Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health

by L. Ron Hubbard

  He is pseudo-brother who beat her regularly or he is pseudo-father whom she had to mind. Maybe he is even pseudo-mother who screamed ceaselessly at her but whom she had to placate, and he might be the doctor who hurt her so savagely. She may be his pseudo-mother, his pseudo-grandmother whom he had to love despite the way she undermined his decision; she may be a pseudo-nurse in some operation long gone or the pseudo-teacher who kept him after school to whet her sadism upon him.

  Before the marriage takes place they only know there is a compulsion that they must be together, a feeling that each must be extremely nice to the other. And then the marriage takes place and more and more restimulation of ancient pain is felt until at last each is ill and life, complicated now perhaps by unhappy children, is an unhappy ruin.

  The mechanism of propitiation carries with it covert hostility. Gifts given without cause and beyond the ability to expend, self-sacrifices which seem so noble at the time compose propitiation. Propitiation is an apathy effort to hold away a dangerous “source” of pain.

  Mistaken identity is one of the minor errors of the reactive mind. To buy off, to nullify the possible anger of a person perhaps long since dead but living now again in the partner, is the hope of propitiation. But a man is dead who will not sometimes fight. The hostility may be masked, it may be entirely “unknown” to the individual who indulges it. Certainly it is always justified in the mind of the person who exerts it and is supposed to be a natural consequence of some entirely obvious offense.

  The wife who makes inadvertent blunders before the guests and by them accidently gives away the truth of her husband’s favorite myth, the wife who forgets the little favors he has asked, the wife who suddenly stabs him with a “logical” pin in the region of his hopes: these are wives who live with partners whom they must, out of some wrong done years before the courtship and by some other man, propitiate, and these are wives who, propitiating, numb the hopes and misunderstand the sorrows of their mates.

  The husband who sleeps with another woman and “accidentally” leaves the lipstick on his tie, the husband who finds her excellent cooking bad and idleness in her days, the husband who forgets her letters he must mail, the husband who finds her opinions silly, these are husbands who live with partners whom they must propitiate.

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  A soaring, roller-coaster curve of peace and war in the home, failures to understand, mutual curtailment of liberty and self-determinism, unhappy lives, unhappy children and divorce are caused by reactive mind marriages. Compelled by an unknown threat to marry, repelled by fear of pain from trust, this “meeting of minds” is the primary cause of all marital disaster.

  The law lacked definition and so invoked great difficulty in the path of those involved in such marriages. The track of it is the dwindling spiral of misery which accompanies all chronic restimulation and leads only down to failure and to death. Someday there will, perhaps, exist a much more sentient law that only the unaberrated can marry and bear children.

  The present law only provides that marriages must be at best most difficult to part. Such a law is like a prison sentence for the husband, the wife and the children -- all and every one.

  A marriage can be saved by clearing its partners of their aberrations. An optimum solution would include this in any case since it is most difficult for a wife or a husband to rise, even when divorced, to any future plane of happiness: and where there are children, if clearing is not effected, a great injustice has been done.

  It is usually discovered that when both partners in a reactive mind marriage are cleared of aberration, life becomes considerably more than tolerable; for human beings often have a natural liking even when no sexual selection has been present. The restoration of a marriage by clearing the partners may not bring about one of the great loves that poets strummed about but it will at least bring a high level of respect and cooperation toward the common goal of making life worthwhile. And in many marriages so cleared it was discovered that the partners, beneath the dirty cloth of aberration, loved each other well.

  A major gain to such a clearing is for the children’s sake. Nearly all marital discontent has as its major factor aberration on the second dynamic, sex. And any such aberration includes a nervous disposition toward children.

  Where there are children, divorce does not answer, clearing does. And with clearing comes a fresh new page of life on which happiness can be written.

  In the case of the reactive mind marriage, turn-about clearing is often complicated by the concealed hostilities which lie below the propitiative mechanism. It is wise for the partners to look outside the home, each interesting a friend in a therapy turn-about. If such mutual clearing is begun, with the partners working on each other, much restraint of anger and exertion of patience must be practiced, and the auditor’s code must be most severely followed.

  It requires a saintly detachment to bear the Tone One of the partner who, returned to a quarrel, seasons the recountings with further recrimination. If it must be done, it can be done but, when many quarrels and travails have beset a couple, it is easier if they each look without the home for a therapy partner.

  Additionally, there is a kind of “rapport” established between any auditor and pre-clear and after the therapy session is done, a strengthening of the natural affinity is such that a small deed or word may be taken as a savage attack with the result of a quarrel and the inhibition of therapy.

  Men can be considered to be best audited by men and women by women. This condition is changed when one deals with a woman who has such severe aberrations about women that she is in fear around them or when one is auditing a man who has deep fear of men.

  The dynamics of men and women are somehow different and a wife, particularly if there have ever been quarrels of any magnitude, sometimes finds it difficult at times to be sufficiently insistent to audit her husband. The husband may audit, in the usual case, without great difficulty but when in therapy himself, his feeling that he must rise superior to the situation forces him to attempt auto-control, a thing which is impossible.

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  THE ERASURE

  Sooner or later -- if you keep trying -- you will get basic-basic, the earliest moment of

  “unconsciousness” and physical pain. You will know when you have it, perhaps, only because things start to erase rather than reduce. If the patient still has a sonic shut-off, you can still erase: sooner or later that sonic will turn on, perhaps not even until the case is almost finished.

  You will reach basic-basic sooner or later.

  The erasure, then, is more or less the same procedure as the entrance. You erase all the early engrams, always the earliest you can find, and you keep discharging painful emotion engrams either in the basic area or in the later periods after birth and later in life. You erase as much as you can find in the early part of the case, then you release all the emotion you can find later in the case (erase everything in each engram you touch) and then you come back and find early material.

  The reactive engram bank is a hurrah’s nest. The file clerk must have a great deal of trouble with it. For things are keyed-in early and late, sometimes all he can get is material under certain topics, sometimes all he can get is material under certain somatics (all teeth, for instance), sometimes he can go in an orderly parade forward in time and give consecutive incidents: this last is the most important proceeding.

  Not until you have worked out every moment of physical pain and discharged all the moments of painful emotion will the case be cleared. There will be times when you are sure that you are almost to the goal only to discover, going into the prenatal area again, a new series of material uncovered by the later life painful emotion you have released.

  One day you will find a case which will not have any occlusions anywhere on the track, which will no longer be interested in engrams (apathy cases aren’t interested at the start; clears, at the top level, are not interested either, making a cycle, though the clear is a long way from apathetic), wh
ich will have all recalls, which will compute accurately and make no errors (within the limitations of the data available) and which, in short, has an exhausted engram bank. But do not be too optimistic, ever. Keep looking until you are sure. Observe the case to make certain no aberrations are displayed about anything, that dynamics are high in it and that life is good. If this person now feels he can solve all the problems of life, lick the world with one hand tied behind him and feel a friend to all men, you have a clear.

  The only way you can go wrong is to compute with the idea that human beings are full of error and evil and sin and that if you have made a person less unhappy and above normal he is to bejudged a clear. This is a release.

  In gold panning, it is true that every tenderfoot mistakes iron pyrites -- fool’s gold --

  for gold. The tenderfoot will crow with delight over a bright bit of something in his pan which, actually, is worth a few dollars a ton. And then he sees real gold! The moment he sees real gold in that pan, he knows what gold really looks like. It cannot be mistaken.

  Aside from the fact that psychometry would show a clear phenomenally intelligent, would show his aptitude and versatility wide, there is another quality, the human quality of a freed man. You take a release through psychometry and show him to be above normal, too.

  But a clear is a clear and when you see it you will know it with no further mistake.

  That a clear is no longer interested in his extinct engrams does not mean he is not interested in the troubles of others. That a person is not interested in his own engrams does not necessarily argue a clear but may well be another mechanism, the apathy of neglect. To have engrams and neglect them is a common aberration with the reactive mind on a tone scale of apathy. To have no engrams and neglect them is another thing. Every apathy case, neglecting his engrams as an answer to his woe, insisting he is happy, insisting, as he racks himself to pieces, that there is nothing wrong with him, will, in work, particularly after basic-basic is lifted, become interested in his engrams and more interested in life. It is easy to tell the apathy 196

  case from the clear for the two are at opposite ends of the spectrum of life: the clear has soared up toward victory and triumph, the apathy case knows victory and triumph are not for him and explains they are not worth it.

  What the life span of a clear is cannot be answered now; ask in a hundred years.

  How can you tell a clear? How close does the man measure to optimum for Man? Can he adjust to his environment smoothly? And far more important, can he adjust that environment to him?

  Sixty days and again six months after a clear has apparently been effected, the auditor should again make a search for any neglected material. He should question the possible clear carefully as to the events of the past interval. In such a way he can learn of any worries, concerns or illnesses which may have taken place and attempt to trace these to engrams. If he cannot then find engrams, the clear is definitely and without question, cleared. And he will stay that way.

  If a case merely stalls, however, and while aberration seems to be present, engrams cannot be found, the cause probably lies with thoroughly masked despair charges -- painful emotional engrams. These are not necessarily postnatal, they can be within the prenatal period and involve circumstances which are very secret -- or so the engrams announce. Also, some cases have stalled and proven “impenetrable” because of a current or immediately past circumstance the patient has not revealed.

  There are two reasons which can delay a case:

  (a)

  the person may be so aberratedly ashamed of his past or so certain of retribution if he reveals it that he does nothing but avoid;

  and

  (b)

  the person may be in fear because of some existing circumstance or threat.

  The auditor is not interested in what the patient does. Or in what the patient has done.

  Dianetics treats of what has been done to the person exclusively in therapy. What has been done by a patient is of no concern. The auditor who would make it any concern is practicing something other than dianetics. However, a patient, because of his engrams, may become obsessed with the idea that he must hide something in his life from the auditor. general classes above cover the general conditions.

  These active reasons, as under (a), may be such a thing as a prison sentence, a murder hitherto unknown (although many people think they have done murder who have not even threatened it to anyone), abnormal sexual practices, or some such circumstance. The auditor should promise not to reveal any confidential matter, purely as a matter of routine and explain the principle of “done to. not done by.” And no auditor would taunt or revile a patient for having been victimized by his engrams. As under (b) there may exist some person, even the wife or husband, who has cowed the patient into secrecy. One case is at hand where no advance was made although there were many incidents contacted: the incidents would not reduce or erase no matter where they were. It was discovered that this case, a woman, had been beaten savagely and often by her husband and that she had been threatened with death if she told the auditor a word of these acts; and yet these acts contained the whole despair charges of the case and had to be released. Seeing this, finally suspecting, the auditor was able to gain her confidence and locate the despair charges. Even if he had not gained her confidence, by constant restimulation of late life areas he would have provoked her tears. In another case, that of a small child, “dub-in” recall was so obvious and lie factories were so busy that the auditor at last realized that he was attempting to penetrate not just the secrecy on an engram but the secrecy imposed upon a child by some one at hand. The mother, in this case, out of the idea that she would be apprehended, had furiously threatened the child to say nothing about his 197

  treatment at home. There was more than this behind the case, there were eighty-one attempted abortions, an incredible number.

  Anything is the business of an auditor if it has become an engram. If society has jailed a man, if all is not well in the home, these are things done to a person. What the person did to

  “deserve” this treatment is of no concern.

  THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE CASE

  Now and again an auditor will encounter a strange sort of hold-up in a case. He will be unable to get anything to clear or make sense in the prenatal area and sometimes in childhood as well as the prenatal area. He may be encountering a “foreign language case.” Occasionally the child did not know he was born to other parents (who may have spoken a foreign tongue) than those he has known as his parents. This is a special sort of mix-up of its own which is rather easily resolved simply by running engrams. It is always possible for the patient to forget that his parents spoke some other tongue in the home. Another tongue than the one the patient is using or other than that of the country in which the patient resides is, in one way, an asset: it gives a prenatal area which is very difficult to restimulate although it may still be acting upon the patient’s mind. But it is no asset to the auditor, who must now deal with a patient who does not know the language, who may not have sonic recall and yet has an engram bank full of data which once had meaning and really is his basic language.

  The best remedy for such a case is to get an auditor who knows both the language used in the prenatal area and the present tongue. Another remedy is to take a dictionary to the case and figure out the bouncers et al. from the dictionary. Another way is to regress the patient often enough into the infant period that he begins to pick up the language again (making the file drawer of it come forth) and then ask the patient for phrases which, in the foreign tongue, would mean this or that. Gradually he may recover the language and so exhaust the bank. This is an extremely difficult case only when there was no childhood use of the other tongue. Given childhood use of that tongue, the auditor simply keeps returning the patient to childhood when he knew the tongue and then returning him into the prenatal area: the patient can translate what is happening. The cliches of other tongues than that the auditor speaks are of
ten quite productive of other literal meanings than comparable cliches in the auditor’s tongue. This difference of cliche is a very responsible agent in the social aberrations of one nation as they differ from those of another. “I have hot,” says the Spaniard. “I am hot,” says the Englishman.

  Engramically, they mean different things, even if they mean the same to the analyzer.

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  CHAPTER IX

  PART TWO

  Mechanisms and Aspects of Therapy

  EXTRA-SENSORY PERCEPTION

  Every time the auditor has a case with dub-in recall or which is highly charged with emotion, the case may return into the prenatal area and start describing scenery. This is the awe and wonder of some beholders. There is the patient in the womb and yet he can “see” outside.

  The patient tells about father and mother and where they are sitting and what the bedroom looks like, and yet there he is in the womb. Some pretty theories can be advanced for this: one of them is that the tortured foetus develops extra-sensory perception in order to see what is coming next. ESP is an excellent theory and some observation may confirm it but not in the foetus.

  One must recall that the foetus, even if it has highly developed and clever cells, is yet not a truly rational organism. The presence of the engram does not necessarily mean that the foetus could think. The engram became most severely aberrative when the child finally learned speech. The engram is not a memory but a recording of pain and percepts.

  Returning a grown man or a child into the prenatal area returns there an experienced mind which, connecting with these engrams, forms conclusions. To listen to some pre-clears one would think they read Keats and drank lemonade every afternoon at four throughout the prenatal period.

  To return reason and analytical power back into a period when neither reason nor analytical power existed, of course, impinges upon the returned individual many ideas. All he is supposed to run are the engrams and their contents. He may additionally, by dream mechanisms and current computation, try to fashion in a whole technicolor picture of the scenery.