Confabulating Reincarnation

At the suggestion of a friend, I recently completed Michael Newton’s Journey of Souls. This is a classic text in the New Age genre, as evidenced by the 800,000 copies sold and the glowing endorsement written by Shirley MacLaine.1 In this seminal book, the late Newton, a hypnotherapist, leads his clients through his modality of past life regression (PLR).

One of the more unique aspects of Newton’s practice is that he goes beyond the typical PLR therapy—a practice that gained notoriety with the in...