DMSH 1950 Book 1 Chapter 1

← Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950)

The Scope of Dianetics

A science of mind is a goal which has engrossed thousands of generations of Man. Armies, dynasties and whole civilizations have perished for the lack of it. Rome went to dust for the want of it. China swims in blood for the need of it; and down in the arsenal is an atom bomb, its hopeful nose full-armed in ignorance of it.

No quest has been more relentlessly pursued or has been more violent. No primitive tribe, no matter how ignorant, has failed to recognize the problem as a problem, nor has it failed to bring forth at least an attempted formulation. Today one finds the aborigine of Australia substituting for a science of mind a “magic healing crystal.” The Shaman of British Guiana makes shift for actual mental laws with his monotonous song and consecrated cigar. The throbbing drum of the Goldi medicine man serves in the stead of an adequate technique to alleviate the lack of serenity in patients.

The enlightened and golden age of Greece yet had but superstition in its principal sanatoria for mental ills, the Aesculapian temple. The most the Roman could do for peace of mind for the sick was to appeal to the penates, the household divinities, or sacrifice to Febris, goddess of fevers. And an English king, centuries after, could have been found in the hands of exorcists who sought to cure his deliriums by driving the demons from him.

From the most ancient times to the present, in the crudest primitive tribe or the most magnificently ornamented civilization, Man has found himself in a state of awed helplessness when confronted by the phenomena of strange illnesses or aberrations. His desperation, in his efforts to treat the individual, has been but slightly altered during his entire history, and until this twentieth century passed mid-term, the percentages of his alleviations, in terms of individual mental derangements, compared evenly with the successes of the shamans confronted with the same problems. According to a modern writer, the single advance of psycho-therapy was clean quarters for the madman. In terms of brutality in treatment of the insane, the methods of the shaman or Bedlam have been far exceeded by the “civilized” techniques of destroying nerve tissues with the violence of shock and surgery, treatments which were not warranted by the results obtained and which would not have been tolerated in the meanest primitive society, since they reduce the victim to mere zombie-ism, destroying most of his personality and ambition and leaving him nothing more than a manageable animal. Far from an indictment of the practices of the “neurosurgeon” and the ice-pick which he thrusts and twists into insane minds, they are brought forth only to demonstrate the depths of desperation man can reach when confronted with the seemingly unsolvable problem of deranged minds.

In the larger sphere of societies and nations, the lack of such a science of mind was never more evident; for the physical sciences, advancing thoughtlessly far in advance of man’s ability to understand man, have armed him with terrible and thorough weapons which await only another outburst of the social insanity of war.

These problems are not mild ones; they lie across every man’s path; they wait in company with his future. As long as Man has recognized that his chief superiority over the animal kingdom was a thinking mind, so long as he understood that his mind alone was his weapon, he has searched and pondered and postulated in efforts to find a solution.

Like a jig-saw puzzle spilled by a careless hand, the equations which would lead to a science of the mind and, above that, to a master science of the universe, were stirred round and round. Sometimes two fragments would be united; sometimes, as in the case of the golden age of Greece, a whole section would be built. Philosopher, shaman, medicine man, mathematician: each looked at the pieces. Some saw they must all belong to different puzzles. Some thought they all belonged to the same puzzle. Some said there were really six puzzles in

it, some said two. And the wars went on and the societies sickened or were dispersed, and learned tomes were written about ever-increasing hordes of madmen.

With the methods of Bacon, with the mathematics of Newton, the physical sciences went on, consolidating and advancing their frontiers. And, like a derelict battalion, careless of how many allied ranks it exposed to destruction by the enemy, studies of the mind lagged behind.

But after all, there are just so many pieces in any puzzle. Before and after Francis Bacon, Herbert Spencer and a very few more, many of the small sections had been put together, many honest facts had been observed.

To adventure into the thousands of variables of which that puzzle was composed, one had only to know right from wrong, true from false, and use all Man and Nature as his test tube.

Of what must a science of mind be composed?

1. An answer to the goal of thought.
2. A single source of all insanities, psychoses, neuroses, compulsions, repressions and social derangements.
3. Invariant scientific evidence as to the basic nature and functional background of the human mind.
4. Techniques, the art of application, by which the discovered single source could be invariably cured, ruling out, of course, the insanities of malformed, deleted or pathologically injured brains or nervous systems and, particularly, iatrogenic psychoses (those caused by doctors and involving the destruction of the living brain itself).
5. Methods of prevention of mental derangement.
6. The cause and cure of all psycho-somatic ills, which number, some say, 70% of Man’s listed ailments.

Such a science would exceed the severest terms previously laid down for it in any age, but any computation on the subject should discover that a science of mind ought to be able to be and do just these things.

A science of the mind, if it were truly worthy of that name, would have to rank, in experimental precision, with physics and chemistry. There could be no “special cases” to its laws. There could be no recourse to Authority. The atom bomb bursts whether Einstein gives it permission or not. Laws native to Nature regulate the bursting of that bomb. Technicians, applying techniques derived from discovered natural laws, can make one or a million atom bombs, all alike.

After the body of axioms and technique was organized and working as a science of mind, in rank with the physical sciences, it would be found to have points of agreement with almost every school of thought about thought which had ever existed. This is again a virtue and not a fault.

Simple though it is, dianetics does and is these things:

1. It is an organized science of thought built on definite axioms: statements of natural laws on the order of those of the physical sciences.
2. It contains a therapeutic technique with which can be treated all inorganic mental ills and all organic psychosomatic ills, with assurance of complete cure in unselected cases.f
3. It produces a condition of ability and rationality for Man well in advance of the current norm, enhancing rather than destroying his vigor and personality.
4. Dianetics gives a complete insight into the full potentialities of the mind, discovering them to be well in excess of past suppression.
5. The basic nature of man is discovered in dianetics rather than hazarded or postulated, since that basic nature can be brought into action in any individual completely. And that basic nature is discovered to be good.
6. The single source of mental derangement is discovered and demonstrated, on a clinical or laboratory basis, by dianetics.
7. The extent, storage capacity and recallability of the human memory is finally established by dianetics.
8. The full recording abilities of the mind are discovered by dianetics with the conclusion that they are quite dissimilar to former suppositions.
9. Dianetics brings forth the non-germ theory of disease, complementing bio-chemistry and Pasteur’s work on the germ theory to embrace the field.
10. With dianetics ends the “necessity” of destroying the brain by shock or surgery to effect “tractability” in mental patients and “adjust” them.
11. A workable explanation of the physiological effects of drugs and endocrine substances exists in dianetics and many problems posed by endocrinology are answered.
12. Various educational, sociological, political, military, and other human studies are enhanced by dianetics.
13. The field of cytology is aided by dianetics, as well as other fields of research.

This, then, is a skeletal sketch of what would be the scope of a science of mind and of what is the scope of dianetics.