Ian Stevenson
Encyclopedia
Ian Pretyman Stevenson, MD
, (October 31, 1918–February 8, 2007) was a Canadian biochemist
and professor
of psychiatry
. Until his retirement in 2002, he was head of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia
, which investigates the paranormal
.
Stevenson considered that the concept of reincarnation
might supplement those of heredity and environment in helping modern medicine to understand aspects of human behavior and development. He traveled extensively over a period of 40 years to investigate 3,000 childhood cases that suggested to him the possibility of past lives. Stevenson saw reincarnation as the survival of the personality after death, although he never suggested a physical process by which a personality might survive death. Stevenson was the author of several books, including Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation
(1974), Children Who Remember Previous Lives (1987), Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect
(1997), Reincarnation and Biology
(1997), and European Cases of the Reincarnation Type
(2003).
There has been a mixed reaction to Stevenson's work. Critics have questioned his research methods and conclusions, and his work has been described by some as pseudoscience
. Others have, however, stated that his work was conducted with appropriate scientific
rigor. Stevenson's research was the subject of Tom Shroder
's Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives
(1999) and Jim B. Tucker's Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lives
(2005).
, where his Scottish father was the Canadian correspondent for The Times
of London. His mother had an interest in theosophy
, and Stevenson would later credit her vast library on the subject as triggering his own interest in the paranormal. As a child Stevenson was often bedridden due to bouts of bronchitis
, a condition that would continue throughout his adult life, and lead to the lifelong voracious reading habit which saw him read over 3500 books according to the list he kept since 1935.
He studied medicine at St. Andrews University in Scotland, and at McGill University
in Montreal, receiving a BSc in 1942 and a degree in medicine
in 1943, graduating top of his class.
focusing on biochemical
tissue oxidation. He became interested in finding explanations for psychosomatic illnesses and in the late 1940s he worked at New York Hospital
as part of a team exploring psychosomatic medicine, a theme that persisted throughout his later research. This work persuaded him that the reductionism
of biochemistry rendered it inadequate as an explanatory tool, and he chose to pursue psychiatry over internal medicine.
After training as a psychiatrist, Stevenson taught at Louisiana State University
. In the 1950s, inspired by a meeting with Aldous Huxley
, he was involved in the early medical study of the effects of LSD
and mescaline
. He tried LSD himself, describing three days of "perfect serenity" and commenting, "I could never be angry again. As it happens that didn't work out, but the memory of it persisted as something to hope for."
In 1957, he was appointed head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia
. His early scientific research included psychosomatic illnesses, as well as writing textbooks on interviewing patients and psychiatric examinations.
. He opposed what he saw as the determinism of Sigmund Freud
, arguing that there was little room for free will
if a person's character was formed almost entirely by their experiences as an infant. His 1957 paper questioning whether personality was more plastic in childhood than adulthood provoked strong reactions from psychoanalysts. He said later that the rejection of his views in these cases helped prepare him for the rejection he experienced with his work on paranormal phenomena.
and psychoanalysis as unable to explain the formation of individual characteristics and personality. In the late 1950s, he reviewed "cases suggestive of reincarnation", and was impressed by certain similarities among published reports, particularly that a significant proportion of subjects were under the age of 10 when they apparently recalled past lives. He started collecting and investigating cases of children who seemed to recall past lives, without using hypnosis
. After publishing a paper on reincarnation in 1960, Stevenson was invited to travel to India and Sri Lanka by self-professed psychic
and founder of the Parapsychology Foundation Eileen J. Garrett
. The trip convinced him that the child cases were plentiful and impressive. Around the time of his first visits to India, inventor Chester Carlson
began to offer financial support for his work, and when Carlson died in 1968 he left $1 million to endow a Chair at the University of Virginia, and a further $1 million for Stevenson himself to continue his research into reincarnation.
, with the founding principle of conducting "scientific empirical investigation of phenomena that suggest that currently accepted scientific assumptions and theories about the nature of mind or consciousness, and its relationship to matter, may be incomplete." It remains one of several academic departments in the world dedicated to the study of paranormal phenomena. It was later renamed The Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) with Stevenson appointed as Director. Stevenson resisted efforts to have the word "parapsychology
" used to describe his department and research, arguing that his work was distinct from parapsychology, and was an extension of his more mainstream psychiatric work.
Stevenson's research is associated with a 'minimalist' model of reincarnation that makes no religious claims. According to Robert Almeder
, the central feature of this model is that "There is something essential to some human personalities, however we ultimately characterize it, which we cannot plausibly construe solely in terms of either brain states, or properties of brain states, or biological properties caused by the brain and, further, after biological death this non-reducible essential trait sometimes persists for some time, in some way, in some place, and for some reason or other, existing independently of the person's former brain and body. Moreover, after some time, some of these irreducible essential traits of human personality, for some reason or other, and by some mechanism or other, come to reside in other human bodies either some time during the gestation period, at birth, or shortly after birth."
Stevenson believed the strongest cases he had collected in support of this model involved both testimony and physical evidence. In over 40 of these cases Stevenson gathered physical evidence relating to the often rare and unusual birthmarks and birth defects of children which he claimed matched wounds recorded in the medical or post-mortem records for the individual Stevenson identified as the past-life personality.
The children in Stevenson's studies often behaved in ways he felt suggestive of a link to the previous life. These children would display emotions toward members of the previous family consistent with their claimed past life, e.g., deferring to a husband or bossing around a former younger brother or sister who by that time was actually much older than the child in question. Many of these children also displayed phillias and phobias associated to the manner of their death, with over half who described a violent death being fearful of associated devices. Many of the children also incorporated elements of their claimed previous occupation into their play, while others would act out their claimed death repeatedly.
Tom Shroder said Stevenson's fieldwork technique was that of a detective or investigative reporter, searching for alternative explanations of the material he was offered. One boy in Beirut described being a 25-year-old mechanic who died after being hit by a speeding car on a beach road. Witnesses said the boy gave the name of the driver, as well as the names of his sisters, parents, and cousins, and the location of the crash. The details matched the life of a man who had died years before the child was born, and who was apparently unconnected to the child's family. In such cases, Stevenson sought alternative explanations—that the child had discovered the information in a normal way, that the witnesses were lying to him or to themselves, or that the case boiled down to coincidence. Shroder writes that, in scores of cases, no alternative explanation seemed to suffice.
Stevenson argued that the 3,000 or so cases he studied supported the possibility of reincarnation, though he was always careful to refer to them as "cases suggestive of reincarnation," or "cases of the reincarnation type." He also recognized a limitation, or what Paul Edwards
calls the "modus operandi problem", namely the absence of evidence of a physical process by which a personality could survive death and travel to another body. Against this, Robert Almeder argues that "you may not know how something occurs but have plenty of evidence that it occurs." Recent work by Roger Penrose
and Stuart Hameroff
on quantum consciousness
has been suggested as hinting at a possible mechanism for the persistence of consciousness after death. However the hypothesis of Quantum mind
which this work builds on, is itself under ongoing debate.
In 1977 the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease devoted most of one issue to Stevenson's work. In an editorial for that issue, psychiatrist Eugene Brody explained the decision to publish research that might normally be regarded as unscientific due to the "scientific and personal credibility of the authors, the legitimacy of their research methods, and the conformity of their reasoning to the usual canons of rational thought." In the same issue psychiatrist Harold Lief wrote in a commentary: "Either [Stevenson] is making a colossal mistake, or he will be known ... as 'the Galileo of the 20th century'." More recently a review of Stevenson's European Cases of the Reincarnation Type
described it as "an inspiring example of application of a painstaking protocol to sift facts from fancy."
Stevenson's work has drawn criticism from skeptical
groups and individuals such as The Skeptics Society
and Robert Todd Carroll
, while philosopher Paul Edwards
included a lengthy criticism of Stevenson's work in his book Reincarnation: A Critical Examination. In each of these critiques, the authors question both the methods used and the evidence gathered by Stevenson, and offer alternative, more mainstream, explanations for the types of cases Stevenson argued were suggestive of reincarnation. Philosopher Paul Kurtz, founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, has gone further and suggested Stevenson's reincarnation research is pseudoscience. By contrast, in his books Death and Personal Survival and Beyond Death: The Evidence for Life After Death, philosopher Robert Almeder
endorsed Stevenson's research, rebutted most of Kurtz's objections, and concluded that the evidence he assembled argues strongly in favor of reincarnation, to the point of it being irrational to disbelieve that some people reincarnate. Skeptic Sam Harris
said of Stevenson "either he is a victim of truly elaborate fraud, or something interesting is going on".
has taken over as the Director while Jim B. Tucker, a child psychiatrist, is continuing Stevenson's reincarnation research with children, focusing on North American cases and exploring possible mechanisms for personality transfer.
Tucker said that toward the end of his life, Stevenson felt his long-stated goal of getting science to consider reincarnation as a possibility was not going to be realized in this lifetime. According to his University of Virginia obituary, his greatest frustration was not that people dismissed his theories, but that in his opinion most did so without even reading the evidence he had assembled. Stevenson died of pneumonia at the Blue Ridge Retirement community in Charlottesville, Virginia
, on February 8, 2007.
device known only to him, possibly a word or a sentence.
A colleague, Emily Williams Kelly, told The New York Times: "He did say, that if he found himself able, he would try to communicate that. Presumably, if someone had a vivid dream about him, in which there seemed to be a word or a phrase that kept being repeated—I don't quite know how it would work—if it seemed promising enough, we would try to open it using the combination suggested." As of February 2007, the Times reports, the filing cabinet remains locked.
, New York Times, and the Washington Post.
Doctor of Medicine
Doctor of Medicine is a doctoral degree for physicians. The degree is granted by medical schools...
, (October 31, 1918–February 8, 2007) was a Canadian biochemist
Biochemist
Biochemists are scientists who are trained in biochemistry. Typical biochemists study chemical processes and chemical transformations in living organisms. The prefix of "bio" in "biochemist" can be understood as a fusion of "biological chemist."-Role:...
and professor
Professor
A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...
of psychiatry
Psychiatry
Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study and treatment of mental disorders. These mental disorders include various affective, behavioural, cognitive and perceptual abnormalities...
. Until his retirement in 2002, he was head of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia
University of Virginia
The University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States, founded by Thomas Jefferson...
, which investigates the paranormal
Paranormal
Paranormal is a general term that designates experiences that lie outside "the range of normal experience or scientific explanation" or that indicates phenomena understood to be outside of science's current ability to explain or measure...
.
Stevenson considered that the concept of reincarnation
Reincarnation
Reincarnation best describes the concept where the soul or spirit, after the death of the body, is believed to return to live in a new human body, or, in some traditions, either as a human being, animal or plant...
might supplement those of heredity and environment in helping modern medicine to understand aspects of human behavior and development. He traveled extensively over a period of 40 years to investigate 3,000 childhood cases that suggested to him the possibility of past lives. Stevenson saw reincarnation as the survival of the personality after death, although he never suggested a physical process by which a personality might survive death. Stevenson was the author of several books, including Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation
Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation
Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation is a book written by psychiatrist Ian Stevenson on the phenomena of what he calls spontaneous recall of information about previous lives by young children. The book focuses on twenty cases investigated by the author...
(1974), Children Who Remember Previous Lives (1987), Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect
Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect
Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect is a 1997 book by psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, published by Praeger. The book is about birthmarks and birth defects ostensibly associated with reincarnation...
(1997), Reincarnation and Biology
Reincarnation and Biology
Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects is a 1997 two-part monograph written by psychiatrist Ian Stevenson and published by Praeger...
(1997), and European Cases of the Reincarnation Type
European Cases of the Reincarnation Type
European Cases of the Reincarnation Type is a 2003 book by psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, who conducted research into claims of reincarnation. The work focuses on different reincarnation research case studies in a Western setting...
(2003).
There has been a mixed reaction to Stevenson's work. Critics have questioned his research methods and conclusions, and his work has been described by some as pseudoscience
Pseudoscience
Pseudoscience is a claim, belief, or practice which is presented as scientific, but which does not adhere to a valid scientific method, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, cannot be reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific status...
. Others have, however, stated that his work was conducted with appropriate scientific
Scientific method
Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of...
rigor. Stevenson's research was the subject of Tom Shroder
Tom Shroder
Tom Shroder is an award-winning journalist, writer and editor, who worked for the Washington Post for many years. Shroder is co-author of Fire on the Horizon: the Untold Story of the Gulf Oil Disaster and author of Old Souls: Scientific Evidence From Children Who Remember Previous Lives...
's Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives
Old Souls
Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence For Past Lives is a non-fiction book by journalist Tom Shroder. An editor at the Washington Post, Shroder traveled extensively with psychiatrist Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia, who conducted past life and reincarnation research in Lebanon, India and...
(1999) and Jim B. Tucker's Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lives
Life Before Life
Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lives is a 2005 book written by psychiatrist Jim B. Tucker, which presents an overview of more than 40 years of reincarnation research at the University of Virginia Division of Personality Studies, into children's...
(2005).
Early life and education
Stevenson was raised in OttawaOttawa
Ottawa is the capital of Canada, the second largest city in the Province of Ontario, and the fourth largest city in the country. The city is located on the south bank of the Ottawa River in the eastern portion of Southern Ontario...
, where his Scottish father was the Canadian correspondent for The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
of London. His mother had an interest in theosophy
Theosophy
Theosophy, in its modern presentation, is a spiritual philosophy developed since the late 19th century. Its major themes were originally described mainly by Helena Blavatsky , co-founder of the Theosophical Society...
, and Stevenson would later credit her vast library on the subject as triggering his own interest in the paranormal. As a child Stevenson was often bedridden due to bouts of bronchitis
Bronchitis
Acute bronchitis is an inflammation of the large bronchi in the lungs that is usually caused by viruses or bacteria and may last several days or weeks. Characteristic symptoms include cough, sputum production, and shortness of breath and wheezing related to the obstruction of the inflamed airways...
, a condition that would continue throughout his adult life, and lead to the lifelong voracious reading habit which saw him read over 3500 books according to the list he kept since 1935.
He studied medicine at St. Andrews University in Scotland, and at McGill University
McGill University
Mohammed Fathy is a public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university bears the name of James McGill, a prominent Montreal merchant from Glasgow, Scotland, whose bequest formed the beginning of the university...
in Montreal, receiving a BSc in 1942 and a degree in medicine
Doctor of Medicine
Doctor of Medicine is a doctoral degree for physicians. The degree is granted by medical schools...
in 1943, graduating top of his class.
Early career
Following graduation, Stevenson took a series of jobs in hospitals as an intern or resident, before embarking on research at Tulane UniversityTulane University
Tulane University is a private, nonsectarian research university located in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States...
focusing on biochemical
Biochemistry
Biochemistry, sometimes called biological chemistry, is the study of chemical processes in living organisms, including, but not limited to, living matter. Biochemistry governs all living organisms and living processes...
tissue oxidation. He became interested in finding explanations for psychosomatic illnesses and in the late 1940s he worked at New York Hospital
New York Hospital
New York Hospital or “Old New York Hospital” or “City Hospital” was the oldest hospital in New York City and the second oldest hospital in the United States.-Early History:...
as part of a team exploring psychosomatic medicine, a theme that persisted throughout his later research. This work persuaded him that the reductionism
Reductionism
Reductionism can mean either an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can...
of biochemistry rendered it inadequate as an explanatory tool, and he chose to pursue psychiatry over internal medicine.
After training as a psychiatrist, Stevenson taught at Louisiana State University
Louisiana State University
Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, most often referred to as Louisiana State University, or LSU, is a public coeducational university located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The University was founded in 1853 in what is now known as Pineville, Louisiana, under the name...
. In the 1950s, inspired by a meeting with Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. Best known for his novels including Brave New World and a wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel...
, he was involved in the early medical study of the effects of LSD
LSD
Lysergic acid diethylamide, abbreviated LSD or LSD-25, also known as lysergide and colloquially as acid, is a semisynthetic psychedelic drug of the ergoline family, well known for its psychological effects which can include altered thinking processes, closed and open eye visuals, synaesthesia, an...
and mescaline
Mescaline
Mescaline or 3,4,5-trimethoxyphenethylamine is a naturally occurring psychedelic alkaloid of the phenethylamine class used mainly as an entheogen....
. He tried LSD himself, describing three days of "perfect serenity" and commenting, "I could never be angry again. As it happens that didn't work out, but the memory of it persisted as something to hope for."
In 1957, he was appointed head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia
University of Virginia
The University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States, founded by Thomas Jefferson...
. His early scientific research included psychosomatic illnesses, as well as writing textbooks on interviewing patients and psychiatric examinations.
Criticism of psychoanalysis
Early in his career Stevenson became a controversial figure amongst psychoanalystsPsychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
. He opposed what he saw as the determinism of Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
, arguing that there was little room for free will
Free will
"To make my own decisions whether I am successful or not due to uncontrollable forces" -Troy MorrisonA pragmatic definition of free willFree will is the ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints. The existence of free will and its exact nature and definition have long...
if a person's character was formed almost entirely by their experiences as an infant. His 1957 paper questioning whether personality was more plastic in childhood than adulthood provoked strong reactions from psychoanalysts. He said later that the rejection of his views in these cases helped prepare him for the rejection he experienced with his work on paranormal phenomena.
Interest in parapsychology
Stevenson came to see both behaviorismBehaviorism
Behaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things that organisms do—including acting, thinking, and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors, and that psychological disorders are best treated by altering behavior...
and psychoanalysis as unable to explain the formation of individual characteristics and personality. In the late 1950s, he reviewed "cases suggestive of reincarnation", and was impressed by certain similarities among published reports, particularly that a significant proportion of subjects were under the age of 10 when they apparently recalled past lives. He started collecting and investigating cases of children who seemed to recall past lives, without using hypnosis
Hypnosis
Hypnosis is "a trance state characterized by extreme suggestibility, relaxation and heightened imagination."It is a mental state or imaginative role-enactment . It is usually induced by a procedure known as a hypnotic induction, which is commonly composed of a long series of preliminary...
. After publishing a paper on reincarnation in 1960, Stevenson was invited to travel to India and Sri Lanka by self-professed psychic
Psychic
A psychic is a person who professes an ability to perceive information hidden from the normal senses through extrasensory perception , or is said by others to have such abilities. It is also used to describe theatrical performers who use techniques such as prestidigitation, cold reading, and hot...
and founder of the Parapsychology Foundation Eileen J. Garrett
Eileen J. Garrett
Eileen J. Garrett was an Irish medium, founder of the Parapsychology Foundation in New York City, and a leading figure in the scientific study of paranormal phenomena during the mid-20th century.-Ireland:...
. The trip convinced him that the child cases were plentiful and impressive. Around the time of his first visits to India, inventor Chester Carlson
Chester Carlson
Chester Floyd Carlson was an American physicist, inventor, and patent attorney born in Seattle, Washington....
began to offer financial support for his work, and when Carlson died in 1968 he left $1 million to endow a Chair at the University of Virginia, and a further $1 million for Stevenson himself to continue his research into reincarnation.
Division of Personality Studies
Carlson's bequest enabled Stevenson to set up the Division of Personality Studies at the University of VirginiaUniversity of Virginia
The University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States, founded by Thomas Jefferson...
, with the founding principle of conducting "scientific empirical investigation of phenomena that suggest that currently accepted scientific assumptions and theories about the nature of mind or consciousness, and its relationship to matter, may be incomplete." It remains one of several academic departments in the world dedicated to the study of paranormal phenomena. It was later renamed The Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) with Stevenson appointed as Director. Stevenson resisted efforts to have the word "parapsychology
Parapsychology
The term parapsychology was coined in or around 1889 by philosopher Max Dessoir, and originates from para meaning "alongside", and psychology. The term was adopted by J.B. Rhine in the 1930s as a replacement for the term psychical research...
" used to describe his department and research, arguing that his work was distinct from parapsychology, and was an extension of his more mainstream psychiatric work.
Reincarnation research
Stevenson traveled extensively to conduct field research into reincarnation and investigated cases in Africa, Alaska, Europe, India and both North and South America, logging around 55,000 miles a year between 1966 and 1971. He reported that the children he studied usually started to speak of their supposed past lives between the ages of two and four, then ceased to do so by seven or eight, with frequent mentions of having died a violent death, and what seemed to be clear memories of the manner of death. After interviewing the children, their families, and others, Stevenson would attempt to identify if there had been a living person who satisfied the various claims and descriptions collected, and who had died prior to the child's birth.Stevenson's research is associated with a 'minimalist' model of reincarnation that makes no religious claims. According to Robert Almeder
Robert F. Almeder
Robert F. Almeder worked as an American Professor of Philosophy at Georgia State University until his retirement in 2005 and has written extensively on the Philosophy of Science, Epistemology, and Ethics...
, the central feature of this model is that "There is something essential to some human personalities, however we ultimately characterize it, which we cannot plausibly construe solely in terms of either brain states, or properties of brain states, or biological properties caused by the brain and, further, after biological death this non-reducible essential trait sometimes persists for some time, in some way, in some place, and for some reason or other, existing independently of the person's former brain and body. Moreover, after some time, some of these irreducible essential traits of human personality, for some reason or other, and by some mechanism or other, come to reside in other human bodies either some time during the gestation period, at birth, or shortly after birth."
Stevenson believed the strongest cases he had collected in support of this model involved both testimony and physical evidence. In over 40 of these cases Stevenson gathered physical evidence relating to the often rare and unusual birthmarks and birth defects of children which he claimed matched wounds recorded in the medical or post-mortem records for the individual Stevenson identified as the past-life personality.
The children in Stevenson's studies often behaved in ways he felt suggestive of a link to the previous life. These children would display emotions toward members of the previous family consistent with their claimed past life, e.g., deferring to a husband or bossing around a former younger brother or sister who by that time was actually much older than the child in question. Many of these children also displayed phillias and phobias associated to the manner of their death, with over half who described a violent death being fearful of associated devices. Many of the children also incorporated elements of their claimed previous occupation into their play, while others would act out their claimed death repeatedly.
Tom Shroder said Stevenson's fieldwork technique was that of a detective or investigative reporter, searching for alternative explanations of the material he was offered. One boy in Beirut described being a 25-year-old mechanic who died after being hit by a speeding car on a beach road. Witnesses said the boy gave the name of the driver, as well as the names of his sisters, parents, and cousins, and the location of the crash. The details matched the life of a man who had died years before the child was born, and who was apparently unconnected to the child's family. In such cases, Stevenson sought alternative explanations—that the child had discovered the information in a normal way, that the witnesses were lying to him or to themselves, or that the case boiled down to coincidence. Shroder writes that, in scores of cases, no alternative explanation seemed to suffice.
Stevenson argued that the 3,000 or so cases he studied supported the possibility of reincarnation, though he was always careful to refer to them as "cases suggestive of reincarnation," or "cases of the reincarnation type." He also recognized a limitation, or what Paul Edwards
Paul Edwards (philosopher)
Paul Edwards, born Paul Eisenstein, was an Austrian American moral philosopher.-Life and career:Edwards was born in Vienna in 1923 to assimilated Jewish parents, the youngest of three brothers....
calls the "modus operandi problem", namely the absence of evidence of a physical process by which a personality could survive death and travel to another body. Against this, Robert Almeder argues that "you may not know how something occurs but have plenty of evidence that it occurs." Recent work by Roger Penrose
Roger Penrose
Sir Roger Penrose OM FRS is an English mathematical physicist and Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College...
and Stuart Hameroff
Stuart Hameroff
Stuart Hameroff is an anesthesiologist and professor at the University of Arizona known for his scientific studies of consciousness.-Career:...
on quantum consciousness
Orch-OR
Orch-OR is a theory of consciousness, which is the joint work of theoretical physicist Sir Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff. Mainstream theories assume that consciousness emerges from the brain, and focus particularly on complex computation at synapses that allow communication...
has been suggested as hinting at a possible mechanism for the persistence of consciousness after death. However the hypothesis of Quantum mind
Quantum mind
The quantum mind or quantum consciousness hypothesis proposes that classical mechanics cannot explain consciousness, while quantum mechanical phenomena, such as quantum entanglement and superposition, may play an important part in the brain's function, and could form the basis of an explanation of...
which this work builds on, is itself under ongoing debate.
Reception
Stevenson’s conclusions gained little support from within the scientific community, although Eugene Brody has suggested many of them simply dismiss ideas like reincarnation. While Stevenson published his research in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and three scientific commentators have stated that Stevenson rigorously followed the scientific method in conducting his research, mainstream scientists "tended to ignore or dismiss his decades in the field and his many publications".In 1977 the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease devoted most of one issue to Stevenson's work. In an editorial for that issue, psychiatrist Eugene Brody explained the decision to publish research that might normally be regarded as unscientific due to the "scientific and personal credibility of the authors, the legitimacy of their research methods, and the conformity of their reasoning to the usual canons of rational thought." In the same issue psychiatrist Harold Lief wrote in a commentary: "Either [Stevenson] is making a colossal mistake, or he will be known ... as 'the Galileo of the 20th century'." More recently a review of Stevenson's European Cases of the Reincarnation Type
European Cases of the Reincarnation Type
European Cases of the Reincarnation Type is a 2003 book by psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, who conducted research into claims of reincarnation. The work focuses on different reincarnation research case studies in a Western setting...
described it as "an inspiring example of application of a painstaking protocol to sift facts from fancy."
Stevenson's work has drawn criticism from skeptical
Scientific skepticism
Scientific skepticism is the practice of questioning the veracity of claims lacking empirical evidence or reproducibility, as part of a methodological norm pursuing "the extension of certified knowledge". For example, Robert K...
groups and individuals such as The Skeptics Society
The Skeptics Society
The Skeptics Society is a nonprofit, member-supported organization devoted to promoting scientific skepticism and resisting the spread of pseudoscience, superstition, and irrational beliefs. The Skeptics Society was originally founded as a Los Angeles-area skeptical group to replace the defunct...
and Robert Todd Carroll
Robert Todd Carroll
Robert Todd Carroll , Ph.D., is an American writer and academic. Carroll has written several books and skeptical essays but achieved notability by publishing the Skeptic's Dictionary online in 1994.-Early life and education:...
, while philosopher Paul Edwards
Paul Edwards (philosopher)
Paul Edwards, born Paul Eisenstein, was an Austrian American moral philosopher.-Life and career:Edwards was born in Vienna in 1923 to assimilated Jewish parents, the youngest of three brothers....
included a lengthy criticism of Stevenson's work in his book Reincarnation: A Critical Examination. In each of these critiques, the authors question both the methods used and the evidence gathered by Stevenson, and offer alternative, more mainstream, explanations for the types of cases Stevenson argued were suggestive of reincarnation. Philosopher Paul Kurtz, founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, has gone further and suggested Stevenson's reincarnation research is pseudoscience. By contrast, in his books Death and Personal Survival and Beyond Death: The Evidence for Life After Death, philosopher Robert Almeder
Robert F. Almeder
Robert F. Almeder worked as an American Professor of Philosophy at Georgia State University until his retirement in 2005 and has written extensively on the Philosophy of Science, Epistemology, and Ethics...
endorsed Stevenson's research, rebutted most of Kurtz's objections, and concluded that the evidence he assembled argues strongly in favor of reincarnation, to the point of it being irrational to disbelieve that some people reincarnate. Skeptic Sam Harris
Sam Harris (author)
Sam Harris is an American author, and neuroscientist, as well as the co-founder and current CEO of Project Reason. He received a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Stanford University, before receiving a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA...
said of Stevenson "either he is a victim of truly elaborate fraud, or something interesting is going on".
Retirement
After the 1984 death of his wife Octavia, Stevenson married Margaret Pertzoff in 1985. He retired in 2002, although the Department of Perceptual Studies continues his work. Bruce GreysonBruce Greyson
Bruce Greyson, M.D. , is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia. He is co-author of Irreducible Mind and co-editor of The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences...
has taken over as the Director while Jim B. Tucker, a child psychiatrist, is continuing Stevenson's reincarnation research with children, focusing on North American cases and exploring possible mechanisms for personality transfer.
Tucker said that toward the end of his life, Stevenson felt his long-stated goal of getting science to consider reincarnation as a possibility was not going to be realized in this lifetime. According to his University of Virginia obituary, his greatest frustration was not that people dismissed his theories, but that in his opinion most did so without even reading the evidence he had assembled. Stevenson died of pneumonia at the Blue Ridge Retirement community in Charlottesville, Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia
Charlottesville is an independent city geographically surrounded by but separate from Albemarle County in the Commonwealth of Virginia, United States, and named after Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the queen consort of King George III of the United Kingdom.The official population estimate for...
, on February 8, 2007.
The locked cabinet
Nearly 40 years ago, Stevenson bought and set a combination lock on a filing cabinet in the Division of Perceptual Studies. He based the combination on a mnemonicMnemonic
A mnemonic , or mnemonic device, is any learning technique that aids memory. To improve long term memory, mnemonic systems are used to make memorization easier. Commonly encountered mnemonics are often verbal, such as a very short poem or a special word used to help a person remember something,...
device known only to him, possibly a word or a sentence.
A colleague, Emily Williams Kelly, told The New York Times: "He did say, that if he found himself able, he would try to communicate that. Presumably, if someone had a vivid dream about him, in which there seemed to be a word or a phrase that kept being repeated—I don't quite know how it would work—if it seemed promising enough, we would try to open it using the combination suggested." As of February 2007, the Times reports, the filing cabinet remains locked.
Books
Ian Stevenson authored or co-authored more than a dozen books. Stevenson died in 2007, and many of these books are mentioned in his obituaries in the British Medical JournalBritish Medical Journal
BMJ is a partially open-access peer-reviewed medical journal. Originally called the British Medical Journal, the title was officially shortened to BMJ in 1988. The journal is published by the BMJ Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of the British Medical Association...
, New York Times, and the Washington Post.
Early medical books
- Medical History-Taking, New York: Paul B. Hoeber, 1960.
- The Psychiatric Examination, Boston: Little, Brown, 1969.
- The Diagnostic Interview (2nd revised edition of Medical History-Taking), New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation
- Twenty Cases Suggestive of ReincarnationTwenty Cases Suggestive of ReincarnationTwenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation is a book written by psychiatrist Ian Stevenson on the phenomena of what he calls spontaneous recall of information about previous lives by young children. The book focuses on twenty cases investigated by the author...
, University of VirginiaUniversity of VirginiaThe University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States, founded by Thomas Jefferson...
Press, ISBN 0813908728, 1966. - Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, (second revised and enlarged edition), University of Virginia Press, ISBN 9780813908724, 1974.
- This book includes detailed reports of 20 cases of children (from five different countries) who claimed to remember previous lives.
Cases of the Reincarnation Type
- Cases of the Reincarnation Type Vol. I: Ten Cases in India, University of Virginia Press, 1975.
- Cases of the Reincarnation Type Vol. II: Ten Cases in Sri Lanka, University of Virginia Press, 1978.
- Cases of the Reincarnation Type Vol. III: Twelve Cases in Lebanon and Turkey, University of Virginia Press, 1980.
- Cases of the Reincarnation Type Vol. IV: Twelve Cases in Thailand and Burma, University of Virginia Press, 1983.
Birthmarks and birth defects
- Reincarnation and BiologyReincarnation and BiologyReincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects is a 1997 two-part monograph written by psychiatrist Ian Stevenson and published by Praeger...
: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects Volume 1: Birthmarks and Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects Volume 2: Birth Defects and Other Anomalies. (2 volumes), Praeger Publishers, ISBN 0-275-95282-7, 1997. - Where Reincarnation and Biology IntersectWhere Reincarnation and Biology IntersectWhere Reincarnation and Biology Intersect is a 1997 book by psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, published by Praeger. The book is about birthmarks and birth defects ostensibly associated with reincarnation...
. Praeger Publishers, ISBN 0-275-95282-7, 1997. (A short and non-technical version of Reincarnation and Biology, for the general reader)
Other books
- Children Who Remember Previous Lives: A Question of Reincarnation, (revised edition) ISBN 0-7864-0913-4, 2000, (A general non-technical introduction into Reincarnation researchReincarnation researchReincarnation research is a branch of parapsychology. Psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, from the University of Virginia, investigated many reports of young children who claimed to remember a past life...
). - European Cases of the Reincarnation TypeEuropean Cases of the Reincarnation TypeEuropean Cases of the Reincarnation Type is a 2003 book by psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, who conducted research into claims of reincarnation. The work focuses on different reincarnation research case studies in a Western setting...
. McFarland & CompanyMcFarland & CompanyMcFarland & Company, Inc. is a book publisher of primarily academic and adult nonfiction based in Jefferson, North Carolina. Its president and editor-in-chief is Robert Franklin, who began the enterprise in 1979...
, ISBN 0786414588, 2003. - Telepathic Impressions: A Review and Report of 35 New Cases, University Press of Virginia, 1970.
- Unlearned Language: New Studies in Xenoglossy. University of Virginia Press, ISBN 0813909945, 1984.
- Xenoglossy: A Review and Report of A Case, University of Virginia Press, 1974.
- A World in a Grain of Sand: The Clairvoyance of Stefan Ossowiecki, ISBN 978-0-7864-2112-1, (with Mary Rose Barrington and Zofia Weaver), McFarland Press, 2005.
See also
- AfterlifeAfterlifeThe afterlife is the belief that a part of, or essence of, or soul of an individual, which carries with it and confers personal identity, survives the death of the body of this world and this lifetime, by natural or supernatural means, in contrast to the belief in eternal...
- C. T. K. ChariC. T. K. ChariC. T. K. Chari was Head of the Department of Philosophy at Madras Christian College from 1958 to 1969 and the most prominent among contemporary Indian philosophers who paid close attention to psi phenomena...
- Satwant PasrichaSatwant PasrichaDr. Satwant Pasricha is the head of Department of Clinical Psychology at NIMHANS, National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences at Bangalore. She also worked for a time at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in the USA. Pasricha investigates reincarnation and near-death...
- Richard WisemanRichard WisemanRichard Wiseman is Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom.Wiseman started his professional life as a magician, before graduating in Psychology from University College London and obtaining a Ph.D...
- XenoglossyXenoglossyXenoglossy , also written xenoglossia , is the putative paranormal phenomenon in which a person is able to speak or write a language he or she supposedly could not have acquired by natural means...