Recently a reader named Steve asked for my perspective on Dr. Brian Weiss’s book Many Lives, Many Masters. Specifically, he asked about the “past lives” of Dr. Weiss’s pseudonymous patient “Catherine.” This is my response after reading the book. (Note: I will receive a commission if you buy the book from Amazon using any of the title links in this article.)

Overall, Dr. Weiss seems to be a good and well-intentioned person, albeit somewhat full of his own importance. His “past-life regression” therapy does seem to help people, though probably not for the reason he thinks. And in general, recognizing that we are embedded in spiritual reality, and that this is the source of much of our mental disorder and dysfunction, is a good thing.

Materialistic psychology, psychiatry, and psychiatric medication can get you only so far. Some mental illnesses do result from physical, chemical, or cellular damage or dysfunction in the brain and nervous system. However, psychiatric drugs commonly only control symptoms rather than curing the patient, and they have many undesirable side effects. Further, much mental illness is not physical at all. It is the result of traumatic life experiences, yes, but mainly the result of evil spirits assailing people from the spiritual realm using these traumatic life experiences and various individual character traits as “hooks” by which they grab onto the person’s psyche so that they can pour in their dark, deleterious influence.

I am well aware that the idea of spirits being involved in mental illness is rejected as superstitious nonsense by secular psychologists and psychiatrists. Nevertheless, Dr. Weiss successfully used spiritual methods to achieve full healing for a patient who was not responding to traditional psychiatric treatment. And this is far from the only case in which recognizing the reality of spiritual influences has helped people achieve mental and emotional healing when traditional psychiatric and pharmaceutical methods were failing. At the end of this post, I’ll put an Off The Left Eye video featuring interview segments with Dr. Jerry Marzinsky along these lines.

Overall, though I think Dr. Weiss is mistaken in his belief that Catherine’s visions under hypnosis are from past lives she has lived, I do appreciate his willingness to open his mind to methods of treatment that go beyond the strictly material and biological level, and explore the spiritual realities behind people’s mental and emotional struggles.

For more on Many Lives, Many Masters, please click here to read on.