"Dr. Joyce Johnson" wrote:
> Maybe you should read his books. I had a student refer to his first book
> in a paper. So I got a copy and read it. What is particularly impressive is
> that he is, in his own words, left-brained and tradiationally trained. I
> think he trained at Columbia and practices at Mt Sinai in Florida.
Teacher's College at Columbia, if I recall correctly, is heavily psychoanalytic
in its orientation, so I would bet that your memory is correct here: his
training, if it was obtained there, should have disposed him to use hypnosis as
a way to access unconscious (repressed) memories.
> He did not set out to explore
> regression hypnosis.
But, as you point out a little later, he had been doing hypnotic age
regressions. According to Ofshe and Watters (1994), before getting into
past-life regression "therapy," Weiss "routinely used hypnosis to uncover his
patients' histories of sexual abuse" (p. 165), so he apparently had been
age-regressing patients for some time in order to recover sexual-abuse
memories. According to Gary Posner, he had been doing this for years prior to
his first past-life regression (see Posner at
http://members.aol.com/tbskep/Past_Lives.html). Posner asked: "Since Weiss now
routinely regresses his patients to past lives (and can do so in minutes for
any sufficiently suggestible attendees of his advertised $200-a-head Sunday
reincarnation 'workshops,'...), why did it take so many years to stumble upon
his first case?" I suppose the answer might be that he had never tried. But the
real problem is the abundant evidence showing that hypnotic inductions can give
people an excuse to consider their imaginative narratives to be actual memories
of earlier events (e.g., Spanos, 1996). In fact, people have been progressed
into future lives and have described these future lives with all the detail
obtained for past lives (this was in Spanos, I believe, but I don't have it
with me today).
> He was using it in the traditional sense when his
> client, Catherine, I think, a lab tech from the hospital- could not
> overcome her problem swallowing. He had tried traditional techniques for
> about 18 months without success. He suspected that the fear of swallowing
> might reside in a childhood episode, so he was doing a childhood regression
> - not a past life regression-- when the first past life regression session
> occurred. He wrote that he held back his information for four years because
> of the ridicule he feared he would draw from his professional colleagues.
> He was quite surprised himself when it occurred, but the phenomenon was
> quite astonishing. Here was a person,his client, in a hypnotic state-
> talking about his father and his deceased son in a way that shc could not
> have known. His infant son had "chicken heart", where the heart is reversed
> in the chest cavity, and had died within 21 days, maybe 11 days, or so,
> after birth. And that had occurred years before. She used his deceased
> father's name that was not his common name- either his original name before
> Americanization or his nickname. Anyway, that was from his first book. In
> his third book, I think it is, two clients tell the same past life
> regression scene from two perspectives. Anyway, I was impressed by the
> sincerity of his approach. By the way, the past life incident with the
> swallowing revealed a death in a former life related to the throat, and
> upon awakening from the hypnotic state, the swallowing problem was resolved.
Posner had several questions about this case:
---------------quoted from Posner--------------------------------------------
Weiss, who says he began "entirely skeptical," told the story of the main
character in his first book, a young woman ridden with
phobias. Like thousands of other psychiatrists, Weiss had employed hypnosis
"for years" to regress patients back to childhood in
order to find the origins of their incapacitating fears. But for some reason,
this one patient unexpectedly
flipped back spontaneously, it appeared to me, about four thousand
years. She was in a different body, face, hair . . .
and [at the end of that life she] drowned . . . in a flood or tidal
wave. . . . I thought it was imagination or fantasy [but]
her life-long fear of drowning started to get better. . . . She knew
details and facts about ancient cultures that she had
no conscious knowledge of. . . . She died in [another] middle ages
lifetime, floated up to a beautiful light, which she
did after every lifetime, and told me there were two people there to see
me, my father and my son. And she knew
nothing about me . . . [but] she told me your father is here. She told
me his name -- Hebrew name -- and she's a
Catholic woman. . . . She said he's here, he died from his heart, [and]
your daughter is named after him. She said your
son is here, he's very tiny [but his spirit is] shining brightly, [and]
his heart is important also because it's turned around
backwards, why he died (Weiss' infant son had died of a rare such heart
anomaly ten years earlier). And she didn't
know any of this.
I can't help but harbor a few questions after dissecting the above recital....
If the spirits
of his father and son were present in the "middle ages," why were they not also
present "four thousand years ago" or at his patient's
other deaths? Why did his infant son's eternal spirit appear as that of a
"tiny" infant back in the "middle ages" (that brief lifetime
wasn't lived until the 20th century)? Why do the references to his father and
son sound suspiciously like "psychic readings" rather
than like excited hellos from long-lost loved ones with hundreds or thousands
of years of wisdom and gossip to impart?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The problem with such anecdotes is that we cannot tell what is going on and
what the person actually knows. The case of Bridey Murphey, for example, should
make us very cautious about accepting such anecdotes as Weiss' at face value.
Regards,
Jeff
--
Jeffry P. Ricker, Ph.D. Office Phone: (480) 423-6213
9000 E. Chaparral Rd. FAX Number: (480) 423-6298
Psychology Department [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Scottsdale Community College
Scottsdale, AZ 85256-2626
"The truth is rare and never simple."
Oscar Wilde
"No one can accept the fundamental hypotheses of scientific psychology
and be in the least mystical."
Knight Dunlap
