The effectiveness of past-life therapy grows out of its philosophical underpinnings as a plant grows out of rich and nourishing soil. To understand its potential for change and healing without grasping the significance of the underlying assumptions would be like trying to understand how psychoanalysis works without postulating the existence of unconscious motivation and psychic determinism. In a sense, past-life therapy is an extension of these principles: that which happens later depends on the groundwork set earlier with the enrichment of transpersonal and spiritual factors. Psychoanalysis subjected itself to grave limitations by its myopia regarding the spiritual nature of man. It limited itself by considering birth to be the cut-off point of psychic determinism. Past-life therapy remedies these truncations and restores the total nature and scope of the human being.
The first and underlying assumption in past-life work is that each individual possesses an inner wisdom that is dependable and can be recovered when a technique is used to assist him to contact it and to act in a constructive manner upon what he has come to understand. In this way, regression therapy introduces a new and significant dimension to psychotherapy. It provides a modus-operandi for successfully assisting the client, in an altered state, to communicate with the unconscious, the “inner self,” in order to produce in detail a history of his personal lifetimes.