Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health

by L. Ron Hubbard

  him into doing something or into retreating from a quarrel, which language had been restimulative to him long before therapy.

  C thereupon entered into painful emotion engrams late in R’s life and, by working early physically painful engrams which said R could “feel nothing” alternately with late engrams 232

  when he was feeling intensely on an emotional plane but could not exhibit it, began to release the emotion in the case. R then showed steady improvement. Late painful emotion was released and early prenatals would show to be reduced, at which more late emotion would be visible for reduction.

  It was suddenly disclosed in the case that the reason R was so easily upset by C lay in the person of a nurse who had attended R during his tonsillectomy when he was five years of age. C had some similarity of mannerism to this nurse. This was a sympathy engram, and when it was released the time track began to straighten out and the abortion engrams could be more easily contacted.

  It so happened that R had been well off his time track most of his life, his memory occluded, his recall in poor condition. This was found to lie in the hidden key engram, the abortion attempt wherein his father had vowed to kill him if he came out and had added that the child could not see, feel or hear anything anyway, engramic material which was demonstrated by R’s inability to move on his time track.

  The moment the key was found -- two hundred and eighty hours of therapy had elapsed

  -- R came back on the time track, could move on it, and the erasure of his engrams proceeded in an orderly fashion.

  C had been cleared about two months before R reached the final engram. C’s allergies, however, disappeared long before her case was cleared completely and R’s ulcer and some other psycho-somatic difficulties also vanished well before his case was finally cleared.

  A PROBLEM IN A RESTIMULATED CASE

  G was cleared in ten months of sporadic sessions. His case had the initial diagnosis of non-sonic, non-visio, pain and emotional shut-off, permanent light trance, permanent

  “regression” at the age of three years. This is to say that the instant he went into reverie he was startled and frightened to find himself in a dental chair, three years old, and having a tooth pulled, an engram in which he had been situated, unknowingly, about half of his ensuing life.

  It had been the partial cause of his chronic tooth decay and his inability to sleep as negation against the anesthetic. The situation was obvious since he immediately began to wrestle about and lisp, which condition was instantly remedied by running the engram so that he could come to present time, which he did.

  He had had considerable difficulty in life, was a high dynamic but manifested apathy. It was discovered after seventy-five hours, at which time release took place, that his wife was sometimes his pseudo-grandmother and also, by ambivalence, was his pseudo-mother. As his sympathy computation demanded that he be ill so that his grandmother would stay with him and as his contra-survival engrams demanded that his mother was only nice to him when he was ill, the reactive computation added up to the fact that he must be ill continually, which demand had been obeyed by his body for twenty-three years. All this was recovered and remedied, of course, only by reducing engrams.

  The erasure began to take place at the end of about two hundred hours of therapy and was proceeding when the case suddenly stopped all progress. For fifty or more hours of therapy, few engrams could be located, those which were located could not be reduced, no painful emotion could be reached and whatever engrams were reached and reduced were located and treated only because the auditor in this case used highly skilled forcing techniques which are almost never necessary and should not be employed save in psychotic cases. Such endeavor had not been necessary at the beginning of the case. Something was obviously wrong.

  On close questioning it was discovered that G’s wife was violently opposed to dianetics, that she never lost any chance of leveling the most scathing attacks against it to G and 233

  particularly when he was in the company of friends. She derided him as being psychotic. She sought a lawyer to give her a divorce (announcing it after he had entered therapy but actually having had continual consultation on it with a lawyer for two years past) and generally agitated and disturbed G to such an extent that he was continually receiving painful emotional engrams even though he did not display any emotion against her.

  They had a child, nine years of age, a boy. G was very fond of the boy. The child had had an unusual number of childhood illnesses and suffered from eye trouble and chronic sinusitis; he was backward in school. The wife was somewhat sharp with the child. Anything he did made her nervous.

  The auditor in the case, on learning the facts about her attitude toward her husband in general and dianetics in particular, held a conference with her about her husband. She was found to be unopposed to therapy for herself. Shortly after the conference, G and this woman had a brief quarrel in which G made the remark that she must be aberrated. She took intense affront at this and said that he must be the one who was crazy since he was interested in dianetics. He countered with the fact that of the two he must be the least aberrated since he was taking steps to do something about it. Further, he pointed out that she must be aberrated or she would not be as quarrelsome with the child as she was, a fact which definitely indictated that she must have a block on her second dynamic, sex.

  The following day he came home from work and found she had withdrawn the money from the bank and gone to another town, taking the boy with her. He followed and found her staying with some of her relatives. She had told them that he beat her and had gone so crazy that he had to have therapy. The truth of the matter was that he had never touched her brutally in his life. In this meeting, before witnesses, she began to rave and revile any “system of psychiatry” which believed in pre-speech memory. He pointed out to her that many schools of the past had believed in pre-speech memory, that the whole background of psychiatry had long talked about “memories of the womb” without knowing what they were, and so forth.

  Her relatives, seeing him so calm about it, forced her to return home with him. En route she made a dramatic gesture, although in no way threatened, of committing suicide by leaping out of the car.

  The auditor in the case had a private conversation with her on her return. He had somewhat belatedly deduced the fact that there was something in her life which she was afraid her husband would find out and that, confronted with a science which could recover all memory, she had become wildly emotional about it. She at length admitted under close questioning, that this was the case, that her husband must never know. She was so disturbed that the auditor, with her consent, gave her a few hours of therapy. It was instantly discovered that her father had many times threatened to kill her mother and that her father had not wanted her. Further, it was found that her father’s name was Q and that her engram bank was strewn with remarks such as “Q, please don’t leave me. I will die without you.” Additionally, when she was no longer in session, she suddenly volunteered what was to her a hysterically humorous fact that all her life she had been having affairs with men named Q no matter what their shape or size or age. This was far from a release but in view of the fact that his other patient, G, was jeopardized by all this unnecessary hubbub and that therapy was being stalled, the auditor further questioned her. She divulged that she had tried many times to abort their son because she was terribly frightened that he would be a blond whereas she and her husband had dark hair. Further, the engrams of that child, she knew, contained data which she considered incriminating beyond mere abortion; while pregnant she had had intercourse with three men other than her husband.

  The auditor pointed out to her that this guilt feeling, no matter how real, was still engramic in her and that it was doubtful if her husband would kill her on receipt of these tidings. He told her that she was condemning a child to a second-rate existence and that she was reducing her husband to apathy by her fears and causing the auditor far more work than was necessary. In he
r husband’s and the auditor’s presence she confessed her infidelity and 234

  learned with some amazement that her husband had known about it for years. He had not known about her attempts on their child.

  She was requested to study a therapy manual and clear the child which, with her husband’s help, she did. The auditor continued G on to clear, who then cleared his wife.

  ADVICE TO THE AUDITOR

  The hidden source of human aberration was hidden for a number of very specific reasons. The auditor will encounter all of these and although with these techniques, the ability of the reactive engram bank to deny him is precisely nil, he should know the nature of the beast he has under attack.

  The mechanisms of protection which the engram bank had -- although they are not very good now that we know how to penetrate this armor of insanity’s cause -- are as follows: 1.

  Physical pain.

  2.

  Emotion in terms of captured units.

  3.

  “Unconsciousness.”

  4.

  The delayed character of the key-in.

  5.

  Delay between restimulation and illness.

  6.

  Utter irrationality.

  Of the physical pain we know much -- that the mind, in memory, sought to avoid it just as the mind in life seeks to avoid it as an outside source: hence, memory blockage.

  Emotion of loss piles up to make a buffer between the individual and the reality of death.

  “Unconsciousness” is not only a mechanism of hiding data, it is also a block to memory which cannot jump the gaps of past moments when the fuses were blown.

  An engram might slumber for the better part of a lifetime and then, given the correct set of restimulators in the right moment of physical weariness or illness, manifest itself, making an apparent cause of insanity or lesser aberration many years after the actual incident had taken place.

  Another aspect of the bank protective mechanism was the restimulator lag, which is to say that when a keyed-in engram was restimulated it often required two or three days for action to take place. (Example: say a migraine headache has as its restimulator a rhythmic bumping sound; that sound is heard by the individual who has the engram; three days later he suddenly has a migraine.) Given this lag, how could one locate the cause of a specific restimulation of a sporadic illness?

  The utter irrationality of an engram, the ultimate in irrationality, that everything equals everything else in the engram and that these are equal to things in the exterior environment which are only vaguely similar is a feat of idiocy which any sentient man might be expected to overlook as a “thought process.”

  Man has been looking for this source for some thousands of years; but he was looking for something which was complicated on the grounds that anything which could be so 235

  harrowing, so destructive, so vicious and so capable of producing complex manifestations must therefore have a complex source; on examination it is remarkably simple.

  The auditor will have very little to do with trying to draw a line between sanity and insanity, they are such relative terms. He will be asked to compare dianetics with old standards such as the complex classifications of Kraepelin: it can be done but it has the usefulness of Aristotelian natural history, of interest only to the historian.

  If an individual is incapable of adjusting himself to his environment so as to get along with or obey or command his fellows, or, more importantly, if he is incapable of adjusting his environment, then he can be considered to be “insane.” But it is a relative term. Sanity, on the other hand, closely approaches, with dianetics, a potential absolute meaning for we know the optimum mind. Modifications of education and viewpoint may make the rational action of one person appear irrational to another but this is not a problem of sanity, it is a problem of viewpoint and education, with which the auditor will have but small concern.

  Thus the patients the auditor will encounter will fall into the three general dianetic classes of non-sonic recall, imaginary recall and sonic recall. The question of sanity does not arise: the question of how difficult or how long the case may be is fairly well determined by the degree of these three conditions.

  However, the auditor will find that he may have in his hands a truly “insane” case, one which is “psychotic.” The treatment of such a case depends on which of the three above classes the psychotic patient may be entered. The problem is to de-intensify the engrams of the patient as swiftly as possible.

  The conditions and mechanisms which hide the engram bank do not vary: they are uniformly present in every patient, in every human being. The techniques of dianetics may be improved upon -- and what scientific technique, particularly in its first few years of existence cannot be -- but they also do not perform selectively but are applicable to all individuals.

  Hence, if we have an “insane” patient, the fundamental problem does not change and dianetic technique works as in any other case. The task is to reduce the intensity of charge in the case so that it can be resolved by standard technique.

  Insane patients are often found stuck on the time track, in which case a holder is fed to them, one kind after another, until they are moving again. If the patient is regressed, he has become so thoroughly stuck that he has lost touch with the present time. Any patient can begin to relive instead of merely return and the auditor, as the remedy for this, merely snaps at them that they can remember this, which places them in a returned status again. Insane patients are often found listening to one engram over and over, in which case it is again only necessary to fix attention and feed them holders until they are once more moving on the track. Insane patients are sometimes discovered completely off the time track, listening to demons or seeing illusion. The problems are always the same; use repeater technique when, by one means or another, their attention has been fixed and then either get them moving on the track or get them back on the time track. The schizophrenic is usually a long way off his time track.

  The best way to de-intensify a case so that it can be entered in routine therapy is to discover and discharge painful emotion engrams. If ordinary means fail, get the help of a medical doctor, place the patient under nitrous oxide or sodium pentothal and reach a deep level of trance where the patient will be found, ordinarily, to be capable of moving on his track even though he was off his track when awake. Find a late despair engram and discharge it as described in the chapter on emotion. The technique for deep trance is no different except that very cautious safeguards must be taken to say nothing which will aberrate the patient further but to limit all conversation to therapy patter, being very careful to include the canceller.

  The insane patient is obeying some engramic command, perhaps many, no matter what he is doing. That command may dictate, by the patient’s misinterpretation, some strange action; 236

  it may dictate demons; it may dictate anything. But diagnosis merely consists of observing the patient in order to discover, by his actions, what the engramic command might be.

  This volume does not cover Institutional Dianetics beyond these few remarks, but an auditor who knows the fundamentals in this volume and with any understanding can bring about a “sanity” in patients in a short time which the boards of these institutions normally consider a miraculous recovery. The patient, however, is very far from a release, and many more hours should be spent in discharging further painful emotion and reducing engrams before an auditor should consider it safe to permit him to leave therapy.

  The auditor should be extremely cautious, at least for the next twenty years, about any case which has been institutionalized, for he may be getting a case with iatrogenic psychosis --

  caused by doctors -- in addition to the patient’s other engrams. Dianetics may help a mind a little in which the brain has been “ice-picked” or “apple-cored,” but it cannot cure such insanity until some clever biologist finds a way to grow a new brain. Electric shock cases are equivocal: they may or may not respond to treatment, for b
rain tissue may have been burned away to a point where the brain cannot function normally. In entering any such case, the auditor will be perplexed by the scrambled condition of the standard bank, to say nothing of the circuits by which he should be able to reach the engram bank. Syphilis and other brain erosions should be similarly classified and should be approached or undertaken only with the full knowledge that dianetics may not be able to help the dismembered machine at all. There have been many thousands of these brain “operations” and hundreds of thousands of electric shock treatments: thus the auditor should be alert not to engage upon what may be a hopeless cause when there exist so many cases which can better be helped. Any case which has been institutionalized should be suspected. And if anything unusual in the way of memory scramble or lack of coordination is observed, searching inquiry may reveal hidden institutionalization. Further, an auditor called upon to assist a case which is about to be institutionalized should always be wary. The case which is being sent to an institution may be a case which has been in one before, regardless of the protestations of relatives or friends that such is not the circumstance.

  Similarly combat exhaustion cases should be warily undertaken, for the case was probably processed before quitting the service, at which time electric shock or brain operation or narco-synthesis may have been applied without the knowledge or consent of the patient.

  These warnings are given not because the auditor will be in any particular physical danger -- patients seldom do anything but cooperate, sane or insane, when dianetics is applied, even if they snarl about it -- but because much work may be expended only to discover that the entire mental machinery has been wrecked beyond repair.