Divyanshu Yaduvanshi
Blog 1
There has been a lot of research in the field of psychology and physiatry regarding Past-Life Experiences (PLE) and reincarnation by extension especially on children between the ages of 2-5 years in which children remember their past life experiences and memories. Most of these past-life memories recalled by children have been of traumatic and violent death experiences of their past-life self (Haraldsson, 2003). The children with PLEs recall various memories of their past self which are verified by investigating through the instruments like interviews (of children, their family and their supposed previous family) by the experimenter, and various documented empirical evidence of the deceased as recalled by the children (Moraes et al., 2021). PLE studies have been a popular field in psychology due to the extensive work by Jim Tucker, a psychiatry professor at University of Virginia following the footsteps of his predecessor Ian Stevenson.
The idea of reincarnation was introduced into the nascent discipline of psychology in the 20th century by William James and was first studied by Théodore Flournoy. In the early psychological approaches Flournoy reasoned the possibility of Cryptomnesia, a condition in which a subject remembers a forgotten memory without it being recognized by the subject and believes it to be something original. Methods like hypnosis which were used in psychoanalysis became widely popular in the early stages of learning about a person's past-life. Hence, Pierre Janet’s ideology about a connection between events in subject’s past-life and their present-day trauma in psychoanalysis became popular, building up the early stages of PLE.
Since, most of the recent studies in the field of PLE were recorded and surveyed in Asian cultures like India, Sri Lanka and the Druze in Lebanon. So, it received a lot of criticism because of profound reincarnation ideologies popular in these cultures due to their religion/spiritual traditions. However, PLE cases were also verified in western and non reincarnationist cultures, such as North America and Europe (Moraes et al., 2021). Tucker’s research on PLE has made this a topic of interest in pop culture and various reputed publications and the remarkable case studies like Ryan and 2-year-old James Leininger have made this field very peculiar.
The case of James is one of the most interesting cases in PLE wherein a 2-year-old remembered being a pilot in World War II and being traumatized by remembering dying due to a plane crash in War. James vividly remembered the details of his past self’s life and death which was verified by his family and Tucker by tracing the death of a similar soldier as stated by James without there being any connection of James and his family with the deceased soldier. The boy at a young age of 2-years showed all the characteristics of being diagnosed with PTSD without any other observed trauma and abuse in their life which is quite extraordinary (Jawer, 2014). Simultaneously, several interpretations have been made to answer the question of similarity between a child's claim about their past-life and the facts in the life of a deceased person who died before the child was born (Haraldsson, 2003).
Most of the research on cases of PLEs have been centered around the attempts of verifying the claims of the child about their previous life and little attention has been made to psychological factors in the development of these cases (Haraldsson, 2003). Two of the most prominent research using psychological methodologies was conducted in Sri Lanka and another study in Lebanon which shows a lot of variability in the culture and accounts for multi-ethnicity for research. Haraldsson (2003) conducted their study in Lebanon building on the already existing study in Sri Lanka where they tested several hypotheses on PLE children like social isolation, suggestibility, rich fantasy life, dissociative tendencies and attention seeking and how it may facilitate reporting of previous life memories. Various factors were looked at and compared in this study with the Sri Lankan study and found that PLE children tend to be attention-seeking, to have rich fantasy life, and to have mild dissociative tendencies that may explain past-life memories.
Simultaneously, Haraldsson (2003) also concluded that most PLE children show signs of disorders like Schizophrenia, PTSDs but most do not develop them in their later life and live a normal life which can be explained according to the research evidence of PLE children forgetting about their “previous” life memories around the age of 5-8 years. Most of the other studies in PLE children which are anecdotal may help in explaining minor correspondence between the past-life statements of the child and facts of a deceased person’s life but they can’t explain higher correspondence between them which can only be done using psychological explanations. Although, some obsolete methods of psychoanalysis are still being used to this date whereby hypnosis is used to treat a patient's present-day trauma by evoking their alleged past-life memories like reincarnation therapies and past life regression. These methods can be easily debunked using psychological explanations like source-monitoring error which is an error in judgment about the original source of a memory (Mims, 2007).
Hence, reincarnation and PLE is an extremely important theory which is still not answered by the scientific community using the results concluded so far like, why does PLE children have a correspondence between their birthmarks or deformities during birth and fatal wounds of the deceased person to whom they claim to be in the past-life. It is important to explore more methods to explain such high correspondence between PLE and the facts of a person who died recently. There is a large scope of modern biopsychosocial models to explain this theory as proposed by Jawer (2014) where he proposed that strong trauma of past life can be transferred, as seen in the experiments conducted on mice who were given electric shocks passed on their fear to their pups. Hence, further research using more scientific theories like epigenetics can help us in solving the true mystery behind past-life memories and possibly even reincarnation!
References
Moraes, L. J., Barbosa, G. S., Castro, J. P., Tucker, J. B., & Moreira-Almeida, A. (2021). Academic studies on claimed past-life memories: A scoping review. EXPLORE. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2021.05.006
Haraldsson, E. (2003). Children who speak of past-life experiences: Is there a psychological explanation? Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 76(1), 55–67. https://doi.org/10.1348/14760830260569256
Mims, C. (2007, March 30). Remember a previous life? maybe you have a bad memory. Scientific American. Retrieved February 3, 2022, from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/previous-life-memories-due-to-bad-memory/#:~:text=A%20new%20study%20shows%20that,any%20given%20piece%20of%20information.&text=This%20is%20important%20because%20source,believe%20lead%20to%20false%20memories.
Jawer, M. (2014, December 13). Children who seemingly remember Past lives. Psychology Today. Retrieved February 3, 2022, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/feeling-too-much/201412/children-who-seemingly-remember-past-lives
Taylor, S. (2021, December 20). Evaluating the evidence for reincarnation. Psychology Today. Retrieved February 4, 2022, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-the-
darkness/202112/evaluating-the-evidence-reincarnation
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