DMSH 1950 Book 2 Chapter 5

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

Psychosomatic Illness

Psycho-somatic illnesses are those which have a mental origin but which are nevertheless organic. Despite the fact that there existed no precise scientific proof of this before dianetics, an opinion as to their existence has been strong since the days of Greece, and in recent times various drug preparations have been concocted and sold which were supposed to overcome these sicknesses. Some success was experienced, sufficient to warrant a great deal of work on the part of researchers. Peptic ulcers, for instance, have yielded to persuasion and environmental change. A recent drug called ACTH has had astonishing but wildly unpredictable results. Allergies have been found to yield more or less to things which depressed histamine in the body.

The problem of psycho-somatic illness is entirely embraced by dianetics, and by dianetic technique such illness has been eradicated entirely in every case.

About seventy per cent of the physician’s current roster of diseases falls into the category of psycho-somatic illness. How many more can be so classified after dianetics has been in practice for a few years is difficult to predict, but it is certain that more illnesses are psycho-somatic than have been so classified to date. That all illnesses are psycho-somatic is, of course, absurd, for there exist, after all, life forms called germs which have survival as their goals.

The work of Louis Pasteur formulated the germ theory of disease. With dianetics is gained the non-germ theory of disease. These two, with bio-chemistry, complement each other to form the whole field of pathology so far as can be determined at this time, providing of course that the virus is included under the germ theory.

Dianetics adds an additional leaf to the germ theory in that it includes predisposition. There are three stages of pathology: predisposition, by which is meant the factors which prepared the body for sickness, precipitation, by which is meant the factors which cause the sickness to manifest itself, and perpetuation, by which is meant the factors which cause the sickness to continue.

There are two kinds of illness: the first could be called autogenetic, which means that it originated within the organism and was self-generated, and exogenetic, which means that the origin of the illness was exterior. Actually, although this is good medicine, it is not quite as precise as dianetics could desire. Mental illness itself is actually exterior in origin. But medically, we consider that the body can generate its own sicknesses (autogenetic) or that the sickness can come from an exterior source such as bacteria (exogenetic). The Pasteur germ theory would be the theory of exogenetic — exteriorly generated — illness. Psycho-somatic illness would be autogenetic, generated by the body itself.

Treatment for accidental injury, surgery for various things such as malformation inherent in the body on a genetic basis, and orthopedics, which actually can be classed under both, remain properly outside the field of dianetics, although it can be remarked in passing that almost all accidents are to be traced to dramatization of engrams and that clears rarely have accidents.

Psycho, of course, refers to mind and somatic refers to body; the term psycho-somatic means the mind making the body ill or illnesses which have been created physically within the body by derangement of the mind. Naturally such diseases, when one has resolved the problem of human aberration, become uniformly susceptible to cure.

Arthritis, dermatitis, allergies, asthma, some coronary difficulties, eye trouble, bursitis, ulcers, sinusitis, etc. form a very small section of the psycho-somatic catalogue. Bizarre aches

and pains in various portions of the body are generally psycho-somatic. Migraine headaches are psycho-somatic and, with the others, are uniformly cured by dianetic therapy. (And the word cured is used in its fullest sense.)

Just how many physical errors are psycho-somatic depends upon how many conditions the body can generate out of the factors in the engrams. For example, the common cold has been found to be psycho-somatic. Clears do not get colds. Just what, if any, part the virus plays in the common cold is not known, but it is known that when engrams about colds are lifted, no further colds appear — which is a laboratory fact not so far contradicted by 270 cases. The common cold comes about, usually, from an engram which suggests it and which is confirmed by actual mucus present in another engram. A number of germ diseases are predisposed and perpetuated by engrams. Tuberculosis is one.

The engram itself, as has been covered, follows a cycle of action. The body is predisposed to the conduct and conditions contained in the engram when that engram is first received. Then a conscious-level experience keys-in the engram and other experience or the content of the engram itself may make it chronic. This is predisposition, precipitation and perpetuation in the mental plane.

Engrams and inherited disabilities and accidents and germs are the four ways an organism can be reduced physically from the optimum. Many conditions which have been called “inherited disabilities” are actually engramic Engrams predispose people to accidents. Enengrams predispose and perpetuate bacterial infections. Therefore the catalogue of ills affected by dianetics is very long. This is not a book listing effects but a book stating causes, and so the reader is asked to call upon his own knowledge or consult a medical text to understand just how many thousands and thousands of conditions result from engrams to disturb or derange the body.

At the present time dianetic research is scheduled to include cancer and diabetes. There are a number of reasons to suppose that these may be engramic in cause, particularly malignant cancer. This is remarked so that attention may be given to the possibility; no tests of any kind have been made on cancer or diabetic patients, and the thought is purely theory and is not to be taken as any kind of an avowal about a cancer cure. Those diseases which were catalogued above, however, have been thoroughly tested and have uniformly yielded to dianetic therapy.

The mechanism by which the mind is able to cause a physical disability or predispose the body to an illness and perpetuate sickness is, in its basic cause, a very simple thing. The complexity arrives when one begins to combine all the factors possible; then a staggering list of potential illnesses can be written.

A series of simple tests can be made on drugged or hypnotic patients which will prove clinically in other laboratories this basic mechanism. A series of these tests were run in the formulation of dianetics with uniform success.

Let us take first something — which is only mildly psycho-somatic and scarcely an illness at all. A patient is hypnotized. He is given the positive suggestion that he will be able to hear much more acutely. This is “extended hearing.” Controlling out other means of his gaining data (including safeguards against telepathy between operator and subject) the hearing can be found to be amplifiable many times over. In fact, there exist all around aberrees who have “extended hearing.” By suggestion the power of the hearing can be tuned down or up so that a person is nearly deaf or can hear pins fall at a great distance. When the suggestion is removed, the subject’s hearing returns to its previous normal state.

Similarly, experiments can be performed on the eyes, using light sensitivity. The patient’s sight is tuned up or down so that his eyes are much more or much less sensitive to light than is normal for him. This is done entirely on the word suggestion basis such as “The light will appear very, very bright to you,” or “The light will appear so dim it will be hard for you to see.” With the former suggestion the patient can be made to see almost as well as a cat,

although other people around might think it impossible to see objects the patient can unerringly point out. In the latter suggestion the patient can be placed under light almost blinding and yet can read through a glare with apparent comfort.

The tactile sense can likewise be tuned up or down by verbal suggestion until touch becomes painfully acute or so dull it scarcely registers.

So with the various senses. Here we have simply the spoken word going into the mind and causing physical function to change.

Let us now address the heart. By deep hypnosis or drugs we take a patient into amnesia trance, a state of being wherein the “I” is not in control but the operator is the “I” (and that’s all there is, really, to the function of hypnosis: the transfer of analytical power through the law of affinity from subject to operator, a thing which had a racial development and survival value in animals which ran in packs).

A caution should be observed that a patient who has a very sound heart and no heart- trouble history be chosen for this experiment, which, even above any other hypnotic experiment, can make a patient very ill if he has a heart history. And none of these hypnotic tests should be performed until one has finished this book and knows how to get rid of the suggestions; for hypnosis, as practiced, is strictly live fuse stuff and the hypnotist who is unacquainted with dianetics has no more idea how to get rid of a suggestion he has made than he has of how to peel an atom. He has thought he had the answer, but dianetics has treated many, many former hypnotic subjects who were thoroughly, as the engineers interested in dianetics say, “loused-up.” This is no criticism of hypnosis or hypnotists, who are often very able people, but it is a comment that there is more to be known about it.

The heart, by positive suggestion alone, can be speeded up, slowed down or otherwise excited. Here are words spoken into the deep strata of the mind which cause physical action. Further, blood flow can be inhibited in some area of the body by suggestion alone. (This experiment, it is warned, particularly overloads the heart.) Blood can be denied to a hand, for instance, so that if you were to cut a vein in that hand it would bleed slightly if at all. A fine swami trick; which most amazed the author in India, was the inhibition of blood flow by the awake individual in himself. On command a cut would bleed or not bleed. It looked fantastic and made very good press agentry that here was a swami who had so associated himself with Nirvana that he was in control of all material matters. Awe faded when the author learned that, via hypnosis, he could make his own body do the same thing and no Nirvana involved. The mechanism fades out rapidly and in a few days would have to be renewed: the body has its own optimum operation, and although such a function can be “analytically” handled, it is not an upper echelon analytical job to keep the blood going in the hand. The point here is that blood flow can be interrupted by verbal suggestion. Words connect up with the physical being.

How this can come about can be shown by an analogic explanation such as a schematic diagram, but we are not so much interested in structure as in function at this stage of the science of mind — because by knowing function alone we can cure aberrations and psycho- somatic ills every time, predict new ills and conditions, and generally “work miracles,” as such actions were once called before Man knew anything about the mind.

Excreta are among the easiest things to regulate by suggestion. Constipation can be caused or cured by positive suggestion with remarkable speed and facility. The urine can also be so controlled. And so can the endocrine system.

It is harder to make tests on some of the more poorly understood functions of the endocrines. Glandular research has not progressed very far at this time. But, by removing engrams and watching the endocrine system rebalance, it has been made obvious that the endocrine system is a part of the control mechanism with which the mind handles the body. The glands are easily influenced. These fluids and secretions — testosterone, estrogen, adrenalin, thyroid, parathyroid, pituitrin, etc. — are the substances the mind uses as one means of controlling the body. They form relay circuits, so to speak. Each one has its own action within the body.

This experiment tends to prove the fallacy of an ancient assumption that the mind was controlled by the glands. An aberree is given a shot of 25 mg. of testosterone in oil twice a week. There may be some improvement in his physical status for a short time — his voice may deepen and he may grow more hair on his chest. Now, without suggestion, we simply delete the engrams from his reactive bank so that they can re-form as experience in the standard bank. Before we have completed this task

his body begins to use more of the testosterone. The dose can be markedly reduced and still give more benefit than formerly. Finally the dose can be eliminated. This experiment has also been performed on people who had not been able to receive benefit from glandular substances such as testosterone and estrogen. And upon people who were made ill by the administration of these hormones. The deletion of the engrams from the reactive bank uniformly brought about a condition where they could receive benefit from the hormones but where such artificial administration was not necessary save in cases of extreme age. What this means to gerontology, the study of longevity in life, cannot at this time be estimated, but it can be predicted with confidence that the deletion of engrams from the reactive bank has a marked effect upon the extension of life. A hundred years or so from now this data will be available, but no clears have lived that long as yet.

Just now, to our purpose, it is easy to demonstrate the effect of positive suggestion upon the endocrine system and the lack of effect of artificial hormones upon aberrees.

This sort of an engram has a terribly reductive effect upon testosterone manufacture: “Sex is horrible; it is nasty; I hate it.”

The autonomic nervous system, which has been supposed to run without much connection to the mind can be shown to be influenced in its parts by the mind. There is a dwindling spiral effect (note the lines on the survival potential chart) whereby the engram starts malfunction in the life function regulator; this produces malfunction in the mind, which in turn has further effect on the life function regulator; this again reduces physical activity, and the mind, being part of the organ and, so far as we can tell, organic itself, is further reduced in tone. Mental tone makes body tone go down. Body tone, then being down, makes mental tone go down. This is a matter of inverse geometric progression. A man starts to get sick and, having engrams, he gets sicker. Clears are not subject to this dwindling spiral. Indeed, so entirely superficial is this horrible stuff called psycho-somatic illness that it is the first thing which surrenders and can be alleviated without clearing.

Now the reason why various drug preparations which seek to change psycho-somatic illness meet with such uncertain success lies in the fact that the mind, containing these engrams which are “survival” (like a fellow needs a hole in his head), handles the life function regulator to actively produce illnesses. Something comes to take them away (they’re “survival,” you see, and these confounded cells moronically insist upon it) and the mind has to rapidly reverse the activity and put an illness back in place again. Try to influence the reactive mind by reason or needles and it is not any easier to convince than a drug-crazed man bent on murdering everybody in a bar. He’s “surviving,” too.

A concoction like ACTH has a slightly different effect. It is too exclusive to have any research done with it, but on reports about it, it seems to affect engrams in the time sense. That is to say, as will be covered under therapy, the individual’s reactive location in time is shifted by it. ACTH and perhaps many others in its category move the individual from one chronic engram into another. This is about as reliable as changing dictators in Europe. The next one may be twice as bad. It may even be a manic and that’s horrible despite its apparent “euphoria.”

Electric shock treatment, the beatings of Bedlam and other things of their ilk, including surgical treatment of things psycho-somatic in origin, have another effect but one not dissimilar

to drugs like ACTH in that they give another shock which transfers the engram pattern to another part of the body (and switches around the aberrations; when these things work it is because the new aberration is less violent than the old one). Shocks, blows, surgery and maybe even things like cobra venom change the effect of the engram bank on the body, not necessarily for the worse, not necessarily for the better; they just change them. Like shooting dice: sometimes one gets a seven.

Then there is the deletion of tissue treatment of psycho-somatic ills. This simply removes the area which is busy dramatizing in the physical line. This can be the removal of a toe or the removal of a brain. These things are quite commonly used, as this is being written. The removal of the toe is addressed to one part of the engram content, the somatic, and the removal of parts of the brain (as in the trans-orbital leukotomy and the pre-frontal lobotomy or anything else more recent) is addressed mistakenly to “the removal of” the psycho-aberration. There is a surrender system at work in this as well: the surgeon or the patient has an aberration about “getting rid of it,” and so bits of the body are cut up or removed.

Some patients surrender anatomy on advice or at their own insistence like old timers shed blood in a phlebotomy. There is a straight parallel between bleeding the patient to make him well and cutting away parts of him to make him well. Both are based on a surrender (get rid of) engram and neither are effective in any way. Barber basin medicine, it is hoped, will eventually die out as did its patients.

These are the five classes of psycho-somatic ills: (1) those ills resulting from mentally caused derangement in physical fluid flow, which class subdivides into (a) inhibition of fluid flow and (b) magnification of fluid flow; (2) those ills resulting from mentally caused derangement of physical growth, which class subdivides into (a) inhibition of growth and (b) magnification of growth; (3) those ills resulting from predisposition to disease resulting from a chronic psycho-somatic pain in an area; (4) those ills resulting from perpetuation of a disease on account of chronic pain in an area; and (5) these ills caused by the verbal command content of the engrams.

In Class 1 (a) fall such ordinary things as constipation and such extraordinary things as arthritis. Arthritis is a complex mechanism with a simple cause and a relatively simple cure. Remember that there are two things present in an engram: physical pain and verbal command.

In arthritis both must be present (as in the bulk of psycho-somatic ills). There must have been an accident to the joint or area affected, and there must have been a command during the “unconsciousness” which attended the injury which would make the engram susceptible to chronic restimulation. (Such commands as “It is always like this” or “It just goes right on hurting” or “I’m stuck” will produce similar results). Given this engram and given this engram keyed-in, there is a chronic pain in the area of the injury. It may be minor, but it is a pain just the same. (It can be a pain but not be felt if the engram contains a command which is anaesthetic such as “He’ll never feel this,” which produces a similar condition but makes one “unconscious” of the pain there.) This pain in the body probably tells the cells and the blood that this area is dangerous. It is therefore avoided.

The command permits the mind to influence, let us say, the parathyroid, which contains the secret of the calcium content in the blood stream. A mineral deposit then begins to be laid down in the area. The mineral deposit is not necessarily the cause of the pain, but it is an organic restimulator so that the more mineral, the more pain, the more the engram keys-in.

This is the dwindling spiral. And this is arthritis in action. Understand that the parathyroid and the blood avoidance are theoretical cause; the scientific fact is that when an engram is picked up and deleted about an area containing arthritis, that arthritis vanishes and does not return and this is X-ray plate evidence; it happens every time and does not happen because of any suggestion or medicine; it happens because an engram is picked up and refiled. As the engram goes away, so goes the pain, so vanishes the arthritis. This forms a whole class of ills, of which arthritis is only one.

The mechanisms involved vary slightly. All can be headed under “physical derangement caused by reduced body fluid flow.”

Class 1 (b) of psycho-somatic ills, magnification of fluid flow, contains such things as high blood pressure, diarrhea, sinusitis, priapism (overactivity of the male sex glands), or any other physical condition resulting from a superabundance of fluid.

Class 2 (a) can cause such things as a withered arm, a foreshortened nose, underdeveloped genital organs or any other underdevelopment of a gland having to do with size (which cross-classes this with 1 [a]), hairlessness (which also like the rest can be part of the gene pattern and therefore inherent), and in short reduction in size of any part of the body.

Class 2 (b) causes such things as oversized hands, a lengthened nose, oversized ears, enlarged organs and other common physical malformations. (Cancer might possibly come under this heading as overhealing.)

Class 3 would include tuberculosis (some cases), liver trouble, kidney trouble, rashes, common colds, etc. (cross-classing with others, as do all of these in one way or another).

Class 4 would include those diseases which, arising without psycho-somatic influence, yet fix upon by accident a previously injured area and by restimulation, keep an engram keyed- in in that area so that a condition becomes chronic. Tuberculosis could be included here. Conjunctivitis, all running sores and any condition which refuses to heal, etc.

This fourth class would also include all bizarre pains and sicknesses which cannot be found to have actual pathology.

Class 5 includes an enormously wide catalogue of conditions, any one of which may cross-index to other classes or which arise solely out of engrams which dictate the presence or necessity of an illness. “You always have colds,” “I have sore feet,” etc. announce a psycho- somatic illness and the mechanisms of the body can furnish one.

Any disease whatever can be precipitated by engrams. The disease may be of germ origin; the individual possesses an engram to the effect that he may become sick and on this generalization, becomes sick with whatever is to hand. Further and even more general, the engram reduces the physical resistance of the body to disease, and when an engram goes into restimulation (perhaps because of a domestic quarrel, an accident or some such thing), the ability of the individual to resist sickness is automatically decreased.

Children, as will be explained, have many more engrams than has been supposed. Almost all childhood illnesses are preceded by psychic disturbance and if psychic disturbance is present — keeping an engram restimulated — such illnesses can be far more violent than they should be. Measles, for instance, can be just measles or it can be measles in company with engramic restimulation, in which case it can be nearly or entirely fatal. A check of many subjects on this matter of childhood illness being predisposed by, precipitated by and perpetuated by engrams causes one to wonder just how violent the diseases themselves really are: they have never been observed in a cleared child and there is reason to investigate the possibility that childhood illnesses are in themselves extremely mild and are complicated only by psychic disturbance — which is to say, the restimulation of engrams.

In fact, one could ask this question of the entire field of pathology: what is the actual effect of disease minus the mental equation? How serious are bacteria?

The field of bacteriology has been without dynamic principles until now; the dynamic, survival, is applicable to all life forms and “life forms” include germs. The purpose of the germ is to survive. Its problems are those of food, protection (offense and defense) and procreation.

To accomplish these things the germ survives at its optimum efficiency. It mutates, alters with natural selection and changes dynamically from survival necessity (the missing step of the evolution theory, that last) in order to accomplish the maximum survival possible. It makes errors by killing the hosts, but to have a purpose to survive does not mean that a form necessarily survives.

In pathology, the germ, bent on its purpose, acts as a suppressor to the survival dynamic of the human species.

How serious this suppressor is in the absence of engram suppression in the human has not been determined; enough data exists to indicate that a human individual with his potential in the fourth zone is not, apparently, very subject to disease: the common cold, for instance, if it is a virus or not, passes him by; chronic infections are absent. What antibodies have to do with this or what this factor is, is yet another question. But it remains that a clear is not easily made ill. In the aberree illness closely pursues mental depression (depression of the dynamic level).

The aberration of mind and body by engrams leads, then, not only to psycho-somatic ills but also to actual pathology, which has hitherto been considered more or less independent of the mental state. As has been proven by clinical research, clearing of engrams does more than remove psycho-somatic illness, potential, acute or chronic; the clearing also tends to proof the individual against the receipt of pathology: to what extent it is not yet known, for such a wide and long term view is required to establish the actual statistics that the project will require thousands of cases and the observations of medical doctors over a long term.

The amount of aberration which a person manifests, which is to say, the position he would occupy on a sanity scale, has little to do with psycho-somatic illness. Such illnesses require only one or two engrams of a specific nature to become manifest. These engrams may not be aberrative in any other way than to predispose the individual to illness. Having a psycho-somatic illness is not the same as being “crazy” or having hypochondriacal tendencies. The hypochondriac thinks he has illnesses, a special case of Class (5) above.

Derangement falls sharply into two categories: the first is the mental derangement, any irrational condition, which in dianetics we call aberration in order to avoid constant cataloguing of the thousands, the millions of manifestations irrationality can have. The other derangement of the individual is somatic: this applies entirely to his physical being and physical ability and health. Both these things are present in every engram: the aberration and the somatic. But the engram can manifest itself chronically as either a somatic (a noun has been made out of an adjective here and it is commonly employed in dianetics to avoid the use of the word pain, which is not embracive and which is restimulative) or as an aberration or as both together.

An engram must contain physical pain. When an engram is restimulated in everyday life, that physical pain may appear or it may not. If it does not appear as pain but as aberration, then the individual is in another valence than his own (the “necessity to manifest his hostilities”). If he is sane enough to be in his own valence, the physical pain will be present. In dianetics we say the somatic has appeared. When any somatic appears, unless the individual is a pre-clear in therapy, some of the aberration is also appearing. In short, the aberration can appear by itself or the somatic plus some of the aberration can appear. When a person dramatizes another valence than his own, the aberration is present; when the dramatization, running off the engram phonograph-record-wise in one or another valence, is suppressed by some other factor such as the police or a stronger person or even the individual himself (this has been called repression — the term is not used here because it is loaded with other meanings), the somatic most certainly will come into view.

The individual is then apparently “better off,” as the cells meant him to be, to occupy the survival role in the engram, the winning valence, for he is, at least, not ill. But how many people have been killed, how many banks have been robbed and how many marital partners have been driven mad by these dramatizations?

So the health of the individual would be considered by society, in its effort to protect its members to be a secondary affair. In fact, “society” has not known about this mechanical aspect. The individual who dramatizes the survival valence in his engrams may do violent things to other people. The individual who will not permit himself such a dramatization or who is forced by society away from such dramatization will most certainly become psycho- somatically ill. “Heads I win, tails you lose.” The answer is in the alleviation or deletion of the engram. For there are many additional aspects to the problem: the man who dramatizes his engrams, society or no society, is not apt to survive, and if he dramatizes them, he is subject to whatever slurs were leveled at the valence he is in by another valence in that same engram.

The combinations of the classes and aspects of psycho-somatic illness listed and described here lead to some highly complex situations. It is a scientific fact that no psycho- somatic ill exists without an aberration. And it is true that no aberration exists without a potential or actual psycho-somatic ill. One of the psycho-somatic illnesses one would least expect to find as a psycho-somatic affair is the illness of sexual perversion.

The sexual pervert (and by this term dianetics, to be brief, includes any and all forms of deviation in Dynamic II such as homosexuality, lesbianism, sexual sadism, etc. and all down the catalogue of Ellis and Krafft-Ebing) is actually quite ill physically. Perversion as an illness has so many manifestations that it must be spread through the entire gamut of classes from (1) to (5) above. Over-development of sexual organs, underdevelopment, seminal inhibition or magnification, etc. are found some in one pervert, some in another. And the sum of it is that the pervert is always a very ill person in one way or another, whether he is conscious of it or not. He is very far from culpable for his condition, but he is also so far from normal and so extremely dangerous to society that the tolerance of perversion is as thoroughly bad for society as punishment for it.

Lacking proper means prior to this time, society has been caught between tolerance and punishment, and the problem of perversion has, of course, not been resolved. A bit off the subject here, but it can be remarked about perversion that the best previous explanation for it was something about girls becoming envious of Papa’s penis or boys becoming upset about that terrible thing, the vulva, which Mama was incautious enough to show one day. It takes a great deal more than this utter tripe to make a pervert.

It is, rather, something on the order of kicking a baby’s head in, running over him with a steam roller, cutting him in half with a rusty knife, boiling him in lysol and all the while with crazy people screaming the most horrifying and unprintable things at him. The human being is a very tough character. He is so confoundedly tough that he has whipped the whole animal kingdom and he can shake the stars. And when it comes to throwing his second dynamic out of balance, what that takes is straight out of Dante and Sax Rohmer combined. Hence the pervert, containing hundreds and hundreds of vicious engrams, has had little choice between being dead and being a pervert. But with an effective science to handle the problem, a society which would continue to endure perversion and all its sad and sordid effects doesn’t deserve to survive.

Perversion can have other aspects. In one society examined, these aberrations had multiplied so far that a principal mystic cult had sprung up which contended that all mental illness came from sex; this, of course, gave further impetus to aberrations on the second dynamic (sex), as such a cultic belief must have been originated by an individual who had severe aberrations across the second dynamic; this belief that sex was the only source of human aberration and travail, naturally attracted as its practitioners individuals who had similar aberrative patterns. And so the cult further enforced existing aberrative factors in the society, since all their activity was leveled at making sex something ogreish and dreadful by labeling it the society’s primary source of illness. The prophet of this god was Manichaeus, a Persian of the third century, who taught that all things about the body, especially sex, were evil; the cult of Manichaeus carried on well into the Dark Ages and then vanished, to trouble Man no more.

Any dynamic can be blocked, the personal dynamic, the sex dynamic, the group dynamic or the Mankind dynamic. Each one has been the target at some time of one cult or another seeking to cure all Man’s ills and save him. Dianetics is not interested in saving Man, but it can do much to prevent him from being “saved.” As an organized body of scientific knowledge dianetics can draw only the conclusion which it observes in the laboratory.

It can be observed that the Church is entirely correct in doing all in its power to prevent blasphemy. Blasphemy can very often be uttered during the “unconsciousness” of a person who has been struck. This would enter sacred names and curses into engrams which, reacting within the individual, give him an unnatural terror and compulsion or repulsion toward God. It is not the religion which is at fault, it is the blaspheming of the religion. Such blasphemy makes the insane zealot and the murderous atheist, both of whom the Church would very gladly do without.

In the realm of psycho-somatic illness any combination of the language is as damaging a factor in an engram as any other factor. The moronic reasoning of the reactive mind, which considers everything in an engram equal to everything in an engram, also considers that everything similar to the engram in the exterior world (the restimulators) is sufficient cause to place an engram in effect. Hence aberration and illness can come about.

There is, however, a peculiarity in psycho-somatic illnesses which is chronic: the aberree’s reactive mind exercises a power of choice to the extent that only pro-survival engrams become chronic. It could be said, on a reactive level, that the aberree will not permit himself to suffer illness from his engrams unless that illness has a “survival” value. This is very important in therapy. The chronic psycho-somatic illnesses which a patient displays are those which have a sympathy (pro-survival) background.

It is not possible to “spoil” a child with love and affection. Whoever postulated that it was possible was postulating out of bad data and no observation. A child needs all the love and affection it can possibly get. A test was run in one hospital which tended to show that babies, when left without attention, ran fevers. When given attention the fevers immediately abated. The test, while not observed personally by the author, seems to have been conducted with proper controls according to report. If this is true, it postulates a mechanism in the human being which uses illness for affection on a genetic basis. There is no reason why not; there have been enough years of engineering — almost two billion — to build anything into the blueprint. These babies, in several groups, were left in the hospital by their parents for the test; they uniformly became ill when not given affection. Here is the law of affinity at work, if these tests were accurately conducted, their purpose was not to help dianetics but to show that the leaving of a baby in the hospital after his birth because he has a slight illness invariably increases that illness.

A series of severely controlled dianetic experiments over a much longer period demonstrated that the law of affinity, as applicable to psycho-somatic illness, was more powerful than fear and antagonism by a very wide margin. So great is this margin that it could be compared as the strength of a steel girder to a straw. It was found, as above, that chronic psycho-somatic ills existed only when they had a sympathy engram behind them. The law of affinity might be interpreted as the law of cohesion; “affinity” might be defined as “love” in both its meanings. Deprivation of or absence of affection could be considered as a violation of the law of affinity. Man must be in affinity with man to survive. The suicide ordinarily commits the act on the computation that the removal of self will some way benefit other selves — this, on the reactive mind level is a very ordinary computation, deriving exclusively from engrams. The violent industrial chieftain with his merciless mien, when he suffers from a psycho-somatic ill, ordinarily derives it out of a sympathy engram.

The sympathy engram pretends to be pro-survival. As one preclear said, a man is not victimized by his enemies but by his friends. An engram comes about always from a greater or lesser moment of “unconsciousness.” There is no engram without “unconsciousness.” It is only when the analyzer is out of circuit that the exterior world can come interior,

unrationalized, and work from within. The second the analyzer identifies one of those engrams as such, that engram loses about twenty percent of its value to aberrate and usually a hundred percent of its value to cause a psycho-somatic illness. Pain is extremely perishable. Pleasure is recorded in bronze. (Not poetry here, science. Physical pain will delete with brief attention, a pleasant or even a media-media experience is so solidly fixed in the mind that no treatment known to dianetics will shake it and a great deal of effort has been leveled at pleasure recordings just to test them for permanence. They are permanent; physical pain is perishable. Too bad, Schopenhauer, but you were a most mistaken man.)

Exposing a lock to the analyzer — a moment of “mental anguish” — once the engram which gave it power is gone causes that lock to blow away like chaff. The analyzer works on the Doctrine of the True Datum: it has no truck with anything which it once discovers to be false. Just exposing an engram without relieving it has some therapeutic value — twenty percent — and this gave rise to a belief that all one had to do was know about his ills and they would vanish. Nice if it were so.

The most aberrative engram, then, is one which is held down by the reactive mind’s — that moron’s — concept that it is needed in the survival of the individual. This sympathy engram is the one which comes forward and stays chronic as a psycho-somatic illness. There are two reasons for this: one is usually in one’s own valence when a sympathy engram is received; and one’s reactive mind, knowing well the value of affinity, puts forward the psycho- somatic illness to attract affinity. There is no volition here on the part of the individual’s “I” analytical self. But there is every “volition” on the part of the reactive mind.

A sympathy engram would go something like this: a small boy, much victimized by his parents, is extremely ill. His grandmother attends him and while he is delirious soothes him and tells him she will take care of him, that she will stay right there until he is well. This puts a high “survival” value on being sick. He does not feel safe around his parents; he wants his grandmother present (she is a winning valence because she orders the parents around), and he now has an engram. Minus the engram there would be no psycho-somatic illness. Sickness, “unconsciousness” and physical pain are essential to the receipt of this engram. But it is not a contra-survival engram. It is a pro-survival engram. It can be dramatized in one’s own valence.

The psycho-somatic illness, in such a case as this, would be a “precious possession.” “I” doesn’t even know the computation. The analyzer was out when the engram went in. The analyzer cannot recall that engram with anything short of dianetic therapy. And the engram will not clear away.

Now with this engram we have a patient with sinusitis and a predisposition to lung infections. It may be that he was luckless enough to marry a counterpart of his mother or his grandmother. The reactive mind cannot tell the difference between grandmother or mother and wife if they are even vaguely similar in speech, voice-tone or mannerisms. The wife is not sympathetic. In goes the engram to demand that sympathy. And even if the wife thinks that sinusitis and lung infection are repulsive enough to lead to divorce, the reactive mind keeps that engram keyed-in. The more hatred from the wife, the more that engram keys-in. You can kill a man that way.

The above is a standard sympathy engram. When a therapist tries to get that engram away from the patient, the reactive mind balks. The “I” doesn’t balk. The analyzer doesn’t balk. These are hopeful that this engram will spring. But the reactive mind keeps it nailed down until the dianeticist puts a crowbar under it. Then it is gone. (Enough locks may be lifted, by the way, to alleviate this condition. But the patient will dig up another engram!)

Resistance to past therapies has resulted from these sympathy engrams. Yet they lie right there on the surface, fully exposed as chronic psycho-somatic illness.

Feeding a patient with a psycho-somatic ill any number of drugs can result in only temporary relief. “I” doesn’t want the illness. The analyzer doesn’t want it. But the body has it and if anybody succeeds in curing it short of removing that engram, the body, at the command of the reactive mind, will find something else to substitute for that ill or develop an “allergy” to the drug or annul the effect of the drug entirely.

Of course one can always rip living tissue out of the skull with knives, ice-picks or shock in wholesale quantities. This will cure a psycho-somatic ill. It also, unhappily, cures the personality, the intellect and all too often, life itself.

In dianetics the application of technique to relieve the engrams causing these ills has brought the uniform relief of all patients treated without relapse. In short and in brief, psycho- somatic ills can now be cured. All of them.