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Psychic Discoveries – Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder

Raikov gave an adult an even stranger dose of widened experience. In this case he departed from his mainline effort to evoke creativity, unless you consider self-healing a possible and creative act. As a psychiatrist, Raikov confronted the problem of Boris, a middle-aged, well-educated chronic alcoholic.

The man appeared spasmodically for treatment at the psychiatric clinic. He kept drinking, bouts of  the DTs followed, and his weary family was about to give up and leave.

"O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us!"

Robert Burns wrote. Dr. Raikov thought he knew of one such power. He decided to reincarnate Boris's relatives in him. The psychiatrist started with the man's mother, whom he regarded with "warmth and love."

"Who are you?"

"I'm Tatyana Nikolaevna," said Boris, pronouncing his mother's name. Raikov told the man reincarnated as his own mother that "her" Son was lying on the couch in a drunken stupor. "He's turned blue, it's sickening, things are really bad." Raikov laid it on.

The patient with his eyes wide open threw himself on the couch and gave "her" son artificial respiration, splashed imaginary water on him, spooned out invisible medicine, and implored the doctors for first aid.

"Oh, how could you drink like that," lamented the ‘reincarnated’ mother. "You're dying of alcohol. Your wife is leaving you, your daughter won't love you."

Raikov made a gurgling sound with a bottle of water.

"Tatyana Nikolaevna, your son seems to be drinking again," he called.

"Tatyana," her face creased with repugnance, tried to grab the bottle from her invisible "son" and smash it.

Later Raikov reincarnated Boris's daughter in him. "Papa," Boris said in a quiet, soft voice, similar to his daughter's, "Papa, why have you been drinking again? What's the matter with you?  It's terrible for me." Tears streamed down the face of Boris ‘reincarnated’ as his own daughter.

Eventually Raikov evoked the man's wife and other members of his family in him. Boris remembered nothing of these emotion-charged moments as his own family. Then, one day, he told his psychiatrist, Dr. Raikov, that he suddenly had begun thinking how his family felt toward him. He almost physically seemed to feel their anger and disgust, "I began to see all the loathsomeness of my drunkenness through their eyes. It's horrifying."

According to Raikov, this medical ‘reincarnation’, playing on Boris's strongest ties with life, gradually helped him form a critical attitude toward his behaviour.

"A type  of reincarnation," Raikov says, "can be an excellent addition to psychotherapeutic treatment." It could also be used for rehabilitation of criminals.