DMSH 1950 Book 2 Chapter 9

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

Keying-in the Engram

The single source of inorganic mental illness and organic psycho-somatic illness is the reactive engram bank. The reactive mind impinges these engrams upon the analytical mind and the organism whenever they are restimulated after being keyed-in.

There are many known incidents in a lifetime which apparently have a profound influence upon the happiness and mental condition of the individual. The individual remembers these and to them attributes his troubles. In a measure he is right: he is at least looking back at incidents which are held in place by engrams. He does not see the engrams. In fact, unless he is acquainted with dianetics, he does not know the engrams are there. And even then he will not know their contents until he has undergone therapy.

It can be demonstrated with ease that any moment of “conscious level” unhappiness which contained great stress or emotion was not guilty of the charge of causing aberration and psycho-somatic illness. These moments, of course, played a role in the matter: they were the key-ins.

The process of keying-in an engram is not very complex. Engram 105, let us say, was a moment of “unconsciousness” when the prenatal child was struck via Mother, by Father. The father, aware or not of the child, uttered the words, “God damn you, you filthy whore: you’re no good!” This engram lay where it was impressed, in the reactive bank. Now it could lie there for seventy years and never become keyed-in. It contains a headache and a falling body and the grating of teeth and the intestinal sounds of the mother. And any of these sounds, post-birth, may be present in large quantities without keying-in this engram.

One day, however, the father becomes exasperated at the child. The child is tired and feverish, which is to say that his analytical mind may not be at its highest level of activity. And the father has a certain set of engrams which he dramatizes and one of these engrams is the above incident. And the father reaches out and slaps the child and says, “God damn you: you’re no good!” The child cries. That night he has a headache and is much worse physically. And he feels both an intense hatred and a fear of his father. The engram has keyed-in. Now the sound of a falling body or grating teeth or any trace of anger of any kind in the father’s voice will make the child nervous. His physical health will suffer. He will begin to have headaches.

If we take this child who has now become an adult and rake back over his past, we shall discover (though it may be occluded) a lock like the above key-in. And now not only the key-in; we may discover half a hundred, half a thousand, such locks just on this one subject. One would say, unless he knew dianetics, that this child was ruined post-natally by being beaten by the father, and one might attempt to bring the patient’s mind back into better condition by removing these locks.

There are literally thousands, tens of thousands of locks in the average life. To take all of these locks away would be a task for Hercules. Every engram a person has, if it has been keyed-in, may have its hundreds of locks.

If conditioning existed as a mechanism of pain and stress, Mankind would be in very bad condition. Fortunately conditioning does not so exist. It appears to exist but the appearance is not the fact. One would think that if a child were daily thrust around and reviled he would eventually becomed conditioned into a belief that this was the way life was and that he had better turn against it.

Conditioning does not, however, exist. Pavlov may have been able to drive dogs mad by repeated experiments: this was simply bad observation on the part of the observer. The dogs might be trained to do this or that.

But it was not conditioning. The dogs went mad because they were given engrams if and when they did go mad. A series of such experiments, properly conducted and observed, proves this contention.

The boy who was daily told he was no good and who apparently went into a decline solely because of that declined only because of the engram. This is a happy fact. The engram may take a while to locate — a few hours — but when it is alleviated or refiled in the standard memory banks, everything which had locked on to it also refiles.

People trying to help others with their aberrations who did not know about engrams were, of course, operating with 2.9 strikes against any success. In the first place, the locks themselves may vanish down into the reactive bank. Thus we get a patient who says, “Oh, my father wasn’t so bad. He was a pretty good guy.” And we discovered, and the patient discovers, when an engram is sprung, that father was customarily to be found dramatizing. What the patient knows about his past before engrams are sprung is not worth cataloguing. In another case we may find a patient saying, “Oh, I had a terrible childhood, a terrible childhood. I was beaten seriously.” And we discover, when we get the engrams refiled, that the parents of this patient never laid a hand on him in punishment or wrath in his entire life.

An engram may coast along without being keyed-in for decades. One of the most remarkable types of case is one which spent an entire youth without displaying any aberration. Then suddenly, at the age of twenty-six, we discover him to be so aberrated, so suddenly, that it appears he must have been hexed. Perhaps most of his engrams were concerned with the action of getting married and having children. He has never been married before. The first time he is weary or ill and realizes he has a wife on his hands, the first engram keys-in. Then the dwindling spiral begins to go to work. This one shuts down the analyzer enough so that others can be keyed-in. And finally we may discover him in an institution.

The young girl who has been happy and carefree to the age of thirteen and then suddenly goes into a decline has not, that moment, received an engram. She has had an engram key-in which let another key-in. Fission reaction. This key-in may have required nothing more than the discovery that she was bleeding from the vagina. She has an emotional engram about this; she becomes frantic. The other engrams, as the days follow, may swing into position to impinge upon her. And so she becomes ill.

The first sexual experience may be one which keys-in an engram. This is so standard that sex has gotten a rather bad name for itself here and there as being an aberrative factor all by itself. Sex is not and never has been aberrative. Physical pain and emotion which incidentally contain sex as a subject are the aberrative factors.

It may be that a patient is urgent in her insistence that her father raped her when she was nine and that this is the cause of all her misery. Large numbers of insane patients claim this. And it is perfectly true. Father did rape her, but it happened she was only nine days beyond conception at the time. The pressure and upset of coitus is very uncomfortable to the child and normally can be expected to give the child an engram which will have as its content the sexual act and everything that was said.

Drug hypnosis is dangerous when one is trying to treat psychotics as has been mentioned. And there are other reasons it is dangerous. Any operation under anaesthetic or any drugging of a patient may bring about the keying-in of engrams. Here is the analyzer shut down, there is the reactive bank open to be stirred by any comment made by the people around the drugged subject.

Hypnotism itself is a condition in which engrams may be keyed-in which have never before been restimulated: the glassy-eyed stare of the person who has been “too often hypnotized,” the lack of will seen in people too often hypnotized, the dependence of the subject upon the hypnotic operator, all these things stem from the keying-in of engrams. Any time the body is rendered “unconscious” without physical pain, no matter how light the degree of

“unconsciousness” is, even if it is only the lightness of weariness, an engram may be keyed-in. And when “unconsciousness” is complicated by new physical pain, a new engram is formed which may gather up with it an entire bundle of old engrams not hitherto keyed-in. Such a late engram would be a “cross-engram” in that it crosses chains of engrams. And if such an engram resulted in a loss of sanity, it would be called a “break-engram.”

There are some aspects to various drug “unconsciousnesses” which have been very perplexing in the past. Psychotic women often maintain, after they are awakened from a drugged sleep (and sometimes a hypnotic sleep), that they have been raped. Men occasionally maintain that the operator has tried to perform a homosexual act upon them while they were drugged. Although it occasionally occurs that people are raped after being drugged, the largest number of such assertions are merely an aspect of the key-in mechanism. Almost any child has been put through the prenatal discomfort of coitus. Often there was violent emotion other than passion present. Such an engram may stay out of circuit for years until drugged “unconsciousness” or some such thing keys it in. The patient goes to sleep without a keyed-in engram; he wakes up with one. He tries to justify the strange sensations he has (and engrams are timeless things unless they are arranged properly on the time track) and comes out with the “solution” that he must have been raped.

Childhood rapes are very seldom the responsible cause in sexual aberration. They are the key-in.

One looks at the conscious-level locks and sees sadness, mental anguish and misfortune. Some of the experience there seems to be so terrible that it must certainly cause aberration. But it does not. Man is a tough, resilient creature. These conscious-level experiences are at best only guide-posts leading toward the actual seat of trouble, and that is not known in any detailed way to the individual.

The engram is never “computed.” An example of this, on a lightly aberrative level, can be found in a child’s punishment. If one examines a childhood where punishment has been corporal and frequent, he begins to understand the utter futility of the pain-drive theory. Punishment actually and literally and emphatically does no good of any kind whatsoever but accomplishes quite the reverse, since it occasions a reactive revolt against the punishment source and is likely to cause not only a disintegration of a mind but also a continual bedevilment of the punishment source. Man reacts to fight sources of pain. When he stops fighting them he is mentally broken and of little use to anyone, much less himself.

We take a case of a boy who was beaten with a hair-brush every time he was “bad.” In researching this case the most searching inquiry fails to reveal any vivid recall of why he was punished but only that he was punished. The progress of the event would go something like this: activity more or less rational, fright at threatened punishment, punishment, sorrow over punishment, renewed activity. The mechanics of the case showed the person to have been engaged on some activity which, whether others would consider it so or not, was nevertheless survival activity to him, giving him either pleasure or actual gains or even the assertion that he could and would survive; the moment punishment is threatened old punishments go into restimulation as minor engrams, resting usually on major engrams: this shuts down the analytical power to some extent and the recording is now being done on a reactive level; the punishment takes place, submerging analytical awareness so that the punishment records in the engram bank only; the sorrow following is still in the period of analytical shut-down; the analyzer gradually turns on; full awareness returns, and then activity on an analytical plane can be resumed. All corporal punishment runs this gamut and all other punishments are, at best, locks, following this same pattern with only the complete shut-down resulting from pain missing.

If the analyzer wants this data for computation, it is not available. There is a reaction in the reactive mind when the matter is approached. But there are five courses the reactive mind can take with this data! And there is no guarantee and no method between land and sky of knowing what course the reactive mind will take with the data except knowing the full engram

bank — and if that is known, the person could be cleared with a few more hours work and would need no punishment.

These five ways of handling data make corporal punishment an unstable and unreliable thing. A ratio exists which can be tested and proven in any man’s experience: A man is evil in the direct ratio that destructiveness has been leveled against him. An individual (including those individuals society is liable to forget as individuals: children) reacts against the punishment source whether that source be parents or government. Anything which sets itself forward against an individual as a punishment source will be considered in greater or lesser degree (as it is in proportion to benefits) as a target for the reactions of the individual.

The little accidental milk glass upsets of children, that noise which just accidentally occurs on the porch where the children are playing, that little accidental ruination of Papa’s hat or Mama’s rug, these are often cold, calculated reactive mind actions against pain sources. The analytical mind may temporize about love and affection and the need of three square meals. The reactive mind runs off the lessons it has learned and devil take the meals.

If one turned an idiot loose on an adding machine to let him audit the company books and let him prevent the auditor from touching equipment and data which has to be his if any answers will be right, one would get very little in the way of correct answers. And if one kept feeding the idiot and made him fat and powerful, the firm would sooner or later go to ruin. The reactive mind is the idiot, the auditor is “I” and the firm is the organism. Punishment feeds the idiot.

The helpless amazement of police about the “confirmed criminal” (and the police belief in the “criminal type” and the “criminal mind”) comes about through this cycle. Police, for some reason or other, like governments, have become identified with society. Take any one of these “criminals” and clear him and the society regains a rational being of which it can use all it can get. Keep up the punishment cycle and the prisons will get more numerous and more full.

The problem of the child lashing back at his parents by “negation” and the problem of Jimmie the Cob blowing a bank guard apart in an armed robbery stem both from the same mechanism. The child, examined on the “conscious-level,” is not aware of his causes but will put forth various justifications for his conduct. Jimmie the Cob, waiting for this oh so very sentient society to tie him down with straps in an electric chair and give him an electric shock therapy which will cause him to cease and desist forever, examined for his causes, will pour forth justifications to explain his life and conduct. The human mind is a pretty wonderful computing machine. The reasons it can evolve for unreasonable acts have staggered one and all and particularly social workers. Without knowing the cause and the mechanism, the chances of drawing a correct conclusion by comparing all conducts available are as remote as winning at fantan from a Chinese. Hence, the punishments have continued as the muddled answer to a very muddled society.

There are five ways in which a human being reacts toward a source of danger. These are also the five courses he can take on any given problem. And it might be said that this is five-valued action.

The parable of the black panther* is appropriate here. Let us suppose that a particularly black-tempered black panther is sitting on the stairs and that a man named Gus is sitting in the living room. Gus wants to go to bed. But there is the black panther. The problem is to get upstairs. There are five things that Gus can do about this panther: (1) he can go attack the black panther; (2) he can run out of the house and flee the black panther; (3) he can use the back stairs and avoid the black panther; (4) he can neglect the black panther; and (5) he can succumb to the black panther.

These are the five mechanisms: attack, flee, avoid, neglect or succumb.

All actions can be seen to fall within these courses. And all actions are visible in life. In the case of a punishment course, the reactive mind can succumb, neglect, avoid, flee or attack it. The action is dictated by a complexity of engrams and depends upon which one comes into restimulation. This maelstrom of reaction generally resolves itself, however, in one of the five courses. * In dianetics considerable slang has been developed by patients and dianeticists and they call the “black panther mechanism” a neglect of the problem. One supposes this stems from the ridiculousness of biting black panthers.

If a child is punished and thereafter obeys, he can be considered to have succumbed. And the value of a child who will succumb to punishment is so slight that the Spartans would long since have drowned him, for it means he has sunk into an apathy unless it so happens that he himself has computed the idea, by-passing all reaction, that the thing for which he was punished was not bright (he can’t be assisted in this computation if punishment is entered into the reactive mind by the source trying to assist him). He can flee the punishment source, which at least is not apathy but merely cowardice by popular judgment. He can neglect the matter entirely and ignore the punishment source — and would have been called a Stoic by the ancients, but might be called merely dull-witted by his friends. He can avoid the punishment source, which might give him the doubtful compliment of being sly or cunning or pandering. Or he can attack the punishment source either by direct action or by upsetting or fouling the person or the possessions of the source — in which instance he would be called, on direct action, a valiant fool, taking parental size into account, or in a less direct fashion he could be called “covertly hostile” or could be said to be “negating”; as long as a human being will attack as a response to a valid threat, he can be said to be in fair mental condition — “normal” — and a child is said to be “just acting like any normal child.”

Enter punishment into the computation and it no longer computes. It is entirely different in the case of “experience.” Life has plenty of painful experience waiting for any human being without other human beings complicating the score. A person who is still unblocked in his dynamics or who has been unblocked by dianetics can absorb the most amazing amount of hammering in the business of living. Here, even when the reactive receives engrams as a result of some of this experience, the analytical mind can continue to cope with the situation without becoming aberrated in any way. Man is a tough, resilient, competent character. But when the law of affinity begins to be broken and such a breaking of affinity gets into the reactive bank, human beings, as antagonistic sources of non-survival, become a punishment source. If no contra-survival engrams involving human beings are in the earlier (before 5 years) content of the engram bank, pro-survival engrams are taken as a matter of course and are not severely aberrative. In other words, it is the breaking of affinity with his fellows on an engramic level which most solidly blocks the dynamics. Man’s affinity with Man is far more a scientific fact than it is a poetic and idyllic idea.

The cycle, then, of life which will be “normal” (current average state) or psychotic is an easy thing to draw. It begins with a large number of engrams before birth, it gathers more in the dependent and rather helpless condition post-birth. Punishment of various kinds entering now as locks key-in the engrams. New engrams which will involve the earlier ones enter. New locks accumulate. Illness and aberrated action set in most certainly by the age of forty or fifty. And death ensues sometimes afterwards.

Short of the optimum solution of clearing the engrams, there are several things which can be done about aberration and psycho-somatic ills. That these methods are uncertain and of only limited value does not mean that they will not occasionally meet with some astonishingly beneficial responses.

Such methods can be classified under the headings of environmental change, education and physical treatment. Taking factors out of the environment of an aberree or taking the aberree out of the environment in which he is unhappy or ineffective can bring about some astonishingly swift recoveries: this is valid therapy; it removes the restimulators from the individual or takes the individual away from the restimulators. It is ordinarily quite hit-or-miss and more miss than hit, and it will not remove all the restimulators by nine-tenths since the

individual himself carries the bulk of these around with him or is compelled to contact them. One is reminded of a case which had severe asthma. He had received it in a very severe birth engram; his frantic parents carried him to every mountain asthma resort suggested and spent tens of thousands of dollars in these jauntings. When this patient was cleared and the engram refiled, it was discovered that the restimulator for his asthma was clean, cold air! The only certainty in the environment approach is that a sickly child will recover when removed from restimulative parents and taken where he is loved and feels safe — for his sickness is the inevitable result of restimulation of prenatal engrams by one or the other or both his parents. Somewhere along the line there is probably a husband or a wife who has descended chronically into the first two zones after marriage after having married pseudo-mother or pseudo-father or pseudo-abortionist.

In the educational field, new data or enthusiasms may very well key-out engrams by overbalancing the reactive mind in the light of a new analytical surge. If a man can simply be convinced he has been fighting shadows or if he can be persuaded to hang his fears on some indicated cause, whether that cause is true or not, he can be benefited. Sometimes he can be “educated” into a strong faith in some deity or cult which will cause him to feel so invulnerable that he rises above his engrams. Raising his survival potential in any way will raise his general tone to a point where it is no longer on a par with the reactive bank. Giving him an education in engineering or music, where he can receive a higher level of respect, will often defend him from his restimulators. A rise to a position of esteem is actually a change of environment, but it is also educational since he is now taught he is valuable. If a man can be made busy at a hobby or work by personal or exterior education that it is good for him, another mechanism comes into being — the analytical mind becomes so engrossed that it takes to itself more and more energy for its activity and begins to align with a new purpose.

Physical treatment resulting in improved physical condition will bring about hope or change a man’s reactions by shifting him on his time track. It may key-out engrams.

These methods are valid therapy: they are also, in reverse, the things which cause aberrations to manifest themselves. There are wrong ways to act and wrong things to do and wrong ways to treat men which, in the light of what we know now, are criminal.

Thrusting a man into an environment which restimulates him and making him stay there is a slice of murder. Making him keep an associate who is restimulative is bad: making a man or a woman stay with a marriage partner who is restimulative is unworkable mores unless dianetic therapy is used; making a child stay in a home where he is restimulated is most certainly inhibitive, not only of his happiness but of his mental and physical development — a child should have many more rights about such things, more places to go.

On the physical therapy level anything as violent as surgery or exodontistry in the psycho-somatic plane is utter barbarism in the light of dianetics. “Toothache” is normally psycho-somatic. Organic illnesses enough to fill several catalogues are psycho-somatic. No recourse to surgery of any kind should be had until it is certain that the ailment is not psycho- somatic or that the illness will not diminish by itself if the potency of the reactive mind is reduced. Mental-physical therapy is too ridiculous, with the source of aberration now a science, to be seriously mentioned. For no thinking doctor or psychiatrist possessed of this information would touch another electrode for electric shock therapy or even glance at a scalpel or ice-pick to perform an operation on the pre-frontal lobes of the brain unless that doctor or psychiatrist is himself so thoroughly aberrated that the act springs, not from any desire to heal but from the most utter and craven sadism to which engrams can bring a man.*

* Many persons investigating the treatment of the mentally ill by psychiatrists and others in charge of mental institutions are prompted, when they discover just what the pre-frontal lobotomy, the trans-orbital leukotomy and electric shock actually do to patients, to revile the psychiatrist as unworthy of trust and accuse him of using it to conduct vivisection experiments on human beings. That any possible hope of recovery via dianetics may be gone for these unfortunate patients in the majority of cases should not be blamed upon the psychiatrist and

neuro-surgeon. These people have only followed their teachings in various universities and have practiced such actions merely because they believed the problem of the mind could not be solved by anyone. A witch-burning attitude toward these people is very far from the one adopted by dianetics. Pointing to the fact that they have murdered minds which would otherwise have recovered, labeling them “mind snatchers” and making a horror story out of their actions is far from rational conduct. On the whole these people have been entirely sincere in their efforts to help the insane. By contagion of aberration such people have been subjected to enormous stresses in this work, having had their own engrams in continual restimulation. They can be cleared and their experience is valuable. Legislation against them such as that recently mentioned by a senator who was familiar with dianetics, horror stories about them in newspapers and a general public antipathy as well as the medical doctor’s traditional distrust of them cannot but bring about a disorderly condition. Dianetics is a newly discovered science and is nonpartisan.