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 The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives (1999) and Jim B. Tucker's A Scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lives (2005).
Stevenson was raised in Ottawa, 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.
Early career
Following graduation, Stevenson took a series of jobs in hospitals as an intern or resident, before embarking on research at Tulane University 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 experimented with 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.
Early in his career Stevenson became a controversial figure amongst psychoanalysts. 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.
Interest in parapsychology
Stevenson came to see both behaviorism 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.
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 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.
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, 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.
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 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 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.
Stevenson’s work also attracted the attention of Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke who, while intrigued, felt it fell short of providing proof of reincarnation, which they both viewed as unlikely. In The Demon-Haunted World (1996), Sagan wrote that claims about reincarnation have some, though dubious, experimental support, arguing 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." Clarke observed that Stevenson had produced a number of studies that were "hard to explain", then noted that accepting reincarnation raised the question of the means for personality transfer. Skeptic Sam Harris said of Stevenson "either he is a victim of truly elaborate fraud, or something interesting is going on."
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 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.
