PEOPLE ARE MATHEMATICAL CONCEPTS
Reliving Past Lives: The evidence under hypnosis – Helen Wambach
If you’re inclined towards hypnotism’s more esoteric edges and/or read sceptical overviews, then it’s only a matter of time before you come across Helen Wambach. Wambach (1925-1985) had a PhD in psychology, and taught psychology and psychotherapy (and parapsychology) at colleges in the US. (Some sources, including the author’s bio at the back of this book, state that she was also a ‘clinical psychiatrist’. But Wambach does not mention holding a medical doctorate or use ‘Dr’, and only writes of brief periods practising as a psychologist/psychotherapist irrespective of her teaching and research. So I’m not stating that title as fact.)
Wambach became interested in early-life-regression under hypnosis to resolve trauma at its apparent ‘root’, then extended this into pre-birth and past-life regression (as you do). She is known for her qualitative studies, with her academic credentials, and commitment to studying larger numbers of individuals giving credence to the ‘evidence’ for past lives.
I first came across Wambach when reading Chet B Snow’s Dreams of the Future, published in 1989, in which he charts his succession into Wambach’s later-life work on ‘future-life’ progression. She also crops up briefly in overviews which dismiss her research as not credible. I was intrigued to read Wambach in her own words, with Reliving Past Lives, published in 1979, introducing her work.
As we’ve previously found, it’s tricky to read vintage qualitative studies and to not view them as anything but calamitously hilarious – especially when it comes to parapsychology. So I’ll be generous to Wambach in her enthusiasm for the then-newish field of parapsychology; in her misunderstanding of the word ‘sceptic’ in stating her clear bias for parapsychologist J B Rhine and the Bridey Murphy case from the start of her studies and throughout her career; and for crudely believing, despite her PhD requiring a study of statistics, that more anecdotes equals (more) proof and that therefore past lives are *mic drop* real. FACT. End of. Done.
But what I did find shocking was just how quickly, and extremely, Wambach could add up two plus two to make five... or, you know, start an accidental cult, traumatise a ‘psychic’ housewife, or psychologically scar a small child! Aaand still confidently call herself a psychologist/psychotherapist (or, as per my intro parenthesis, a ‘psychiatrist’) aaand still claim her work as science. (Or “science” as she is sometimes inclined to distinguish it, all-at-once joining, owning, and othering her field without a rationale for the whys and wherefores.)
Wambach’s book describes her journey from ‘sceptic’ student to researcher and believer in past lives, culminating in the ‘evidence’ from her first qualitative studies of hypnotic past-life regression. A key early milestone in this journey is while working as a psychotherapist to young children suspected of having autism. Wambach develops a hunch that autism is when a child still remembers their past life and is thus trapped in an infantilised hellscape. I mean, it’s quite the theory! But, while Little Linda apparently responded well to Wambach’s psychological probings, Little Peter’s belief – formed and nurtured via his therapist – that he was a dead traffic cop got him withdrawn from therapy in a worse state than he started in… and almost withdrawn from life when he, aged five, was rescued by an actual cop from a busy traffic intersection where he was trying to redirect traffic (!).
This incident seems to have sufficiently scared Wambach off meddling with children – but not with students and willing seekers who attended her uni and adult-learning classes. Her freewheeling parapsychology club, where she and her pupils experiment with ESP, table-tipping, automatic writing and such, quickly descends into a cult led by a young woman group member, Anna, who starts receiving ominous messages. Wambach worries it might be a poltergeist, but it instead turns out to be ‘Ethan’; the chosen name for the baby Anna claims to be pregnant with. The group pesters Ethan with mundane immediate-future predictions, but splinters as his inaccuracy and insistence on boring them with classic cult philosophising prevails. Wambach discovers that true believers have been meeting with Anna, now a full-blown medium, on the sly… only for them to discover that their leader lied and isn’t pregnant at all.
Anna’s disgrace and – possibly psychotically disturbed – vanishment from the classroom and locale is of little matter to Wambach, who was more awed by her own automatic writings while her students went batshit crazy. Higher beings shared, via Wambach’s self-hypnotised handwriting, stray ideas on ‘harmony’, planes of existence, the fourth dimension, and our primitive understandings of God and maths blah blah. They even shared a complex mathematical formula that Wambach showed to a physicist friend. He didn’t think it made any sense, which Wambach – demonstrating with aplomb how her mind, methodology, and unwavering bias works – interpreted as proof of its cosmic-wisdom, rather than as her expert source clearly just stating that it was gibberish.
Armed with the divine wisdom that “mathematics is a form of music”, Wambach leads us into the qualitative studies of past-life regression for which she is known and celebrated. I mean, if you’re still reading this, and still wish to believe in the veracity of Wambach’s work – as well as the concept of ‘regressed’ memories, from a last life or last week, being reliably plucked from a hypnotee’s mind – then I’m not sure I can persuade you otherwise at this point! Suffice to say her findings are hopelessly flawed, if quaintly and charmingly so, and her titularly promised ‘evidence’ for past lives is non-existent.
When mulling the mathematical formula she received, Wambach writes: “Although I have some interest in this field, and have studied advanced statistics in order to do psychological research, I am primarily at home with people, not with mathematical concepts”. I didn’t study advanced statistics – just scraped a C at GCSE maths – but let’s take a look at how Wambach ‘adds up’ data on gender/sex (she uses the terms interchangeably)… Regressed subjects filled in a form post-group-hypnosis-session to report the broad brushstrokes of their past life, including their current and past gender/sex. Wambach triumphantly reports that the participants still divided at 50:50 as reflects the global population (as it was, and still largely is, sorted and sifted in a binary) – and that this is thus ‘evidence’ of the truth of these past lives. Wambach muses that, if people were just making this shit up, men would remain men and women would give being a man a bash, thus throwing the 50:50 gender divide out of whack. So: neither the kinds of people who were drawn to her and her work – mostly New Agey seekers – nor any gender-bending curiosities they might have, gave her pause for thought. Plus apparently PhD-level advanced statistics doesn’t include the simple fact that flipping a coin will yield the same meaningless, binary, 50:50 insight?!
People ARE mathematical concepts. And people are infinitely more fascinating and diverse than pennies. Wambach’s work could have been qualitatively quite interesting if she’d had even a small appreciation for the maths, and didn’t wholly disregard such tediums of “science”. Given she loves a bit of Jungian dream analysis, one can only lament her abandonment of the scientific method for not wondering, say, whether her findings were a collective fantasy – a collective hope? The pasts she extracted were invariably populated by humble poor folks avatared by New Agey white people trying on different genders, skin colours, cultures, and sympathies. And what comes through strongly in Dreams of the Future is that the future is queer AF; if you don’t come back as ‘androgynous’ in appearance and unable to tick the 1970s ‘M/F’ box 100 years from now, then, trust me, you will still be wearing flowing robes or something very, very sparkly, be you ‘man’ or ‘woman’. Wambach clearly had a gift for making her seekers feel brave yet safe, and so it’s a shame that qualitative insights on, say, her mostly white demographic seeing themselves in Indigenous American, Black, and Asian past lives and what that might mean for US race relations were lost on Wambach.
Instead, Wambach ends this book with the speculation that one subject’s future-tech-utopia-themed regression is ‘evidence’ for the lost city of Atlantis. As you do. And so the mathematical music dances her off into ‘future-life progression’ research, where her unquote-science is unfettered by the checking of history books for crude descriptions of clogs, spoons and skin colours that constitutes the ‘evidence’ in this book.
