Page "Ian Stevenson" Paragraph 9

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.