42 pages • 1 hour read
Brian WeissMany Lives, Many Masters: The True Story of a Prominent Psychiatrist, His Young Patient, and the Past-Life Therapy That Changed Both Their Lives
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1988A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Many Lives, Many Masters opens with a nervous Catherine pacing the halls of the Department of Psychiatry. She is a laboratory technician in the hospital and has an appointment with Brian Weiss, the author of this book. During the appointment, Catherine discusses her worsening symptoms which add up to a “life full of fears” (16) and include insomnia, tension, nervousness, fear of death, fear of airplanes, and recurring nightmares.
Catherine is unable to remember specific childhood traumas which might explain her symptoms, but troubling aspects of her past begin to emerge during this first session, including being raised by a mother with depression and a father who has alcoholism, while living through their constant fighting. She outlines her rocky relationship with Stuart, a married doctor who treats her poorly, and reveals an incident in which she ran into another doctor, Edward Poole, who insisted that she visit Weiss for a psychiatry appointment immediately after she told him about her problems. When she failed to schedule an appointment, she ran into another doctor acquaintance, Frank Acker, who also demanded that she visit Weiss. As her symptoms worsened, she finally scheduled today’s appointment.
Chapter 2 Summary
Despite 18 months of “intensive psychotherapy” (23), Catherine’s condition has not improved. However, despite her acute fear of flying, she gladly accompanied Stuart to a conference in Chicago and forced him to attend an Egyptian exhibit at a local museum in the spring of 1982. She was always fascinated by Egyptian history despite never studying it, and she mysteriously demonstrated expert knowledge about ancient artifacts at the exhibit, her knowledge surpassing even that of the tour guide.
Weiss decides to try hypnotic regression with Catherine, a practice that helped some of Weiss’s other clients access repressed memories. She falls into a hypnotic trance easily and begins to remember some traumas from her childhood, most significantly a memory of her father molesting her at age three. Catherine sobs while in trance, and Weiss wakes her up and instructs her to remember everything that happened. Unfortunately, following this appointment, Catherine’s symptoms worsen. During the next session, Weiss instructs Catherine to “go back to the time from which your symptoms arise” (27) and is shocked when she begins describing an experience from 1863 BCE living as an 18-year-old girl named Aronda in a sandy valley. Weiss fast-forwards her in this lifetime until she has a daughter named Cleastra who Catherine recognizes as also being her current niece, Rachel. Fast-forwarding to her death, Catherine relives the traumatic flood that killed her and others and is suddenly calm.
These appear to be past-life memories. Weiss is shocked by these results, particularly because Catherine has no previous history of mental illness. He instructs Catherine to continue, and she works through two additional lifetimes: one as a Spanish sex worker in the year 1756 CE and another in which Weiss himself appears in the form of Diogenes, her teacher in the year 1568 CE. After the session, Weiss resolves to keep an open mind in the spirit of “true science” (31) and waits one week to call Catherine back for the next session.
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
In these beginning chapters, Weiss hints at themes that will build throughout the text, namely, the overreliance of modern medicine on drugs to fix surface symptoms instead of root problems, and the obligations people have to each other in the present which are carried over from past lives. It seems that the universe conspires to get Catherine in touch with Weiss. Although it is not fully explained, the reader later learns that Dr. Poole and Dr. Acker’s insistence that she visit Weiss is not a coincidence and has to do with their own past-life connections with Catherine. Chapter 1 lays the groundwork for the reader’s understanding of Catherine as a relatively uncomplicated and normal woman despite her debilitating symptoms, which is important for Weiss’s ability to convince the audience that their experiences together were not based on some kind of personality quirk, drug addiction, or hoax.
Weiss commenced hypnotic regression with Catherine as part of a proven traditional therapy technique used previously on other clients. This was not originally intended to access past life memories. From this first session, the reader learns that past lives can go as far back as human history, as shown by Catherine’s experiences during an ancient Egyptian lifetime from 1863 BCE. Weiss’s skepticism is still firmly entrenched at this early stage of discovery; he was “skeptical about life after death, reincarnation, out-of-body experiences, and related phenomena” (30) despite his commitment to keep an open mind in the spirit of “true science” (31), which is a concept that Weiss develops alongside his growing mastery of intuitive knowledge.
