Giving more life to Marilyn?

But throughout her life, the 43-year-old Laird contends, she has also been someone else: Marilyn Monroe.

Laird's assertion that she is the reincarnation of the late Hollywood icon is sure to be dismissed by skeptics. But it has found an ardent defender in a Malibu psychiatrist named Adrian Finkelstein, who said he uncovered Laird's previous existence after placing her under hypnosis as part of a highly controversial therapy known as "past life regression," in which patients recall their past lives as a way to deal with problems in their current lives.

"In science, and I'm a scientist, we end up believing in what we prove scientifically," Finkelstein said in a recent interview. "I established through research that Sherrie Lea Laird is the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe."

Finkelstein is an author and lecturer who, before journeying into the realms of spiritual healing and New Age therapies, was schooled in traditional forms of psychiatry, graduating from the prestigious Menninger School of Psychiatry in Topeka, Kan., was a volunteer instructor in UCLA's department of psychiatry in the early 1990s and is currently accorded privileges to practice at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where he occasionally consults on hypnosis techniques.

His videotaped sessions with Laird -- who bears little resemblance to the late screen legend -- are recounted in a new book he wrote titled "Marilyn Monroe Returns: The Healing of a Soul." Speaking as "Marilyn," the hypnotized Laird recalled love affairs with John and Robert Kennedy, including a tryst with JFK in the White House; she said JFK told her state secrets about Fidel Castro and Cuba; and she gave details about the actress' death at age 36 from a drug overdose on Aug. 5, 1962, dismissing conspiracy theories that Monroe had been murdered.

Neither the American Psychiatric Assn. nor the American Psychological Assn. have taken an official position on past life regression therapy, but it's not considered a mainstream therapy.

Critics, though, say the process can leads to patients incurring false memories, often as a result of intentional or unintentional suggestions of the hypnotist. As a result, skeptics say, these accounts are difficult if not impossible to prove.