Michael Newton, counseling psychologist and master hypnotherapist, published Journey of Souls in 1994: 29 clients under deep hypnosis describing the interval between deaths, souls clustering into groups, reviewing their lives, and planning the next one with guides, choosing bodies, parents, and adversities for karmic lessons. Destiny of Souls, 2000, expanded the hierarchy. The sales figures are extraordinary, 750,000 copies by 2021, one of Llewellyn's biggest titles ever. Wikipedia files it under pseudoscience and spiritual case studies, both labels accurate: the cases exist, the method cannot separate memory from confabulation.
The doctrine does enormous therapeutic work: trauma reframed as chosen curriculum, grief as curriculum completion, abusers as contract partners. It is karma softened from punishment to compassion, fate with an opt-out, you can rewrite the contract through inner work. Critics note the cost: the doctrine implicitly assigns victims authorship of their own victimization, a risk Newton's followers rarely price. The hypnotic methodology inherited the whole problem of the 1990s memory wars, recovered-memory therapy's documented ability to manufacture detailed, felt, false pasts.
The claim: soul contracts are the Akashic Records file upgraded to SaaS, a metaphysics where your life is a user agreement, because the 1990s self was already living inside contracts, employment, mortgage, end-user licenses, and Newton gave the soul the same paperwork the era gave the citizen. Verdict: the historical framing fits, the between-lives bureaucracy, guides, review boards, planning councils, is corporate America wearing halos. Whether the souls report to a cosmos or to a 1994 office park is exactly the question the hypnosis cannot answer.
If you signed the contract before you could read, who wrote the clauses, and who profits from the retelling?