Ian Stevenson

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (1966) and Children Who Remember Previous Lives.

The case of the reincarnation type

Ian Stevenson teaches a way of investigating one kind of claim: the young child who speaks of having lived before. He calls such a case a case of the reincarnation type, and describes its usual shape. A child, most often between two and four, begins to talk of another life: a name, a town, a husband or a wife, children, possessions, and very often the manner of a death. The child may show matching behaviour, a fear of water after a death by drowning, a taste for food or dress the family does not share, the play of a trade, a grown person's way of speaking to people from that life. Many have birthmarks or defects that the families link to the death. The statements usually fade between five and eight.

How a case is examined

The method is to interview as many witnesses as possible, separately and more than once: the child, the parents, the neighbours and the family of the person the child is said to remember, with the interpreters checked against one another. What matters most is what the child said before the two families met, since after they meet the memories of all concerned are mixed, and the best cases are those in which the statements were written down first. Each statement is then checked against the facts of the dead person's life and counted right or wrong. Where he could, he sought documents, a post-mortem report or a hospital record, to set against the child's words and marks.

The explanations weighed

He weighs every case against the ordinary explanations first: fraud, by the child or the families; cryptomnesia, the child having heard of the dead person and forgotten hearing it; paramnesia, the informants' memories reshaping what the child said once the families had met; and, where the families are related, a story handed down. Beyond those he weighs extrasensory perception, the child gaining knowledge of the dead by telepathy and building a personality round it; possession; and reincarnation. For some cases he judged reincarnation the best of the explanations, but he held that none compels belief, and he chose his word with care: the cases are suggestive.

Patterns across peoples

The cases are found most often where rebirth is believed, and they take the shape of the local belief. Among some peoples a mother dreams before the birth that the dead person comes asking for a place, which he called an announcing dream; among others a mark is made on a body at death so that it can be looked for on a newborn. The interval between death and the new birth varies, short where belief holds that rebirth is immediate, and a change of sex between lives is reported among some peoples and almost never among others. A large share of the remembered lives ended in violence.

Birthmarks

His largest work matches birthmarks and birth defects to wounds on the person remembered, from medical records where they could be had: a small round mark where a bullet went in and a larger, ragged one where it came out. To explain how a wound could mark a new body he proposed an intermediate vehicle, which he named the psychophore, carrying something of the person, and the imprint of their wounds, from one life to the next. He offered it as a hypothesis, not a finding.

Xenoglossy

He distinguishes two kinds of claimed speech in an unlearned language. Recitative xenoglossy is the repeating of words or phrases, which might have been heard somewhere and kept in memory. Responsive xenoglossy is speaking the language in conversation, answering in it, and he held this the stronger evidence, because a skill, unlike a fact, cannot be passed by telepathy: a language has to be practised to be spoken.

Against hypnotic regression

He set little store by hypnosis. The past lives people describe when hypnotised and told to go back before birth are, he judged, almost all fantasies, built from things read, seen and heard and coloured by the hypnotist's expectations, and the method lends them a vividness that makes them feel true. Why such memories cannot be trusted is taught in the branch Regression and memory. His evidence came instead from what young children said of their own accord.

A test for survival

He also proposed a test that would not depend on the living. A person sets a combination lock to a word or phrase known only to themselves, turned into numbers by a rule only they know, and tells no one. If, after their death, a message received by any channel gives the word and the lock opens, no living mind could have supplied it.