Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health

by L. Ron Hubbard

  There are three levels of healing. The first is getting the job done efficiently. Below that is making the patient comfortable. Below that is sympathy. In short, if you can do nothing for a man with a broken back, you can make him comfortable. If you can’t even make him comfortable, you can sympathize with him.

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  The second and third echelons above are entirely unwarranted in dianetics. The job can be done efficiently. Making the patient comfortable is a waste of time. Giving him sympathy may snarl up the entire case, for his worst engrams will be sympathy engrams and sympathy may restimulate them out of place. The auditor who indulges in “hand-patting,” no matter how much it seems to be indicated, is wasting time and slowing down the case. Undue roughness is not indicated. A friendly, cheerful, optimistic attitude will take care of everything. A pre-clear sometimes needs a grin. But he has already had more “hand-patting” than the analyzer has been able to compute. His chronic psycho-somatic illness contains sympathy in its engram.

  The next thing the auditor should know and live is the AUDITOR’S CODE. This may sound like something from “When Knighthood Was in Flower” or the “Thirteen Rituals for Heavenly Bliss and Nirvana,” but unless it is employed by the auditor on his patients, the auditor will have some heavy slogging. This code is not for the comfort of the pre-clear; it is exclusively for the protection of the auditor. The AUDITOR’S CODE should never be violated. Practice in dianetics has demonstrated that violation of the AUDITOR’S CODE alone can interrupt cases.

  The auditor should be courteous in his treatment of all pre-clears.

  The auditor should be kind, not giving way to any indulgence of cruelty toward preclears, nor surrendering to any desire to punish.

  The auditor should be quiet during therapy, not given to talk beyond the absolute essentials of dianetics during an actual session.

  The auditor should be trustworthy, keeping his word when given, keeping his appointments in schedules and his commitments to work and never giving forth any commitment of any kind which he has any slightest reason to believe he cannot keep.

  The auditor should be courageous, never giving ground or violating the fundamentals of therapy because a pre-clear thinks he should. The auditor should be patient in his working, never becoming restless or annoyed by the pre-clear, no matter what the pre-clear is doing or saying.

  The auditor should be thorough, never permitting his plan of work to be swayed or a charge to be avoided.

  The auditor should be persistent, never giving up until he has achieved results.

  The auditor should be uncommunicative, never giving the patient any information whatsoever about his case, operates more or less automatically on this code. Dianetics is a parallel to thought, since it follows the natural laws of thought. What works in dianetics works as well in life.

  Various conditions ensue when any of the above are violated. All violations slow therapy and cause the auditor more work. All violations come back to the detriment of the auditor.

  For instance, in the last, it is not part of the auditor’s work to inform the pre-clear of anything. As soon as he starts doing so, the pre-clear promptly hooks the auditor into the circuit as the source of information and so avoids engrams.

  The auditor will see in progress the most violent and disturbing human emotions. He may be moved to sympathy, but if he is, he has overlooked something and hindered therapy: whenever an emotion shows, it is an emotion which will shortly be history. Whatever gyrations the pre-clear may go through, however much he may move or wrestle around, the auditor must keep firmly in mind that every moan or gyration is one step closer to the goal. For 116

  why be frightened or waste sympathy about something which, when it has been recounted a few times will leave a pre-clear happier?

  If the auditor becomes frightened and pulls that error of all errors when a pre-clear begins to shake, “Come up to present time!” he can be sure that the pre-clear will have a couple of bad days and that the next time the auditor wants to enter that engram it will be blocked.

  If an auditor assumes the state of mind that he can sit and whistle while Rome burns before him and be prepared to grin about it, then he will do an optimum job. The things at which he gazes, no matter how they look, no matter how they sound, are solid gains. It’s the quiet, orderly patient who is making few gains. This does not mean that the auditor is trying for nothing but violence, but it does mean that when he gets it he can be cheerful and content that one more engram has lost its charge.

  The task of auditing is rather much a shepherd’s task, herding the little sheep, the engrams, into the pen for slaughter. The pre-clear isn’t under the auditor’s orders but the preclear, if the case runs well, will do whatever the auditor wants with these engrams because the analytical mind and the dynamics of the pre-clear want that job done. The mind knows how the mind operates.

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  CHAPTER IV

  Diagnosis

  One of the most important contributions of dianetics is the resolution of the problem of diagnosis in the field of aberration. Hitherto there have been almost unlimited classifications; further there has been no optimum standard. As one researches in the field of psychiatric texts, he finds wide disagreement in classification and continual complaint that classification is very complex and lacking in usefulness. Without an optimum goal of conduct or mental state and without knowledge of the cause of aberration, catalogues of descriptions alone were possible and these were so involved and contradictory that it was nearly impossible to sharply assign to a psychotic or neurotic any classification which will lead to an understanding of his case.**

  The main disability in this classification system was that the classification did not lead to a cure, for there was no standard treatment and there was no optimum state to indicate when treatment was at end; and as there was no cure for aberration or psycho-somatic illness, there could be no classification which would indicate the direction which was to be taken or what could uniformly be expected of a case.

  This is no criticism of past efforts surely, but it is a source of relief to know that the classification of aberration is unnecessary along such complicated lines as have been used and that the cataloguing of psycho-somatic ills, while necessary to the physician, is unimportant to the auditor. In the evolution of the science of dianetics there were several stages of classification until it finally became clear that the label on a pathological condition should only be whatever the auditor had to overcome to achieve cure. This system, as now evolved through practice, makes it possible for the auditor to “diagnose” without any more knowledge than is contained in this chapter and his own future experience.

  The number of aberrations possible is the number of combinations of words possible in a language as contained in engrams. In other words, if a psychotic thinks he is God, he has an engram which says he is God. If he is worried about poison in his hash, he has an engram which tells him he may get poison in his hash. If he is certain he may be “fired” from his job any moment even though he is competent and well-liked, he has an engram which tells him he is about to be “fired.” If he thinks he is ugly, he has an engram about being ugly. If he is afraid of snakes or cats, he has engrams which tell him to fear snakes and cats. If he is sure he has to buy everything he sees, despite his income, he has an engram which tells him to buy everything he sees. And in view of the fact that anyone not released or cleared has upwards of two or three hundred engrams and as these engrams contain a most remarkable assortment of language and as he may choose one of five ways of handling any one of these engrams, the problem of aberration is of no importance to the auditor except where it slows therapy.

  Most aberrated people talk in a large measure out of their engrams. Whatever the chronic patter of the individual may be, his rage patter, his apathy patter, his general attitude toward life, this patter is contained in engrams wherever it departs even in the slightest degree from complete rationality. The man who “cannot be sure,” who “do
es not know” and who is skeptical of everything, is talking out of engrams. The man who is certain “it cannot be true”

  that “it isn’t possible,” that “Authority must be contacted” is talking out of engrams. The woman who is so certain she needs a divorce or that her husband is going to murder her some night is talking out of either her own or his engrams. The man who comes in and says he has a bad pain in his stomach that feels “just like a #12 gauge copper wire going straight through me”

  has quite possibly had a #12 gauge copper wire through him in an attempted abortion or talk of such a thing while he was in pain. The man who says it “has to be cut out” is talking straight out of an engram either from some operation of his own or his mother’s or from an attempted abortion. The man who “has to get rid of it” is again possibly talking out of an attempted abortion engram. The man who “can’t get rid of it” may be talking from the same source but from another valence. People, in short, especially when talking about dianetics and engrams, give forth with engram talk in steady streams. They have no awareness, ordinarily, that the things they are saying are minor dramatizations of their engrams and suppose that they have 118

  concluded these things themselves or think these things: the supposition and explanation is only justified thought -- the analyzer performing its duty in guaranteeing that the organism is right no matter how foolishly it is acting.

  The auditor can be assured, particularly when he is talking about dianetics, that he is going to hear in return a lot of engram content; for discussion of the reactive mind generally takes place in language which it itself holds.

  Recall that the reactive mind can think only on this equation -- A = A = A, when the three A’s may be respectively a horse, a swear-word and the verb “to spit.” Spitting is the same as horses is the same as God. The reactive mind is a very zealous Simple Simon, carefully stepping in each pie. Thus when a man is told he has to delete the content of the reactive bank, he may say that if he did, he is sure he would lose all his ambition. Be assured -- and how easily this proves up on therapy and how red-eared some pre-clears become -- that he has an engram which may run something like this:

  (Blow or bump, prenatal)

  FATHER: Damn it, Agnes, you’ve got to get rid of that God-Damned baby.

  If you don’t, we’ll starve to death. I can’t afford it.

  MOTHER: Oh, no, no, no, I can’t get rid of it, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t! Honest I will take care of it. I’ll work and slave and support it.

  Please don’t make me get rid of it. If I did I’d just die. I’d lose my mind! I wouldn’t have anything to hope for. I’d lose all my interest in life. I’d lose my ambition. Please let me keep it!

  What a common one that engram is: and how sincerely and “rationally” and earnestly an aberree can be in supporting his conclusion that he has just “thought up” the “computation” that if he “gets rid of it,” he’ll lose his mind and ambition, maybe even die!

  As this work is written, most of the engrams that will be found in adults come from the first quarter of the 20th century. This was the period of “Aha, Jack Dalton, at last I have you in my possession!” It was the period of “Blood and Sand” and Theda Bara. It was the period of bootleg whiskey and woman suffrage. It covered the days of “flaming youth” and the “The Yanks are Coming,” and bits of such color will be demanding action in the engram banks.

  Dianetic auditors have picked up whole passages of the Great Play “The Drunkard” out of prenatal engrams, not as a piece of funny “corn” but as Mama’s sincere and passionate effort to reform Papa. Super-drama, Mellerdrammer. And not only that but also tragedy. The hangover of the Gay Nineties, when the “business girl” had just begun to be “free” and Carrie Nation was saving the world at the expense of bartenders will be common fare in engrams found in today’s adults.

  Yesterday’s cliches and absurdities become, tragically enough, today’s engramic commands. One very, very morose young man, for instance, was found to have as the central motif of his reactive mind Hamlet’s historic vacillations about whether “to be or not to be, that is the question.” Mama (who was what these colloquially-minded auditors call a “loop”) had gotten it by contagion from an actor-father whose failure to be a Barrymore had driven him to drink and wife beating; and our young man would sit for hours in a morose apathy wondering about life. To classify his psychosis required nothing more than “apathetic young fellow.”

  Most of engram content is merely cliches and commonplaces and emotional crash drives by Mama or Papa. But the auditor will have his moments. And when he suddenly learns about them, the pre-clear will have his laughs.

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  In other words, aberration can be any combination of words contained in an engram.

  Thus, to classity by aberration is not only utterly impossible but completely unnecessary. After an auditor has run one case, he will be far more able to appreciate this.

  As for psycho-somatic ills, as classified in an earlier chapter, these depend also upon accidental or intentional word combinations and all the variety of injury and unbalanced fluid and growth possible. It is very well to call an obscure pain “tendonitis” but more probably and more accurately, it is a fall or injury before birth. Asthma comes fairly constantly from birth, as do conjunctivitis and sinusitis, but when these can occur in birth, there is generally prenatal background. Thus it can be said that wherever a man or woman aches is of minor importance to the auditor beyond using the patient’s chronic illness to locate the chain of sympathy engrams, and all the auditor needs to know of that illness is that some area of the body hurts the patient. That, for the auditor, is enough for psycho-somatic diagnosis.

  It happens that the extent of aberration and the extent of psycho-somatic illness are not the regulating factors which establish how long a case may take. A patient may be a screaming lunatic and yet require only a hundred hours to clear. Another may be a “well-balanced” and moderately successful person and yet take five hundred hours to clear. Therefore, in the light of the fact that the extent of aberration and illness has only a minor influence on what the auditor is interested in -- therapy -- classification by these is so much wasted time.

  Oh, there are such things as a man being too sick from heart trouble to be worked very hard and such things as a patient worrying so continuously as a manifestation of his usual life that the auditor finds his work difficult, but these are rarities and again have little bearing on the classification of a case.

  The rule in diagnosis is that whatever the individual offers the auditor as a detrimental reaction to therapy is engramic and will prove so in the process. Whatever impedes the auditor in his work is identical to whatever is impeding the patient in his thinking and living. Think of it this way: the auditor is an analytical mind (his own) confronted with a reactive mind (the preclear’s). Therapy is a process of thinking. Whatever troubles the patient will also trouble the auditor; whatever troubles the auditor has also troubled the patient’s analytical mind.

  The patient is not a whole analytical mind: the auditor will find himself occasionally with a patient who does nothing but swear at him and yet when the appointment time arrives, there that patient is, anxious to continue therapy; or the auditor may find a patient who tells him how useless the entire procedure is and how she hates to be worked upon and yet if he were to tell her, “All right, we’ll stop work,” she would go into a prompt decline.

  The analytical mind of the patient wants to do the same thing the auditor is trying to do, fight down into the reactive bank; therefore, the auditor, when he encounters opposition, adverse theory about dianetics, personal criticism, etc., is not listening to analytical data but reactive engrams and he should calmly proceed, secure in that knowledge, for the patient’s dynamics, all that can be brought to bear, will help him so long as the auditor is an ally against the pre-clear’s reactive mind, rather than a critic or attacker of the pre-clear’s analytical mind.

  This is
an example:

  (In reverie -- pre-natal basic area)

  PRE-CLEAR: (Believing he means dianetics) I don’t know. I don’t know. I just can’t remember. It won’t work. I know it won’t work.

  AUDITOR:

  (repeater technique, described later) Go over that. Say, “It won’t work.”

  PRE-CLEAR: “It won’t work. It won’t work. It won’t work... etc. etc.” Ouch, my stomach hurts! “It won’t work. It won’t work. It won’t work ...” (Laughter of relief.) That’s my mother. Talking to herself.

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  AUDITOR:

  All right, let’s pick up the entire engram. Begin at the beginning.

  PRE-CLEAR: (Quoting recall with somatics [pains]) “I don’t know how to do it. I just can’t remember what Becky told me. I just can’t remember it. Oh, I am so discouraged. It won’t work this way. It just won’t work. I wish I knew what Becky told me but I can’t remember.

  Oh I wish...” Hey, what’s she got in here? Why, God damn her, that’s beginning to burn! It’s a douche. Say! Let me out of here! Bring me up to present time! That really burns!

  AUDITOR:

  Go back to the beginning and go over it again. Pick up whatever additional data you can contact.

  PRE-CLEAR: Repeats engram, finding all the old phrases and some new ones plus some sounds. Recounts four more times, “re-experiencing” everything. Begins to yawn, almost falls asleep (“unconsciousness” coming off), revives and repeats engram twice more. Then begins to chuckle over it. Somatic is gone. Suddenly engram is “gone” (refiled and he cannot discover it again. He is much pleased.)

  AUDITOR:

  Go to the next earliest moment of pain or discomfort.