“When we were children, every one of us had a very rich imagination. And if we can just remember how we used to play as children, we’ve made a major step into past-life awareness. I believe that as children we were often quite unconsciously playing out our past-life stories – playing with toy soldiers, nursing a doll, exploring in the woods, building castles. And the truth is that imagination is the most misunderstood faculty that we have within us."
"There isn’t a single college in America that teaches the psychology of the imagination. Imagination is only taught in the literature departments, and then it’s part of literary theory. The only people then who know anything technical about the imagination are actually psychiatrists, and what they know all comes from the study of hallucinatory fantasies of psychotic patients. So it’s not even a psychology of the normal. It’s a psychology of the abnormal. Fortunately, we have Jung and, to a degree, Freud, who tried to return imagination to the realm of the normal. They gave us permission to connect to these vast stores of imagery that we have within us."
"The question of truth is very much a left-brain question, which is often asked from a culturally biased point of view. I can tell you that from the therapeutic standpoint, it doesn’t seem to matter whether the person who undergoes a regression really believes in past lives or not. You see, it’s the power of the psychodrama, the story itself which is healing. The pioneers of psychodrama said its true purpose is catharsis – that is, a healing purification of blocked feelings and emotions. Getting it out, finishing it."
Roger J. Woolger, PhD.
Taken from interview "Eternal Return" for Sounds True 2002
Roger Woolger, Ph.D., holds psychology, religion, and philosophy degrees from Oxford and London Universities, and was trained as an analyst at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland.. In 1986, when he wrote Other Lives, Other Selves, an acclaimed work on past lives, he brought intelligence and scholarship to an often misunderstood field of psychotherapy. Today, after translations into five languages, his book is regarded as a definitive work in the field. Dr. Woolger continues to investigate the phenomena of past lives, teaching and lecturing in Great Britain, Europe, and South and North America.
Born a British citizen, Roger has lived and taught Jungian and transpersonal psychology and comparative religion in North America and England. He has been a guest professor at Vassar College, Visiting Professor at the University of Vermont and Concordia University, Montreal. He has led workshops at the New York Open Center, Esalen Institute and speaks at a broad range of conferences internationally. Currently, Roger lectures and holds workshops throughout the world.