Hypnosis: Space Machine to a Former Life

The large print on the posters for a current movie announces, "This movie was filmed on location . . . inside a woman's soul!" The compulsion to get inside people, to find out "just what makes them tick" is not a new thing. But The Search for Bridey Murphy has done the most successful job of exploring it since the Ouiji board. Besides tramping around inside a woman's consciousness, the energetic Mr. Bernstein also takes her on a trip "back across time and space" to do it.

A Trip Through Her Prenatal Days

It all started back in 1952 when Morey Bernstein, a Colorado businessman, was giving a demonstration of hypnosis after a club dance. There he met a lively young brunette named Ruth Simmons who was "on the smallish side" and a good social dancer. She also, he soon discovered, had the "ability to enter an uncommonly deep trance while under hypnosis." Despite the objection of her husband Rex ("Look, I just want to sell insurance and be a regular guy; I don't want to be dubbed a crackpot or a screwball"), Bernstein convinced her to go on a trip through her prenatal days--by means of hypnotic suggestion.

Through hypnotism he learned that Ruth Simmons (1923- ) of Pueblo, Colorado was, in her previous life, Bridey Murphy (1798-1864) of Cork, Ireland. Before that she had died while still a baby in New Amsterdam--the thing has endless possibilities! After his hypnotic sessions with Miss Simmons, Bernstein was persuaded to write it all up. He has not done badly by the enterprise; in seven weeks The Search for Bridey Murphy has climbed to the top of The New York Times booklist.

Structurally, the account has a rather odd appearance. The first hundred pages describe the author's introduction to hypnosis, extrasensory perception and, finally, reincarnation. Then come a hundred pages of interview in which Ruth Simmons becomes Bridey Murphy. The book ends with an impressive-looking thirty pages of appendix (twelve appendices). In the first part Bernstein's technique is clever. Setting himself up as a "real skeptic," he plunges into each subject with the determination of a bloodhound. Of hypnosis he had thought, "That's strictly for the lunatic fringe." However, by ecclectically drawing from whatever sources he can find, or as he puts it, "doffing my hat" to the experts, Bernstein soon discovers hypnosis has got it.

If the determination with which Bernstein sets about explaining people--their mechanics--is more than a little nauseating, the Bridey Murphy part of the book is, by contrast, charming. But the recordings of the author's interviews with her make up less than half of the book's content. She is an ingenuous young lady who seems to have been as fond of her priest as her husband. Once in the astral world, she says she saw a lot of Father John, but Brian wasn't around much. She knows a few Irish songs, can dance an old Irish Mourning Jig, and doesn't like to cooperate when Bernstein, over-eager for the facts, asks her to spell things for him. For all Bridey's pleasantness, however, she is selling, the jacket notes, on "an unusual 12-inch long-playing record . . . available at record shops anywhere."

Since the record has sold almost as well as the book, it would be in the spirit of the enterprise to ask why Bridey Murphy has been such a success. Bernstein says his aim has been to prove his process--he calls it parapsychology research.

"The principles" have, it must be said, gotten intensive consideration from some areas. From North Carolina, Chicago, and especially Los Angeles (birthplace of dianetics) have come more reports of hypnotically inspired revelations of previous existences. While the west coast has been enlivened by an outbreak of parapsychological parties (with invitations reading, "Come as you were."), Broadway too has taken it up.

Only last week Dorothy Killgallen reported (in her syndicated eHarst column), "The Bridey Murphy craze is captivating the town's chorus girls. The belles are meeting by the dozens at one another's apartments after showtime, chipping in to hire a professional hypnotist and sitting around fascinated as they listen to their chums' "regressions" and trying to uncover some intriguing previous existence."

The book is hard to read on any other terms than Miss Kilgallen's. Even Bernstein's syntax makes his motives suspect. For the author, age regression is a "stunning spectacle." Speaking of his "opposition," he blithely remarks, "Men of science are, after all, human beings, basically the same kind of men who opposed Galileo, Mesmer, Newton . . ."

Does It Do Any Good?

Long before Freud, people were interested in explaining everything about each other. Clearly the technique Bernstein uses offers an opportunity for people to find out more about themselves. Whether or not, in the end, people will be any better off for being able to explain "everything" about themselves, there is no doubt that any study of human behavior is a dangerous thing. Even for experts, the hypnotic study of age regression requires real care. For an exploiter or even a sincere but half-informed layman there isn't much excuse.