Past Life Regression
(PLR)

History of PLR

The use of hypnotic regression to bring a subject back to a purported past life began in the late 19th century in France. The idea of reincarnation was essentially non-Western, an idea imported from the East and the Hindu as well as Buddhist religious beliefs.

Franz Mesmer, a German physician in the late 1770s, and his associates observed that as part of his “magnetic cure” the client may need to go through some kind of healing crisis, by bringing to a head dammed-up emotions and thoughts. This has been known as the cathartic method since the late nineteenth century.

The Society for Psychical Research was founded at the end of the nineteenth century in London by a group of scholars, philosophers, spiritualists and scientists who were intent on saving religious values by basing them on scientific evidence. Their goal was to investigate, expose or document those phenomena that indicated a life after death. They found that the study of reincarnation is intrinsically involved with the study of psychic phenomena in general.

In the 1930s, JB Rhine at Duke University began a systematic scientific study of parapsychology and essentially converted the research to a psychological discipline and ESP became the forefront of all parapsychological research. The modern renaissance of interest in reincarnation begins in 1956 with the publication of Morey Bernstein’s book The Search for Bridey Murphy. Only four years later Dr. Ian Stevenson, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, published his scholarly report on “The Evidence for Survival from Claimed Memories of Former Incarnations.” It served as a prelude to the gradual emergence of reincarnation as a topic of import to parapsychology as a whole. He brought respectability to the field having dedicated his career to the study of reincarnation and its research.