Or again, psychologist Martin Orne once got hold of some pictures drawn by a student when he was six. The student had not seen them since the age of six, and Professor Orne was sent them by the student's parents. He was delighted to find that the parents had lovingly written the exact date of their son's sketches: 23 October 1937. He regressed the young man back to that exact date, and asked him to draw exactly the same objects: a house, a tree and so on. In repeated tests, the two sets of pictures showed little correlation, until after the student had been shown the original 1937 drawings. Sceptically, one might say that until then he was drawing as an adult imagined a six-year-old might draw; more charitably, that he was simply drawing like a different six-year-old. On another occasion, Orne asked someone regressed back to age six to write ‘I am conducting an experiment which will assess my psychological capabilities.’ Slowly and laboriously, as a six-year-old might, the subject printed the sentence – but there was no problem with the spelling.
In any case, someone some time got the idea of regressing one of his clients back even further, back beyond birth. It is said to have been either Dr Mortis Stark in 1906 or Colonel Albert de Rochas a little earlier, though there had already been cases of spontaneous regression under hypnosis to past lives. Perhaps the most famous such medium was Mrs Smith, whose recollections were written up in 1900 by the Swiss psychiatrist Théodore Flournoy.
One of the most tireless workers in the field of past-life regression in recent years has been Helen Wambach, who has regressed thousands of subjects, often in groups. Her approach is different, because she is an academic researcher, not a therapist. So, for instance, she guides more than a therapist would, directing her subjects to particular eras in time. Early in her research she seems to have realized that it was going to be impossible to find a historically verifiable past life, uncontaminated by her subjects’ buried memories from this lifetime, so instead she has focused on statistics. She finds it significant, for instance, that the percentage of her subjects who find themselves female or male in a past life is statistically accurate; that the same goes for the percentage of upper-, middle-and lower-class lives; that the kinds of clothing, footwear, foodstuffs, etc., seem to check out. But despite her academic credentials, her work is characterized by a high degree of gullibility. If one of her groups displays the same proportion of men and women as in the century to which they were regressed, that hardly proves they were actually remembering events from that century.
Bridey Murphy
There are by now a huge number of past-life regressions on record, but probably the single most famous case is the one published in the bestselling 1956 book The Search for Bridey Murphy, by Morey Bern-stein, which was the first to alert the public to the phenomenon. It makes sense to focus on this case, old enough for the facts to have been checked, rather than on more recent cases such as those described by Joe Keeton in The Power of the Mind. Bridey Murphy is also one of the better cases, in the sense that a lot of so-called past-life memories do not stand the slightest investigation.
Bernstein was a skilled amateur hypnotist who found that ‘Ruth Simmons’ (actually Virginia Burns Tighe), the wife of a friend, was a good hypnotic subject. Having become interested in the possibility of reincarnation, in 1952 and 1953 he regressed Ruth back past what she could remember of the childhood of her present life, and she began to reveal details of a previous life, from Ireland early in the nineteenth century. And there are plenty of these details: nearly 100 pages of Bernstein's book are transcripts from taped sessions, which were always conducted in the presence of witnesses. Ruth's description of her life as Bridey impresses by its consistency (her ability to repeat the same facts during separation sessions, although Bernstein sometimes leads her in this respect), and its ordinariness. She also spoke in an Irish accent, which was more marked at some times than at others, and displayed a vivacious character. After one session, in which she said that as Bridey she had been good at dancing a particular jig, Bernstein planted the suggestion that after she came to she would dance it for them, and with a certain amount of reluctance she did.
As Bridey she also reported how, after dying in 1864 at the age of sixty-six, she lingered around her married home in Belfast, and returned to Cork, where she had been born, to watch over her brother Duncan. Then she lived in the spirit world, before being reborn in 1923 in Iowa as ‘Ruth Mills’. She gave some details of life in the spirit or astral world. She also vaguely remembered an even earlier life in New Amsterdam (the place that later became New York), but seemed reluctant to talk about it.
Although a great deal of what Bridey said about Ireland was trite and predictable (for instance, that it is a beautiful country), or at the level of common knowledge (for instance, that the currency was pounds, shillings and pence, or that there is a legend of gigantic CÚchulain), she did also come up with some more obscure facts. Bernstein and his friends checked up on several of the details of Bridey's life – a newspaper and a book she remembered, for instance – and found that they existed. Most interesting was her mention of a place called Baylings Crossing. This was not on any map, nor had the British or Irish embassies heard of it, nor the relevant railway company. But people who had visited the area (as ‘Ruth’ had not) knew of it; it was just too small to be widely known. Later, once a book contract had been signed, the publisher arranged for a legal firm in Ireland to run some more checks. Remarkably, a couple of the Belfast shops Bridey mentioned did actually exist; she was accurate on stories, customs and legends current in Ireland at the time; she seemed again (as in the case of Baylings Crossing) to have peculiar local knowledge, in that she said that tobacco was grown around Cork, and indeed it was at the time, though in such small quantities as to escape the record books.
But there were also a number of details for which corroboration should have been easy, but was not forthcoming. For instance, to mention just a few of the oddities, Bridey claimed that her husband Sean Brian Joseph MacCarthy taught law at Queen's University, Belfast, and she named a couple of his colleagues there. She also said that her husband published letters in the Belfast News-Letter. Not all the names of Belfast shops she mentioned have been found, nor has the church at which she worshipped, nor the Dooley Road on which the church was located. She failed to recognize the names of some well-known shops and people from Belfast at the time. She gave her birthday as 20 December 1798, and yet on another occasion claimed to have died aged sixty-six in 1864, leaving her only eleven days of 1864 in which she could have died. There were no wooden houses in Cork, and no lyres in Ireland.
The case was headline news, so all this evidence and counterevidence has been thoroughly sifted and worked over. Each piece of evidence that seemed to support or refute the book became news throughout 1956, with the Hearst group of newspapers leading the attack. The reaction of the scientists and professional hypnotists may be gauged by the fact that within only two or three months the collection of responses edited by Milton Kline as A Scientific Report on ‘The Search for Bridey Murphy’, a book which combines hard-headed and hard-hitting analysis with the occasional sly innuendo, had been rushed into print. Meanwhile newspaper reporters took up the investigation and amateur hypnotists around the world began to regress their subjects back to past lives. Even the recordings of Bernstein's sessions with Mrs Tighe went on sale. Reincarnation was the topic of the day. The publishers must have been delighted.
But there are both theoretical and factual grounds for concern. There is little doubt, as we have seen, that Bridey came up with ‘facts’ that have not been confirmed by research, but other possible concrete pieces of evidence proved more elusive, especially because over-eager newspaper reporters muddied the waters. Hearst reporters claimed that an Irish woman named Bridie Murphy Corkell had once lived across the street from Mrs Tighe when she lived in Chicago, and that the two had been friends; and that Mrs Tighe also had an Irish aunt who had regaled her with stories in her childhood. But neither of these ‘facts’ is unassailable. A reporte
r from a rival newspaper found that although the aunt was Irish in origin, she had been born in New York, and didn't meet Virginia until the girl was in her late teens. It is not even certain that Mrs Corkell's middle name was Murphy. By the time this news was published, however, the damage was done, and other newspapers got carried away, claiming falsely that either or both of Bernstein and Virginia Tighe had confessed to a deliberate deception.
The theoretical grounds for concern are a little more complex, and a couple of parallel cases will help first, by way of illustration. A hypnotized patient in America in the early 1950s suddenly began to speak a few words in an unknown language. Since the therapists could not understand a word he was saying, they got him to write it out. It looked like this: Usurs inim malaks nistrus Pakiu Kluvatui Valamais pulukui antkadum damia. Was this gibberish? A language from outer space? Or what?
A very similar case, also involving xenoglossy (speaking a foreign language), is a little more recent. In the 1960s psychiatrist Reima Kampman from the University of Oulu in Finland hypnotized a number of teenage schoolchildren, several of whom seemed to remember past lives. Perhaps the most amazing was ‘Niki’, who revealed a whole sequence of past lives, stretching back 2,000 years. One of them was as ‘Dorothy’, an innkeeper's daughter in thirteenth-century England. When regressed to this life, Niki began to sing the old English song which begins ‘Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing cuccu! Groweth sed and bloweth med, And springeth the wude nu.’ Actually, though, she sang it in a modernized version of the words. How on earth did a teenage Finnish girl know this song?
In a way, the explanation for both these cases is just as remarkable as reincarnation. The apparent gibberish coming from the mouth of the American patient turned out to be a curse in old Oscan, an Italian language, from the third century BCE. The patient denied any knowledge of Oscan. Is this, then, not proof of reincarnation? From where did he learn Oscan if not from a previous life, either as a scholar or even in ancient Italy? If the therapists had been inclined to believe this, they could have pursued the fantasy, and the patient would have constructed for himself a past life as coherent as that of Bridey Murphy. Or if they had failed to identify the language as Oscan, all the parties involved might have assumed reincarnation from another planet, and become caught up in a fantasy along those lines. In actual fact, though, this is what they found:
We discovered that one afternoon he had seated himself at a table in the Library of the University of Pennsylvania in order to prepare for an examination in Economics that was scheduled for the following day, but that instead he began to daydream about his girl friend, who had just broken a date with him, while looking not at the text he was supposedly outlining but at another book which was on the table and which was opened at page 243. This was Buck's Grammar of Oscan and Umbrian (Ginn & Company, Boston, 1904). In the middle of the page, in English, was the phrase: ‘the Curse of Vibia’. ‘Vibia’ looked like his girl friend's nickname. Without being aware of the fact that he was looking at this book, he nevertheless photographically imprinted on his memory the Oscan Curse printed immediately below the English title.
And the case of the Finnish schoolgirl is exactly the same. When questioned under hypnosis, the girl explained that she was once sitting in a library and happened to be flicking through a book in which the English song was printed. It was (in Finnish) Musiikin Vaiheet (The Phases of Music), by Benjamin Britten and Imogen Holst. She gave Kampman exact details of whereabouts in the book the song was to be found, and Kampman found these to be true. Both these subjects were affected by what has been called ‘source amnesia’: they had an accurate memory for information, but could not remember where the information had been acquired.
Whatever one thinks about reincarnation, is it not remarkable – and just as remarkable in its way as the possibility of reincarnation – that the human mind is capable of absorbing and retaining apparently meaningless information with such precision, for such a long time, when that information was so casually come by? What does this tell us about the powers of the mind? They are obviously far greater than is normally assumed. In another famous pseudo-reincarnation case, the subject spoke fairly fluent German, when she hardly knew it at all in her waking state.
Now add to this extraordinary capacity another equally remarkable mental ability. We all know far more than we are consciously aware of knowing. An everyday example of this is that we can all recognize many more words than we use in our personal vocabularies. We have taken in and stored all kinds of odd pieces of information. But that on its own is not the remarkable ability I'm getting at. We can also put all these odd pieces of information together and create a vivid and coherent story. We do it every night in our dreams. In my dreams I have composed symphonies and spoken foreign languages with fluency – neither of which are daytime abilities. The mind is astonishingly creative. Vividness is no guarantee of a genuine reincarnation experience, though it is often taken to be. The most convincing factors of the many supposed reincarnation cases I have read are their vividness and consistency, but if I was able to relive one of my vivid dreams out loud it would have the same qualities. In short, I believe that past-life regression is not genuine, but an instance of the mind's imaginative capabilities.
Films like the star-studded Dead Again (1992) have helped to perpetuate the idea that we can access past lives through hypnosis, and in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever Barbra Streisand doesn't just regress to a past life, but progresses to a future life too. Though nowhere near as common as past-life progression, there have been cases of future-life progression under hypnosis (recently popularized by Chet Snow in Dreams of the Future). Since the early days of hypnotism subjects have imagined the future. In the nineteenth century mesmerized ‘clairvoyants’ would describe life in the 1920s; they have since all been proved wrong. There is no reason to think that hypnotized subjects today who describe life in the 2020s, or on other planets, are any less wrong. There is every reason to think that they are creating a story in exactly the same way that others do when regressed to supposed past lives. The pictures they paint of the future are obviously built up from current concepts of the future, which shows that imagination and not objective reality is at work.
Anyway, to return to the Bridey Murphy case, the point is that in a sense Bernstein was just as entranced as Ruth Simmons. Because he wanted to believe in reincarnation, he shelved all other possible interpretations in favour of just this one, and joined her in a folie à deux. If the transcripts are read in this light, it is easy to see that Ruth was responding to his eagerness, and when she cannot answer one of his questions she resorts to vague replies such as ‘I don't know: that's not for a woman.’ The phenomenon of cryptomnesia (apparently lost memories which are actually capable of being recalled in dreams or under hypnosis) was well known and documented by the early 1950s, but Bernstein, not being a professional, did not take it into account as a possible explanation. A couple of times I have read the Bridey Murphy case described as a ‘hoax’. This seems unfair, since a hoax is a deliberate attempt to deceive. It would take considerable cynicism to describe Bernstein or Virginia Tighe as anything other than innocent and well meaning. Bernstein made mistakes, that's all.
But this is one of those areas of psychiatry where errors should not be allowed, and amateurs therefore should be excluded. Imagine a man who ‘remembers’ having committed a murder in a past life. What would be the emotional effect on him? On the other hand, even if past-life regression is false, it can still be useful therapy, and a number of therapists make use of it while claiming to be sceptical about the reality of their clients’ fantasies. Precisely because the client is emotionally involved in the fantasy, it can cause an abreaction – an emotional release which is therapeutic. Suppose a client has arthritis in the elbow, and the therapist guesses that there is a neurotic component to the ailment. The therapist might regress her patient to a past life and ask when the elbow first started to hurt. The patient might come up with a ‘past life’ in
which he broke his elbow while fighting in the Battle of Trafalgar. If his involvement in the battle scenario has the appropriate emotional quality, abreaction might follow, and the pain might be relieved. The most important recent Russian researcher into this area, Dr Vladimir Raikov, has found that past-life regression helps people develop a critical attitude towards their behaviour, and so has been an aid in the rehabilitation of criminals and, especially, recovery from alcoholism. To sum up, then, past-life regression is an uncertain practice, and should only be used, if at all, by professionals.
Confabulation
At one point in her book Hypnotism Made Easy (which, despite the title, is fiction), French novelist Marie Nimier says: ‘One can inject basically any event, shaped appropriately, into the memory of a well-disposed individual, as long as it isn't against his principles.’ Once such a memory has been installed, it becomes as real, subjectively, as any true memory. This is the phenomenon of confabulation – the trap into which I have just accused Morey Bernstein and Virginia Tighe of falling. Confabulation is when two people unwittingly conspire to create a scenario; they implant a false memory into the subject's mind, and then make it concrete. Suppose a subject has fragmentary memories (true or false) of an event; in confabulation the gaps between these memories are filled in with a seemingly coherent story, which then takes on the appearance of a series of true memories.
The phenomena of confabulation and the creation of false memories (‘retroactive hallucination’, as Bernheim accurately called it) were well known in the nineteenth century. If only they had been known 200 years earlier, when, during the notorious Salem witch trials of the 1690s, it is clear with hindsight that the children involved named many of the accused in order to please their questioners and put an end to the hours of interrogation to which they had been subjected. Nineteenth-century researchers also recognized the importance of the feeling of certainty to one's impression of the accuracy of a memory, and the legal repercussions of these phenomena were discussed. Nevertheless, despite this background of nineteenth-century knowledge, there have been too many distressing cases since then, and especially in the 1980s and 1990s.
Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis Page 32
