Book Review: Children Who Remember Previous Lives (2001). Ian Stevenson.

Some years ago I heard about the work of a University of Virginia Medical School psychiatrist, Dr. Jim B. Tucker, who has spent his long academic career (up to the present) researching thousands of cases of the phenomenon of very young children who claim to remember details of previous lives, which has been reported in societies around the world. I then read two earlier books he had written, recently combined into one, Before: Children’s Memories of Previous Lives (2021), which I reviewed here. From this I learned that Dr. Tucker is almost certainly the world’s current leading academic authority on this unusual phenomenon.

However, as I learned from Dr. Tucker’s books, an earlier researcher, Dr. Ian Stevenson, was actually the original study founder, and Dr. Tucker’s predecessor, mentor and academic advisor in the long-running University of Virginia research study of children with previous life memories, which has now been underway continuously for the past fifty years.

In Dr. Stevenson’s book, which is remarkably dry, clinical and scientific for a topic which you might expect to be eerie, sensational and speculative, he presents an intellectual defense and report on his life’s work, his approaches to compiling and analyzing reports, and the rigorous research and interviewing methodologies he devised early on, with which the study has been conducted.

He begins by describing how the study came into being. He lists all the countries around the world where he and his colleagues have collected reports, and discusses cultural factors and differences between sets of reports from different countries. He delves into many aspects of solved and unsolved cases (a solved case is one where the deceased person whose memories the child claims to have is identified, so that the facts claimed by the child can be compared to official documents, and usually the memories of families and friends of the deceased).

Stevenson reviews the frequency and characteristics of many of the common elements of reports, such as: average time between lives in reports from different cultures, familial connections between current and reported previous lives, birthmarks coinciding with circumstances of death of reported previous lives (such as birthmarks or deformities in the same place on the child’s body as the site of wounds on the deceased), frequency and behavioral effects of sex change between lives, presence of vivid “announcing dreams” to pregnant mothers of children who subsequently report memories of a past life, and many other commonly-occurring features of cases.

Stevenson also evaluates alternative explanations to reincarnation in these cases, the effects of widespread cultural belief or disbelief in reincarnation on the frequency of reporting and the characteristics of reports taken from different parts of the world, and considers philosophical and religious implications of differing proposed explanations relative to the major world religions.

Most importantly, he makes it clear that as a scientist, he doesn’t claim to know whether this phenomenon and his study of it “proves” reincarnation. But he does suggest based on exhaustively documented reports from thousands of case histories, and the fact that young children don’t have the experiential knowledge or the access to information to make up the detailed, very specific sets of facts they frequently recount (which are often verified in solved cases), that reincarnation may provide the least convoluted and perhaps most likely explanation to fit the inexplicable nature of this phenomenon.

This book is an important foundation for understanding the study of children who remember past lives, by the leading and original scientist in this unusual research field. It can be heavy going in parts, because of Stevenson’s dry, dispassionate and unsensational writing style, but that in fact lends to its credibility. Recommended.