DMSH 1950 Book 3 Chapter 8

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

Some Types of Engrams

Two examples of each kind of engram are given, so that the auditor can clearly understand their differences:

CONTRA-SURVIVAL ENGRAM

This is any kind of engram which lies across the dynamics and has no alignment with purpose: Fight between mother and father shortly after conception. Father strikes mother in stomach. She screams (first percepts are pain, pressure, sound of blow and scream) and he says, “God damn you, I hate you! You are no good. I’m going to kill you!” Mother says, “Please don’t hit me again. Please don’t. I’m hurt. I’m hurt. I’m frantic with pain!” Father says, “Lie there and rot, damn you! Good-bye!”

In this engram we have a severe aberrative situation, first, because it is early; second, because its content says the person who has it is hurt and frantic; third, because it has a holder and is therefore apt to become chronic (“Lie there”); fourth, because it can produce disease (“and rot”); fifth, because it has religious connotation about God and being damned; sixth, because it gives the individual a feeling other people are no good (“you” applies to other people, ordinarily); seventh, because it has an emotional tone, by content, of hostility (“I hate you”) and eighth, because the individual, post-birth, has to live with these restimulative persons, his father and mother. It has other additional effects, giving, like all engrams, two additional and unnecessary valences to the individual, one of which, the mother’s, is a coward valence and the other, the father’s, a bully valence. The individual may dramatize this in several ways: if he does not dramatize it, he feels the pain (as he would then be in his own valence) whenever it is restimulated; if he dramatizes the mother, he will feel the pain she received, which is a blow in the stomach (whereas his own was on his head and heart); if he dramatizes the father, he will be in trouble with society, to say nothing of his own wife and children. There is no winning with any engram of any kind but so long as a person has engrams, some kinds, the sympathy engram particularly, serve to hold away antagonistic engrams.

The second contra-survival example is a morning sickness engram where the mother is vomiting so violently that the compression on the child is severe and renders it “unconscious.” The mother is vomiting and gasping and saying to herself between spasms, “Oh, why was I ever born! I knew I shouldn’t have let him come in me. I knew it, I knew it. It was wrong but he had to do it anyway. Ugh, how nasty. Sex is nasty. It’s horrible. I hate sex. I hate men. I hate them. Oh, ugh, it won’t come up, it won’t come up. I am so sick at my stomach and it won’t come up.”

In this engram we have something a woman might dramatize if she were pregnant but which a man could never dramatize as pregnancy but only by being sick at his stomach. Much morning sickness seems to be an aberration stemming from engrams: somewhere back in time some mother may have vomited from food poisoning and started the whole thing — perhaps in the days when Man was still in trees. Now note that the mother is throwing up, that the content of her stomach is being regurgitated: the engram, however, says that it won’t come up: when this is dramatized with the individual in his own valence, he experiences pressure on him and “unconsciousness” and thus such a dramatization is impossible; when this is dramatized it must be dramatized as the mother but the action is not dramatized so much as the command and we get a condition where the individual with such an engram, when he is sick, cannot vomit. The command of the engram is more important than the action people take in it. On a reactive level there is no rationality. If this were on a conscious level, where it would not be aberrative, of course, the action could be mimicked and then would contain actual vomiting, the action on the conscious level being more important than the word content.

In therapy, when we encounter this engram, we may have difficulty entering it because it says that “I shouldn’t have let him come in me,” which is a denyer. We also find, with the “It won’t come up,” a holder. The engram will most certainly lift the moment these words and the somatic lift, and these words could not interrupt the engram. If the engram does not lift, it is because there is a previous engram with much the same content (the aberree has a pattern of dramatization which he repeats over and over and over, giving people around him many incidents which are more or less alike except in their point in time). This could be restimulated in the environment (but not in therapy) to a point where it would cause madness, for “it” may also refer to the child, who identifying himself with the word “it,” then cannot rise to present time. In therapy the engram is somewhat drained of power just by being touched with the returned analytical mind; further, the auditor discovers the patient is not moving on the track and a scout of the situation soon discovers the holder, for the patient will sooner or later say he “can’t come up” even if the auditor has not guessed it.

In the aberrative sphere, this engram would probably put a heavy block across the second dynamic and we would find the person in whose reactive mind it was being frigid, prudish and sharp with children (all of which go together in various combinations). Further, we would find an apprehension that “he” was going to have to do something when he found out it was wrong.

In the psycho-somatic sphere it might cause headaches during or because of coitus or a tendency to nausea whenever coitus was performed. Any of the phrases of this engram, like any other phrases in any other engram, would tend to give him both the somatic and the aberration, providing, of course, the individual was in a state of low analytical power as found in weariness or slight illness. Thus, this one is waiting until somebody says during a future “unconsciousness” period, preferably in a voice like the mother’s would sound through the walls of the abdomen and womb, “Ugh, how nasty!” or some other phrase to key it in. “Nastier,” by the way, would not key it in: “ugly” despite a similar syllable to “Ugh” would not key it in. The sound of vomiting itself probably would key it in.

PRO-SURVIVAL ENGRAM

This could be any engram which, by content only, not by any real aid to the individual containing it, pretended to assist survival. Let us take a coitus engram: mother and father are engaged in intercourse which, by pressure, is painful to the unborn child and which renders him “unconscious” (common occurrence, like morning sickness, usually present in any engram bank). Mother is saying, “Oh, I can’t live without it. It’s wonderful. It’s wonderful. Oh, how nice. Oh, do it again!” and father is saying, “Come! Come! Oh, you’re so good. You’re so wonderful! Ahhh!” Mother’s orgasm puts the finishing touch on the “unconsciousness” in the child. Mother says, “It’s beautiful.” Father, finished now, says, “Get up,” meaning she should take a douche (they do not know she is pregnant) and then begins to snore.

Obviously this is a valuable incident because one “cannot live without it.” Furthermore, “it’s beautiful,” also, “it’s wonderful.” But it is also extremely painful.

It cannot be followed because it has first something which beckons part of the mind back, “Come!” and then, later, tells it to “Get up.” Things that are “beautiful” and “wonderful” can cause our patient, not in therapy, to have an orgasm when she looks at beautiful and wonderful things, providing they have been so labeled.

Dramatization of this can be in either the father valence or the mother valence: to dramatize it in the personal valence would mean physical pain. Thus, the individual holding this, will be found, varied only by his other coitus engrams, to be, as father, disgusted after the act and telling his partner to “Get up.” The emotion is contained in how the words, “Get up,” were spoken: this is a telegraphed emotion out of voice tones, not word content: engrams always contain both.

In therapy, we find the reactive mind very chary of letting this one come to view because, after all, one “cannot live without it.” There are whole classes of these favorable evaluation phrases in engrams and wherever he comes upon one the auditor will find the pre- clear’s reactive mind holding out on him. “I don’t want to lose you,” “Hold on to this,” “I can’t let go of this, I’d fall,” and so forth. But this is, after all, just another engram and “pleasant” or not is aberrative.

Masochistic and sadistic impulses often stem from coital engrams which contain those specific things, so the auditor is not to infer that merely because this coitus is painful to the child, it will make the child a masochist or a sadist. If masochism or sadism is present in the patient it is caused by engrams which contain rapes, beating for sexual gratification, enjoyment of pain, etc., and engrams which homonymically seem to state that sex and pain are alike such as a “normal” coitus which says, “It hurts so good! Hurt me again, Bill. Hurt me again! Oh, shove it in me, way up! Make it hurt so I can come.” Dramatized by a boy, this might very well bring about sodomy because the engram is not an observed action but a series of commands, literally taken.

Thus our pro-survival coitus engram, as the first example of one here, is relatively innocent in a person’s aberrative pattern. But by an accident of words, it could be very different in its aberrative effect.

The second pro-survival example concerns another prenatal engram. (One auditor commented, while he was being cleared, that he “had thought of my life B.D. — before dianetics — as a graph of years, in which the time from conception to birth occupied one-fiftieth of the linear distance between conception and present time, but now think of the prenatal period as occupying two-thirds of the distance between the beginning and now.” The prenatal area, cleared, at last went back to being one-fiftieth.)

The mother, subject to high blood pressure, continually brought about a condition of great pain in the unborn infant, particularly when she was agitated. (This is a prime source of migraine headache.) Whatever it was which agitated her into high blood pressure at the moment this engram was received was unknown — and much of the “plot” of prenatal life may remain unknown for the explanatory data may come before the pain and the engram and a complete recording only happens after the instant of pain when some degree of “unconsciousness” comes about. The mother, at the beginning of the engram, when pressure began to build up and stiffen out the unborn child, was weeping. She was by herself. “Oh, how am I ever going to get out of it. Everything looks so drab and colorless to me. Oh, why did I ever start it; I can’t possibly go through with it. But I have to, I have to. I would be sick if I didn’t. Oh, Lord, everything comes in on me at once. I am utterly trapped. But there, I will go through with it, I’ll feel better. I’ll be brave and do it. I’ve got to be brave. I am brave. I am the bravest person in the world. I have to be and I am.” The pressure receded.

Exactly what this was about will remain a mystery to the auditor who reduced it, the patient who had it, the auditor and the reader: such is often the case with an engram. They are conceived in misunderstanding and they aren’t to be understood, save mechanically, and only deleted from the engram bank.

This is a particularly dangerous engram to have for it contains a manic in the words, “bravest person in the world.” “I,” of course, is ordinarily used by the unborn child to be himself, when the engram is at last able to affect an analyzer in which there is speech. Before that moment, of course, there is just a recording without word meaning, although even before the words are given meaning, the engram can be aberrative. This is further dangerous because it says, “I’m trapped,” and because it says, “Everything comes in on me at once.” “Trapped” is our enemy, the holder. But “everything comes in on me at once” is a grouper. Further, the remainder of the content, as an engram, will not compute in the analyzer. It says one “must go through with it,” but that one “cannot go through with it,” that one “would get sick if I didn’t go through with it” but that “it is impossible.” Everything being equal to everything, as our moronic enemy, the reactive mind computes, this engram both repels and attracts therapy: it brings about a condition of indecision in the analytical mind which is insufferable.

The individual holding this engram might find himself — as it acted as aberration — first in the manic portion of being the bravest person in the world and then, regressed a trifle by a slight change of restimulators such as his migraine headache getting bad, find himself utterly undecided about any course of action and with the telegraphed emotion, contained in the tears, of being very depressed. But this is pro-survival because it apparently dictates a way out of a situation. As an additional factor, it brings, with its phrase about “everything being drab and colorless” color blindness at least in recall so that the recalled images of the past are “seen” in the mind as having no color. It can bring about, if added to by enough subsequent dramatizations, actual perceptic color blindness. The whole engram is very likely, when combined with other factors, to place the individual in an institution with all of his somatic turned on (migraine) and, because of the grouper, all other pain he felt in his life turned on as well. This grouper bunches the track of the engram bank all into one place and then puts the individual squarely in that place.

In therapy, when this was contacted, a case which had been classified as “insane” came into a release state of “normal.” The patient had been institutionalized, was in the foetal position and had regressed physically. That she kept screaming these exact words and weeping had been placed on her record as the manifestation of a childhood delusion. The case was opened by repeater technique, using the words she kept screaming, after she had had her attention fixed upon the auditor by loud, monotonous noise. There were some former incidents containing these words which had to be reached before the incident in dramatization would ease. However, engrams like this are commonly contacted in more or less “normal” people and are relieved as routine. A very high degree of restimulation had been experienced by this patient and several severe “loss” engrams had occurred which had kept earlier content keyed-in.

It might also be remarked in re all these “trapped,” “caught,” “can’t get out of it” cases (which is to say where there are several holders and also a high quantity of painful emotion) that certain foetal aspects are visible even when the case is “normal.” A shiny skin, a spinal curvature, only partial development of the gonads, all are common and one or many such signs may be present.

SYMPATHY ENGRAM

The first example is an illness suffered by a patient when he was a small boy. At two years and a half he was taken ill with pneumonia. He had a considerable background of attempted abortion and the usual engram cargo received from aberrated parents. He was extremely worried about the quarrels and upsets od his own home; numbers of his engrams had been keyed-in and amongst them was his pneumonia. His grandmother came and took him to her home because, whenever he was ill, his mother would go away and leave him. The incident was extremely occluded and was only reached after several late life painful emotion engrams had been discharged and after almost a hundred prenatal physical pain engrams had been released. The grandmother, when he was crying in delirium, mistook his activity as demonstrating that he was “conscious,” which he was not, and she sought to reason with him. She said, “Those people don’t really mean to be so bad to you, honey. I know they have good hearts really. You just do what they say and believe what they tell you and you’ll be all right. Now promise you’ll do that, won’t you, honey.” The child, in the last depths of reaction, responded and promised her he would believe them and do what they said. “I love you very much,” the grandmother continued, “and I will take care of you. Now don’t worry, honey. Forget it now. Just get a little rest.”

The phrases contained in this engram, because they were on a trance level and because they could be held in place by his fever and pain, produced a very profound effect on the child. He had to believe whatever was said. This means literal belief and cost him, for one thing, much of his sense of humor. Because he wanted to be all right, he had to believe what his

parents said; the things they had said, prenatally, contained every kind of a bad datum possible about who was the boss and how much fun it was to beat the mother and so forth. All this, then, was made into “true data” which, because his sympathy engram said so, he had to believe. No more horrible curse could ever be laid on anyone than those in sympathy engrams which say “Believe what is said,” “Believe what is read,” “Believe people,” because that engram means literally that the poor old analyzer will now never be able to evaluate its own data unless, by utter rebellion, the individual negates against the whole world, which can occasionally be done. Let this individual, however, as this one did, marry a woman who has characteristics similar to his grandmother’s (a pseudo-grandmother) and he becomes prey to: (a) the pain and illness, chronic, which he experienced in his grandmother sympathy engrams (necessary to get and keep her sympathy); and (b) all his prenatals, since the pseudo- grandmother throws him into his own valence: This makes him quarrel, which makes his wife fight back, and suddenly this woman is not pseudo-grandmother but pseudo-mother. Exit sanity.

In therapy, when we encounter this sympathy engram at last, it is discovered to have been buried in two ways: (a) it was aligned with purpose; and (b) it had a forgetter mechanism on it.

Because of (a) the self-protection of the mind permitted it to give up the engram only when enough tension was taken off the case to permit the mind to get along without this engram.

In (b) we have a device which is common in engrams. Whenever we try to run an engram which has somatics enough even to make the pre-clear roll around on the couch but which contains no word content, we suspect a forgetter mechanism. There are evidently people in this world who think that the panacea for all mental discomfort is to forget: “Put it out of my mind,” “If I remembered it I would go mad,” “Junior, you never remember a thing I tell you,” “Nobody can remember anything,” “Can’t remember,” and just plain “I don’t know,” as well as the master of the family of phrases, “Forget it!” all bar information from the analyzer. A whole case, freshly opened, may keep answering everything with one of these denyers (there are many other kinds of denyers, if you recall). Repeater technique will eventually begin to release the phrase from various engrams and begin to show up incidents. To have a grandmother who says, “Forget it” continually every time a child gets hurt is to be cursed beyond Macbeth. A forgetter, used by an ally, all by itself and with practically no pain or emotion present will submerge data which, in recall, would not be aberrative but which, so buried — by a forgetter — makes things said just before it aberrative and literal.

Hence this engram remained utterly out of sight until the case was almost finished and as soon as it was contacted, the already de-intensified reactive bank collapsed and the patient was cleared.

The second example of the sympathy engram concerns a childhood experience of a patient who, at the beginning of therapy, was a remarkably confused individual. Here is an example of sympathy engram which is not uncommon. (It will not be primary in any ally computation but because it is often repeated in the same case, becomes aberrative.) This incident occurred when the child had been badly hurt in an accident. He had received a fractured skull and concussion and was for many days in a coma. He had never learned that such an incident happened to him although examination afterwards disclosed evidence of the fracture and disclosed also that while he had known there was a ridge in his skull he had never wondered about it for an instant. His father and mother were, at the time, on the verge of divorce and, in the presence of the only partly conscious child, quarreled several times in these few days, evidently upset by his accident and recriminative as to whose fault it was. The first part of the series of engrams within this one large engram are unimportant as an example save that they brought about a condition where the mother put herself forward as a defender of the child who was not under attack by the father. The mother’s conversation aberratively indictated that the father was attacking the child, and the words in an engram rather than the action are important as aberrative factors. Finally the father left the house and home. The mother sat down by the boy’s trundle bed and, weeping, told him she would keep him from dying, that she would “work and slave and wear her fingers to the bone” to keep him alive and “I am the only reason you are alive. I have defended you against that beast and monster. If it were not for me, you would have died long ago and I am going to care for you and protect you. So don’t pay any attention to anything people tell you. I am a good mother. I have always been a good mother. Don’t listen to them. Please, baby, stay here and get well, please!”

This remarkable piece of nonsense came, of course, straight out of her reactive mind. She did not feel guilty about the way she was taking care of the baby, though she had done her cyclic worst for this child since conception. (There is no such thing as guilt nor a guilt complex that is not straight out of an engram that says, “I am guilty” or some such similar phrase.)

Here is ambivalence at work. By ambivalent is meant power on two sides. It had better be called multivalence, for it is demonstrable that people have many valences, twenty or thirty not being unusual for a “normal.” This mother, with her wild pleas and her mawkish sentimentality, shifted around in valences like a whirling dervish. She was capable of being viciously cruel, torturing her child with, as the Navy calls them, “capricious and unusual punishments”: yet one of these valences which, unfortunately for the patient, only turned on when he was ill, was one of savage protection for the child and assurances to him that she loved him and would never leave him to starve, etc. She formed, in this child, because of her own reactive pattern and her inabilities, close to a thousand engrams before he was ten. This particular specimen given was fairly standard.

The aberrative aspect of this engram was a “conviction” that if one’s mother were not around and if one were not on good terms with her, one would starve, die or suffer generally. Also it meant, because of the time it was given, having a bad headache if one wanted to live. The whole series of these engrams made a highly complex pattern of psycho-somatic ills including sinusitis, a chronic rash, allergies and numerous other actual physical ills, despite the fact that the patient had always tried to be as forthright in his physical being as possible and was not in any way a hypochondriac.

In therapy the entire chain of fights in this area, much of the prenatal area and most late life painful emotion engrams were relieved before this sympathy engram displayed itself.

As a note on the subject of sympathy engrams, these are in nowise exclusively found in childhood: they exist prenatally and postnatally — and sometimes late in life. Any persons who defend the child against further abortion attempts become part of the sympathy engram chains and, of course, they are allies whose loss is something to be dreaded. Late sympathy engrams have been discovered at fifty years of age. One, discovered at thirty, consisted of a nymphomaniac nurse who, during the period when the patient was still under ether and still in pain, talked to him obscenely, played with his genitals and still managed, by the content of her remarks, to plant a sympathy engram which produced a very serious psychic condition in the patient. (It is in nowise true that many cases of sexual play exist while the patient is under anesthetic or drugged but because this is a standard psychotic reaction of delusion is no reason to rule that the incident cannot occasionally happen.)

The sympathy engram only has to sound like a sympathy engram to become one: there is no evaluation of actual intent by the reactive mind.

PAINFUL EMOTION ENGRAM

Three of these are given to illustrate a type of each. They can happen at any period, including prenatally, but are most easily tapped in more recent life, when they will then lead back to early incidents of physical pain, sympathy engrams and the like. The first example is a case of loss by death of an ally. A girl, at the age of eighteen, was given a painful emotion engram by being told by her parents that her aunt was dead. The aunt was a prime ally. The patient, treated at the age of thirty-one, recalled the death of her aunt but attributed her sorrow

to other things such as a restimulation of what she called her own “death instinct” (which was, in reality, engramic chatter by mother about wanting to die and get it all over with). Actually the aunt had been a large factor in dissuading the mother from “getting rid of” the child and had made the mother promise that she would not. The aunt had also tended the child, postnatally, through illnesses and was, in fact, the only refuge for the girl when a termagant mother and a religiously bigoted father would converge on her, for neither had wanted her and there had been a number of efforts to terminate the pregnancy pre-term.

Her father communicated the information to the girl with a sonorous voice and appropriately long face. “I want you to be very respectful at the funeral, Agatha.” (“What funeral?”) “Your aunt just passed to the great beyond.” (“She’s dead?”) “Yes, death must come to us all and we must all be prepared some day to meet the fate which waits for us at the end of the road. For it is a long path, life, and God and flaming hell wait at its other end and someday we all must die. Be sure you are very respectful at the funeral.” She had begun to pale at the word “funeral,” she was to all purposes “unconscious” when she heard the first mention of “death” and she remained “unconscious,” if moving about, for two whole days. The case had been very slow until this engram was discovered and run. An enormous discharge of grief took place, which had never before manifested itself. It was reduced to boredom in eight recountings, at which the first moment of the aunt’s intervention in the abortion attempts was automatically contacted and released.

Thereafter the case made progress in the prenatal area, prohibition against “getting rid of it” having been removed and (according to theory, free units being available), the charge had come off the prenatal area. There were five other allies in this case, the girl, with parents who had been so wicked to her, having attached herself to anyone who would show her interest and refuge. As lower physical pain came into view, more allies showed up and more painful emotion engrams were discharged, permitting new physically painful engrams to display themselves.

The next example is an engram from a patient who had all his life been reared and cared for by “moneyed parents.” He had a very severe prenatal area which yet would not lift to view. It was discovered at length that his nurses had been his only source of love and affection and that his mother, being a woman who liked to unsettle the household as often as possible, would discharge a nurse every time she found the child had grown fond of her, even though the mother herself made it plain that she considered the child “nasty.” The engram: the boy sees his nurse coming out of the house with her suitcase in her hand: he stops playing in the yard and runs to her to “scare her”: she is quite angry from the scene she has just had — an Irish girl — and yet she smooths her face and kneels down beside him. “I am leaving, Buddy. I can’t stay here any more. No, I can’t be your nurse now. But there, there, you’ll have another one. Don’t cry. It’s not good for little boys to cry. Good-bye, Buddy. I love you.” And she goes off out of sight.

He was stunned from the first instant she said she was leaving. The prohibition against crying was from an ally: whatever an ally says must be good and must be believed because allies are survival and one must survive: allies therefore must be believed. He had not cried except on rare occasions of enormous sorrow in all the years thereafter. Eight of these departures were touched without result but with this one, they all loosened and discharged, one after the other.

Any departure of or from an ally contains an emotional charge which, if it will not display itself, is elsewhere suppressed.

The third example of the painful emotion engram is the third type, loss of an ally by reversal. A wife loved her husband very dearly. They had gotten along well together until his parents came into the vicinity and began to malign his wife. He was furious with them for it and quarreled with them. His wife was a pseudo-ally and unfortunately that ally had told the child to believe his parents. (This is fairly chronic with allies — if they would give the child correct data when he is emotionally disturbed or ill, there would be less trouble. A remark such as, “Well, you’ll grow up some day and be able to care for yourself,” is much better than a hat full of Emersonian platitudes.) This brought about a tragic reversal. The reactive mind, restimulated at the sight of his wife (the husband was emotionally disturbed, very restimulated already by his parents) threw in the data that one must believe one’s parents. This made his wife no good, as per their aberrative chatter. He went into his father’s valence to escape this imponderable situation and that valence beat women. He struck his wife repeatedly, dramatizing one of his father’s engrams: “I hate you. You are no good. I should have listened to them sooner. You’re no good.”

The wife was in therapy. This charge suppressed itself, not out of shame for her husband’s actions but for the mechanical reason that the early area had to be relieved before this one would discharge (smart file clerk). Her case had slowed down to a point where the board looked entirely clear although somatics (which she attributed to natural causes) and aberrations (which she said were reasonable reactions) still manifested themselves. Suddenly this incident appeared when repeater technique was used on the auditor’s random guess: “I hate you,” for it was known that she said this now and then to her husband. Three recountings discharged this painful emotion despite its violence (it made her weep until she almost choked). Immediately twelve prenatals, all fights between her mother and father (an ally, of which her husband was the pseudo-ally) wherein the mother beat her abdomen and cursed the child, appeared and were erased and the case progressed to clear.

Loss of dogs, dolls, money, position, even the threat of a loss, anything may bring about a painful emotion engram so long as it is loss. It may be loss by death, loss by departure, loss by reversal. Anything connected with the life of the patient and associated by him with his own survival seems to be capable of locking up life units when lost. A condition of such painful emotion is that it has early physically painful engrams upon which to append. The physically painful engram is still the villain but it has an accomplice in the painful emotion engram.