concept
Reincarnation research
Two and a half thousand cases of children who said they remembered a previous life — collected by a psychiatry professor over forty years, and clustered where the belief already is.
What it is
The systematic investigation of cases — almost always young children — in which someone makes detailed statements about a life they claim to have lived before.
The typical case: a child of two or three begins speaking about another family, another town, another death, often with distress and often with unusual specificity. The statements stop around age seven. Where the previous personality can be identified, investigators attempt to check whether what the child said matches the facts.
The doctrinal background is described under Hinduism and Buddhism. This article is about the empirical programme, which is a separate thing.
Where it came from
Ian Stevenson (1918–2007) was head of psychiatry at the University of Virginia and gave up the chair to pursue this work full-time from 1967, funded by a bequest from Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography. Over forty years he and his colleagues compiled around 2,500 cases, chiefly from India, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Turkey, Thailand, Burma and among the Tlingit of Alaska.
His major works — Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (1966) and the two-volume Reincarnation and Biology (1997) — are meticulous, dry, heavily caveated, and were reviewed in mainstream medical journals with a mixture of respect for the rigour and scepticism about the conclusion.
Jim Tucker at Virginia continues the work, and has focused on American cases, which are rarer and where the child usually has no cultural framework for what they are saying.
How it is used
As the strongest available empirical case for survival of death — Stevenson himself never claimed more than "suggestive of", a phrase he chose deliberately and defended for forty years.
What we can and cannot say
We can say the work was serious. Stevenson interviewed families, took statements, sought independent witnesses, recorded who said what before verification, and published the failures alongside the successes. Nobody has credibly alleged fraud. The critical literature is about interpretation, not integrity.
We can say the strongest feature is the birthmark cases. Stevenson documented around two hundred in which a child had a birthmark or defect corresponding to a wound — usually fatal — described in the claimed previous life, and in a subset he obtained the medical or autopsy records. Two marks matching entry and exit wounds is the sort of thing that is hard to produce by coincidence, and it is why the work is not simply dismissible.
And we can say the distribution is the central problem. Cases cluster overwhelmingly in cultures that already believe in reincarnation. If children were genuinely remembering previous lives, the phenomenon should be roughly evenly distributed across humanity, and it is not.
Stevenson's answer was that cases occur everywhere but are only reported and pursued where the culture takes them seriously — a Western parent hearing this from a three-year-old redirects the conversation. That is a reasonable reply and it cannot be tested, which is the difficulty.
We can say the case histories are vulnerable in a specific way. Almost every case reaches the investigator after the family has already identified a candidate previous personality and often after the two families have met. What the child said before that meeting is then reconstructed from the memory of people who now have a strong emotional investment in the answer. Stevenson knew this and worked hard on it, and it remains the weak joint. The handful of cases documented before any contact are the valuable ones, and they are few.
We can say the normal explanations are available and unproven. Unconscious cueing by parents; cold-reading dynamics operating within a family; cryptomnesia — information acquired ordinarily and forgotten as such; social reinforcement of a child who has found that certain statements produce dramatic adult attention; and the ordinary reshaping of memory in everyone involved. Each is plausible. None has been demonstrated to account for the birthmark subset.
We can say no independent programme has replicated it. Almost the entire corpus comes from Stevenson's group and its successors. Where the same evidential standard has been applied by outside investigators, the strong cases have not accumulated.
We cannot say what these cases are. Stevenson's own final position was that the evidence was suggestive, that no other explanation fitted comfortably, and that he could not prove it — and after forty years of the most sustained fieldwork anyone has done on the question, that judgement is probably still the accurate one.
Hypnotic past-life regression is a separate matter and a much weaker one. Memories recovered under hypnosis are known to be highly susceptible to suggestion, and where regression accounts have been checked they have generally traced to forgotten ordinary sources. Stevenson deliberately did not use hypnosis, and his reasons are worth knowing.
Further reading
- Ian Stevenson, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (1966).
- Jim Tucker, Life Before Life (2005) and Return to Life (2013).
- Champe Ransom's critical report on Stevenson's methods, and the exchanges it produced.