Let's Sell These People a Piece of Blue Sky: Hubbard, Dianetics and Scientology (22 page)

Arthur Ceppos, the head of a medical and psychiatric
textbook publishing company, joined the Bay Head circle, and commissioned a
manual on Dianetics. In April 1950, the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation
(HDRF) was incorporated
⁷
to answer the many enquiries generated by
Campbell's editorials. Hubbard, his wife Sara, Campbell, Winter, Ceppos, Don
Rogers, and lawyer Parker C. Morgan, made up the Board of Directors. The HDRF had
its headquarters in Elizabeth, New Jersey, not far from New York City.

Hubbard's 400 page textbook was outlined and written in six
weeks. He sometimes claimed it took him only three, and an eyewitness has
confirmed this, saying the first three weeks were spent working out how to
write the book.
⁹

The writing process was punctuated, on March 8, by the birth
of a daughter to Sara Hubbard. The child, Alexis Valerie Hubbard, had her
father's red hair, though he later denied paternity, suggesting she was Jack
Parsons' child! She was delivered by Joseph Winter.
¹⁰

The May 1950 edition of Astounding sold out at record rate.
It was soon followed by the book
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental
Health
, which became an immediate best-seller. The Hubbard Dianetic Research
Foundation was inundated with inquiries and requests for therapy.

Dianetics was supposed to “Clear” people of irrational behavior.
A “Clear,” according to the book, would have no compulsions, repressions, or
psychosomatic ills.
¹¹
A “Clear” would have full control of his
imagination,
¹²
and a near perfect memory.
¹³
With Dianetic
counseling, IQ would “soar” by as much as “50 points,”
¹⁴
and the
Clear would be “phenomenally intelligent.”
¹⁵
Dianetics would even
rescue a broken marriage.

It was claimed that through Dianetics the individual would
be freed of psychoses and neuroses.
¹⁶
Amongst the “psychosomatic”
conditions Dianetics claimed to cure were asthma, poor eyesight, color
blindness, hearing deficiencies, stuttering, allergies, sinusitis, arthritis,
high blood pressure, coronary trouble, dermatitis, ulcers, migraine,
conjunctivitis, morning sickness, alcoholism and the common cold. Even tuberculosis
would be alleviated.
¹⁷
Dianetics would also have “a marked effect
upon the extension of life.”
¹⁸
A Clear could do a computation which
a “normal would do in half an hour, in ten or fifteen seconds.”
¹⁹

Hubbard claimed to have examined and treated 273 people
²⁰
and, through this research, found the “single and sole source of aberration.”
²¹
The book claimed that Dianetics was effective on anyone, who had not had “a
large portion of his brain removed,” or been “born with a grossly malformed
nervous structure.”
²²
Better yet, Dianetics could be practiced
straight from the book with no training. Therapy would take anything from 30 to
1,200 hours,
²³
by which time the person would be Clear and thus free
of all irrationality, and every psychosomatic ailment.

The new therapy which prompted these incredible claims was
basically a reworking of ideas abandoned by Freud in favor of the interpretation
of dreams.
²⁴
Dianetics extended Freud's earlier techniques slightly,
and allied them to a different theory. It was a form of “abreaction” in which
the patient remembered and then acted out, or supposedly re-experienced, the
memory of a traumatic incident. Freud had speculated that traumas with similar
content join together in “chains,” embedded in the “unconscious” mind, causing
irrational responses in the individual. According to Freud a “chain” would be
relieved by inducing the patient to remember the earliest trauma, “with an
accompanying expression of emotion.” Earlier traumas would only become
available as later traumas were remembered and abreacted. Forty years before
Dianetics
,
in the Clark lectures at Worcester, Massachusetts, Freud had explained this
theory and methodology. The description is uncannily similar to Dianetics.

Freud would repeat one of the patient's common phrases to
him. This would often induce a buried memory to surface. In Dianetics, the
therapist asked the patient to repeat the phrases. Hubbard called this
“repeater technique” and, in early Dianetics, it was the principal method for
discovering traumatic incidents.

Hubbard renamed the “unconscious” the “reactive mind.” He
differentiated two principal types of trauma: “physical pain or unconsciousness,”
and “emotional loss.” Before
Dianetics
was published, three words had
been tried out to describe the first type of trauma: norn, impediment and
comanome. Eventually, Dr. Winter suggested that a word already current would
fit the bill. The word was “engram,” defined in Dorland's 1936 Medical
dictionary as “a lasting mark or trace ... In psychology it is the lasting
trace left in the psyche by anything that has been experienced psychically; a
latent memory picture.” Hubbard limited the term to actual pain or
unconsciousness, separating out emotional losses as “secondary engrams” or
“secondaries,” meaning they were only stored where an earlier, similar “engram”
existed. Freud too had commented on trauma based on both physical pain and
emotional loss.
²⁵

So, according to Hubbard, the “reactive mind” is composed of
recordings of incidents of physical pain or unconsciousness called “engrams.”
The earliest engram (or “basic”) is the foundation of a “chain” of engrams, and
through re-experiencing it, the “chain” will dissipate. To make an earlier
engram available it is necessary to “destimulate” more recent engrams by
re-experiencing them.

Hubbard claimed it was possible to relieve all such engrams,
thus “erasing” the reactive (unconscious) mind. A person without a Reactive
mind would be “Clear.” To make a Clear, it would be necessary to erase the
earliest engram by re-experiencing it. Hubbard asserted that the engram of
birth was very important, and claimed it was possible, and necessary, to find
the earliest engram, long before birth, perhaps as far back as conception, the
“sperm dream.”

A year before Hermitage House published
Dianetics: The
Modern Science of Mental Health
, it published an extensive psycho-analytic
study by Dr. Nandor Fodor, called
The Search for the Beloved
, subtitled
“A clinical investigation into the trauma of birth and pre-natal conditioning.”
Fodor credited Otto Rank, another Freudian, with original work on the trauma of
birth.

Someone at the publishers must have noticed the similarities
between the two books prior to the publication of
Dianetics
. Arthur Ceppos
was both the head of Hermitage House and a director of the Hubbard Dianetic
Research Foundation. It is highly unlikely that Hubbard did not know about
Fodor, even though his book was certainly not as popular as
Dianetics
.
Fodor did publish first, and had been expressing his ideas on the trauma of
birth in psychiatric journals for some years. The first edition of
Dianetics:
The Modern Science of Mental Health
even carried an advertisement for
Fodor's book on the dust-jacket, subtitle and all.

Fodor and Hubbard each argued that birth and the pre-natal
period could be “abreacted” or re-experienced, and were fundamental to later behavior.
Scientologists mistakenly credit Hubbard with the discovery of the trauma of
birth and the pre-natal period. Hubbard did nothing to disabuse them of this
notion.

Although Fodor's patients apparently re-lived their birth,
his method differed from Hubbard's. Dianetics was closer to Freud's original approach.
Fodor also believed that very few people were able to re-experience their
birth, whereas Hubbard claimed nearly everyone could.

Using hypnosis, Hubbard tried out some of Freud's ideas, and
eventually came up with a “non-hypnotic” therapy, a few months before
Dianetics:
The Modern Science of Mental Health
was published.
²⁶
Hypnosis,
which already had a Hollywood Svengali image, was to be given an even more
vicious, mind-bending image by Hubbard. To this day many people think that
hypnosis refers only to a state of deep-trance. In that sense, Dianetics is not
hypnosis, but Dr. Winter and others were later to argue that Dianetics creates
a light trance, of highly suggestible condition.

In
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health
,
Freudian ideas were presented in a new, elaborate language. Dianetics, a
survivor of several abreactive therapies practiced in the 1940s,
²⁷
differed by approaching the general public directly, rather than through the
psychiatric or psychological professions. Dianetics also completely avoided the
libido theory, the interpretation of dreams, transference and complex Freudian
evaluations. The early Dianeticist simply directed the individual in the
exploration of his memory and, inevitably, his imagination, leaving the patient
(or “Preclear”) to make his own interpretations about the validity or
significance of his memories.
²⁸

According to
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental
Health
(“DMSMH” as Scientologists call the book), an engram contains every
“perceptic” - sight, smell, touch, taste, sound, and so forth. It is a running,
three-dimensional record of experience during moments of unconsciousness or
pain which acts as a post hypnotic suggestion on the recipient. He has no real
idea why he reacts irrationally in certain circumstances, but rationalizes his
responses.

In the book Hubbard described an engram and its effects
²⁹
:

A woman is knocked down by a blow. She is rendered
“unconscious.” She is kicked and told she is a faker, that she is no good, that
she is always changing her mind. A chair is overturned in the process. A faucet
is running in the kitchen. A car is passing on the street outside. The engram
contains a running record of all these perceptions ... [and would contain] the
whole statement made to her ... any perception in the engram she received has
some quality of restimulation. Running water from a faucet might not have
affected her greatly. But running water from a faucet plus a passing car might
have begun some slight reactivation of the engram, a vague discomfort in the
areas where she was struck and kicked ... add the sharp falling of a chair and
she experiences a shock of mild proportion. Add now the smell and voice of the
man who kicked her and the pain begins to grow. The mechanism [the Reactive
mind] is telling her she is in dangerous quarters, that she should leave ...
She stays. The pains in the areas where she was abused become a predisposition
to illness or are chronic illness in themselves.

The experiential content of the engram is outside conscious
recall except, of course, when probed by the Dianeticist. When enough elements
of the environment match elements of an engram, then it, and all engrams
similar to it (the “chain” to which it belongs), come into force, or “key-in.”
The individual must either feel the pain of the engram, or “dramatize” (act
out) the often inappropriate verbal content. An engram which contained the
phrase “Get out!” might well create an escapist. The Reactive mind is literal
and puns crazily.

Hubbard called the sequential record of experience the
“Time-track.” In Dianetics, he claimed that by finding the earliest engram on a
chain the whole chain would refile in the “analytical” (“conscious”) mind,
losing its reactive power. So came the idea that finding the earliest engram
(“basic-basic”), and thoroughly re-experiencing its content will knock away the
foundation of all later engrams, emptying the Reactive mind, and creating a
Clear.

A rather peculiar aspect of
Dianetics: The Modern Science
of Mental Health
was Hubbard's emphasis on “attempted abortions.” Hubbard
claimed “it is a scientific fact that abortion attempts are the most important
factor in aberration,”
³⁰
and that “Attempted abortion is very common
... Twenty or thirty abortion attempts are not uncommon in the aberree.”
³¹
Hubbard asserted that ulcers were caused by attempted abortions.
³²
He had been suffering from a duodenal ulcer since 1943.

Going against popular belief, Hubbard insisted that life in
the womb was fraught with pain and that the fetus is constantly receiving
engrams. Hubbard gave a gruesome list, which he claimed was from a real case:

Coitus chain, father 57 incidents; Coitus chain,
lover 19 incidents; Constipation chain 52 incidents; Douche chain 22 incidents;
Morning sickness 33 incidents; Fight chain 38 incidents; Attempted abortion 28
incidents; Accident chain 18 incidents; Masturbation chain 81 incidents.

This unfortunate individual had received over 300
engrams before coming into the world.
³³

In
Scientology: the Now Religion
, author George Malko
wrote that “Hubbard's extensive discussion of things sexual, his concern with
abortions, beatings, coitus under duress, flatulence which causes pressure on
the fetus, certain cloacal references, all suggest to me a fascination which borders
on the obsessive, as if he possessed a deep-seated hatred of women. All of them
are being beaten, most of them prove to be unfaithful, few babies are wanted.”
³⁴

Dianetic counseling was called “auditing.” Hubbard defined
the verb “audit” as “to listen & compute,” which he considered the basic
functions of the therapist. So the Dianetic therapist was called the “Auditor.”

In
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health
,
Hubbard used the analogy of building a bridge. He had built a bridge to a
better state for mankind, pleading with his readers “For God's sake, get busy
and build a better bridge!”
³⁵
To Scientologists, the steps of
Hubbard's therapy are still known as “the Bridge.”