DMSH 1950 Book 3 Chapter 3

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

The Auditor's Role

The purpose of therapy and its sole target is the removal of the content of the reactive engram bank. In a release, the majority of emotional stress is deleted from this bank. In a clear, the entire content is removed.

The application of a science is an art. That is true of any science. The efficacy of its application depends upon the understanding, skill and ability of whomever applies it. The chemist has a science of chemistry and yet the profession of being a chemist is an art. The engineer may have behind him the precision of all the physical sciences and yet the practice of engineering is an art.

Certain rules of procedure can be laid down after the basic axioms of a science are understood. Beyond those rules of procedure is the understanding, skill and ability necessary to application.

Dianetics is extremely simple. This does not mean that cases cannot be extremely complicated. To cover one case for each kind of case in this book would necessitate two billion cases and that would only encompass the current population. For each man is a great deal different from every other man. His inherent personality is different. His composite of experience is different. And his dynamics are of different strengths. The only constant is the mechanism of the reactive engram bank and that alone does not vary. The content of that bank is different from man to man both in quantity and intensity but the mechanism of operation of the bank and therefore the basic mechanisms of dianetics are constant from man to man, and were in every age and will be in every future age until Man evolves into another organism.

The target is the engram. It is also the target of the patient’s analytical mind and the patient’s dynamics as he tries to live his life: it is the target of the auditor’s analytical mind and the auditor’s dynamics. So bracketed and salvoed it gives up its store of engrams.

This should be extremely plain to any auditor: the amount he relaxes from the position of auditor and forgets the target, he garners trouble which will consume his time. The moment he makes the error of thinking that the person, the analytical mind or the dynamics of the patient are resisting, trying to stop therapy, or giving up, the auditor has made the fundamental and primary error in the practice of dianetics. Almost anything that goes wrong can be traced back to this error. It cannot be too emphatically stated that the analytical mind and the dynamics of the patient never, never, never resist the auditor. The auditor is not there to be resisted. He has no concern with resistance from anything except the patient’s (and sometimes his own) engrams.

The auditor is not there as the patient’s driver or adviser. He is not there to be intimidated by the patient’s engrams or be frightened by their aspects. He is there to audit and only to audit. If he feels that he is called upon to be lordly to the patient, then the auditor had better change chair for couch because he has a case of authoritarianism coming into view. The word auditor is used, not “operator” or “therapist,” because it is a cooperative effort between the auditor and the patient, and the law of affinity is at work.

The patient cannot see his own aberrations. That is one of the reasons why the auditor is there. The patient needs to be bolstered to face the unknowns of his life. That is another reason the auditor is there. The patient would not dare address the world which has gotten inside him and turn his back upon the world that is outside him unless he has a sentry. That is another reason the auditor is there.

The auditor’s job is to safeguard the person of the patient during therapy, to compute the reasons why the patient’s mind cannot reach into the engram bank, to strengthen the patient’s nerve and to get those engrams.

There is a three-way case of affinity at work this moment. I am in affinity with the auditor: I am telling him all that has been discovered and is in practice in dianetics and I want him to succeed. The auditor is in affinity with the patient: he wants the patient to attack engrams. The patient is in affinity with the auditor because, with minimal work, that patient is going to get better and with persistence lent him by the auditor, plus his own, will become a release or a clear. There are even more affinities at work, a vast network of them. This is a cooperative endeavor.

The engram bank is the target, not the patient. If the patient swears and moans and weeps and pleads, those are engrams talking. After a while the engrams that make him swear and moan and weep and plead will be discharged and refiled. The patient, in whatever state, knows full well that the action taken is necessary. If the auditor is short of rationality that he mistakes this swearing or moaning as something directed at him personally, that auditor had better change places with the patient and undergo therapy.

The only thing which resists is the engram! When it is being restimulated it impinges against the patient’s analyzer, tends to reduce analytical power, and the patient exhibits a modified dramatization. Any auditor with two brain cells to click together will never be in any slightest danger of his person at the hands of the pre-release or pre-clear. If the auditor wants to use hypnotism and try to run late physically painful engrams such as operations when early ones are available, he may find himself targeted. But then he has done something very wrong. If the auditor suddenly gets supermoral and lectures the patient, he may get involved, but again he has done something very wrong. If the auditor snarls and snaps at the patient, he may get targeted, but once more a fundamental error has been made.

The target is the engram bank. It is the auditor’s job to attack the pre-clear’s engram bank. It is the pre-clear’s job to attack that bank. To attack the pre-clear is to permit his engram bank to attack the pre-clear.

We know that there are five methods of handling an engram. Four of them are wrong. To succumb to an engram is apathy, to neglect one is carelessness, but to avoid or flee from one is cowardice. Attack and only attack resolves the problem. It is the duty of the auditor to make very sure that the pre-clear keeps attacking engrams, not the auditor or the exterior world. If the auditor attacks the pre-clear, that’s bad gunnery and very poor logic.

The engram bank is best attacked primarily by discharging its emotional charge anywhere it can be contacted. After that it is best attacked by finding out what the pre-clear, in reverie, thinks would happen to him if he got well, got better, found out, etc. And then it is most and always most important, in any way possible, to contact the primary moment of pain or unconsciousness in the patient’s life. This is basic-basic. Once an auditor has basic-basic, the case will swiftly resolve. If the preclear’s reactive mind is suppressing basic-basic, then the auditor should discharge more reactive emotion, discover the computation now in force, and try again. He will eventually get basic-basic. That’s important. And that is all that is important in a pre-clear.

In the pre-release (patient working toward release only) the task is to discharge emotion and as many early engrams as will present themselves easily. The reduction of locks may be included in pre-release; but only when they lead to basic-basic should locks be touched in a preclear.

There are three levels of healing. The first is getting the job done efficiently. Below that is making the patient comfortable. Below that is sympathy. In short, if you can do nothing for a man with a broken back, you can make him comfortable. If you can’t even make him comfortable, you can sympathize with him.

The second and third echelons above are entirely unwarranted in dianetics. The job can be done efficiently. Making the patient comfortable is a waste of time. Giving him sympathy may snarl up the entire case, for his worst engrams will be sympathy engrams and sympathy may restimulate them out of place. The auditor who indulges in “hand-patting,” no matter how much it seems to be indicated, is wasting time and slowing down the case. Undue roughness is not indicated. A friendly, cheerful, optimistic attitude will take care of everything. A pre-clear sometimes needs a grin. But he has already had more “hand-patting” than the analyzer has been able to compute. His chronic psycho-somatic illness contains sympathy in its engram.

The next thing the auditor should know and live is the AUDITOR’S CODE. This may sound like something from “When Knighthood Was in Flower” or the “Thirteen Rituals for Heavenly Bliss and Nirvana,” but unless it is employed by the auditor on his patients, the auditor will have some heavy slogging. This code is not for the comfort of the pre-clear; it is exclusively for the protection of the auditor. The AUDITOR’S CODE should never be violated. Practice in dianetics has demonstrated that violation of the AUDITOR’S CODE alone can interrupt cases.

The auditor should be courteous in his treatment of all pre-clears.

The auditor should be kind, not giving way to any indulgence of cruelty toward pre- clears, nor surrendering to any desire to punish.

The auditor should be quiet during therapy, not given to talk beyond the absolute essentials of dianetics during an actual session.

The auditor should be trustworthy, keeping his word when given, keeping his appointments in schedules and his commitments to work and never giving forth any commitment of any kind which he has any slightest reason to believe he cannot keep.

The auditor should be courageous, never giving ground or violating the fundamentals of therapy because a pre-clear thinks he should. The auditor should be patient in his working, never becoming restless or annoyed by the pre-clear, no matter what the pre-clear is doing or saying.

The auditor should be thorough, never permitting his plan of work to be swayed or a charge to be avoided.

The auditor should be persistent, never giving up until he has achieved results.

The auditor should be uncommunicative, never giving the patient any information whatsoever about his case, operates more or less automatically on this code. Dianetics is a parallel to thought, since it follows the natural laws of thought. What works in dianetics works as well in life.

Various conditions ensue when any of the above are violated. All violations slow therapy and cause the auditor more work. All violations come back to the detriment of the auditor.

For instance, in the last, it is not part of the auditor’s work to inform the pre-clear of anything. As soon as he starts doing so, the pre-clear promptly hooks the auditor into the circuit as the source of information and so avoids engrams.

The auditor will see in progress the most violent and disturbing human emotions. He may be moved to sympathy, but if he is, he has overlooked something and hindered therapy: whenever an emotion shows, it is an emotion which will shortly be history. Whatever gyrations the pre-clear may go through, however much he may move or wrestle around, the auditor must keep firmly in mind that every moan or gyration is one step closer to the goal. For why be frightened or waste sympathy about something which, when it has been recounted a few times will leave a pre-clear happier?

If the auditor becomes frightened and pulls that error of all errors when a pre-clear begins to shake, “Come up to present time!” he can be sure that the pre-clear will have a couple of bad days and that the next time the auditor wants to enter that engram it will be blocked.

If an auditor assumes the state of mind that he can sit and whistle while Rome burns before him and be prepared to grin about it, then he will do an optimum job. The things at which he gazes, no matter how they look, no matter how they sound, are solid gains. It’s the quiet, orderly patient who is making few gains. This does not mean that the auditor is trying for nothing but violence, but it does mean that when he gets it he can be cheerful and content that one more engram has lost its charge.

The task of auditing is rather much a shepherd’s task, herding the little sheep, the engrams, into the pen for slaughter. The pre-clear isn’t under the auditor’s orders but the pre- clear, if the case runs well, will do whatever the auditor wants with these engrams because the analytical mind and the dynamics of the pre-clear want that job done. The mind knows how the mind operates.