Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health

by L. Ron Hubbard

  But remember that in engrams there is another factor present: valence. Once its own analyzer is out the body will assume the evaluation or emotional condition of any other analyzer present. Here we have affinity at work in earnest. “Unconscious” in the presence of other beings, an individual picks up a valence for every other being present. Some of these valences are incidental. He will pick first that valence which is most sympathetic as a desirable future friend (or some similar person). And he will pick that valence which is the top valence (highest survival, the boss, the winner) for his dramatization. He will also take the valence of the winning entity (winning over himself or others) for emotional tone. If the winning valence is also the sympathetic valence, he has an engram which can be utilized to its fullest extent.

  Let us make this an example: a man is under nitrous oxide (the most vicious anaesthetic ever invented as it is actually not anaesthetic but a hypnotic) undergoing exodontistry. As usual everybody present around the “unconscious” patient chatters and yaps about the patient, the weather, the most popular movie star, or baseball. The exodontist is a tough character, bossy to the nurse, apt to be angry about trifles; he is also very sympathetic toward the patient. The nurse is a blue-eyed blonde who is sexually aberrated. The patient, actually in agony, receiving an engram amongst engrams which may ruin his life (terrible stuff, nitrous oxide; really hands out a fancy engram as any dianeticist can attest) is unanalytical. Everything said to him or around him is taken literally. He takes the valence of the exodontist as both the top valence present and the sympathetic valence. But every phrase uttered is aberrative and will be interpreted by that happy little moron, the reactive mind, on the order of Simple Simon who was told he had to be careful how he stepped in the pies, so he stepped in them carefully.

  These people may be talking about somebody else but every “I” or “he” or “you” uttered is engramic and will be applied to others and himself by the patient in the most literal sense. “He can’t remember anything” says the exodontist. All right, when the engram keys-in, this patient will have an occlusion on memory in greater or lesser degree. “He can’t see or feel it”: this means an occlusion on sight, pain and tactile. If the patient has his eyes watering in agony at the moment (though completely “under”) he may get actual bad vision as well as poor visual recall from this experience.

  Now they put him in the hands of this blonde nurse to let him sleep off the drug and recover. She is an aberree amongst aberrees.

  She knows patients do weird things when they are still “out” so she pumps him for information about his life. And she knows they are hypnotic (yes, she sure does) so she gives him some positive suggestions. Amusing herself. She says he’ll like her. That she’ll be good to him. And stay there now for the present.

  So the poor patient, who has had two wisdom teeth, impacted, taken out, has a full anger-sympathy dramatization. The general tone he takes is the tone the exodontist showed to the others in the room. The exodontist was angry at the nurse. With his recalls all messed up, the patient a few years later meets a woman similar to this nurse. The nurse has given him compulsions toward her.

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  The silly little moron, the reactive mind, sees in this entirely different person enough similarity to create an identity between the nurse and this new woman. So the patient divorces his wife and marries the pseudo-nurse.

  Only now that he has married the pseudo-nurse the dental engram begins to key-in in earnest. Physically he gets ill: the two molars adjacent to where the wisdom teeth came out develop large cavities and begin to rot (circulation shut down, pain in the area but can’t be felt because there’s a pain recall shut-off). His memory goes to pieces. His recalls become worse.

  He begins to develop eye trouble and a strange conjunctivitis. Further (because the dentist leaned on his chest and stomach with a sharp elbow from time to time) he has chest and stomach pains. The nitrous oxide hurt his lungs and this pain is also in chronic restimulation.

  But most horrible: he believes that this pseudo-nurse will take care of him and he stops to some degree taking care of himself in any way; his energy dissipates; and analytically he knows it is all wrong and that he is not himself. For he is now fixed in the valence of the exodontist who is angry with this nurse and so he beats the pseudo-nurse because he senses that from her all evil flows. The girl he married is not and was not the nurse: she sounds something like her and is a blonde. She has her own engrams and reacts. She attempts suicide.

  Then, one day, since this is one engram among many, the mental hospital gets our patient and the doctors there decide that all he needs is a good solid series of electric shocks to tear his brain up, and if that doesn’t work, a nice ice-pick into each eyeball after and during electric shock, the ice-pick sweeping a wide arc to tear the analytical mind to pieces. His wife agrees. Our patient can’t defend himself: he’s insane and the insane have no rights, you know.

  Only the cavalry, in this one case, arrived in the form of dianetics and cleared the patient and the wife and they are happy today. This is an actual engram and an actual case history. It is a sympathy engram, pro-survival on the moronic reactive mind level.

  This is to show the ebb and flow of emotion within this one engram. The physical being is out and in agony. The mental being is given a variety of emotional tones on a contagion principle. The actual emotional tone of the patient, his own, is beaten apathy; hence he can no longer “be himself.”

  In passing it should be mentioned that only absolute silence, utter silence and tomb-like silence, should attend an operation or injury of any kind. There is nothing which can be said or given as a perceptic in any moment of “unconsciousness” which is beneficial to a patient.

  Nothing! In the light of these researches and scientific findings (which can be proven in any other laboratory or group of people in very short order), speech or sound in the vicinity of an “unconscious” person should be punished criminally as, to anyone who knows these facts, such an act would be a willful effort to destroy the intellect or mental balance of an individual.

  If the patient is complimented, as in hypnosis or during an injury or operation, a manic is formed which will give him temporary euphoria and eventually plunge him into the depressive stage of the cycle.

  The golden rule could be altered to read: If you love your brother, keep your mouth shut when he is unconscious.

  Emotion can be seen then to exist in two planes, the personal plane and the extra-valence plane. It is communicable in terms of identical thinking. Rage present when a man is

  “unconscious” will give him a Tone 1 engram: it will contain rage. Apathy present in the vicinity of an “unconscious” person will give him a Tone 0 engram. Happiness present during an engram is not very aberrative but will give a Tone 4 engram. And so forth. In other words, the emotion of those present around an “unconscious” person is communicated into the person as part of his engram. Any mood can be so communicated.

  In dramatizing an engram, the aberree always takes the winning valence and that valence is not, of course, himself. If only one other person is present and the other is talking in 80

  terms of apathy, then the apathy is the tone value of the engram. When an apathy engram is restimulated, the individual, unless he wants to be hurt severely, is apathetic and this tone, being the nearest to death, is the most dangerous one to the individual. The rage emotion communicated to an “unconscious” person gives him a rage engram he can dramatize. This is most harmful to the society. A merely hostile tone present around an “unconscious” person gives him a merely hostile engram (covert hostility). With two people present, each having a different mood, the “unconscious” person receives an engram with two valences other than his own. When this happens he will first dramatize the winning valence with its mood and, if forced from this, will dramatize the second valence with its mood. Driven from this in a chronic engram, he goes insane.

  Nothing here should be construed to mean that a
person only uses or dramatizes sympathy engrams. This is very far from the case. The sympathy engram gives him the chronic psycho-somatic illness. He can dramatize any engram he has when it is restimulated.

  Emotion, then, is communication and a personal condition. The cellular level evaluation of a situation depends upon any other analyzer present, even if that analyzer is thoroughly hostile to it. Lacking such evaluation, the individual takes his own tone for the moment.

  There is another condition of emotion which is of extreme and useful interest to the therapist since it is the first thing with which he will have to deal in opening a case. We do not mean here to start discussing therapy but to describe a necessary part of emotion.

  Great loss and other swift and severe suppressor action dams up emotion in an engram.

  Loss itself can be a shock to reduce analytical power. And an engram is received. If it is the loss of a sympathetic person on whom an individual has depended, it seems to the individual as if death itself stalks him. When such a suppressor effect occurs, it is as if a strong steel spring had been compressed within the engram. When it releases it comes with a terrible rush of emotion (if this discharge is, indeed, emotion, though we hardly know what other name to call it).

  Life force apparently gets dammed up at these points in life. There may be enormous quantities of that life force available but some of it becomes suppressed into a loss engram.

  After that the person does not seem to possess as much fluid vitality as before. This may be not emotion but life force itself. The mind then has below it, as in a cyst, a great quantity of sorrow or despair. The more of these charges exist in such an encysted state, the less free are the emotions of the individual. This may be on a basis of suppression to a point from which there is no swift rising. Nothing in the person’s future seems to bring him up to any plane like those he occupied before.

  The glory and color of childhood vanishes as one progresses into later years. But the strange part of it is that this glamor and beauty and sensitivity to life are not gone. They are encysted. One of the most remarkable experiences a clear has is to find, in the process of therapy, that he is recovering appreciation of the beauty in the world.

  Persons, as they live forward from childhood, suffer loss after loss, and each loss takes from them a little more of this ; Ø quantity which may be, indeed, life force itself. Bound up within them, that force is denied them and indeed, reacts against them.

  Only this emotional encysting can, for instance, compartment the mind of a person who is multi-valent or who cannot see or hear his past. The analytical mind, worked upon by the reactive bank, compartments and divides with loss after loss until there is no free flow left.

  Then a man dies.

  Thus we could say that emotion, or what has been called emotion, is really in two sections: first, there is the endocrine system which, handled either by the analytical mind in the upper two zones or the reactive mind in the lower two zones, brings emotional responses of 81

  fear, enthusiasm, apathy, etc.; second, there would be life force itself becoming compartmented by engrams and being sealed up, little by little, in the reactive bank.

  It is possible that a therapy could be formulated which would spring out these various life force charges only and create thereby a full clear. Unfortunately, to date, this has not been possible.

  The odd part of emotion is that it is so ordinarily based on the word content of engrams. If an engram says, “I am afraid,” then the aberree is afraid. If an engram says, “I am calm,” even if the rest of the engram gives him chattering shakes, the aberree still has to be

  “calm.”

  The problem of emotion as endocrine balance and life force has another complication in that the physical pain in an engram is often mistaken for a particular emotion named in the engram. For instance, the engram can say with verbal content that the individual is “sexually excited” and have as a pain content an ache in the legs and have as an actual emotional content (the valence that says “I’m sexually excited”) anger. This, to the aberree dramatizing it is a complex affair. When he is “sexually excited” -- he has an idea what that means as just language -- he is also angry and has an ache in the legs. This is actually very amusing in many cases and has led to a standard set of clinical jokes, all of which begin with, “You know, I feel like everybody else.”

  Dianeticists, having discovered that people evaluate the emotions, beliefs, intelligence and somatics of the world in terms of their own engramic reactions, delight in discovering new concepts of “emotion.” “You know how people feel when they’re happy. Their ears burn.” “I feel just like anybody else when I’m happy; my feet and eyes ache.” “Of course I know how people feel when they’re happy; just pin prickles going all over them.” “I wonder how people can stand to be passionate when it makes their noses hurt so.” “Of course I know how people feel when they’re excited: they have to go to the toilet.”

  Probably every person on earth has his own peculiar definition for every emotional state in terms of engram command. The command plus the somatics and perceptics make what they call an “emotional state.”

  Actually the problem, then, should be defined in terms of the clear, who can function without engramic orders from the reactive mind. So defined it breaks down in terms of the endocrine system and the varying level of life force free to resurge against the suppressor.

  Laughter, it should be added, is not, strictly speaking, an emotion but a relief from emotion. The early Italians had a very definite idea, as represented by their folk tales, that laughter was of therapeutic value. Melancholy was the only mental illness these tales consider and laughter was its only cure. In dianetics we have a great deal to do with laughter. In therapy patients vary, in their laughter reaction, from the slight chuckle to hilarious mirth. Any engram which really releases may be expected to begin somewhere between tears and boredom and end with laughter; the nearer the engram’s tone is to tears at the first contact, the more certainly laughter will appear as it is relieved.

  There is a stage of therapy often reached by the preclear when his entire past life seems to be a subject of uncontrollable mirth. This does not mean he is clear but it means that a large proportion of the encysted charges have been tapped. A pre-clear has laughed for two days almost without ceasing. Hebephrenia is not the same thing as this laughter for the relief of the pre-clear on realizing the shadowy aspect and completely knowable character of his past fears and terrors is hearty.

  Laughter plays a definite role in therapy. It is quite amusing to see a pre-clear, who has been haunted by an engram which contained great emotional charge, suddenly relieve it, for the situation, no matter how gruesome it was, when relieved, is in all its aspects a subject of great 82

  mirth. The laughter fades away as he becomes disinterested in it and he can be said to be “Tone 3” about it.

  Laughter is definitely the relief of painful emotion.

  [The complete Tone Scale, its use in predicting the behavior of others as well as assisting in auditing, is given in the book SCIENCE OF SURVIVAL by L. Ron Hubbard, 1951, 580

  pages.]

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  CHAPTER VII

  Prenatal Experience and Birth

  Old women less than a hundred years ago talked wisely about “prenatal influence” and how a woman marked her child. Many such intuitive thoughts are based, actually, on observed data. It can be observed that the child born out of wedlock is often a luckless creature (in a society which frowns upon such bearings). These tenets have been held in the market place for a great many millenia. Just because they have been held is no reason they are true, but they make an excellent beginning for a chapter on prenatal experience and birth.

  If dianetics had worked on obscure theories such as those of the old women or those of the mystics who believe that “childish delusions” are capable of aberrating a child, dianetics would not be a science of mind. But it was no obscure theory which brought about the discover
y of the exact role prenatal experience and birth play in aberration and psycho-somatic ills.

  Many schools of mental healing from the Aesculapian to the modern hypnotist were studied after the basic philosophy of dianetics had been postulated. Much data was accumulated, many experiments were made. The fundamentals about engrams had been formulated and “unconsciousness” had been discovered as being a period of actual recording when the theory began to predict new phenomena not hitherto observed.

  There has been, in recent years, a practice called “narco-synthesis.” This was actually a branch of “hypno-analysis” and “deep analysis.” It did not produce clears and it did not even produce alleviation in the majority of its cases. But it was discovered to be an aberrative factor in itself. A thing which aberrates may well lead to something which removes aberrations if it is studied scientifically. Narco-synthesis was so studied. Several cases were examined on which narco-synthesis had been employed. Some of these cases had experienced relief from narcosynthesis. Others had become a great deal worse.

  Working with hypno-analysis it was discovered that the technique could be varied until it would actually remove the aberrative charge contained in locks. In treating schizophrenics with narco-synthesis it was found that the locks (periods of mental anguish not including physical pain or “unconsciousness”) would sometimes spring (clear) and sometimes not.

  Narco-synthesis is a complicated name for a very ancient process quite well known in Greece and India. It is drug hypnotism. And it is generally employed either by those practitioners who do not know hypnosis or on those patients who will not succumb to ordinary hypnotism. A shot of sodium pentothal is given intravenously to the patient and he is asked to count backwards. Shortly he stops counting at which the injection is also stopped. The patient is now in a state of “deep sleep.” That this is not sleep seems to have missed both narco-synthesists and hypnotists. It is actually a depressant on the awareness of an individual so that those attention units which remain behind the curtain of his reactive bank can be reached directly. These attention units are up against the standard banks. The by-pass circuits (demon circuits) which lie between these banks and “I” have themselves been by-passed. In other words, a section of the analytical mind has been exposed which is not aberrated. It is not very powerful and it is not highly intelligent, but it has the advantage of being hard up against the standard banks. This is basic personality. The intent and purpose and persistence of these few attention units have the same quality and direction as the whole analytical mind would have if it were clear. It is a very nice, co-operative group of attention units and it is very useful; for basic personality has all recalls -- sonic, audio, tactile, smell, pain, etc. It can get at anything that is in the banks -- which is everything perceived or thought in a lifetime, minute by minute. These qualities of basic personality have been very poorly described in hypnotism, and it is doubtful even if it was generally known that sonic was part of the recall system disclosed by deep hypnotism or the drug hypnotism called narco-synthesis.