Ian Pretyman Stevenson (October 31, 1918 – February 8, 2007) was a Canadian-born U.S. psychiatrist. He worked for the
University of Virginia School of Medicine for fifty years, as chair of the department of psychiatry from 1957 to 1967, Carlson Professor of Psychiatry from 1967 to 2001, and Research Professor of Psychiatry from 2002 until his death.
[1]
As founder and director of the university's Division of Perceptual Studies, which investigates the
paranormal, Stevenson became known internationally for his research into
reincarnation, the idea that emotions, memories, and even physical injuries in the form of birth-marks, can be transferred from one life to another.
[2] He traveled extensively over a period of forty years, investigating three thousand cases of children around the world who claimed to remember past lives.
[3] His position was that certain
phobias,
philias, unusual abilities and illnesses could not be explained by heredity or the environment. He believed that personality transfer provided a third type of explanation, although he was never able to suggest what kind of process might be involved.
[4][5]
Stevenson helped to found the
Society for Scientific Exploration in 1982, and was the author of around three hundred papers and fourteen books on reincarnation, including
Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (1966) and
European Cases of the Reincarnation Type (2003). His major work was the 2,268-page, two-volume
Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects (1997). This reported two hundred cases of birth-marks that, he believed, corresponded with a wound on the deceased person whose life the child purported to recall. He wrote a shorter version of the same research for the general reader,
Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect (1997).
[6]
Reaction to his work was mixed. In his
New York Times obituary,
Margalit Fox wrote that Stevenson's supporters saw him as a misunderstood genius, but that most scientists had simply ignored his research, regarding him as earnest but gullible.
[7] His life and work became the subject of two supportive books,
Old Souls (1999) by
Tom Shroder, a
Washington Post journalist, and
Life Before Life (2005) by
Jim B. Tucker, a psychiatrist and colleague at the University of Virginia. Critics, particularly the philosophers
C.T.K. Chari (1909–1993) and
Paul Edwards (1923–2004), raised a number of issues, including that the children or parents interviewed by Stevenson had deceived him, that he had asked them leading questions, that he had often worked through translators who believed what the interviewees were saying, and that his conclusions were undermined by
confirmation bias, where cases not supportive of his hypothesis were not presented as counting against it.
[8]