Many Lives, Many Masters opens with a nervous Catherine pacing the halls of the Department of Psychiatry. She is a laboratory technician in the hospital and has an appointment with Brian Weiss, the author of this book. During the appointment, Catherine discusses her worsening symptoms which add up to a “life full of fears” (16) and include insomnia, tension, nervousness, fear of death, fear of airplanes, and recurring nightmares.

Catherine is unable to remember specific childhood traumas which might explain her symptoms, but troubling aspects of her past begin to emerge during this first session, including being raised by a mother with depression and a father who has alcoholism, while living through their constant fighting. She outlines her rocky relationship with Stuart, a married doctor who treats her poorly, and reveals an incident in which she ran into another doctor, Edward Poole, who insisted that she visit Weiss for a psychiatry appointment immediately after she told him about her problems. When she failed to schedule an appointment, she ran into another doctor acquaintance, Frank Acker, who also demanded that she visit Weiss. As her symptoms worsened, she finally scheduled today’s appointment.