You Believe in an Afterlife?

Please take a look if you have not already. We would love to hear your answers.

Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry and is now in retirement and retirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekday column titled “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry & Society,” since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He was chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award from the American Association for Social Psychiatry. Previously, he received the Administrative Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the one-time designation of being a Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Speaker of the Assembly of the APA in 2002, and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He presented the third Rabbi Jeffrey B. Stiffman lecture at Congregation Shaare Emeth in St. Louis on Sunday, May 19, 2024. He is an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout, and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry for Springer: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianity, and now The Eastern Religions, and Spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.

References

1. Moffic HS, Gogineni RR, Peteet JR, et al, eds. The Eastern Religions, Spirituality, and Psychiatry. Springer; 2024.

2. Weiss BL. Many Lives, Many Masters: The True Story of a Prominent Psychiatrist, His Young Patient, and the Past-Life Therapy That Changed Both Their Lives. Fireside; 1988.

3. Miller L. Remembrances of lives past. New York Times. August 27, 2010. Accessed June 24, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/fashion/29PastLives.html