Where Were You in 1643?

Therapy for the born-again

Nancy Shiffrin, 33, a California writer, always had trouble finishing books and articles. But unlike most authors bedeviled by blocks, she now knows where her troubles began: in the 17th century. During a session with Morris Netherton, a Los Angeles therapist, she had a vision of herself as a woman on trial in America in 1677 for heresy and trying to hide an incriminating diary from her inquisitors. Three hundred years later she was still "hiding the book." But no more. After Netherton's therapy, she says: "I seem to have very little problem finishing up things now, as if the pattern were erased."

Shiffrin is one of many devotees of a growing fad known as "past-lives therapy." Essentially, its practitioners take a conventional Freudian idea--that much adult behavior is unconsciously guided by early traumas--and apply it to the concept of reincarnation. Although the treatment has had a following in the U.S. and Europe for at least 15 years, more and more Americans are experimenting with the notion that their psychological problems arose during previous existences as, say, Shinto priests, Roman guards, citizens of Atlantis or even another planet.

Therapists use various methods: standard talk techniques, meditation and hypnosis, either with individuals or in mass sessions that sometimes smack of revival meetings. In many cases, the discipline sounds more entrepreneurial than scientific. Ralph Grossi, a Pittsburgh hypnotherapist, travels to ten clinics in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia where he treats some 25 people a week with past-lives therapy at $75 per session. An Arizona couple, Dick and Trenna Sutphen, who say they first met and married thousands of years ago, not only operate group seminars but also market tape recordings enabling patients to treat themselves at home. Typically Dick Sutphen hypnotizes 150 customers at a time; by unearthing the secrets of their past lives, he claims, he helps them overcome depression, tension and sexual problems.

At least some of the practitioners are psychiatrists or psychologists in good standing. Netherton works at the conservative end of the past-lives spectrum, often laboring for months to deal with emotions behind a patient's visions. In one-on-one talk sessions, he listens for telling phrases suggesting a problem that can be "worked." Netherton then tells the patient that he is back in the womb and asks him to describe what he sees and hears. Most respond with vivid scenarios.

One patient, a divorced interior decorator named Diane Strom, complained about anxiety from constant financial problems. Netherton saw in her a fear that no one would help her. Sure enough, while reliving her birth, Strom struggled helplessly with the umbilical cord, which was wrapped around her neck. In another situation, living back in 1801 on a farm in the South, she saw her son trampled by a horse, then ran into town looking for aid but could not find any. Past-lives therapists believe that these encounters with old traumas help patients to understand, and thus deal with, their present problems.

Can the "lives" that patients recall be for real? Walnut Creek, Calif., Psychologist Helen Wambach, who has spent five years gathering and analyzing reports of past lives, notes that no patients ever say they lived as Cleopatra, Jesus or Joan of Arc; usually patients recall lowly past existences as peasants, serfs or tribe members--a fact that many therapists believe lends credence to the tales of past life. Insists Netherton: "If people were making this up, they would never make up the mundane, lowly people they were."

Many practitioners argue that the question of whether the past lives were real is irrelevant, on the theory that whatever helps a patient is worthwhile. Says Ojai, Calif., Therapist Marcia Moore, who claims to have taken more than 3,000 people back into earlier lives: "Anything that comes out of the psyche is per se legitimate." What bothers orthodox psychiatrists and psychologists most about past-lives practitioners is their tendency, despite occasional disclaimers, to accept daydreams as fact. British Psychiatrist Anthony Storr argues that recall of past lives is really an example of cryptomnesia, a fantasy based upon subconscious recollections of some long-forgotten historical novel or magazine article. Says Storr: "Most of us have a B movie running in our heads most of the time." Alexander Rogawski, former chief of the Los Angeles County Medical Association's psychiatry section, is even less kind to past-lives treatment: "It's a mystic takeoff on psychoanalysis ... one of those fads that come and go like mushrooms."

Indeed, the past-lives movement is cashing in on the disillusionment with conventional therapies, fear of death and the current interest in the occult. But all that the therapy's popularity proves, says Rogawski, is that "suckers are born every minute and customers can be found for everything."

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