DMSH 1950 Book 2 Chapter 10
← Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950)
Preventive Dianetics
There are many branches in dianetics. It is actually a family of sciences covered by a single set of axioms. There is, for instance, Educational Dianetics, which contains the body of organized knowledge necessary to train minds to their optimum efficiency and to an optimum of skill and knowledge in the various branches of the works of Man. And there is Political Dianetics, which embraces the field of group activity and organization to establish the optimum conditions and processes of leadership and inter-group relations. And again there is Medical Dianetics. And there is Social Dianetics. There are many such subdivisions which are sciences within themselves guided by their own axioms.
We are dealing in this volume, actually, with basic dianetics and dianetic therapy as applied to the individual. This is the most immediately important and the most valuable to the individual.
But no book on dianetic therapy would be complete without a mention of a branch of dianetics which, some say, is even more important to the race than the therapy. This is Preventive Dianetics.
If one knows the cause of something, he can usually prevent the cause from going into effect. The discovery and proof of Ronald Ross that the malaria germ was carried by the mosquito makes it possible to prevent the disease from committing the ravages it once enjoyed at the expense of Mankind. Similarly, when one knows the cause of aberration and psycho- somatic illness, he can do a great deal toward preventing them.
While Preventive Dianetics is a large subject, infiltrating the fields of industry and agriculture and other specialized activities of Man, its basic principle is the scientific fact that engrams can be held to minimal content or prevented entirely with large gains in favor of mental health and physical well-being as well as social adjustment.
The engram is actually a very simple thing: it is a moment when the analytical mind is shut down by physical pain, drugs or other means, and the reactive bank is open to the receipt of a recording. When that recording has verbal content, it becomes most severely aberrative. When it contains antagonism on an emotional level, it becomes very destructive. When it is intensely pro-survival in content it is most certainly capable of thoroughly deranging a life.
The engram, amongst other things, determines fate. The engram says that a man has to fail to survive and so he contrives numerous ways to fail. The engram commands that he can only experience pleasure amongst the members of another race and so he goes amongst them and abandons his own. It commands that he must kill to live and so he kills. And far more subtly, the engram weaves its way from incident to incident to cause the catastrophe which it dictates.
A recent case was plotted out to have actually gone to enormous lengths to break his arm, for with a broken arm he received the sympathy without which the engram said he could not live. The plot covered three years and half a hundred apparently innocent incidents which, when netted together, told the story.
The accident prone person is a case where the reactive mind commands accidents. He is a serious menace in any society for his accidents are reactively intentional and they include the destruction of other people who are innocent.
Drivers with several accidents on their records are generally accident prone. They have engrams which command them to have accidents. When you have run a case, just one, you will see how thoroughly and maliciously disposed this moronic thing, the reactive mind, can be
about such things. Cleared drivers could have accidents only through two sources: (a) mechanical failure and, more important, (b) because of accident prone people. The terrible and awesome death toll taken by our automotive transport is almost all attributable to reactive mind driving rather than learned response driving. The apathy of this society is measured by the fact that it does not act severely to prevent all automotive accidents; just one broken windshield is one too many: now that an answer is to hand action can take place.
The aberree in thousands of ways complicates the lives of others. Preventive Dianetics makes it possible to sort out the aberree who is accident prone and bar him from activities which will menace others. This is one general aspect of Preventive Dianetics. That the aberrees so isolated can be cleared is another type of problem.
The other general aspect of Preventive Dianetics, and the more important, is the prevention of engrams and modification of content both on the social and the individual scale. On the social scale one would delete from the society the causes of aberration in that society as if he were deleting engrams from the individual. In the same way, one can prevent the social causes from occurring in the first place.
In the individual, the prevention of engrams is a very easy matter. Once the source of aberration and illness is known, one can prevent the source from entering a life. If the source has been known to enter, one can prevent the next step, in key-in. Of course, the final answer in all this is therapy to a clearing, but there is one aspect of the source which is not so answered.
The child cannot be safely cleared until he is at least five years of age and current practice is to place this figure at about eight years. Improved address to the problem may reduce this figure, but it cannot be reduced below the age of speech unless some one in the future invents a catalyst which simply clears out the reactive mind without further treatment (not as wild as it may sound). But just now and probably for a long time to come the child will remain a problem to dianetics.
Childhood illness is chiefly derived from engrams. It is most likely to be severe before the age of speech and the number of deaths within the first year of life, while medicine may reduce them, is yet a serious thing.
Preventive Dianetics addresses this problem in two phases: first the prevention of engrams, and second, the prevention of the key-in.
Taking the key-in first, there are two things which can be done to prevent it. The child can be given a calm and harmonious atmosphere which is not restimulative or, if the child appears to be restimulated despite kindly treatment, he can be removed to another environment which will be minus the two most certain sources: his father and mother, and which will contain a source of affection. The test of whether or not a child is restimulated, pre-speech or post-speech, is very simple. Is he susceptible to illness? Does he eat well? Is he nervous? There can be actual physical things wrong with the child, of course, but these are quickly established by a doctor and they lie in the category of physical derangement.
Quarrels within the hearing of a child, loud noises, frantic conduct, drooling sympathy when he is sick or hurt, these things are some of the key-in catalogue. These make a child ill physically and aberrated mentally by keying-in his engrams. And nobody can say how many he has!
The primary source of prevention lies in the field, oddly enough, of the regard in which another person is held — his mother.
It is not “biological love” which makes mother play such an enormous role in the life of a human being. It is the simple mechanical truth that Mother is a common denominator to all the child’s prenatals. The prenatal engram is far more serious than the post-natal. Any such engram
a person has contains his mother or his mother and another person, but always his mother. Therefore her voice, the things she says, the things she does, have an enormous and vast effect upon the unborn child.
It is not true that emotion gets into a child through the umbilical cord as people always suppose the moment they hear of prenatals. Emotion comes on another (more electrical than physical) type of wave — what type is a problem for structure. Therefore, anyone who is emotional around a pregnant woman is communicating that emotion straight into the child. And mother’s emotion is, in the same manner, so conducted to his reactive mind.
Whether or not the unborn child is “unanalytical” has no bearing on his susceptibility to engrams. The prenatal engram is just another engram. Only when the child is actually struck or hurt by high-blood pressure or orgasms or other sources of injury does he become “unconscious.” When he becomes “unconscious” he receives all the percepts and words in the area of the mother as engrams. Analytical power has nothing to do with engrams. If the child is “unanalytical,” this does not predispose him to engrams. If the child is “unconscious” or hurt it does.
The presence or absence of “analytical power” has nothing to do with whether or not engrams are received.
Morning sickness, coughing, all monologuing (mother talking to herself), street noises, household noises, etc., are all communicated to the “unconscious” child when he is injured. And the child is very easily injured. He is not protected by formed bones and he has no mobility. He is there: when something strikes him or presses him, his cells and organs are injured. A simple experiment to demonstrate how mobility influences this is to lie down in bed and place one’s head on a pillow. Then have somebody lean a hand on one’s forehead. As there is no mobility, the pressure of the hand is far stronger than it would be if a hand were laid on the forehead when one was standing. The tissue and the water around the child form very slight buffers. In an injury amniotic fluid, as an incompressible medium, presses him, for it cannot compress itself. The child’s situation is far from armored.
Mother’s act of tying her shoes, in the later stages of pregnancy, even may be severe on the child. Mother’s strain when lifting heavy objects is particularly injurious. And mother’s collision with objects like a table edge might well crush a baby’s head. The repair facilities of the unborn child, as mentioned elsewhere, are far above anything ever before discovered. The child may have its head crushed but the blueprint is still there and the building materials and repair can be made. So it is not a case of the child being “all right” just because it can live through almost anything. It is a case of whether or not these injuries are going to have high aberrative value as engrams.
Attempted abortion is very common. And remarkably lacking in success. The mother, every time she injures the child in such a fiendish fashion, is actually penalizing herself. Morning sickness is entirely engramic, so far as can be discovered, since clears have not so far experienced it during their own pregnancies. And the act of vomiting because of pregnancy is via contagion of aberration. Actual illness generally results only when mother has been interfering with the child either by douches or knitting needles or some such thing. Such interference causes the mother to become ill and, from an actual physical standpoint, is much harder on the mother than on the child. Morning sickness evidently gets into a society because of these interferences such as attempted abortion and, of course, injury.
The cells know when pregnancy occurs. The reactive mind is acquainted with the fact before the analyzer by process of organic sensation, since the endocrine system is altered. Hence, the mother’s discovery of pregnancy has little to do with whether or not she was sick before the discovery.
This entire field has been a subject of considerable research in dianetics. Much more research must be done. These conclusions are tentative. But the conclusion that the engram is
received and that it is as violent as its content, rather than its actual pain, is a scientific fact and not in any way a theory. It is as real a discovery as gravity.
Preventing these engrams is the first consideration. Preventing them from having any content is the second. Women who lead peasant lives, doing heavy labor, are subject to all manner of accident. Perhaps such accidents cannot be prevented because of the purpose these women serve in the society. But when it is known that any injury to the mother can create an engram in the unborn child, it should be the concern of all those present during such an injury, including the mother, to maintain a complete and utter silence. Any remark is aberrative in an engram. Even such a statement as “You can remember this when in dianetic therapy,” made toward an unborn child, installs an engram so that every word in this statement means a physical pain just where he received it at the time, and in the future “dianetic therapy” will be restimulative to him.
The doctor, punching around to find out if mother is pregnant, may say, “Well, it’s hard to tell this early.” The patient in dianetic therapy years later will return into the vicinity of this incident only to draw a blank until the dianeticist suddenly guesses the content from how the patient describes his reactions. If the doctor is very tough and says, “You had better take good care of yourself, Mrs. Jones. If you don’t, you’ll be mighty sick!” the child, “unconscious” from the examination no matter how mild it is, will get a mild hypochondria when the engram keys-in and be very concerned over his health.
If the husband uses language during coitus, every word of it is going to be engramic. If the mother is beaten by him, that beating and everything he says and that she says will become part of the engram.
If she does not want the child and he does, the child will later react toward him as an ally and perhaps have a nervous breakdown when the father dies. If she wants the child and he doesn’t, the ally computation is reversed.
This is true when abortion is threatened or attempted providing the threat is contained in an engram.
Should the mother be injured and the father be highly solicitous, the engram has this for content and the child has a sympathy engram. The way to survive, then, is to be pathetic when injured, and even see to it that one is injured.
A woman who is pregnant should be given every consideration by a society which has any feeling for its future generations. If she falls, she should be helped — but silently. She must not be expected to carry heavy things. And she should not have coitus forced upon her. For every coital experience is an engram in the child during pregnancy.
An astonishing number of pregnancies must take place which are never realized. The violence of coitus, the use of douches and jellies (used because the woman is still contracepting and does not know she is already pregnant), straining bowel movements, falls and accidents must account for a large number of miscarriages which come about sometime around the first period after conception. For the zygote and embryo forms of the child have a rather frail grip on existence and are very severely injured by things the mother would consider nothing. Once past the first missed period, the chances of miscarriage rapidly grow less and only when the child is a genetic monstrosity or when abortion attempts are made can a miscarriage be expected to take place. The monstrosities are so small a percentage that they are negligible as a possibility.
The amniotic sac can be pierced many times and repeatedly and emptied of all water after the first missed period and the child can still survive. Twenty or thirty abortion attempts are not uncommon in the aberree and in every attempt the child could have been pierced through the body or brain.
The child before birth does not depend upon the standard senses for its perceptions. Engrams are not memories but cellular level recordings. Therefore, the child needs no eardrums to record an engram. Cases are on hand where whatever hearing mechanism the unborn child had must have been temporarily destroyed by an abortion attempt. And the engram was still recorded. The cells rebuilt the apparatus which was to be the source of sound in the standard banks and stored their own data in the reactive bank.
Release of such engrams means a restoration of rationality to the individual far above the current norm and a stability and well-being greater than Man ever thought Man possessed. These engrams have been confirmed by taking the data from a child, from the mother and the father, and all data checked. So we are dealing here with scientific facts which, no matter how startling, are nevertheless true.
The mother, then, should be extremely gentle on herself during pregnancy and those around her should be entirely informed of the necessity for silence after any jar or injury. And in view of the fact that it is not possible to tell when a woman has become pregnant and in view also of the high potentiality of aberration in the zygote and embryo engrams, it is obvious that society must better its ways toward women if the future health of the child is to be preserved.
The woman has to some degree become considered less valuable in this society than in other societies and times. She is expected to be in competition with men. Such a thing is nonsense. A woman has as high a plane of activity as man. He cannot compete with her any more than she can compete with him in the fields of structure and vigorous activity. Much of the social maelstrom now in existence has as its hub the failure to recognize the important role of the woman as a woman and the separation of the fields of women and men.
The changes which will come about in the next twenty years need no urging here. But with the recent discoveries in photosynthesis which should secure enough food to feed Man better and at less cost, the importance of birth control dwindles. The morality standards have already changed, no matter what moralists do to try to block the change. And woman, therefore, can be freed of many of her undesirable chains.
In the custody of Man is the current world and its activity and structure. In the charge of woman is the care of the person of the human being and his children. Almost sole custodian of tomorrow’s generation, she is entitled to much more respect than her chattel-period of the past gave her.
It is not, then, any wild Utopian thought that woman can be placed above the level hitherto occupied. And so she must be placed if the childhood of tomorrow’s generation is to reach any high standard, if homes are to be peaceful and unharassed and if society is to advance.
Preventive Dianetics, in the sphere of the home, must place emphasis on the woman in order to safeguard the child.
As any first step, a mother should be cleared, for any mother who attempts an abortion is blocked across the second dynamic and any block menaces her health as well as her happiness. An antipathy for children has been found to accompany sexual aberration.
Preventive Dianetics, then, on the level of the individual, asks for cleared parents and then precaution against the aberrating of the child, and further precaution against the keying-in of any aberration the child might have received.
To do this is very easy. Maintain silence in the presence of injury. Do what has to be done for the injure ill and do it in silence. Maintain silence in the presence of birth to save both the sanity of the mother and the child and safeguard the home to which they will go. And the maintaining of silence does not mean a volley of “Sh’s,” for those make stammerers.
In a wider field, the maintenance of silence around any “unconscious” or injured person is second in importance only to preventing the “unconsciousness” in the first place.
Say nothing and make no sound around an “unconscious” or injured person. To speak, no matter what is said, is to threaten his sanity. Say nothing while a person is being operated upon. Say nothing when there is a street accident. Don’t talk!
Say nothing around a sick child or an injured child. Smile, appear calm, but say nothing. Actions do not speak louder than words but actions are all that can be done around the sick and injured unless one has an active desire to drive them into neurosis or insanity or, at best, to give them a future illness.
And above all, say nothing around a woman who has been struck or jarred in any way. Help her. If she speaks, don’t answer. Just help her. You have no idea of whether she is pregnant or not.
And it is a remarkable fact, a scientific fact, that the healthiest children come from the happiest mothers. Birth, for one thing, in a cleared mother, is a very mild affair. Only birth engrams in the mother made it hard. A cleared mother needs no anaesthetic. And that is well because the anaesthetic makes a dazed child and the engram, when it reacts, makes him appear a dull child. A happy woman has very little trouble. And even a few engrams, which arrive despite all precautions, are nothing if the general tone of the mother is happy.
Woman, you have a right and a reason to demand good treatment.