Ian Stevenson

For the cricketeer, see Ian Stevenson (cricketer).

Ian Stevenson
File:Ian Stevenson.jpg
Born	(1918-10-31)October 31, 1918 Montreal, Canada
Died	February 8, 2007(2007-02-08) (aged 88) Charlottesville, Virginia
Alma mater	St. Andrews University, McGill University
Known for	Reincarnation research
Scientific career
Fields	Psychiatry, parapsychology
Institutions	University of Virginia

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, one of a small number of academic facilities around the world that study the paranormal.

Stevenson was best known for his research into reincarnation, or what he called the survival of the personality after death. Over several decades Stevenson documented thousands of cases involving children which he felt were suggestive of past lives. He also hypothesized that reincarnation offered a possible explanation for a range of phobias and special gifts, although he was never able to identify any physical process by which a personality might survive death, and this work gained little or no support within the scientific community. Stevenson also studied topics such as near-death experiences, apparitions (death-bed visions), and the mind-brain problem, as well as more mainstream topics such as tissue oxidation, psychosomatic medicine, and psychedelic drugs.

He was the author of several books on the subject, including Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects (1997) and Children Who Remember Previous Lives: A Question of Reincarnation (1987). Stevenson himself became the subject of Tom Shroder's Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives (1999).

Biography

Early life and education

Stevenson was raised in Ottawa, where his father, born in Scotland, was the Canadian correspondent for The Times of London. His mother had an interest in theosophy, which Stevenson said later had triggered his own interest in the paranormal.

He studied medicine St. Andrews University in Scotland, and at McGill University in Montreal, receiving from the latter a BSc in 1942 and a degree in medicine in 1943, graduating top of his class.

Early career

After university, he took a series of jobs in hospitals as an intern or resident. His early research at Tulane University focused on bichemical tissue oxidation. He became interested in finding explanations for psychosomatic illnesses; 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. The research persuaded him that the reductionism of biochemistry rendered it inadequate as an explanatory tool, and he switched to psychiatry.

After training as a psychiatrist, he taught at Louisiana State University. In the 1950s, inspired by a meeting with Aldous Huxley, he became a pioneer in the 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 named 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.

Research interests

Criticism of psychoanalysis

Stevenson became a controversial figure amongst psychoanalysts. He opposed what he saw as the determinism of 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 phenomenon.

Interest in the paranormal

Stevenson came to see both behaviorism and psychoanalysis as unable to explain the formation of individual characteristics and personality. In "the late 1950s", Stevenson reviewed "cases suggestive of reincarnation", and was impressed by certain similarities among published reports (particularly the fact that a significant proportion of subjects were under the age of 10 when they seemed to recall past lives). He started collecting and researching cases of children who seemed to recall past lives without the use of hypnosis. After he published a paper on reincarnation in 1960, he was invited to travel to India and Sri Lanka by 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. 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 Virginia 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 parapsychology and other paranormal phenomena. Others are the Veritas research program at the University of Arizona, the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at Edinburgh University, and a division of the psychology department at the University of Amsterdam. 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.

Reincarnation research

Stevenson conducted field research about reincarnation in Africa, Alaska, British Columbia, Burma, Europe, India, North America, South America, Lebanon, Turkey, and numerous other locations, 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. Stevenson also gathered testimonies and medical records on birthmarks, birth defects, and other physical anomalies.

Tom Shroder writes that Stevenson used the techniques 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 the normal way, that the witnesses were lying to him or to themselves, or that the case boiled down to cooincidence. 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 Shroder calls a "glaring flaw," in using reincarnation to explain the phenomena he investigated, namely the absence of evidence of a physical process by which a personality could survive death and travel to another body.

Critics questioned his methodology and objectivity, and his work gained little or no support within the scientific community. Astronomer Carl Sagan wrote in The Demon-Haunted World (1996) that claims about reincarnation have some, though dubious, experimental support. He argued that one of three claims in parapsychology deserving serious study is that, "young children sometimes report details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation." The other two are that human beings can affect random number generators by thought alone, and can receive thoughts that are projected at them. "I pick these claims not because I think they're likely to be valid (I don't)," he wrote, "but as examples of contentions that might be true."

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 Greyson has taken over as the Director while Jim Tucker, a child psychiatrist, is continuing Stevenson's work with children, focusing on North American cases.

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 he believed few had read the anecdotal evidence he had assembled. Stevenson died of pneumonia at the Blue Ridge Retirement community in Charlottesville, Virginia, 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 mnemonic 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.

Bibliography

Selected books

• Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. (1966). (Second revised and enlarged edition 1974), University of Virginia Press, ISBN 0813908728
• Cases of the Reincarnation Type Vol. I: Ten Cases in India, (1975). University of Virginia Press.
• Cases of the Reincarnation Type Vol. II: Ten Cases in Sri Lanka. (1978). University of Virginia Press.
• Cases of the Reincarnation Type Vol. III: Twelve Cases in Lebanon and Turkey. (1980). University of Virginia Press.
• Cases of the Reincarnation Type Vol. IV: Twelve Cases in Thailand and Burma. (1983). University of Virginia Press.
• Unlearned Language: New Studies in Xenoglossy. (1984). University of Virginia Press, ISBN 0813909945
• Reincarnation and Biology: 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. (1997). (2 volumes), Praeger Publishers, ISBN 0-275-95282-7
• Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect. (1997). Praeger Publishers, ISBN 0-275-95282-7 . (A short and non-technical version of the scientific two-volumes work, for the general reader)
• Children Who Remember Previous Lives: A Quest of Reincarnation. (2001). McFarland & Company, ISBN 0-7864-0913-4 , (A general non-technical introduction into reincarnation-research)
• European Cases of the Reincarnation Type. (2003). McFarland & Company, ISBN 0786414588

Selected articles

• "The Explanatory Value of the Idea of Reincarnation" (1977) Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 164:305-326.
• "American Children Who Claim to Remember Previous Lives" (1983) Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 171:742-748.
• "The Belief in Reincarnation Among the Igbo of Nigeria" (1985) Journal of Asian and African Studies, XX:13-30.
• "Characteristics of Cases of the Reincarnation Type Among the Igbo of Nigeria" (1986) Journal of Asian and African Studies, XXI:204-216.
• "Birthmarks and Birth Defects Corresponding to Wounds on Deceased Persons", (1993). Journal of Scientific Exploration, 7:403-410.
• (with Cook, E.W., Greyson, B.) (1998). "Do Any Near-Death Experiences Provide Evidence for the Survival of Human Personality after Death? Relevant Features and Illustrative Case Reports",Journal of Scientific Exploration, 12(3): 377-406.
• "Past lives of twins"(1999). Lancet, Apr 17; 353(9161):1359-60. (Letter to editor)
• "The phenomenon of claimed memories of previous lives: possible interpretations and importance"(2000). Medical Hypotheses, 54(4), 652-659.
• "Ropelike Birthmarks on Children Who Claim to Remember Past Lives" (2001). Psychological Reports, Aug 89(1):142-144.
• (with Pasricha, S.K., Keil, J. and J.B. Tucker), (2005). "Some Bodily Malformations Attributed to Previous Lives" Journal of Scientific Exploration 19(3):359-383.

See also

• Afterlife
• C. T. K. Chari
• Satwant Pasricha
• Richard Wiseman
• Xenoglossy

Further reading

• Shroder, Tom (1999). Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives.
• Tucker, Jim B. (2005). Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lives.
• Division of Personality Studies (DOPS), University of Virginia
• Obituary from Daily Telegraph
• Obituary from The Washington Post
• Obituary from University of Virginia Health System
• Skeptic Report Review of "Children Who Remember Previous Lives"