Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health

by L. Ron Hubbard

  The corporal punishment of children is just another facet of the problem of the forced group. If any one cares to argue over the necessity of punishing children, let him examine the source of the misbehavior of the children.

  The child who is aberrated may not have his engrams entirely keyed-in. He may have to wait until he himself is married and has children or a pregnant wife to have restimulators enough to cause him to become, suddenly, one of these things they call a “mature adult” blind to the beauty of the world and burdened by all its griefs. But the child is nevertheless aberrated and has many dramatizations. The child is in a very unlucky situation in that he has with him his two most powerful restimulators -- his mother and father. These assume the power of physical punishment over him. And they are giants to him. He is a pygmy. And he has to depend upon them for food, clothing and shelter. One can speak very grandly about the

  “delusions of childhood” until he knows the engram background of most children.

  The child is on the unkind receiving end of all the dramatizations of his parents. A cleared child is a most remarkable thing to observe: he is human! Affinity alone can pull him through. The spoiled child is the child whose decisions have been interrupted continuously and who is robbed of his independence. Affection could no more spoil a child than the sun could be put out by a bucket of gasoline.

  The beginning and end of “child psychology” is that a child is a human being, that he is entitled to his dignity and self-determinism. The child of aberrated parents is a problem because of the contagion of aberration and because he is denied any right to dramatize or counter. The wonder is not that children are a problem but that they are sane in any action for, by contagion, punishment, and denial of self-determinism the children of today have been denied all the things required to make a rational life. And these are the future family and the future race.

  This is not a dissertation on children or politics, however, but a chapter on contagion of aberration. Dianetics covers human thought, and human thought is wide ground. When one gazes at the potentialities inherent in the mechanism of contagion, respect for the inherent stability of Man cannot but arise. No “wild animal” reacting with inherent “asocial tendencies”

  could have built Nineveh or Boulder Dam. Carrying the contagion mechanism like some Old Man of the Sea, we have yet come far. Now that we know it, perhaps we shall truly reach the stars.

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  CHAPTER IX

  Keying-in the Engram

  The single source of inorganic mental illness and organic psycho-somatic illness is the reactive engram bank. The reactive mind impinges these engrams upon the analytical mind and the organism whenever they are restimulated after being keyed-in.

  There are many known incidents in a lifetime which apparently have a profound influence upon the happiness and mental condition of the individual. The individual remembers these and to them attributes his troubles. In a measure he is right: he is at least looking back at incidents which are held in place by engrams. He does not see the engrams. In fact, unless he is acquainted with dianetics, he does not know the engrams are there. And even then he will not know their contents until he has undergone therapy.

  It can be demonstrated with ease that any moment of “conscious level” unhappiness which contained great stress or emotion was not guilty of the charge of causing aberration and psycho-somatic illness. These moments, of course, played a role in the matter: they were the key-ins.

  The process of keying-in an engram is not very complex. Engram 105, let us say, was a moment of “unconsciousness” when the prenatal child was struck via Mother, by Father. The father, aware or not of the child, uttered the words, “God damn you, you filthy whore: you’re no good!” This engram lay where it was impressed, in the reactive bank. Now it could lie there for seventy years and never become keyed-in. It contains a headache and a falling body and the grating of teeth and the intestinal sounds of the mother. And any of these sounds, post-birth, may be present in large quantities without keying-in this engram.

  One day, however, the father becomes exasperated at the child. The child is tired and feverish, which is to say that his analytical mind may not be at its highest level of activity. And the father has a certain set of engrams which he dramatizes and one of these engrams is the above incident. And the father reaches out and slaps the child and says, “God damn you: you’re no good!” The child cries. That night he has a headache and is much worse physically.

  And he feels both an intense hatred and a fear of his father. The engram has keyed-in. Now the sound of a falling body or grating teeth or any trace of anger of any kind in the father’s voice will make the child nervous. His physical health will suffer. He will begin to have headaches.

  If we take this child who has now become an adult and rake back over his past, we shall discover (though it may be occluded) a lock like the above key-in. And now not only the key-in; we may discover half a hundred, half a thousand, such locks just on this one subject.

  One would say, unless he knew dianetics, that this child was ruined post-natally by being beaten by the father, and one might attempt to bring the patient’s mind back into better condition by removing these locks.

  There are literally thousands, tens of thousands of locks in the average life. To take all of these locks away would be a task for Hercules. Every engram a person has, if it has been keyed-in, may have its hundreds of locks.

  If conditioning existed as a mechanism of pain and stress, Mankind would be in very bad condition. Fortunately conditioning does not so exist. It appears to exist but the appearance is not the fact. One would think that if a child were daily thrust around and reviled he would eventually becomed conditioned into a belief that this was the way life was and that he had better turn against it.

  Conditioning does not, however, exist. Pavlov may have been able to drive dogs mad by repeated experiments: this was simply bad observation on the part of the observer. The dogs might be trained to do this or that.

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  But it was not conditioning. The dogs went mad because they were given engrams if and when they did go mad. A series of such experiments, properly conducted and observed, proves this contention.

  The boy who was daily told he was no good and who apparently went into a decline solely because of that declined only because of the engram. This is a happy fact. The engram may take a while to locate -- a few hours -- but when it is alleviated or refiled in the standard memory banks, everything which had locked on to it also refiles.

  People trying to help others with their aberrations who did not know about engrams were, of course, operating with 2.9 strikes against any success. In the first place, the locks themselves may vanish down into the reactive bank. Thus we get a patient who says, “Oh, my father wasn’t so bad. He was a pretty good guy.” And we discovered, and the patient discovers, when an engram is sprung, that father was customarily to be found dramatizing.

  What the patient knows about his past before engrams are sprung is not worth cataloguing. In another case we may find a patient saying, “Oh, I had a terrible childhood, a terrible childhood.

  I was beaten seriously.” And we discover, when we get the engrams refiled, that the parents of this patient never laid a hand on him in punishment or wrath in his entire life.

  An engram may coast along without being keyed-in for decades. One of the most remarkable types of case is one which spent an entire youth without displaying any aberration.

  Then suddenly, at the age of twenty-six, we discover him to be so aberrated, so suddenly, that it appears he must have been hexed. Perhaps most of his engrams were concerned with the action of getting married and having children. He has never been married before. The first time he is weary or ill and realizes he has a wife on his hands, the first engram keys-in. Then the dwindling spiral begins to go to work. This one shuts down the analyzer enough so that others can be keyed-in. And finally we may discover him in an institution.

  The young gir
l who has been happy and carefree to the age of thirteen and then suddenly goes into a decline has not, that moment, received an engram. She has had an engram key-in which let another key-in. Fission reaction. This key-in may have required nothing more than the discovery that she was bleeding from the vagina. She has an emotional engram about this; she becomes frantic. The other engrams, as the days follow, may swing into position to impinge upon her. And so she becomes ill.

  The first sexual experience may be one which keys-in an engram. This is so standard that sex has gotten a rather bad name for itself here and there as being an aberrative factor all by itself. Sex is not and never has been aberrative. Physical pain and emotion which incidentally contain sex as a subject are the aberrative factors.

  It may be that a patient is urgent in her insistence that her father raped her when she was nine and that this is the cause of all her misery. Large numbers of insane patients claim this.

  And it is perfectly true. Father did rape her, but it happened she was only nine days beyond conception at the time. The pressure and upset of coitus is very uncomfortable to the child and normally can be expected to give the child an engram which will have as its content the sexual act and everything that was said.

  Drug hypnosis is dangerous when one is trying to treat psychotics as has been mentioned. And there are other reasons it is dangerous. Any operation under anaesthetic or any drugging of a patient may bring about the keying-in of engrams. Here is the analyzer shut down, there is the reactive bank open to be stirred by any comment made by the people around the drugged subject.

  Hypnotism itself is a condition in which engrams may be keyed-in which have never before been restimulated: the glassy-eyed stare of the person who has been “too often hypnotized,” the lack of will seen in people too often hypnotized, the dependence of the subject upon the hypnotic operator, all these things stem from the keying-in of engrams. Any time the body is rendered “unconscious” without physical pain, no matter how light the degree of 96

  “unconsciousness” is, even if it is only the lightness of weariness, an engram may be keyed-in.

  And when “unconsciousness” is complicated by new physical pain, a new engram is formed which may gather up with it an entire bundle of old engrams not hitherto keyed-in. Such a late engram would be a “cross-engram” in that it crosses chains of engrams. And if such an engram resulted in a loss of sanity, it would be called a “break-engram.”

  There are some aspects to various drug “unconsciousnesses” which have been very perplexing in the past. Psychotic women often maintain, after they are awakened from a drugged sleep (and sometimes a hypnotic sleep), that they have been raped. Men occasionally maintain that the operator has tried to perform a homosexual act upon them while they were drugged. Although it occasionally occurs that people are raped after being drugged, the largest number of such assertions are merely an aspect of the key-in mechanism. Almost any child has been put through the prenatal discomfort of coitus. Often there was violent emotion other than passion present. Such an engram may stay out of circuit for years until drugged

  “unconsciousness” or some such thing keys it in. The patient goes to sleep without a keyed-in engram; he wakes up with one. He tries to justify the strange sensations he has (and engrams are timeless things unless they are arranged properly on the time track) and comes out with the

  “solution” that he must have been raped.

  Childhood rapes are very seldom the responsible cause in sexual aberration. They are the key-in.

  One looks at the conscious-level locks and sees sadness, mental anguish and misfortune. Some of the experience there seems to be so terrible that it must certainly cause aberration. But it does not. Man is a tough, resilient creature. These conscious-level experiences are at best only guide-posts leading toward the actual seat of trouble, and that is not known in any detailed way to the individual.

  The engram is never “computed.” An example of this, on a lightly aberrative level, can be found in a child’s punishment. If one examines a childhood where punishment has been corporal and frequent, he begins to understand the utter futility of the pain-drive theory.

  Punishment actually and literally and emphatically does no good of any kind whatsoever but accomplishes quite the reverse, since it occasions a reactive revolt against the punishment source and is likely to cause not only a disintegration of a mind but also a continual bedevilment of the punishment source. Man reacts to fight sources of pain. When he stops fighting them he is mentally broken and of little use to anyone, much less himself.

  We take a case of a boy who was beaten with a hair-brush every time he was “bad.” In researching this case the most searching inquiry fails to reveal any vivid recall of why he was punished but only that he was punished. The progress of the event would go something like this: activity more or less rational, fright at threatened punishment, punishment, sorrow over punishment, renewed activity. The mechanics of the case showed the person to have been engaged on some activity which, whether others would consider it so or not, was nevertheless survival activity to him, giving him either pleasure or actual gains or even the assertion that he could and would survive; the moment punishment is threatened old punishments go into restimulation as minor engrams, resting usually on major engrams: this shuts down the analytical power to some extent and the recording is now being done on a reactive level; the punishment takes place, submerging analytical awareness so that the punishment records in the engram bank only; the sorrow following is still in the period of analytical shut-down; the analyzer gradually turns on; full awareness returns, and then activity on an analytical plane can be resumed. All corporal punishment runs this gamut and all other punishments are, at best, locks, following this same pattern with only the complete shut-down resulting from pain missing.

  If the analyzer wants this data for computation, it is not available. There is a reaction in the reactive mind when the matter is approached. But there are five courses the reactive mind can take with this data! And there is no guarantee and no method between land and sky of knowing what course the reactive mind will take with the data except knowing the full engram 97

  bank -- and if that is known, the person could be cleared with a few more hours work and would need no punishment.

  These five ways of handling data make corporal punishment an unstable and unreliable thing. A ratio exists which can be tested and proven in any man’s experience: A man is evil in the direct ratio that destructiveness has been leveled against him. An individual (including those individuals society is liable to forget as individuals: children) reacts against the punishment source whether that source be parents or government. Anything which sets itself forward against an individual as a punishment source will be considered in greater or lesser degree (as it is in proportion to benefits) as a target for the reactions of the individual.

  The little accidental milk glass upsets of children, that noise which just accidentally occurs on the porch where the children are playing, that little accidental ruination of Papa’s hat or Mama’s rug, these are often cold, calculated reactive mind actions against pain sources. The analytical mind may temporize about love and affection and the need of three square meals. The reactive mind runs off the lessons it has learned and devil take the meals.

  If one turned an idiot loose on an adding machine to let him audit the company books and let him prevent the auditor from touching equipment and data which has to be his if any answers will be right, one would get very little in the way of correct answers. And if one kept feeding the idiot and made him fat and powerful, the firm would sooner or later go to ruin. The reactive mind is the idiot, the auditor is “I” and the firm is the organism. Punishment feeds the idiot.

  The helpless amazement of police about the “confirmed criminal” (and the police belief in the “criminal type” and the “criminal mind”) comes about through this cycle. Police, for some reason or other, like governments, have become identified with society. Take any
one of these “criminals” and clear him and the society regains a rational being of which it can use all it can get. Keep up the punishment cycle and the prisons will get more numerous and more full.

  The problem of the child lashing back at his parents by “negation” and the problem of Jimmie the Cob blowing a bank guard apart in an armed robbery stem both from the same mechanism. The child, examined on the “conscious-level,” is not aware of his causes but will put forth various justifications for his conduct. Jimmie the Cob, waiting for this oh so very sentient society to tie him down with straps in an electric chair and give him an electric shock therapy which will cause him to cease and desist forever, examined for his causes, will pour forth justifications to explain his life and conduct. The human mind is a pretty wonderful computing machine. The reasons it can evolve for unreasonable acts have staggered one and all and particularly social workers. Without knowing the cause and the mechanism, the chances of drawing a correct conclusion by comparing all conducts available are as remote as winning at fantan from a Chinese. Hence, the punishments have continued as the muddled answer to a very muddled society.

  There are five ways in which a human being reacts toward a source of danger. These are also the five courses he can take on any given problem. And it might be said that this is five-valued action.

  The parable of the black panther* is appropriate here. Let us suppose that a particularly black-tempered black panther is sitting on the stairs and that a man named Gus is sitting in the living room. Gus wants to go to bed. But there is the black panther. The problem is to get upstairs. There are five things that Gus can do about this panther: (1) he can go attack the black panther; (2) he can run out of the house and flee the black panther; (3) he can use the back stairs and avoid the black panther; (4) he can neglect the black panther; and (5) he can succumb to the black panther.