by Gina Cerminara

It seems that all of us have been men in some lifetimes and women in others. At least, sex change is generally accepted as a fact by most believers in reincarnation, such as Buddhists, Hindus, Theosophists, Rosicrucians, and others; and the Cayce readings, as well as the age-regression experiments of many investigators, provide confirmation for those who accept their validity.

No regular pattern of change is deducible from the Cayce data, however; it seems that one can be a man for one or more lifetimes and then a woman for one or more lifetimes, and so forth and so on; but what causes such changes, or when they occur, does not become clear by the Cayce data at least.

But the mere fact that we do change is itself of epoch-making significance, psychologically speaking.

For one thing, it can shed much light on the whole problem of homosexuality. Homosexuality can probably not be attributed to any single cause, but rather to one of several possible causes—and this is true at the medical and psychological level as well as at the karmic. However, if indeed we do change sex from life to life, then it becomes clear that the very fact of change can be a basic explanation for many, if not most, such deviations.

Many cases in the Cayce files indicate that a recent change in sex can result in what might be called a psychological hang-over. That is to say, a person who has just become a woman, after a series of four or five lifetimes as a man, may well have such pronounced masculine tendencies as to find it difficult, if not impossible, to function as a woman is supposed to function, physically, psychologically, and socially. Homosexuality can be the result. Similarly, a person who has just come into the masculine polarity, after a lifetime or series of lifetimes as a woman, may find it extremely difficult to play the masculine role.

This idea can be therapeutically of tremendous value to homosexuals, and even to persons who, though not outright homosexuals, are uncomfortable or ill at ease in the sex in which they find themselves; it points clearly to the areas of thinking and behavior that most need development or modification.

The matter of sex change can also shed light on another psychological area: namely, the much disputed problem of the Oedipus complex.

Freud’s notion was that every male child desires to possess the mother sexually and to kill the father; and similarly, every female child desires the father and hates the mother. Most normal people, the Freudians’ maintain, sooner or later “resolve” the complex—get over it, to use simple language. Thinking in reincarnationist terms, we could imagine the case of two persons, a father and daughter, for example, or a mother and son, who were lovers in a life before—and who loved so intensely that deep in the unconscious the carry-over was still very strong.

When Freud said: “All boys love their mothers and hate their fathers” it would have been more accurate to state, in reincarnationist terms, that “some boys love their mothers and hate their fathers because they (son and mother) were lovers in a life before.”

In either case, the phenomenon of sex change and change of role becomes a highly significant factor in our thinking. It is the persistence of certain psychic attitudes, despite the change of bodies, that is the crux of the matter here.

By the continuitive aspect of karma, we see how talents are carried over from one life to another; how attitudes towards race, religion, politics, and the opposite sex can persist from life to life also. These attitudinal carry-overs can be general; as, for example, hatred for religion in general, or sympathy for the underdog; or they can be very specific; as, for example, love or hatred for some specific individual.

The carry-overs persist despite the change in sex in the individuals involved, or despite the changed role in a family situation or otherwise. Two brothers who became enemies in the past, for example, because one of them won the girl that both of them loved, were born as father and son this time, and a bitter hostility characterized their relationship from the very beginning.

Attitudinal carry-overs such as this could explain many otherwise incomprehensible antagonisms and sympathies among people, and particularly so in the marriage or the sex relationship.

There would seem to be, moreover, a certain temperamental polarity that is basic to many human relations and especially to the sex relationship, both because of biological and cultural factors that have existed for many ages. A theory of the psychologist William McDougall can be very instructive in this connection.

McDougall, in an attempt to account for the manic-depressive psychosis, argues that there are two basic innate modes of response typical of all human beings: (1) the self-assertive and (2) the self-submissive. An individual reacts submissively with regard to his parents, shall we say, assertively with regard to his wife, submissively with regard to his employer, and assertively with regard to his dog. The normal person is able to make all these adjustments of attitude with the same fluency with which he would go from one gear to another in driving his car. If, however, he tends to act submissively with regard to all persons and all situations, or if, instead, he tends to act always with extreme self-assertion, he is going dangerously in the direction of abnormality.

The manic-depressive psychosis is, according to McDougall, a form of breakdown occasioned when the individual, through either of these exaggerated tendencies or through rigidity in making natural transitions from one to the other, has lost touch with reality. His mental illness then proceeds with exaggerated bounds from the depths to the heights of emotion, in excessive swings from self-submission to self-assertion, thus revealing, as so many abnormalities do, the normal mechanism on a magnified scale.

We are not at present concerned with manic-depressive psychosis, or with the truth of falsity of this theory or its origins; but McDougall’s division of basic disposition into self-assertive and self-submissive is extremely interesting and extremely helpful in analyzing the Cayce data having to do with the relations between the sexes.

In modern America, of course, women have an unprecedented economic freedom and independence. There still does not exist full equality of the sexes, even in America; but such rapid strides are being made in this direction, there are so many career women and there is so much self-assertion among women that it seems almost absurd to say—even remembering her biological role—that the role of woman is one of self-submission.

But we must bear in mind that this economic liberation, and the democratic ideal of equality between the sexes, is of very recent and even almost regional growth. Only seventy years ago in this country it was impossible for women to vote; and there are still millions of women all over the world whose condition is essentially the ancient one of submission rather than assertiveness. In the light of these facts, it seems safe to say that the basic disposition of self-assertiveness has, throughout much of human history, been equated with the male, and self-submissiveness with the female. Sadism can be regarded as the extreme of ruthless self-assertiveness; masochism, the extreme of self-submission.

If, then, we see by the reincarnationists view that one’s sex and one’s role in life are constantly changing, we can see that the permutations and combinations of assertiveness and submissiveness must lead to many curious psychological situations. Such situations in the marriage relationship, in fact, appear frequently in the Cayce readings.

There are many cases in the Cayce files where a husband and wife in the present have been in the relationship of father and daughter before. These antecedents, observable in dozens of cases, sometimes have favorable and sometimes unfavorable consequences. In general, such a situation seems to be favorable to marital harmony, because the pattern of dominance-submission which is typically that of a parent-child situation is identical with the traditional culture pattern of dominance-submission in the husband-wife relationship.

In the following case, for example, we see a favorable consequence. The woman in this case is the daughter of a famous American writer, and the widow of a distinguished European artist. She asked in her life reading whether she had been united with her husband in previous lives. She was told: “More than once. In the Danish experience, he was only a friend. In the Egyptian experience, he was your father. In Atlantis, he was your husband.” The woman writes, in a letter acknowledging the receipt of her reading. “I was very much impressed by the statement that in a previous incarnation my husband had been my father, because there was a certain element of that quality in our relationship even in this life.”

It should be noted here that the attitude of self-submissiveness which was deeply ingrained in the Egyptian parent-child experience persisted through the less emotionally charged experience of friendship in Denmark and came down to the present as a continued sense of the woman’s looking upward as to a superior. It is also of interest to note that the woman in this case was four years older than her husband, so that one might almost have expected a motherly attitude on her part rather then a daughterly one.

In other cases, however, the unconscious pattern of parent-child relationship was one of antipathy rather than sympathy (because of a tyrannical element in the dominance); the results in the present husband-wife relationship were, therefore, unfortunate. One case is that of a Polish-born woman who asks: “What has been my relationship in the past with my husband? Why have I feared him?” The answer was: “In the Mohawk Valley experience there was an association as father and daughter; he then kept the entity well in tow.” Another case is that of a marital relationship so difficult as to result in a nervous breakdown on the part of the wife. The husband’s attitude had constantly been one of cold domineering tyranny, which took subtle rather than obvious forms. According to their readings, they were father and daughter in early Williamsburg, and the stern authority of the parent then was fiercely resented by the child. The pattern of domineering tyranny on the one hand, and resentment on the other, never relented into consideration on his part, nor forgiveness on hers; consequently, the same situation had to be met again, though in a slightly different form.

An interesting case of a previous mother-son relationship is to be seen in the case of a famous and wealthy industrialist who was refused a divorce by his wife for many years. Unable to win his freedom, he proceeded to live with and support another woman with whom he had a deep bond of sympathy and understanding, a woman of quick intelligence and wide culture. She was his confidante in matters of business and was solicitous both of his health and his tastes in food. She was told: “In the Atlantean sojourn, he was the son of the entity. And the whole of the relationship in the present often bears just that same aspect, as the entity mothers his ideas and his welfare.”

Frequently a husband and wife were previously associated in exactly the same husband-wife relationship. This exact repetition of role is apparently very common. If the dominance-submission pattern or the equality pattern has been well established by such previous marriages, the present marriage adjustment is very probably a relatively harmonious one. No conflict of attitude polarity is likely to arise unless other disturbing factors or karmic problems are present. There is no need, then, to dwell on these cases at any length here, though we might note in passing one rather curious case. A woman was told by Cayce that she had been traded in marriage in early Virginia for 2,000 pounds of tobacco. When she asked about her previous relationship with her husband, she was told, “He was the one who bought you! Doesn’t he act like it at times?” The wife’s comment on this was simply: “He sure does!”

In many cases, a previous male incarnation of the wife militates against successful marriage. This is very distinctly observable in the case of a woman who was united with her present husband in the same relationship several lifetimes ago. In the life just previous to the present one, however, she took incarnation as a man. From this male incarnation she carries over a very pronounced desire for domination and independence, together with a man-like strength of purpose that will brook no opposition. Their present marriage has been one of continuous strife almost from its inception. The partners have divorced and remarried twice. The excessive drinking, which has become the weakness of both, is a symptom as well as a contributing factor to their friction. Basically, one major difficulty is the pronounced self-assertive tendencies of both. If one or the other, or both, could achieve sufficient grace of spirit for a sufficiently long period of time to curb his or her own self-assertive attitude and be patient of the eruptions of self-assertion in the other, the marriage could perhaps be salvaged.

In other cases we see the reverse situation: namely, one in which the husband has made a recent change in sex, and consequently has a tendency to be feminine and self-submissive in outlook. In one case, for example, that of a somewhat effeminate man who is the father of three children and suffers acutely from sexual maladjustment, the Cayce reading indicated that he had had two previous lives as a woman, one in early America and one in France during the Crusades. The Crusade experience was particularly traumatic; the entity had been betrothed as a young girl to a man who soon afterwards went to the Holy Land. “Knowing little or nothing of the duty of matrimony, the entity’s whole experience was filled with suppression and fear of sexual relationships. The entity was well on in years before these fears were removed.”

We have, of course, only skimmed the surface of this whole area. The Cayce files contain any number of cases illustrative of one or another of the many possible permutations of sexual role.

The basic fact of sex transposition is of importance, first, as an explanation for many strange undercurrents in human relations, particularly as related to love and hate, dominance and submission; and second as an indication to us of the cosmic lesson that we all need to learn.

Life seems almost to be like a school for actors: the director of the school wishes each student to be so flexible and so complete, as to be able to play all roles equally well, and for this purpose makes everyone, willy-nilly, play widely different parts, no matter what his natural inclinations. Were you superb as Puck last night? Very well, then, tomorrow you must begin to learn the role of Shylock. Were you magnificent as a man last life? Very well, then, next life you must learn to be a woman.

In psychological terms, we must learn to be neither too self-assertive nor to self-submissive with regard to other people, no matter what our role in life. No matter what opportunity for dominance presents itself as an enticement and justification to our ego, no matter what situation of oppression seems to overwhelm us into slavery and insignificance, we must learn to be as unaffected by the one as by the other.

To our temporary inferiors, we must fulfill our responsibilities of leadership or instruction or support; to our temporary superiors, we must act with due respect, obedience, or compliance; but in the former case we must not become unduly self-exalted, and in the latter case we must not become unduly self-abased.

The abrasions and agonies of marriage are intended to polish us of our crudities, bring to the surface our latent strengths, teach us to become more self-assertive if we are too self-submissive, or to become more self-submissive if we are to self-assertive.

Excerpt from The World Within