Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health

by L. Ron Hubbard

  173

  CHAPTER IX

  PART ONE

  Mechanisms and Aspects of Therapy

  THE CASE ENTRANCE

  Every case presents a new problem of entrance. No two human beings are exactly alike and no two cases will follow the exact pattern. However, this presents no problem to dianetics since the mechanics are always the same.

  There are three case classifications: the sonic-recall, the non-sonic recall and the imaginary recall (what auditors call a “dub-in” recall).

  In the sonic recall case, the entrance is very easy. But in all cases the basic procedure is the same. Put the patient in reverie (and don’t worry too much if he doesn’t go into a very deep reverie because reverie only serves to fix his attention on himself and the auditor and you can at least accomplish that). Install a canceller. Return him to childhood to pick up a pleasant incident and then find a minor pain incident such as a slap in the face. Run him through this a few times just to let him get the idea. If he doesn’t respond well, put him into yesterday and let him ride to work and ask him about sounds and sights, then send him to childhood again.

  The object of finding a minor incident such as a slapped face is to find out if the patient has a pain shutoff. A pain shut-off is not particularly difficult in dianetics. You can get back before the command which installed the anesthesia, but it is interesting to know about it because you want to look for it early in the case. See then if the patient has an emotional shutoff. This again is not particularly embarrassing but again is data you want to find eventually.

  Test now to find out if the patient is within himself or if he is outside himself, watching himself. If he is exteriorized, you are working a case which has considerable walled up emotion in it which must be discharged.

  Now make a try to basic-basic. You might surprise yourself and get it. And you might work fifty hours for it, releasing the case the while. Get whatever the file clerk will give you in the prenatal area and what you get, reduce.

  Whether basic-basic is contacted or not, locate as many prenatals as will present themselves without much coaxing and reduce each one.

  If you find no prenatals, bring the patient up to present time but remind him to keep his eyes closed. Now ask him a few questions about his family, his grandparents, his wife or, if the pre-clear is a woman, her husband. Ask about any former husbands or wives. Ask about children. And ask particularly about death. You are looking for a painful emotion engram, an instant of loss which will discharge.

  Finding out about one, even if it is just the death of a favorite dog, return the pre-clear to it and run it from the first moment he hears the news of it and for the ensuing few minutes of it. Then start it again. Reduce the moment as an engram. You want an emotional discharge.

  Run it several times. If you don’t get a discharge, find some other moment of loss, some failure, something, anything which will discharge: but do it all quietly as if with sympathy.

  Lacking any success, start in repeater technique, never for a moment giving any intelligence that you are anything but calmly concerned for his welfare (even if some of his gyrations worry you). Try such phrases as “Poor little -- “ using his or her childhood name.

  When the pre-clear has repeated this several times (the auditor at the same time stating that somatic strip will return to any incident containing the phrase to assist the “suck down”), he may find himself in a high tension incident which will discharge. If nothing discharges yet, 174

  keep calm (all this work will pay dividends in the next session or the next or next), keep searching, keep observing. There is emotional charge here somewhere which will discharge.

  Try other combinations of words such as those which would be said to a sick and worried child, make the pre-clear repeat them.

  If you have had no success as yet, make another test, without saying it is a test, to see if the pre-clear is actually leaving present time. Don’t let him “try to remember” -- you want him to return and that is another process, although it is just as natural to the brain. If he is stuck in present time, start him on repeater technique again, suggesting bouncers: “Get out and never come back!” “You can’t ever return!” etc., which would account for his being still in present time. If he is not returning after some of this, start in with holder phrases: “I’m stuck!” “Don’t move!” and so forth.

  Stay calm, never appear anxious. If you get neither a discharge nor an engram with repeater technique in this first session and if you get no motion on the track, read this manual again and try your patient not later than three days after this first session. At that time some of the data you have asked for may be available.

  Ordinarily, however, you will receive either a prenatal or a discharge and if you get a discharge, then ask the somatic strip to go back for the prenatal it was sitting on. Reduce everything you can find. If birth turns up and seems to be in full recall, try to reduce that but do so in the knowledge that it probably will not lift very far and in the knowledge that you had better run it over and over and over to de-intensity it all you can.

  Sometimes the pre-clear will go into a deeper reverie than you wish. But do not try to wake him into a higher level. Work him where he is. But if he seems to be in something approaching hypnotic trance, be very careful of your language. Never tell him, for instance, to go back there and stay there until he finds something. That’s a holder. Don’t use holders and bouncers and groupers et al. on anyone in dianetics. “Will you please return to the prenatal area?” “Let’s see if the somatic strip can locate an early moment of pain or discomfort.” “Please pick up the somatic at the beginning and roll the engram.” “What do you hear, please?”

  “Continue” (when you want him to keep on going from the point of the engram where he is to the later end of the engram). “Recount that again, please.”

  There’s nothing to be nervous about. If you get nervous, then he’ll get nervous.

  Sometimes you run into a pain shut-off. This has a tendency to put the pain into the muscles and the muscles will jump and quiver and the patient may sense this and still feel nothing more. Once in a great while a patient will have such a thorough pain shut-off that he bounces about, all unconscious of the action, and almost falls from couch to floor. If you run into this, do not be alarmed: the pain is locked in somehow. Get early enough and you’ll locate a somatic he can feel, or go late and find an emotional charge.

  Don’t be misled if he tells you, with regard to emotion, that he has worked it all out in psycho-analysis or some such thing. He may have walled in the death of his wife or sweetheart or child, but the whole engram is still there, crammed with captured units, ready to be run exactly as an engram.

  If you run into a heavy emotional charge, simply let the patient weep, keep him at the business of running the engram in a soft, sympathetic voice, have it recounted until there is no charge left in any of it and then run him early into the prenatal area or early childhood to get a physical pain engram that must have been below that emotional charge and held it in place.

  The extravagance of emotional discharge is nothing to be alarmed about. Bringing the patient out of it and to present time suddenly would cause him unhappiness about it. Running the painful emotion engram will discharge, in a few recountings, sorrow which society has believed could never be countered or relieved except by repression. Get the moment he first heard the news or observed the thing which made him feel so bad. Run it far enough from its 175

  beginning to make sure that you have the initial shock -- a few minutes of engram time will do

  -- and then get him to recount it again. He may observe himself to be far outside himself when you start. The moment may not discharge until you have run it several times. Remember, he is returned to the incident, he is not running it as a memory, a thing which would do no good whatever.

  Do not let him replay anything, ever. Repay is a bad habit some pre-clears have of playing over what they remember they said the last time inst
ead of progressing through the engram freshly on each recounting and contacting what is contained in the engram itself. Tell the pre-clear there may be some more in it, ask him what color the bed in the room he is returned to is, keep his attention, by any quiet mechanism, upon the scene. And do not let him replay ever, not on any engram at any time: he could replay forever without therapeutic value, each time saying what he remembered he said the last time. There is a difference between this and the repeated re-experiencing of the engram to gather additional data and to get rid of the charge.

  Discharge emotion, reduce incidents of physical pain as early prenatally as possible. If you can’t get into the prenatal area at first, it has many bouncers in it and repeater technique will take you there.

  If the patient keeps saying such a thing as “I can’t remember,” be patient -- always follow the code. Have him start running that phrase as repeater technique. If he gets a somatic but contacts nothing else, send him earlier. If he gets another and still can’t contact on “I can’t remember,” send him earlier, his whole engram bank must be strewn with them -- poor fellow.

  Somebody really didn’t want him to know what had happened to him. Eventually you will get back to an engram which will release a phrase. When he has gone over the phrase a few more times, he will smile or chuckle or perhaps merely feel relieved. Now you can either run the engram in which you found the earliest phrase, which is best, or you can come back toward present time, lifting the phrase as it later appeared. Or you can start on something else which may block the case.

  The goal and the whole goal is to place the standard bank in entire conscious reach of the individual by deleting (a) early and subsequently all physical pain engrams; (b) all demon circuits (which are merely contained in engrams and come up more or less automatically); and (c) all painful emotion engrams.

  The process of work is to get as early as you can, preferably prenatal and very early in that, and try to find and reduce an engram, complete with all somatics (pain) and perceptics (words and other sensations). If you fail in this, you go late, any time from birth forward to present time, and find a moment of loss or threatened loss from which you can get an emotional charge. Then you go back early, early, early and find the engram on which it rested.

  You try always, until you are certain you have it, to get basic-basic, the earliest engram. You reduce as many early engrams as you can find, using the file clerk and repeater system, and when you seem to run out of material, you go later into life and try to find another emotional charge.

  The physically painful engrams cover up later emotional charges. Emotional charges cover up physically painful engrams. Back and forth, back and forth. Run as much as you can get early: when it seems to be running out or getting too unemotional, get some later material.

  This is the way you work a case. No matter what kind of a case it is, no matter what the state of its recall, no matter if the case is normal, psychotic or neurotic or what, this is the way.

  These are the tools:

  (1)

  Reverie or fixed attention if you cannot get reverie.

  (2)

  Return.

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  (3)

  Repeater technique.

  (4)

  A knowledge of bouncers, holders, groupers, misdirectors, denyers.

  (5)

  A knowledge of the painful emotion engram.

  (6)

  The reduction or the erasure.

  (7)

  The flash answer.

  (8)

  The valence shift.

  This is all you need to do:

  (1)

  Keep the patient mobile, able to move on the track.

  (2)

  Reduce or erase everything you get your hands on.

  (3)

  Deduce from the remarks of the patient, in or out of therapy, what must be his bouncers, holders, groupers, misdirectors, denyers.

  (4)

  Keep it solidly in mind that the number one goal is basic-basic, the earliest moment of pain and “unconsciousness.”

  (5)

  Keep in mind that the patient may have “computations” which make his illness or his aberrated state “valuable” to him and discover whence those “computations” come by flash answer to your questions.

  (6)

  Keep the case progressing, gaining, work only for progress and gain, not for sudden, soaring results. Worry only when the case remains static and worry then in terms of finding the engram which is balking everything. Its content will be a close approximation to the way the patient says he feels about it and will contain the same or similar words.

  (7)

  Get the patient back to present time each time you work and feed him the canceller. Test him with an age flash, get his first reply to how old he is, find the holder at that age if he is not at present time.

  (8)

  Keep your temper no matter what the patient says.

  (9)

  Never try to tell him what his data means: he knows and he alone knows what it means.

  (10)

  Keep your nerve and run dianetics; like Farragut said, “Damn the torpedoes! Go ahead.”

  (11)

  Wife, son, whatever you may be to the pre-clear, you are the auditor when you are auditing. He cannot compute his own engrams to find them -- if he could they would not be engrams. You can compute them. Do what you think a good auditor would do, never what the patient says save only when he accidentally concurs in his opinion that a good auditor would do that. Be the auditor, not a recording device. You and the file clerk in his mind are running the case: what his engrams and his analytical mind believe should have no force in any of your computations. You and his file clerk know. He, as

  “I” doesn’t know.

  (12)

  Be surprised at nothing. Audit.

  These are the things you must not do:

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  (1)

  Dilute dianetics with some practice or belief of yesteryear; you will only slow or sidetrack a case. Analyzing data received on any other basis than getting more engrams leads to delay and confusion for the pre-clear. It is a temptation to use this material for other reasons than getting engrams if one has been trained in another field than dianetics. Yielding to that temptation before one knows how dianetics works is a very unfair test of dianetics, completely aside from the way it snarls a case. The temptation is great because, with dianetics, you get such a wealth of data.

  (2)

  Do not bully the patient. If the case is not progressing, then the fault lies with the auditor. Do not surrender to an old practice of getting mad at a patient just because he doesn’t get well. You may be sure the engram you have just reduced out of his reactive engram bank is the reason he won’t take baths, but if he still refuses to bathe, be certain there is an earlier reason.

  (3)

  Don’t assume grandly that you have a “different” case just because it doesn’t resolve swiftly. They are all “different” cases.

  (4)

  Don’t run for help to somebody who does not know dianetics if your nerve fails you.

  The reason the case did not progress or became involved is right there -- your nerve failed you. Only dianetics can work a problem in dianetics.

  (5)

  Do not listen to a patient’s complaints as complaints; use them as data to get engrams.

  (6)

  Do not suppose that just because you cannot reach prenatal engrams in a case that they are not there. There are scores and scores of them in every case. Remember that an engram isn’t a memory, it has to be developed to become within recall. There is no human being walking on earth today who does not have a plentitude of prenatals.

  (7)

  Do not allow the patient to use his mother or his memory of what he has been told as a by-pass of prenatals. Every time you find a patient talking in past tense instead of present tense he is not returned to an incident. Unless he is returned, the engram will not
lift.

  (8)

  Do not suppose that because a patient does not feel bad today about a sorrow of yesterday that a despair charge is not located back on his track when he received the impact of that despair. Time may encyst, it does not heal.

  (9)

  Do not think in terms of “guilt complexes” or “shame” unless you think of them as engram content for there they will be found. Never suggest to a patient that he may be at fault in an engram.

  (10)

  Any departure from optimum behavior or conduct or rationality on the part of the patient is engramic: don’t make “allowances for human nature” any more than you, as a mathematician, would make allowances for an adding machine which brought up wrong answers.Sexual fears, repressions, defenses are not “natural” as they have been regarded in the past.

  (11)

  Don’t worry about the patient’s aberrations. Work to contact and reduce and erase engrams. You will find, in any patient, enough aberrations to fill a dictionary.

  (12)

  Don’t fret if your patient does not become a clear in an evening or a month. Just keep working. You’ll have him above normal so quickly you won’t realize when you passed it. Above that you are shooting for a very high goal.

  STUCK IN PRESENT TIME

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  Cases, when they are entered, are found in various positions and situations on the time track; sometimes they are off the time track entirely and sometimes the time track is all snarled up in a ball. Now and then the time track is found to be in good condition and the engrams available, but this is not ordinary.

  No case can be said to be more difficult than another except in the matter of recalls,

  “dub-ins” and shut-offs. But the case which seems to be “stuck in present time” and on whom no repeater phrase works is very often quite puzzling to an auditor. The pre-clear will not return to engrams. Ordinarily there may be pain and emotional shut-offs and the painful emotion cannot be quickly discharged. Sometimes somatics will turn on but no content can be gained. Sometimes there is no somatic but content. The situations are quite various.