Soul Contracts

Pre-birth choice in Platonic and Jewish texts

The best-known classical account of souls choosing a life before birth is the myth of Er that closes Plato's Republic, Book 10. In Paul Shorey's translation, a prophet takes lots and patterns of lives from the lap of Lachesis, the souls choose in the order of their lots, and the prophet says that the blame is on the one who chooses and that the god is blameless. The same passage says that the choice of a life determines character, that lives are mixed with wealth, poverty, sickness and health, and that the souls then drink from the River of Forgetfulness. The text is a story told within a philosophical dialogue.

A rabbinic passage on pregnancy in the Babylonian Talmud (Niddah 30b), in the William Davidson English edition, says that a fetus is taught the entire Torah in the womb, that an angel causes it to forget this at birth, and that angels administer an oath before it leaves the womb: to be righteous and not wicked. This is a pre-birth oath, not a plan of particular events or relationships, so it differs from modern soul-contract teaching.

Reincarnation ideas in Kabbalah and Theosophy

A Psi Encyclopedia overview of reincarnation, published by the Society for Psychical Research, reports that the Kabbalist Isaac Luria (1534-1572) used the term gilgul for cycles of souls in his Gate of Reincarnations. It also reports that Helena Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875 and that its teaching drew on Indic ideas of reincarnation, including karma and the Akashic Records. The overview is written from a parapsychology standpoint, and it does not describe pre-birth planning of life events in either tradition.

No free source reviewed documents a Theosophical, Spiritualist or Spiritist doctrine of agreed life lessons, so this page does not attribute the modern idea to those movements, and no source here supports doing so.

Life-between-lives hypnosis in the twentieth century

The Psi Encyclopedia article on past life regression lists Michael Newton's Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives (1994) among books by regression practitioners. A second Psi Encyclopedia article, by the researcher James G. Matlock, says Newton became well known for books in which hypnotized subjects describe an interval between lives. Newton's accounts, as Matlock summarizes them, include healing showers, staging areas, waiting rooms with soul cluster groups and tribunals before which spirits judge how well they met the goals of their last life and formulate plans for the next.

Matlock, who studies spontaneous reports of intermission memories, criticizes this picture. He says it differs from the spontaneous reports, that nothing in it can be objectively verified, and that subjects under hypnosis often produce what the hypnotist expects. Robert Schwartz's Your Soul's Plan is a widely read modern book on pre-birth planning, but no free scholarly or encyclopedic account of it was found, so this page does not summarize its claims.

Names and related terms

The idea circulates as soul contract, soul agreement, soul plan and pre-birth plan, and as soul contract healing when a practitioner offers sessions to examine or revise a supposed agreement. These labels are used by practitioners and writers, not defined by any standards body found in the sources reviewed. Newton's phrase life between lives names the regression setting in which many modern accounts arise. Matlock uses intermission for the period between death and rebirth in the spontaneous cases he reviews.

Karma, fate and soul contracts

Karma is a Hindu and Buddhist concept in which present and past actions are said to shape the circumstances of a later life; a 2023 public-health study describes it in these terms. A soul contract is usually described differently, as an agreement made by the soul before birth, though the two ideas are often combined in popular teaching. The Platonic myth also differs from both, because there the souls choose from patterns of lives and the text places the blame on the chooser.

Psychologists separate several lay beliefs about fate. Evelyn Au and Krishna Savani describe fatalism as the belief that fate dictates outcomes and makes action irrelevant, and contrast it with a belief in negotiating with fate, in which fate sets boundaries within which people can still act. Whether a given soul-contract teaching is fatalistic or closer to the second belief depends on how the teacher describes it, and the sources reviewed do not classify it.

Where the idea appears

In the sources reviewed, the idea appears mainly in two settings. One is hypnotic life-between-lives work, where, in the accounts Matlock summarizes, subjects describe reviewing a past life and formulating plans for the next. The other is the wider field of regression therapy, where Gabriel Andrade, a medical ethics author, describes practitioners who treat anxiety, mood disorders and other conditions on the assumption that they reflect problems from previous lives. No free source reviewed describes a soul-contract session in a practitioner's own words, so session formats are not described here.

Matlock also reports that, in the intermission cases he reviews, about half involve a stated choice of parents and that one case involves a compact with other spirits to be reborn together. He presents these as spontaneous accounts, distinct from hypnotic ones, and he finds little evidence of detailed pre-birth planning in them.

Practitioner standards where regression is offered

The International Board for Regression Therapy, a United States certifying body, publishes five standards of ethical conduct. They cover competence, honest disclosure of qualifications and the proposed therapy, protection of the public, written consent before client information is used publicly, and avoiding sensationalism, false claims and diagnosis or treatment that the law reserves to licensed practitioners. The standards concern past life regression and do not mention life between lives or soul contracts.

Uses reported for related regression practice

The free sources reviewed do not set out what soul-contract practitioners themselves say the work is for. For the closely related practice of past life regression, Andrade reports that some physicians use it for anxiety disorders, mood disorders and gender dysphoria on the assumption that these reflect problems in past lives. He presents this as a description of a practice he argues is unethical, not as a finding about benefit, and it should not be carried over to soul-contract work.

Meaning-making and coping

A community survey of survivors of violent trauma in the United States, by Jonathan Davidson and colleagues, suggested that belief in karma and reincarnation may represent a way of coping after trauma. The authors presented this as a question for further study. In experiments by Au and Savani, a belief in negotiating with fate, but not fatalism, was linked to more acceptance and a sense of meaning after a recalled constraining event. Neither study examined soul contracts, so these findings show only that beliefs about fate and rebirth can play a part in how people interpret hardship.

Searches run and what was found

No controlled study of soul contracts or of life-between-lives sessions was found. PubMed searches on 2026-10-06 for the phrase life between lives in titles and abstracts returned no records, and a search for soul contract or pre-birth together with reincarnation also returned none. A search for past life regression in titles and abstracts returned six records, none of which was a trial of such sessions: they included an ethics article, hypnosis experiments, a review, a case report that mentions the term in passing and a cancer survey.

The core claim, that souls exist and make agreements before birth, is a metaphysical claim, and the sources reviewed do not report any way of testing it. Matlock, writing from a parapsychology standpoint, says Newton's accounts contain nothing objectively verifiable.

Hypnosis, suggestion and memory

Experiments on hypnotic regression bear on how life-between-lives reports arise. Young Don Pyun and Yun Joo Kim gave 64 Korean men three past-life regressions and found that hypnotizability, but not belief in past lives, significantly influenced the rate of reported memories; the content reflected cultural and religious background, including animal identities. Cynthia Meyersburg and colleagues found that people reporting memories of past lives had higher false recall and recognition in a word-list task than controls, and scored higher on magical ideation and absorption.

A 2021 systematic review by Beate Muschalla and Fabian Schönborn, covering 59 experimental articles, found that guided imagery and suggestive statements induced false beliefs or memories in about 20-50 percent of participants who underwent the manipulation, and that false belief induction after dream interpretation or hypnosis occurred in more than half. The studies were heterogeneous and none examined life-between-lives sessions.

Research on beliefs in fate and karma

Research on related beliefs is more developed. In six experiments, Au and Savani found that recalling a constraining event strengthened a belief in negotiating with fate, and that exposure to that belief, but not fatalism, reduced repetitive thoughts and increased acceptance after the event. In the survey by Davidson and colleagues of 1,969 United States respondents, 5 percent strongly agreed with a belief in karma and reincarnation and 77 percent strongly disagreed, and agreement was associated with more trauma exposure and more severe posttraumatic stress symptoms.

A cross-sectional survey of 325 directly exposed and 105 less exposed coastal residents in Sri Lanka, eight years after the 2004 tsunami, found that belief in karma was associated with a higher risk of posttraumatic stress symptoms. The authors note that causality cannot be established and that the study used questionnaires, not clinical evaluation. These studies concern fate and karma, not soul contracts, and the sources reviewed contain no study of soul-contract belief itself.

Blame and self-blame

The idea that hardship, illness or harm was agreed in advance raises a question the sources reviewed do not answer: whether it increases self-blame. No study found measures this for soul-contract teaching. A related qualitative study of 23 patients with advanced cancer in an Austrian palliative care unit, by Anna Kitta and colleagues, found that some patients experience guilt and blame themselves, and that clinicians benefit from understanding patients' own beliefs about why they are ill. The study did not examine soul contracts or any spiritual framework in particular.

Plato's myth itself places responsibility on the chooser, in the sentence that the blame is on the one who chooses. That is a feature of an ancient literary text and does not show how modern teachings are received. Readers who are distressed by an explanation of past harm as chosen may wish to discuss it with a qualified mental health professional.

Distress, fatalism and delayed care

In the Sri Lankan survey, the authors suggest that survivors who saw events as determined by karma may have been discouraged from healthy behaviors, a hypothesis their cross-sectional data cannot test. Davidson and colleagues found that stronger agreement with karma beliefs was linked to poorer mental and physical health and more trauma, and suggest the belief may also help some people cope. Neither study involved soul contracts. Interpreting illness or distress as part of a pre-birth plan is not a substitute for assessment and treatment, and necessary medical or mental health care should not be delayed or replaced.

False memories and practitioner standards

Andrade argues that past life regression risks implanting false memories and that clients cannot give informed consent without being told that the reincarnation hypothesis lacks evidential support. The Muschalla and Schönborn review supports the general concern that suggestion can produce false beliefs. Life-between-lives sessions use similar hypnotic methods, but the sources reviewed contain no study of harms specific to them.

No statutory regulation or training standard for soul-contract practice was found. The International Board for Regression Therapy publishes ethics standards for regression therapists, which ask members to disclose qualifications, avoid false claims and avoid unlicensed diagnosis or treatment. The standards do not address false memory or soul contracts, and the registers of life-between-lives training bodies were not reviewed.