Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health

by L. Ron Hubbard

  “recoveries” for it is about as permanent as the fire of a burning match. It goes out and leaves very cold ashes. The auditor, seeing this euphoria, had better enter the case again and reduce the engram it contains more thoroughly or get a more basic engram.

  The length of time it takes to clear a person is quite variable. By blowing despair charges and working a few early engrams, an auditor can get a better state of being in the patient than in any past therapy in twenty or thirty hours: this is a release. It compares to two or three years of past therapeutic work. The length of time it takes to get a clear cannot be compared to any past standard because a clear is something no past standard ever dreamed about.

  In a sonic case, where recall is in good condition, a clear can be obtained in a hundred hours. In a case which has thoroughly shut down recalls, anything can happen up to, in extremity, a thousand hours. Similarly, the imaginative case which has things which never happened, may be long.

  Look at it this way: we can get the results of two or three years of psycho-analysis in a score or two of hours of dianetics and what we accomplish with dianetics does not have to be done again, which is not true with psycho-analysis. This is the release. He can go about his business in a far more competent fashion, his emotional charges being largely freed. In the clear we are attempting and can achieve a supernormal state of mind. Thousands and thousands and thousands of hours were spent in the education of a man: the expenditure of two or even ten thousand hours of work to make him rank about what would formerly have been possible for him is work well spent. But we do not have to spend anything like this amount of time.

  People have been cleared in anything from thirty hours, when they had sonic and little volume, to five hundred hours when they had shut-down recall plus imaginary recall. What an auditor can do with his first few cases by way of time is a question mark. He will get to the clear eventually and certainly in less than twelve hundred hours in a severe case. All the time he is working toward a clear he is achieving a higher and higher release which, after at least fifty hours, rises well above the current norm and keeps right on soaring. Improvement is such that from week to week the charge is physiologically noticeable and psychologically startling. If one thinks the reach for clear is a short jump and a small gain, then he has no conception of just how high that goal is.

  Most auditors will try for release at first and are wise if they do. When their own case is finally cleared, only then will they suddenly realize that the state was worth far more time than was expended to attain.

  It is impossible to forecast, with a new auditor, just how much time he will consume in making errors, learning his tools, attaining skill. It is therefore impossible to estimate for him how long it will take him to gain a clear in a patient. A well trained auditor never takes more than eight hundred hours with the worst of cases: five hundred is high.

  DATA FROM RELATIVES

  The auditor will always be plagued by the anxiety of the patient to get data from relatives or friends. The request for this data itself is restimulative both to the pre-clear and the relative. Mothers have been made very ill by being given the restimulators of their own past illnesses by the child who has “suddenly found out.”

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  It is a uniform experience that the data obtained from relatives, parents and friends by the pre-clear is absolutely and utterly worthless. Here we are depending upon an aberree’s memory when we have at hand, with dianetics, a reliable source of accurate material. Auditors have had cases progress very smoothly and then suddenly stop progress: on inquiry it is discovered that the pre-clear has been running around to his parents and relatives for material and they, wanting nothing more than that he forget all about what they have done to him, throw him red herrings which have to be carefully eliminated. These are the villains of the piece, the people who have done the things to the pre-clear which made him an aberree. If one expects accurate data from them, one might as well expect the moon to be green cheese.

  If the auditor wants data from these people and requests it, by-passing the pre-clear, he may get somewhere. But any data so received has a value which, in intelligence, is used to label “Incompetent Source -- Improbable Material.”

  Warn a pre-clear not to bother his relatives and parents and explain to him that he can make them ill by asking for data, on the restimulator principle. If we want confirmation of the data received, the only way to get it is put the parent or relative in therapy. At such time, we shall get the basic dramatization sources: in the prenatal life and childhood of the parent. This is a problem of research, not of therapy.

  If the auditor has Mama available, he can run off the child’s birth and then Mama giving birth, keeping the two apart, and get his check on the accuracy of therapy. And there are other data that can be so compared, using proper safeguards.

  The subjective reality, not the objective reality, is the important question to the auditor.

  First, last and always, does the patient get well?

  STOPPING THERAPY

  The woman scorned has a violent rival in the pre-clear on whom therapy has been stopped by the auditor’s decision.

  Keeping the pre-clear in therapy, no matter how seldom are the sessions, satisfies in some measure the effort his basic personality makes to fight clear of the aberrations.

  The basic personality, the file clerk, the core of “I” which wants to be in command of the organism, the most fundamental desires of the personality, may be considered synonymous for our purposes. There is an enormous surge of this basic self -- which is really the individual himself -- to conquer the engrams. The engrams, borrowing life from their host, appear as things which do not want to be conquered. As mechanistic as all this actually is, the auditor will often find himself wondering at the resistance the engrams can make and marveling at the efforts of the basic personality to conquer the engrams. He works with the basic personality, the individual himself, and ignores the engramic efforts to interfere. But there is a situation in which the basic personality seems to give free play to the engrams in an effort to accomplish therapy.

  In work, a “patient” might have been skeptical, sarcastic or even vicious to the auditor.

  Or the patient may have been thought to be completely neglectful of his engram bank. Or the patient may even rage that he hates therapy. For some of these reasons the auditor may injudiciously decide to cease working the patient. The patient is so informed. For a short while, perhaps, the patient may manifest no reaction but in a few minutes, a few hours or a few days, basic personality, denied a route out, may begin to use every weapon to hand to compel the auditor to resume therapy.

  Disturbed by cessation of therapy, even though he may have insisted upon its being stopped, the ex-patient may begin either to rapidly decline or to attack to his face or behind his back the auditor and even therapy itself. The woman scorned has rarely made such thorough 243

  upsets as ex-patients who have been refused continuance of therapy. Auditors have been personally reviled, have had other pre-clears searched out and undermined by violent attacks upon therapy itself, have been targeted by all manner of accusations and whispering campaigns and have been made most uncomfortable by pre-clears who have had further therapy denied to them before a release had taken place. Even solid, legitimate releases, whose psycho-somatic ills have disappeared and who should be quite cheerful, have been observed to create turbulence when the auditor would not take them through to clear. Any number of mechanisms may be used by the ex-patient. as many mechanisms as men use to force other men into action.

  One of the mechanisms is a resumption of apathy and a “swift decline.” Another is wild campaigning against therapy. Another is personal attack of the auditor. Each has, as its provable intention, the resumption of therapy.

  The mind knows how the mind works. And the mind which has tasted a way out of pain and unhappiness may be expected, if that way is blocked, to use all methods to cause therapy to be resumed.

 
No matter how thoroughly disagreeable the ex-patient has been, the moment the auditor starts therapy upon him again, the attitude alters. No further destructive efforts are made against the auditor or therapy but all is almost as well as it was before the cessation was declared.

  Do not suppose, however, that the pre-clear, if he has been neglectful, recalcitrant or generally uncooperative before, will now embrace therapy as chastened patient. Far from the case, he is now at least as difficult to work as he was before plus some additional antagonism engendered by the cessation order.

  In such a case the auditor is damned if he does and double-damned if he doesn’t. But there is a way out of this. The phenomenon of “transference,” where the patient simply transfers his griefs to the practitioner, is not the mechanism here at work; transference is a different thing, bred of a thirst for attention and a feeling of needed support in the world.

  Transference can be expected to keep up forever if permitted; the patient of a doctor, for instance, may go on and on having illnesses just to keep the doctor around. Transference may occur in dianetic therapy, the patient may lean on the auditor solidly, beg the auditor for advice, appear to hold out engrams in an effort to keep the auditor working hard and available and interested; all this is the resultant of a sympathy computation and is aberrated conduct. The clever auditor will not give advice or attempt to run anyone’s life, for a person works well only as a self-determined organism. In dianetic therapy, no matter what the attitude of the patient, no matter how great his “desires to be ill” or his transference of burden, no matter about even his vicious remarks to the auditor during sessions, the condition cannot obtain forever.

  Basic personality is trying to get through; “I” is trying to integrate self. Even indifferent work will eventually release enough charge from a case and reduce enough engrams to bring a higher stability to the patient. Basic personality gets stronger and stronger and therefore more self-reliant. The introversion occasioned by continual effort to reach the interior world of the engram bank de-intensifies and extroversion comes more and more into being as the case advances. The way out is to work the patient smoothly and well and one day he will be well released or clear. But meanwhile, if you stop therapy on anyone, don’t be surprised at anything that happens; you can only remedy it by resuming the case.

  AUDITOR EVALUATION

  The auditor must do much evaluation to himself. He does not evaluate or force upon his pre-clear any computation. If the pre-clear computes that this was what was making him ill, then this is what the auditor accepts. Explaining to the pre-clear what it was in the engram which affected him so and so is not only a waste of time but also makes the pre-clear confused.

  The reason an auditor evaluates is to make sure he is not accepting imagined data or incomplete data as engrams.

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  An incident will not lift unless the data in it is correct: this is automatic. Change just one syllable in the incident and it will stick. Or, if it seems to go away, it will be back. So there is no fear that any incident which decreases with recounting is incorrect. The data in it must be more or less correct or it would not so reduce. Thus the auditor who challenges incidents, data or otherwise plays god is going to have a thoroughly fouled up case on his hands before he goes very far, and he is going to have a subject who is not progressing. If the subject begins to run an engram where Mama is having intercourse with five Eskimos, let him run it and never, never, never, never tell him that you feel it was untrue. If you tell the subject you think he is imagining things, you may give him a serious set-back. Tell him you think Mama had her reasons and you have sided with the opposition: you are not attacking the engram, you are helping Mama attack the subject. To criticize, correct or otherwise judge the pre-clear has no slightest part in dianetics and will do more to slow up a case than any other single action. An auditor who challenges the material given him may be practicing witchcraft or Chinese acupuncture or shamanism or voodoo, but he is not practicing dianetics. And he will not get results. One remark to the subject such as, “I think that you are mistaken in believing your mother would try to abort you,” or “I feel that you are imagining it” may set your pre-clear back fifty hours. The auditor does not criticize or judge the pre-clear, nor does he evaluate for the pre-clear that person’s material.

  Auditing is all done privately and to oneself. If the patient has just recounted his fifth prenatal train wreck, you may be sure you have run into a lie factory in some engram. The wrong way to go about correcting this is communicating it to the pre-clear. The right way to go about it is to find the lie factory, an engram containing such a remark as, “Tell me anything!

  Tell me anything. I don’t care so long as you say something. But for God’s sakes don’t tell me the truth, I can’t stand it!” Or, “You can’t tell him the truth. It would hurt too much.” There are a thousand forms of lie factory. And they are not too uncommon.

  Never tell the pre-clear why you are looking for anything. If you say you want a lie factory, the lie factory will make up a lie factory. If you say you want an emotional charge, you will inhibit any emotional Charge from discharging. Simply make a quiet estimate of the situation, reduce everything which seems valid and keep on trying to get the reason why the case is not functioning as well as possible.

  The test for validity of an engram is not plot. Plot is worthless. Engrams are just collections of remarks contained in periods of “unconsciousness.” It makes no difference whatever whether these remarks agree with the way the auditor thinks a life should be run or the way a pre-clear should look up to his parents. Plot is something writers put in stories.

  Auditors have nothing to do with it. An engram is basically illogical and irrational; don’t try to read rationality into one! If the parents were known to be fine, upstanding members of the community and the engrams seem to indictate that Mama nightly played the prostitute, accept the engrams.

  Validity is very simply established. Ask these questions of the engrams: (1)

  Does it have a somatic?

  (2)

  Does the somatic undulate, which is to say, undergo a running change?

  (3)

  Does it reduce? (If it does not, the content the pre-clear is running is wrong or the engram is way up the chain and has others before it.)

  (4)

  Does the engramic content agree with the patient’s aberration?

  (5)

  Does the somatic agree with psycho-somatic ills the patient is known to have had?

  (6)

  Does it bring relief to the patient? And this last is more important than all the rest.

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  Because mental healers of the past have grandly said, “Oh, this does not fit with my idea of how life is run” is no reason an auditor should run dianetics off the rails. Mental healers of yesteryear did not get results. Dianetics gets results: and one of the most important reasons why dianetics gets results is that it is not trying to warp life to fit dianetics but is applying dianetics to life. Many new and startling things will come to the notice of the auditor.

  His motto, as seen on an ancient English crest where a ninety-foot raven stood upon a castle, could read, “Be surprised at nothing.”

  The Kinsey report did not begin to tell the story you, as an auditor, will get in dianetics.

  Because the mother, by herself, is neither the face she showed Junior nor the face she showed society and because mother and father, by themselves, do not conduct themselves as they might be supposed to have done in society is insufficient reason to force a pre-clear to go on being an aberree.

  Continually in the psychiatric texts we come upon patients who tried to tell psychiatrists about prenatal life and who were told, with droll solemnity that the incidents were imaginary.

  Patients who had been given up on all fronts by all existing schools because their data was not tailored to fit the belief of those schools have recovered fully and achieved optimum mental condition, well above that of their
former mentors, with dianetics, partially because dianetics does not set itself above the facts of life. He not only requires the patient to face reality by running the engrams but he also requires himself to face reality by accepting the fact that whatever the content, if it fits any of the above conditions listed, it is valid in therapy.

  Auditing means to listen; it also means to compute. Computing on a case consists of establishing where the patient departs from optimum rationality in his conduct of life but, more important, where physically painful and painful emotion engrams exist and how they can be approached and reduced.

  Patients discover some astonishing things about their parents and relatives when they are in therapy. Often they discover, like one patient who had believed he had daily been beaten by his father, that life was actually much better than it had seemed.

  Pre-marital conception cases are very common, with the patient yet unborn discovering himself at his parents’ wedding. And these cases are often very difficult to resolve since they contain so much secrecy in their engrams.

  The lie factory mechanisms will often try to give Mama extra lovers and try to make Papa into a raving beast, but a lie factory is very easy to detect: the incidents brought forth do not run like engrams: the second time over their content is widely changed, they do not have somatics and their content is not aberrative.

  In short, the test is whether or not one has an actual engram, not whether or not the engram makes sense. For father could well have been a raving beast in a boudoir and mother could well have had coitus with the boarders: and father could well have been a tame lamb for all the reputation mother gave him post-birth and mother could well have been a frigid prude despite the wild tales the pre-clear might have heard. The truth will come out in the reduction but its truth is no concern of the auditor’s beyond getting up engrams.

  First, last and always, get engrams, get them as early as possible for pain, later for emotion, get them, erase them, discharge them, clear them! That they did not compute as true data was what drove the aberree into being an aberree. Leave plot to writers: our task is therapy.