Past Life Therapy, Trauma Release and the Body

Geplaatst op: 15-11-2007

Introduction  

Past life regression therapy, as described here, is a therapeutic technique that uses similar strategies and commands to hypnotic age regression (following a time line backwards, talking to the regressed persona etc) but which also draws strongly from Jung's waking dream technique of active imagination and the embodied re–enactments of past events called by J.L Moreno, psychodrama (Woolger, 1996). As in hypnotic regression and psychodrama, the patient is guided back to and encouraged to relive traumatic scenes or unresolved conflicts from the past that have been previously inaccessible to consciousness, but which are thought to be influencing and distorting current mental and emotional stability.  But instead of being regressed solely to the patient's childhood, a strong suggestion is also given to "go to the origin of the problem in a previous lifetime".  In other words, the notional time–line is extended backwards to assume the soul's continuity with previous existences via what some have called the soul memory or "far memory". In many respects the rationale of past life therapy is similar to that of post traumatic stress therapies as well as to the cathartic or abreactive approach taken, but later abandoned by early psychoanalysis (Hermann, 1992).

 

Past Life Regression and Psychotherapy

The ontological status of "past–life" memories is inevitably controversial given the dogmatic adherence of western psychology and Freudian psychoanalysis to a tabula rasa view of the infant's psyche at birth, but this has long been challenged by Jung's theory of a collective unconscious that transcends historical time (Jung, 1935, Assagioli, 1965) and by the widely known school that calls itself "transpersonal psychology" (Tart, 1975, Grof, 1985, Rowan, 1993, Boorstein, 1996). Moreover,...... .

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Bron: http://www.earth-association.org/body.htm - Roger J. Woolger, Ph.D