Brian Weiss, a Yale-trained psychiatrist and chair of psychiatry at Mount Sinai Miami, recounts his case work with a patient named 'Catherine' whose phobias resolved during hypnotic regression to what Weiss came to interpret as past-life memories — a position professionally damaging enough that he sat on the manuscript for four years before publishing.
First lines
The first time I saw Catherine she was wearing a vivid crimson dress and was nervously leafing through a magazine in my waiting room. She was visibly out of breath. For the previous twenty minutes she had been pacing the corridor outside the Department of Psychiatry offices, trying to convince herself to keep her appointment with me and not run away.
Reception
The book that took past-life regression therapy from fringe to mainstream psychiatric reading lists; over 4 million copies sold and the foundation of Weiss's subsequent practice and television presence. The American Psychiatric Association has never accepted past-life regression as a clinical method and the standard concerns — false-memory creation, suggestion under hypnosis — apply with full force. Weiss's defenders point to the book's clinical-rather-than-mystical framing and the Yale-and-Sinai credentials; his critics point out that those credentials are exactly what gave the book the authority that the evidence does not.
Frequently asked
What is Many Lives, Many Masters about?
It is Yale-trained psychiatrist Brian Weiss's account of his case work with a patient he calls 'Catherine', whose phobias and panic attacks resolved during hypnotic regression to what Weiss came to interpret as past-life memories. The book records the sessions and reports the messages Weiss says came through Catherine from 'the Masters' — spirit entities — about the structure of life, death, and rebirth.
Is past-life regression accepted by mainstream psychiatry?
No. The American Psychiatric Association has never accepted past-life regression as a clinical method, and the standard concerns about hypnosis — false-memory creation, confabulation, and suggestion — apply with full force. Weiss makes a clinical-outcomes argument that the technique resolved his patient's symptoms; the profession treats that outcome as compatible with conventional explanations (suggestion, therapeutic narrative) rather than as evidence for the regression hypothesis.
Why was the book delayed four years?
Weiss says in the preface that he sat on the manuscript for four years before publishing because of the professional risk: he was Chief of Psychiatry at a Miami hospital with thirty-seven peer-reviewed papers behind him, and publishing a book about past-life regression and spirit communication was a non-trivial career decision. He describes deciding one evening, mid-shower, that the cost of withholding the material was greater than the cost of publishing it.