Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health

by L. Ron Hubbard

  Do not suppose from all this that our clear has jettisoned all strange mannerisms. Self-determinism is individuality in the extreme; personality is inherent and revealed by clearing, looms up high above the aberree. The engrams compress a man and make him small and afraid. Released his power comes into play. The sympathy engram is to a man like a crutch when he has two sturdy legs. But oh, the pre-clear sobs where he loses old Uncle Goston, whose habit of spitting on the floor, as transplanted, so astonished our pre-clear’s friends and business associates. But the grief is brief, usually the half-hour it takes to run the sympathy engram out. Suddenly the pre-clear recalls Uncle Goston, recalls a thousand things Uncle Goston and he used to do, for the engram had Uncle Goston occluded and amongst those missing from the sight of “I.” Although it might have said in the engram, “All right, there, there, there, Billy. I’ll take care of you. Don’t thrash around so. You’ll be all right.

  There, there, there. Poor little fellow. Poor little fellow. What a terrible rash you’ve got. How feverish. There, there, there, Billy. You’ll be all right as long as I am here. I’ll take care of my Billy. Go to sleep now. Go to sleep and forget it.” And Billy was all the time

  “unconscious” and never “knew” about it. Afterwards he got a partner who looked like Uncle Goston (but happened to be a fool), and when bankrupt somehow developed a rash and a chronic cough and got very “feverish” about his business affairs. He took to spitting on the floor no matter where he was; and his health got worse and he got worse: but if you had asked him about any uncles before he went into therapy, he would have been very vague. “Give me a flash reply,” says the auditor. “Who used to spit on the floor? “Uncle Goston,” answers the pre-clear. “Gosh, that’s funny (hawk, spit), I hadn’t thought of him for years. He was never around much, though (not more than ten years constantly, the auditor may discover). Don’t suppose he’s important. Let’s take up Mrs. Swishback, that teacher I had -- “ “Let’s return now to the time Uncle Goston helped you,” says the auditor, “The somatic strip will now go back to the time your Uncle Goston helped you.” “I feel like my skin’s on fire!” complains the pre-clear. “This must be -- hey, it’s my allergy! But I don’t see anybody. I don’t -- Wait, I get an impression of somebody. Somebody -- Why, it’s Uncle Goston!” And he runs it and the rash goes away. But maybe the auditor had to get a hundred engrams before he got this one.

  And then the pre-clear suddenly remembers about him and Uncle Goston and the time -- but get on with therapy.

  Complete remembering seems to be a synonym for complete sanity. But don’t suppose that just because a clear gets rid of his Uncle Gostons and his habit of spitting on the floor that he will not now indulge in any eccentricity. The difference is, he is not compelled into eccentricity without his consent. Good Lord, what a cleared mind can think up to keep itself from being bored!

  WHAT TO DO IF A CASE STOPS PROGRESSING

  Even in the easiest cases there will come times when progress seems to stop. Here is a list of possibilities of why:

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  1.

  The pre-clear is not moving on the track despite appearances, but is being subject to one of the five types of commands which can inhibit his free motion or information. The commonest of these is a holder and the pre-clear may be found to be in an engram and in a strange valence.

  2.

  There is an emotional or pain shut-off. These can always be detected even at the beginning of a case. The patient’s muscles will tremble or twitch when he is in an engram but he will not feel the somatic: this is inevitably a pain shut-off. Out of therapy the patient may be very tense, his neck muscles in particular may be tight: this is often an emotional shut-off. Either of these conditions can be observed in many aberrees before beginning therapy. If they appear while therapy is in progress, look for pain or emotional shut-offs.

  3.

  There is an exaggerator of emotion and a pain shut-off so that the patient weeps over anything but wriggles and twists when asked to approach pain. He is feeling emotion without feeling the pain.

  4.

  There is an emotional charge in some area which has not been discharged but which is ready to discharge. Or, conversely, if you have been trying to get an emotional discharge in a late painful emotion engram and have had no success, there is a feeling shut-off early in the prenatal area.

  5.

  The Auditor’s Code has been broken. Change auditors or reduce the moments when the code was broken.

  6.

  There is an emotional upset in the patient’s life current with therapy. Question him closely and remove the charge, if possible, of the emotional upset as an engram.

  7.

  The auditor has missed an important point in this book. Study it.

  IF A CASE “REFUSES” TO GET WELL

  It has long been a popular idea, if an erroneous fact, that people desire to retain their neuroses. In any case which “resists” therapy, you may be certain that the engrams are resisting, not the patient; do not, therefore, attack the patient but the engrams.

  There are many computations which give the appearance of resistance. The commonest of these is the ally computation, which derives from engrams containing allies who seem to plead that the patient is not to rid himself of anything. An ordinary situation is one in which some relative or friend of the mother’s is advising the mother against aborting the child. The ally is pleading, “Do not get rid of it!” The pre-clear knows this person to be a friend of his of the highest order. The pre-clear may interpret this to mean that he is not to get rid of his engrams.

  Another computation is the stupidity computation, wherein the pre-clear begins to believe he will be stupid or lacking a mind if he gives up engrams. This stems, for example, from the mother saying she will lose her mind if she loses the child: she calls the child “it.” A whole chain of these may appear in a case, giving the pre-clear the idea that if he parts with any engrams, he will lose his mind. This is the primary reason why past schools believed that the mind was composed of neuroses instead of an inherent personality. The engrams, even though unknown, appeared very valuable, which they are not -- none of them.

  Yet another computation is one of secrecy. It seems to the pre-clear that his life depends upon holding some secret. This is common in a case where the mother has had a lover. Mother and the lover both enjoin secrecy. The pre-clear, obeying engramic commands, believes that he has much to lose if he tells this secret even though those who enjoined it were not even aware that he was present, or if they knew, that he was “listening.” One secrecy computation 224

  stems from the mother’s fearing to tell the father that she is pregnant: if the mother is an ally of the child, then the child will be extremely tenacious of this type of engram.

  All cases have one or more computations which inhibit a delivery of engrams. Some have all the above and more. This is no great worry to the auditor for, by repeater technique, he can open the engram bank.

  DRUGS

  The so-called hypnotics have no great use in dianetics except, on occasion, when a patient is psychotic and narco-synthesis is employed. By hypnotic is meant such preparations as phenobarbital, hyacine, opium and so on. These sleep-producing drugs are undesirable save only as a sedative and would be administered as sedatives by a medical doctor. Any patient who needs a sedative already has a medical doctor whose business it is. The auditor should not, then, concern himself with hypnotics or anything producing sleep. Some pre-clears will beg to be given sleeping drugs to “facilitate therapy” but any such drug is an anesthetic and shuts down somatics, inhibiting therapy. Further, none but the insane should be worked in amnesia trance, particularly a drug trance, for the work is longer than necessary and the results slow, as elsewhere explained. Dianetics wakes people up; it does not try to drug them or hypnotize them. Hence, the hypnotic drug is worthless to the auditor.

  Patients who wish to be knocked over the head with lead pipes or otherwise put int
o a deep trance should not be allowed to have their way even when they humorously present their own lead pipes.

  The trick is to put “I” in contact with the file clerk. All hypnotics work to shut-down

  “I.” While the file clerk can be reached and sonic and visio are available and even while, with much labor, a clearing can be so effected, even the most “hopeless” case is better worked in contact; the work is faster, more satisfactory and less troublesome.

  When one discovers the science of mind, he inevitably discovers numerous other things not properly in his province. Amongst these is the confusion which has unwittingly existed about hypnotics. Those things labeled “hypnotics” as named above are not hypnotics at all but anesthetics. And those things labeled anesthetics are not anesthetics but hypnotics. This will become brilliantly clear to the auditor when he finds himself tangling with his first “anesthetic”

  nitrous oxide engram in some pre-clear. Perhaps there will have been another engram wherein morphine was administered for days and even weeks, leaving the patient in a stupor which, by the definition “hypnotic” should have been a trance: the aberrative material will be there but it will be found to be slight -- compared to a chloroform or nitrous oxide engram.

  Ether, chloroform and nitrous oxide, the “anesthetics,” place the patient in a deep hypnotic trance: the reactive bank is wide open and all reception is sharp, clear and aberrative in the extreme. Of the three, nitrous oxide is easily the worst, being no anesthetic which would dull pain at all but a first class hypnotic. In nitrous oxide the pain is filed and the content is filed with high and brilliant fidelity. Some years ago some investigator wondered if nitrous oxide did not make the brain decay. Fortunately brains do not decay that easily; but nitrous oxide does bring into being particularly severe engrams. The serious late-life engrams which the auditor will encounter may include, at the list’s top, a nitrous oxide dental or surgical or obstetrical engram. Nitrous oxide engrams are particularly bad when they involve exodontistry; they often form the most severe late-life engram. Aside from the fact that all exodontists have in the past talked too much and have offices which are far too noisy with street sounds, running water and flapping drill belts, nitrous oxide is not at all anesthetic and sharpens rather than dulls pain.

  In reverse, nitrous oxide makes an excellent hypnotic for institutional therapy. It is far from the best obtainable from the chemists, that is certain, for some brilliant chemist will 225

  certainly be able to bring out a good gas hypnotic now that dianetics is known and the need of it in institutions is realized.

  There are some drugs which assist reverie, however. The commonest and most easily obtainable is plain, strong coffee. A cup or two of this occasionally alerts the analyzer enough so that it can reach through deeper layers of “unconsciousness.” Benzedrine and other commercial stimulants have been used with some success, particularly on psychotic patients.

  These bring the mind enough awake to permit it to overcome engramic commands. Such commercial stimulants have the disadvantage of exhausting a Q quantity in the mind.

  This Q Quantity has not been much studied. It is as though the brain burns a certain amount of Q when it is exhausting engrams. For instance, therapy every day may bring results more rapidly but it will also bring some stale sessions. Therapy every two or three days produces the best results as observed. (Therapy once a week permits the engrams to sag and slows a case, one week being too long.) Benzedrine burns up Q. After a few sessions with benzedrine the current stock of Q is exhausted and the work has been observed to deteriorate either until a higher dosage was administered -- and there is a close limit to that -- or until more Q was manufactured.

  Here, with all this, must be included an important and vital fact. It should be on a page by itself and underscored. All patients in therapy should be given a dosage of vitamin B1 orally or by injection at the minimum of 10 mg. per day. Reducing engrams exhausts Q which seems to depend in some measure on B1. You can be absolutely certain of nightmares in a patient who is not taking his B1. Taking liberal doses of that, he will have no nightmares. DT’s are probably caused by a similar exhaustion of Q Quantity. DT’s are best treated by B1 and dianetics. Something like DT’s on a very minor scale have been observed to develop in occasional patients who were negligent about their B1. With it, in therapy, they thrive.

  Alcohol is rarely an assist to the auditor. In fact, alcohol is rarely an assist to anyone. A depressant, classifiable at best as a poison, alcohol has the single virtue of being highly taxable. All alcoholics are alcoholic because of their engrams. All alcoholics, unless they have injured their brains -- which case is cited only because it is possible, not because research in dianetics demonstrated any real evidence of it -- can be released. Alcoholism is engramic. It has become, in some very understandable way, a class of contagious aberration whereby the reactive mind confuses alcohol and “being a good sport” or “having fun” or “forget your troubles.” Some of these things can also be obtained by strychnine and cyanide. Alcohol has its uses: one can put specimens of frogs and such in it: one can clean the germs off needles with it: it burns well in rockets. But one would not consider preserving his stomach in a glass jar and, unless insane, does not think of himself as a needle. While some drunks think they act like rockets, few have been observed to reach an altitude of more than the floor. It is not only a poor stimulant-depressant, it is also an hypnotic in the finest sense: what is done to a drunk becomes an engram. The chronic alcoholic is physically and mentally ill. Dianetics can clear him or even merely release him without too much trouble for alcohol is apparently not physiological in its addictive effect. With the whole range of chemistry to choose stimulants and depressants from, why the government chooses a superiorly aberrative and inferiorly stimulative compound to legalize is a problem for the better mathematicians, possibly these who deal exclusively in tax income problems. Opium is less harmful, marijuana is not only less physically harmful but also better in the action of keeping a neurotic producing, phenobarbital does not dull the senses nearly as much and produces less after effect, ammonium chloride and a host of other stimulants are more productive of results and hardly less severe on the anatomy: but no, the engrams, contaging unpleasantly along from the first crude brew which made one of our ancestors drunk, decree that alcohol is the only thing which is to be drunk if a person wants to “forget it all” and “have a good time.” There is really nothing wrong with alcohol save that it depends mainly on engrams and other advertising for its effect and is otherwise remarkably inferior in performance: that it makes such aberrative engrams is probably its main claim to fame and infame. Making one drug immoral and another one taxable is a sample of the alcohol engram in society. However, although it is immensely legal, it is doubtful if the auditor will find any use for it in therapy.

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  And speaking of drugs, that three thousand cycle note in your ears came either from a nitrous oxide engram or mother taking lots of quinine before you were born in the hope that she would not be a mother, saying the while, “It makes my ears ring so: it just keeps on and on and on and will not stop!”

  AUTO-CONTROL

  Since the beginning of dianetics research eleven years ago, patients have, in the majority, had some belief that they could run their cases in auto-control.

  Not understanding that an auditor is only interested in what has been done to, not done by a patient, some shyness or imagined guilt often prompts this vain hope that one can accomplish therapy alone.

  It cannot be done. That is a flat statement and it is a scientific fact. The auditor is necessary for a large number of reasons. He is not there to control or order the pre-clear about, but he is there to listen, to provide insistence, to compute the trouble the pre-clear is having and remedy it. The work is done on these equations:

  The dynamics of the pre-clear are less than the force in his reactive bank.

  The dynamics of the pre-clear plus the dynamics of the audit
or are greater than the force in the pre-clear’s reactive bank.

  The analytical mind of the pre-clear is shut down whenever he reaches an engram and he is then unable to pursue it and recount it enough times to discharge it without auditor assistance.

  The analytical mind of the pre-clear plus the analytical mind of the auditor can discover engrams and recount them.

  (There is another equation, not elsewhere mentioned, but germane to the auditor’s code, which demonstrates mathematically the necessity of that code: The force of the pre-clear’s engram bank plus the force of the auditor’s analytical mind is greater than the analytical mind and the dynamics of the pre-clear. This explains the necessity of never attacking the pre-clear personally. It also explains the behavior of the aberree under attack in usual life and why he grows angry and apathetic, for this equation overwhelms his analyzer.)

  These equations demonstrate actual natural laws.

  Auto-control finds the pre-clear attempting to attack something which has never been overcome by his analyzer although his analyzer has never been trying, interiorly, to do anything else but attack that bank so long as the analyzer would operate. The fact that the preclear’s analyzer shuts down whenever he comes into an area of “unconsciousness” was why the engrams could take him over and use him as a puppet when they were restimulated -- they simply shut down the analyzer.

  Many efforts by many patients have been made to put dianetics on an auto-control level.

  They have all failed and thus far it is believed to be utterly and completely impossible. The preclear in auto-control reverie may be able to reach some locks: he can certainly reach pleasant experiences and achieve data recall by return: but he cannot attack his own engrams without a standard auditor-pre-clear arrangement.