Handling Psychotics (501110)
Date: 10 November 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
The problem of handling psychotics is one that has discouraged man for a very, very long time. Handling the psychotic has been a very, very awesome problem to man. You probably won’t appreciate this completely until you’re out in the field practicing and you find a state of mind of the family and associates of a person who has just had a psychotic break. But man has had a very terrified attitude in the face of psychosis. He is completely awed and made entirely afraid, usually, when he confronts psychosis.
You will find hardened psychiatrists, medical doctors, reacting in—to say nothing of the families of psychotics who are up close to this person—you will find them acting in a very positive fashion. They want to get rid of this man. They want to put him someplace. They want to make him quiet, quickly. The family, for the first day or two or three, will regard this person who has had the psychotic break as Papa or Uncle Willy or Aunt Susan, and about the second or third day, usually, if not immediately, will say inside themselves, “This is not the person he used to be,” and they can think only in terms of, usually, “Let’s put him away. Let’s get him quiet. Let’s get him out of sight. Let’s do something drastic and extraordinary.” If you have been around this very long, you will see how true this is. Man, in other words, has this rejecting reaction toward irrationality. Of course the one thing that man uses as a weapon is his reason. Because of his reason he has managed to ascend to a height far above the animal kingdom and when he sees reason suddenly depart and no more, why, then he himself becomes very disturbed. He identifies reason with personality. The second reason departs, he negates personality, too.
Actually, psychosis is not a very serious thing, unless it’s the psychosis of missing parts—and that’s very easily identified. You can always tell a man who is suffering from a missing brain. It’s an odd thing, but quite a bit of the nervous system can be cut away or eaten away by bacteria without making it impossible for the person ‘s reason to be restored. But there are certain centers which can be attacked which begin to unbalance it more and more.
Now, there is that psychosis that you might say is the psychosis of, to be very plain about it, is the psychosis of missing parts. This person we cannot rehabilitate. But you can still do something for him. Just because somebody has been whittling away on his prefrontal lobes and so on, don’t abandon this case completely and put it aside. However, don’t expect to get very good results, either.
There’s also paresis. Paresis is very interesting, where bacteria has taken away certain portions of the nervous system and the person doesn’t coordinate well or he has various delusions. But it’s interesting that these delusions are not produced because something has happened to the nervous system just as such. What’s happened is that the missing portions of the nervous system were necessary to keep in balance the engrams, to keep them back where they belong. And a certain portion of the nervous system disappears and the engrams are now rampant.
It’s interesting that in a prefrontal lobotomy case that the operation when delivered is normally succeeded by a person’s ability to think the things he thought before without worrying about them. In other words, if he was hearing voices—I ran into one prefrontal lobotomy, he was hearing voices and having a bad time in general. And after the prefrontal lobotomy, why, he could sit there and he’d hear the voices and he wasn’t having a bad time in general. This was a “big gain.” In other words, he had lost his power to react. That was the total gain. He was more tractable.
Now, there are many treatments used on psychotics. Some of them actually have in view doing something for the psychotic. But I’m afraid most of them have in view keeping the psychotic from doing something for the society or to it. The idea is not to cure the psychotic. Long since, people have said the psychotic is incurable. After all, it is genetic, it is hereditary, yak, yak, yak, yak. These conclusions of course were not unjustified in view of the fact that a psychosis does come down through the generations, but it comes down on a different level. Not through the genes. You can get through the genes, naturally, idiots, morons—just insufficient gray matter called for in the blueprint. But this isn’t the type of psychotic you’re going to be worried about. The moron is of no great concern. The moron, somehow or other, will blunder along. He doesn’t have these vicious impulses, unless they’re in engrams.
He doesn’t have, for instance, because he is a moron, certain dramatizations. I mean, he doesn’t dramatize just from the fact that his brains aren’t strong. If he dramatizes, he’s dramatizing out of an engram. And you’ve got a pretty good chance of doing something to that engram. Wherever you can find an engram and you find even part of a frontal lobe left, you can normally do something for the person. Don’t expect any terrific results. But you could probably bring the person back to where he can care for himself, unless he has had his coordinative switchboards sliced through, where his analytical mind can no longer regulate his bodily functions, his glandular functions and so on. If this mechanism has been tampered with, of course there’s nothing much that anybody can do about it.
The repair powers of the brain are very great. The psychiatrist had an awfully hard time, poor fellow, in trying to make these prefrontal lobotomies stick. Now, the first time that they practiced them, the prefrontal lobotomy merely consisted of a slice. They took the analytical mind or what’s probably the analytical mind and they put a slice across the thing. This kept the engrams from reacting. And the bulk of these brains promptly grew back together again. The axons and neurons and so forth—they looked this situation over and said, “Well, we can join up again,” and they did. And left a little bit of scar tissue.
This was very heartbreaking; these people began to dramatize again. They relapsed, in other words, so the next practice of the prefrontal lobotomy was pretty thorough. They’d get in there and they’d take a big, wide slice out and they’d take a chunk out. “Now, that’ll fix them!” So, it does. Fixes them beautifully.
Over 2 percent of the people on whom prefrontal lobotomies are performed restore themselves, somehow or another. The number of remissions is well in excess of 20 percent. By “remission,” that means he can go home. And of the people who go home there are several percent there don’t have to be cared for night and day by a nurse. I mean, this is a successful operation.
I’m pointing this up not as a slam against psychiatry. I wouldn’t slam people who would cut up human brains just because they didn’t know any better. I have nothing to say about that whatsoever. I’m not claiming they ought to be shot or hung or knocked out of the society just per se, but I’m trying to demonstrate to you the extraordinary measures that have been taken about psychosis.
Now, people get around irrationality and they start responding irrationally to irrationality It’s by a contagion itself. As long as a man reacts or restimulates that much around psychosis, of course he isn’t going to be able to do anything about psychosis. And this is the situation which you as auditors are going to face continually.
In a very, very short time, I would say certainly within eight months, you’re going to find that you are being called upon almost 100 percent to do the work done on psychotics in the United States. I’m sure of this. There’s going to be a repercussion about the first of February to the end that Dianetics does work. I mean we’re going to get our validation at that time and publishing straightened out and there’ll be some new books and better communications and you’re going to find out that people won’t be going around talking about “cults.” When there’s psychosis in view, they will be screaming for an auditor. So don’t think you aren’t going to have to treat these people, because you will. Maybe not in the next few months, but certainly by the middle of next year. So you should know a little bit something about them. And that’s the first thing you should know. So that, one, you can prevent the people around this psychotic from committing irrational acts with regard to him. And two, so that you yourself will not commit an irrational act around this psychotic. And so that, three, you won’t look at a psychotic and assume, per se, that nothing can be done for him. Now, those three points are very much to the point because the time when an auditor most needs all of his reason is around a psychotic. They are not easy to treat. They require a great deal of patience and endurance on your part. Actually, if you just keep at it, you can resolve these people unless they fall under the heading of missing parts. But with what patience will you achieve those goals? With what patience will you bring a human being back to reason? It won’t be just by snapping your fingers unless I get a couple of weeks off sometime in January and figure the rest of a couple of things out that I’ve had on the agenda. Now, I’m being serious about that. For two and a half months the problem of making a psychotic accessible has, as far as I know, been solved. But I can’t get enough slack time anywhere along here in order to pick up the thing and find five psychotics and run it through for a Standard Operating Procedure and modify it so that you will have it.
Now, if this has been done in the next few months, why, there’ll be nothing to it. You’ll certainly hear about it. The problem there, is the problem of accessibility. If you’ll notice the Standard Procedure Chart says right under “Standard Procedure” “(For Accessible Cases).” Well of course I’ve talked to you earlier in these lectures about accessibility, and the least accessible character of them all is the psychotic. See, that’s what it means. He’s inaccessible.
Now, if we modified our terminology and made it a little more workable, we would stop calling them psychotics and we would start calling them “inaccessibles,” which would be more to the point. When a person got down to a level of where he was inaccessible you and I could recognize that, then. It wouldn’t be by any esoteric design of how he wove tapestries that we would know he was psychotic, we would just know that he was not accessible, therefore for our purposes he would be immediately classified as psychotic. And we would take measures then to increase his accessibility.
The problem is one of keeping your head. If you can do that and keep plugging, knowing your Dianetics, why, you can resolve these psychotics one after the other. But the working of a psychotic is not without its peculiar problems and perils. A paranoid schiz2 who rolls over and fishes a knife out of his pocket while he’s still in reverie, opens up the knife and looks fixedly at your throat, isn’t likely to steady your nerves. But actually all you have to do is to tell him to put the knife away and go back into the incident. And the chances are very good that he will do just that. I’ve worked with quite a few psychotics and I’ve never had one of them actually harm me. I have had them come within an ace of it until I reminded them that I was me and not their uncle Benny and so on, but the possibility of them actually carrying out these things is very slight, particularly when they have sensed as basic personality the fact that you are their route to the outside world.
Once basic personality really catches on to this, you actually get nothing but cooperation, no matter how this psychotic looks. He’s in dramatizations, the engram is in control and basic personality is back there really taking a back seat. But basic personality will cut through once in a while and keep him in there pitching enough so that you can work on him.
Now, you have to keep your reason. You’re also going to have to resist the demands of families that you permit something to happen to this man immediately. He is a psychotic, he has gone unreasonable and what happens in nature when somebody makes a mistake? You walk down the street and you make a mistake in where you put your foot, and you put it on the wrong side of the curb and you fall And the punishment for having fallen is receiving pain. And having received this pain and knowing the pain there is waiting, you get up and you don’t fall the next time if you possibly can help it. So when a person goes irrational, about the first thought—and this is typically just reactive thought right on the equation—the first thought is to do something to this person to punish him. I mean, you could figure it out, “Now he must have something done to him. He has gone on into the field of unreason.” Now, that is not a rational intention, but it is actually the reaction which underlies some of these weird things that are done to psychotics, as in the days of Bedlam. If you’ll notice, practically the whole category of treatment and so forth has to do with punishment instruments. A human being, when he errs, receives pain from life. So other human beings, when a human being errs so far as to become completely unreasonable, deliver to him pain. You’re going to have people demanding of you that something be done. They will think of the most extraordinary things. They will think of, oh, electric shocks, transorbital leukotomies, prefrontal lobotomies, topectomies, they will think of wet packs and oh, God. If it weren’t disallowed now they’d also think of whips.
I’ve had people demanding of me that this man immediately be given electric shock. But you say, “Look, he’s in no danger, he’s all right! Just let him settle out for a few days, huh? And then we’ll go to work on him. He’ll stop being violent in a few days, probably, and we’ll pick up a period there where his violence tapers off and we’ll work him.” “Oh no! He’s got to have an electric shock right away, you’ve got to wait till we give it to him—oh, we’ve got to give him an electric shock.” I’ve had a psychiatrist tell me that. What is the matter with having this man be quiet for a few days? “Got to give him an electric shock. If you do not give him an electric shock, if you do not permit this to happen, today, this afternoon, we are going to throw this man out of this sanitarium!” With that much heat. Fascinating. We’ve got to do something to this guy.
Now, you look over the records of electric shock and you will find just this to be the case: that a remission takes place, electric shock or no electric shock, in the same amount of time—patient to patient. That’s interesting data, because that data is not advertised. You get an awful lot of propaganda about electric shock. But practically none of it is fact. The truth of the matter is that if a person is given electric shocks, or if a person is not given electric shocks, he has about an equal chance of being remitted. Records, thousands and thousands of records on this subject, demonstrate this unequivocally. There’s no point in this electric shock, in other words. But it may be attended by a broken spine.
Probably a layman who is not used to this sort of thing would be unable to stand in a room long enough to watch a full electric shock given. It is gruesome! It isn’t just a matter of putting a guy on a table and just turning on a little switch and picking him off the table again. Nuh-uh! Convulsions! Everything you could think of.
One dear old lady over at Ward Island was going to get some Dianetic auditing on a Wednesday, so they fixed her up on Tuesday all right. They gave her an electric shock and she died under that shock.
You’re going to find that this will occasionally catalyze people into action, that something else is going to be done. This is not, then, without its liabilities. Furthermore, working in institutions and working with people over whom you do not have sufficient control, that too is not without its liabilities because things may happen to these people that you know nothing about and you may be blamed.
So, if you take over a case of that character, you want to take over a full release of responsibility. Don’t let anybody hang you on it. It would have been just this one auditor’s luck up there if, for instance, he had gone in on Wednesday and the electric shock had been given on Thursday. Because it required a very hard search of the records to establish that this woman had died under an electric shock. Nobody in the institution would admit it. But they didn’t tear up the electric shock appointment book. It was not on her chart. She just died frothing at the mouth.
Now, none of these things are nice and none of them are pretty and your stomachs will be turned the second that you start into this line. Or as far as that’s concerned, if you just pick up a nice, fresh psychotic and start to work him, you’re not going to do so well. They shake you. Obviously. But you stand up to it and just watch one psychotic who is in a thorough spin come out of it because of your auditing and practically nobody will be able to touch you for weeks!
We’re dealing here with white and black. It’s a rough job and no reward compares to it.
Now, I’m telling you this mainly to toughen you up toward the problem. Give you some sort of a preview I want you to understand that a psychotic isn’t something from which you should run. But I’m also getting you to understand that a psychotic isn’t something that you should expect to rank with a game of jacks.
You may be in a room with a psychotic for hours and hours and only succeed in delivering ten minutes of actual processing. You have to catch them on the fly, so to speak, sometimes. They are sailing around and so forth. I worked one psychotic who every time you asked this person for a phrase or to say something, they would throw things. Throw anything. Pillows, ashtray, anything of the sort. So you just duck and say, “Go over it again.” Your assumption that they are reasonable people does a very, very great deal to help them recover. The second that you assume they are reasonable people, no matter how unreasonable they are—you don’t pay much attention to granting them all the things they ask for or anything of the sort, but you talk to them reasonably. You are validating basic personality and you will toughen it up.
The reason psychotics get worse when they get near institutions, they’re treated like unreasonable people and they succeed and continue to be unreasonable. In other words, treat them like reasonable people. Don’t lower your voice the way you talk to a child or a dog. And don’t jump them or challenge them or command them and so forth, just talk to them. “Now, let’s go out and get in the car.” And the odd part of it is they may gyrate three times in the middle of the floor and so forth, but the next thing you know they’re going to go out and they get in the car. It takes a little time for basic personality to get toughened up to it.
Now, there are many, many ways of approaching a psychotic and gaining access to him. Fellow by the name of Homer Lane, over in England—he was a layman, he went into one of the large sanitariums in England and he asked the superintendent if he couldn’t be given the worst psychotic they had in the place. Well, the superintendent said, “Oh, no, we wouldn’t be permitted to do that.” “Well, just give me one of your psychotics; very bad—hopeless.” “Oh, no, we couldn’t do that. No, he’d kill you.” And Lane said, “Well now, I’ll take that responsibility. I’ll give you a release, and after all if he’s hopeless I can’t do him any harm. So let me talk to him for a little while.” And so he finally—superintendent gave way and they let this Homer Lane, who was not a very big man, down the passageway and into a dark dungeon; and here, naked, dirty and frothing, so forth, was a guy about six foot six, weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds. A howling, screaming maniac. And Homer Lane let himself into the cell very quietly and stood there and this shaggy thing looked at him and started to jump. And Homer Lane said, “I heard you could help me.” And the maniac stopped in midflight and said, “How did you know?” So they remitted that guy in a couple of days.
This gives you a sample of some of the bizarre methods that you can adopt to regain accessibility. Another one, and this one is followed by Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Doctor Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Regardless of the feather-brained quality of some of her actions, believe me, that old gal’s got nerve! Lots of it. She will go into a cell with the toughest, meanest, orneriest psychotics imaginable and by a process of acting crazier than they act, bring them out of it. That’s right. There’s nothing wrong with the old girl’s nerve. As a matter of fact, I admire her a great deal. I know some of her record along the line. And how she has been able to work with no tools, practically, but just her own wits and actually get remissions from these people, I don’t know, but she has been able to do it.
Now, there are just tons of these things. They’re just, well, the tricks, the ways to do it. But these things never deviate from this principle: getting into communication, by any means whatsoever, with basic personality; under no circumstances appointing yourself the taskmaster of a psychotic; never giving way to a punishment complex. And by a full confidence within yourself that you’re going to produce marked results with this person. You let your own guts begin to quiver and you’re going to fail.
Now, you see, all of these methods, no matter how bizarre and so forth, they don’t depart from this short list. Nobody ever cured any psychotics by screaming at them, beating them, doing other things to them that are very, very bad. You’ll hear an occasional story that somebody walks in and says he’s going to shoot this catatonic schiz and so forth, and then gets a gun, the catatonic schiz jumps up, well, that reads good. But the chances are you may trigger this fellow further. This is not a 100 percent workable solution. Building a fire under a catatonic schiz is spectacular, but he’s liable to lie just right there and be burned. You mustn’t overlook some of these facts. He knows you are not going to kill him. These are off of the line. They are not workable particularly.
Now, there are some methods of gaining accessibility which you wouldn’t ordinarily expect. Occasionally just by walking the legs off of the psychotic you’ll get him so tired that he’ll go to sleep and get some rest and he’ll wake up accessible. There’s that one. There is another one. Very often it’s very hard to get into communication with these people. It does no good usually to tell them that they have great responsibilities of their own and so forth and they ought to snap to and—that’s what they’re running away from. I’ve seen people do a lot of arguing with psychotics sometimes about the great responsibilities which are awaiting them. Of course this guy just goes back further and further and further, see. He doesn’t want anything to do with these responsibilities.
Another one of gaining accessibility has to do with drugs. Now, if you want to gain accessibility with a psychotic via drugs, stay solidly in the field of stimulants. Stay away from sedatives. I have said quite a bit about sedatives, but you’d be amazed at what a stimulant will do to return accessibility to lots of cases. You take Benzedrine and you slug this psychotic up on Benzedrine, and he couldn’t even talk to you before that stuff started taking effect and suddenly he’s in communication with you. Now, what you say to him does not make new engrams and doesn’t make new locks. He’s accessible, you can talk to him. In other words, you can depress him into a stupefied state where everything that was said to him or around him or done to him or worked with him, that would be knocked right in there with the rest of the engrams. Or you can give him a stimulant and bring him up to this level and his accessibility will often return and you can process him while he’s in that state.
Now, that’s Benzedrine, Dexedrine—there are several more stimulants, and lacking everything else, just simply enough hot coffee will sometimes produce results. The alerting of the body also alerts BP and you can get BP up to a point sometimes where you can take care of it.
Now, another thing is the fact that a psychotic—this was imperfectly known till recently—pointed it out to some people along this line: you can deliver psychometry to a person through the various hours of the day and you will find out that his intelligence varies. His intelligence varies also with the day of the week, with the date of the month, with the month of the year and with the year. This variation takes place because of engrams. Engrams all have a time tab on them. If most of the pain in the engram bank has the time 10:30 at night on it, you won’t be able to work this person at 10:30 at night, because he will be too highly restimulated. Now, there’s also certain stupid statements kicking around the society like “Most people die at two o’clock in the morning.” Well, I don’t think if that were not a social aberration it would particularly be true. There’s no difference between two o’clock in the morning and two o’clock in the afternoon as far as the physiological being is concerned, except that people normally sleep at this time and their heart rate goes down. But people are more likely to be frightened at night and so on, again because of aberration and so on. So all of these things can close in to make the night hours not so good.
Now, you will find that this has a very definite application to the psychotic. Have any of you run into people who wouldn’t work at certain hours of the day? Yeah. It’s very common. You have to be a little bit alert to observe it, but you will find out that . . . Anybody, by the way, who would take a person who is on the verge of a break and who will work them on into the evening and deep into the night hours and so forth, is taking his life in his hands.
Now, the main trouble with any of this is that it’s not completely predictable. There may be those who work best in the night hours. It just depends on the time tabs on the engram. So there are periods during the day, usually, with the psychotic, or there is a day of the week when they are more accessible than other days or hours.
Now, this is not an extraordinary case. A young lady every morning would have to be put in a wet pack. They said she had to be put in a wet pack until about noon, in a sanitarium. And at noon she would begin to perk up and at around two o’clock in the afternoon, why, she’d get all dressed up, perfectly sane and rational and so forth and walk around the grounds and be very companionable to everybody. But the next morning she had to be put back in a wet pack again, in which she would be until noon.
Now, it was interesting to note that the record on this particular patient said that it was necessary to put her in wet packs and if one put her in wet packs for enough hours in the morning, she would be able to keep on going the rest of the day. Well, this is misreading data like I’ve never seen it misread before. And a suggestion was made, “Well, why don’t you just omit the wet pack?” And the same cycle kept right on going. Now, this person could be worked, then, in the afternoon. So there are diurnal and day of the week times when psychotics can be worked, when they can’t be worked other times. It’d be necessary for you to study a psychotic to find out if this happens to be taking place in this person. Don’t look for it in every person. But find out if it’s taking place in this person. And if it is, then there’ll be periods of the day when you can work them.
Now, there is this fact that you should know: a psychotic break usually takes place when the person is very tired. Let’s look over the mechanism of a key-in. We find out that an engram can’t key in unless a person is running at very much suboptimum physical condition. If he is very tired or sick, something like that, an engram can be keyed in. This is until he gets lots of engrams and after that they just sort of key in by chains, they don’t start keying in separately. But at first it’s very hard to get those first engrams to key in. And once they’re keyed in, of course they’ll stay in and after that they can be restimulated.
All right, let’s look at that situation. Now, a psychotic who has no rest, who is a person that’s on the verge of a psychotic break—no rest, poor food, being handled by lots of people—I don’t care whether they’re auditors or attendants or anything of the sort—lots of people around him handling him, doing things to him and so forth, that is another factor. These things will take a person who is on the verge of a psychotic break and snap him. Now, when he starts down this dwindling spiral the first time, remember he is still tired. We’re talking about the first few hours of a psychotic break, now. He is tired. He’s probably not well fed. He is probably being badgered by things in his environment. And this is not the time to work him. Because the more you work him, the more you’re going to key in.
Now, there’s possibilities that this won’t happen but it is so liable to happen that you ought to put it down as a general rule: If a person goes into a break, the first thing to do is give him rest. Put him in an unrestimulative environment if you possibly can.
Male voice: Can’t you run a lock then? Straightwire?
Oh, sure, but you’re not talking about a psychotic break. If you can still run this lock on this person, he is just badly restimulated. I’m talking about a person that really spins.
Now, in other words, this should serve a little note of warning to you here. Don’t work people when they are tired. If you see that somebody is very weary and you are the auditor, I don’t care who that person is. Doesn’t mean that you’re liable to precipitate a break in this person, but you just aren’t going to have him get a session, that’s all. Leave your preclear alone. Tell him, “Skip the session, we’ll take it up some other time, go get some rest.” Female voice: That means anybody?
That’s anybody. That’s anybody. In this way, as you work, you will not have to know then, as precisely as you otherwise would, who you are working that may have an incipient psychosis. You see what I mean? In other words, by taking this precaution on everybody, you don’t make it necessary for you to know each person you work as intimately as though you had psychometry on them. You see how you avoid this?
Just don’t work people who are tired or who are too hungry. Just leave them alone when they’re in that circumstance. There are times when you as an auditor have to also be, to some degree, the physician. Not saying Dianetics is medicine, it certainly isn’t. Dianetics works. (laughter) Oh, I didn’t say anything!
In other words, you take this precaution and any psychotic that you happen to be working, who happens to be in an accessible state, won’t suddenly pitch overboard and go in. Furthermore, you won’t be picking up people at random and you won’t throw them into a restimulated condition, which they would have gone into anyway, and through what you’re doing to them produce any bad effects on them.
Now, another factor which can be looked over is something that you should watch. You are probably going to follow a program, not of just sitting down and working people and working them and working them, you’re probably going to sit down on this basis: there’ll be two or four or six people will come to you one after the other and they will desire to be audited. What you will do is probably open their cases and when you have them running you have these people a little bit instructed as to what to do so they can’t get into very serious trouble with each other and you launch them out and let them work as a team. And this way you could work an awful lot of people. You can get an awful lot of people released this way, and without taking up your valuable time. Because you as trained auditors have got no business sitting there listening to routine running, a routine swamp-up and so forth. And you pick up these cases, then, every now and then you have them come in and you check them over. And then you set them back to running again. And then you bawl them out and so forth and put them back on the track—what they’re supposed to be doing. And keep them from running at sixteen and start them back with the erasure again, all that sort of thing.
Well, in doing this of course you are actually exposing Dianetics a little bit by taking two people who are neurotic and turning them loose on each other and so you want to give them this precaution, is that, “Don’t work each other when you’re excessively tired. Don’t work as an auditor when you’re excessively tired, don’t let yourself be worked as a preclear when you’re excessively tired. And be worked by a minimum number of auditors.” Don’t let auditor after auditor after auditor after auditor work a case. Settle this person down with one auditor. So he doesn’t like this auditor, so what? It’s much safer to keep those cases running together than it is to start swapping auditors. If it is a violent antagonism, you should have been enough on the qui vive in the first place to have picked it up. You should never have matched them together. But once you’ve matched them as co-auditors, leave it that way. That’s arbitrary as the devil, but right immediately it demonstrates to you that you have to be very quick in spotting whether or not people are going to be compatible as auditors.
Now, the number of husband-wife teams which you should start are exactly zero. You as certified auditors should not arbitrarily disrupt a husband-wife team which is running well. But don’t start one. If you’ve got a husband-wife team that happens to be running all right, and by “all right” I mean actually running all right (there are a few of them that do) — therefore you can’t lay down a blanket rule and say, “No husband-wife teams,” because there are a few of them that just run fine. But the bulk of them don’t. The wife pat-a-cakes or the husband pat-a-cakes on the job, and they’re intensely restimulative. And any husband and wife who have ever quarreled have no business co-auditing. Bluntly—who have ever quarreled. How many does that knock out? The fact that they have quarreled demonstrates that they are to some degree reactive mind partners, and you don’t want these people auditing each other. They will practice tacit consent and everything else. So if you follow these few little admonitions, you will very definitely stay out of trouble with regard to this. I mean, there won’t be any trouble. What you have to do is simply make sure that they understand perfectly that they are not to audit and not to be audited when they are too tired or hungry. That once one person starts to audit this person, that he stick with one person. Don’t change auditors. Repair and patch up the auditing of the auditor who is doing the auditing (that you appointed), rather than just haul him off the case for bad auditing. Because he’s going to go someplace else and do bad auditing on somebody else. So you straighten out these little faults he has like letting his preclear bounce out of every engram, insisting that he run out of valence rather than in, and absolutely certain that the best way to get him clean and clear is to get him as tired and as restimulated as possible. Correct these faults in that auditor. Don’t just knock it off. But be very alert for bad auditing.
The things which I have mentioned right here are those things plus one, of course, invalidation of the preclear’s data. That, by the way, isn’t as serious, actually, in precipitating psychotic breaks, as the other three. That is, too many auditors on this one person, auditing with a person who has had insufficient rest, and just plain bad, inept auditing. Those are the three factors.
Now, I’ve had a long time to study this business of what and where. And Dianetics has on it limitations which call for those admonitions. Now, they’re not very hard to see. But you get a person who does a lot of auditing when he’s tired and you’re going to have a guy who is restimulated. Well, how do you key in engrams? Well, you get a guy tired and you give him an emotional experience and that’ll key in an engram. Well, so there he is, auditing, and he’s tired and he’s listening to engrams. And the next thing you know he’ll get restimulated. See, it just follows—it’s very sequitur.
Now, if you observe these things you will never have any trouble. But you may have this kind of trouble: somebody calls you up and tells you that Uncle Benny has just gone for a spin. And you’ve got to do something about it right away. Well, why have you got to do something about it—and let me be blunt about this, they will say, “Dianetics did it! Yeah, that’s why. You’ve got to do something about it, after all, you’re connected with these people and you’ve got to do something about it. He read the book.” And if you at that moment permit yourself to be startled into making no further investigation, you’re going to do yourself a very, very bad disservice. That is, as far as your auditing is concerned, you’re going to be auditing people on very limited data if you suddenly go over and start to work Uncle Benny without asking any further questions.
Because you’re going to find this sort of a situation occurred: it was late at night probably and Uncle Benny had read the book and Uncle Benny thought that something might be done for him and somebody started to invalidate his data and there was a quarrel. And this quarrel had taken place nine hundred and seventy-five times before and Uncle Benny had already had a couple of psychotic breaks or he’d been an incipient psychotic for years. Or he was a war casualty anyhow, that had spent some time in a sanitarium. And the only thing that happened was he wasn’t reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica, he was reading Dianetics at the time he spun. Of course, because there’s data from engrams in the book, there was a chance that he’d be a little more restimulated than reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but there’s data from engrams in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. You get the idea?
All right, you should not at this moment permit yourself to say, “Well then, I must do something about this right away because . . .” Better look the situation over. Chances are you’ll find the last lock. You’ve got to find the last lock in order to do anything about this fellow.
Well, if this is two o’clock in the morning, that’s a tough one. Because you don’t want to audit this fellow at two o’clock in the morning. Don’t want to have anything to do with it. Of course you may be called upon to keep him quiet or do something like that, and if possible, keep him from being thrown into the nearest hospital or some such thing. You should have some sort of a hospital liaison. It’s very hard to procure at this time. Six months hence you will be able to select your hospitals, I’m sure. Right now the hospitals won’t select you. So situation being what it is, you’re faced with a tough one. But remember this: It isn’t your responsibility. You didn’t give birth to Uncle Benny. You didn’t educate him. You didn’t create the psychoses that run along in this society from which he’s suffering. And the reason the power is being placed on you, is somehow or other they know you can do something for Uncle Benny, so they are going to put every single line of force they can on you to make you do something for Uncle Benny. And that is, they’re going to rouse your responsibility for Uncle Benny. They’re going to try to give you a sense of guilt regarding Uncle Benny. They’re going to tell you all sorts of things about Uncle Benny that aren’t true because if Uncle Benny’s gone nuts in any environ, you can be absolutely certain that somebody else in that environ is probably more nuts than he is. And, that that is the person that you will probably be dealing with, with regard to Uncle Benny. So discount 110 percent of everything you hear about Uncle Benny.
Now, I’ve been through this, been through this several times. And right now I am in receipt of telephone calls from a town out West where some horrible thing happened and all I asked was, “Don’t permit him to be given electric shocks.” “If he can’t be given,”—psychiatrist—“if he can’t be given an electric shock immediately we’re going to throw him right out of here, we’re going to get him right out, we’re going to—don’t want anything to do with him.” “Let’s be calm and talk about this for a moment. Now, what condition is this person in?” “That’s no business of yours! The whole thing is your d-d-wup!” That boy was in bad shape! I’ve received several phone calls from this fellow “The chances are,” I said, “that your Uncle Benny” (in this case, whatever the fellow’s name is, I don’t know it), “if left to himself, left off sedation, given rest and given quiet for a few days, will settle out. And although he may not become completely rational, he will not be as violent as you say he is at the moment. And by the way, why is he being violent? Have you put him under restraints?” “Well of course! Of course! What else could we do?” What can you do? The guy was all right, so they put a straitjacket on him. So he wants to get the straitjacket off. So he gets violent. Let’s go down and take a guy off the street and haul him in and say, “You’re crazy and we’re going to put this straitjacket on you.” Is this guy going to fight? Believe me, he’s going to fight. Supposing he hasn’t got all his reason present? Well, by golly, he’ll fight twice as hard. That’s the same problem.
Well anyway, I’ve been through this the last couple of weeks, getting these calls now and then. And what do you know! One of our PAs picked the guy up and took him out to his house. He took him out of the periphery of wifey, who drove him crazy, by the way, by throwing things at him and screaming at him, “You’re losing your mind.” And this PA took him up and took him out to the—PAs got a ranch. And he managed to get in some Straightwire on him, but regardless of this, the fellow settled out to a large degree and he talks rationally, sentence by sentence. Each sentence is rational but the sentences don’t add up to anything. He’s come along that far now. And they’re giving him more Straightwire and of course he’s in an unrestimulative environment and nobody’s doing anything very much to him and this guy is going to come out of his spin very nicely.
The only reason he went into his spin is because the first moment he started to spin they called for guys with butterfly nets and they started putting a restraint on him, and wife’s still screaming and so forth. He’s hauled off to the local spinbin, and that of course practically put the finishing touches. This happened, I think, at two o’clock in the morning.
All right, I’m telling you this rather sarcastically and so forth; however, you may face one like this. Chances of your facing one like this are very good. Because insanity is not unusual. According to the United States Navy’s last figures—the Navy had to make a survey of this to know who to recruit and who not to recruit—one out of eight has been, is, or will be in a mental institution in this populace. One out of eight. That’s really great, isn’t it? Yeah! Yeah!
Now, yeah, that’s really an astounder when you get down to it. It’s fantastic. And yet that’s the figures that they got.
The current population, according to another department of the government, which I don’t trust, is somewhere around one million nine hundred thousand. The current institutional population. And how many are being cared for at home and all the rest of it is very high. It’s around nineteen million. The two figures were very easy to remember because one is one million nine hundred thousand and the other’s nineteen million.
Well, this is lots of people. This is lots of people. As a matter of fact, that many people would make a pretty good population for a country. The whole population of Australia is only seven million people. We get rather dulled at the populace figures here in the United States. And particularly right here, we’re living up against a town that has ten million people in it. Well, that’s absolutely unheard of. Ten million people. Now, that’s pretty hard to figure out. You could actually take ten million people and scatter them out across the United States and you’d have a populated country. That’s lots of human beings. And yet nineteen million people in these United States are crazy. And you don’t think you’ll be called?
Well now, the people in the vicinity or in the family of any person who is psychotic can be absolutely counted upon to have been affected in some way by the same aberrational pattern, either from this person who is psychotic or having come along the line. Now, this is an interesting thing. You will find these people going into very steep depressions. One of the best reasons why is because they are intensely restimulated. The psychotic is giving forth with exactly the stuff it takes to trigger them. So when you pick a psychotic up out in the society, you normally pick him out of an atmosphere where the whole atmosphere is crazy. And as long as he’s there, it’s vibrating with it. Don’t expect anybody to make a rational decision about it. Because nobody will.
Once in a blue moon you’ll find somebody there who is very stable. But usually it’s all along the line of, “We’ve got to get rid of him. We’ve got to punish him. We’ve got to do something to him, push him out, so on, and the doctor knows best.” And yet no doctor’s going to do anything for this man. They’re in a turbulence area. So when you walk into one of these areas, don’t you get turbulent too.
There are two kinds of psychotics, actually. There is the dramatizing psychotic and the computational psychotic. Now, I think I’ve mentioned this. And don’t mistake one from the other. I mean, don’t just decide because this fellow is apparently computing, that he is not a psychotic. He has moved over into the center of a demon circuit. You will find him to be rather stupid; that is to say, the sequence of his answers and replies will not be good.
If you want to know how one of these fellows’ acts and you don’t want to have to go find one, just start talking to somebody’s demon circuit and you’ll find out the intelligence limitations and so forth of one of these demon circuits. It’s very interesting.
Your paranoiac, for instance, is definitely a computational psychotic. Your paranoid is usually a dramatizing psychotic. They don’t differentiate that closely. But there are the two types. And the worst psychotic you can get is one who has broken affinity with himself to such a degree that he would kill himself. Now boy, this is really pretty bad! He’s broken affinity with himself. He’s running on the basis of “the world would be better off with you dead.” So he kills himself.
Now, if he is a computational psychotic, you are dealing with the most dangerous case. Not dangerous to you, he’s not going to murder anybody except himself. And he’s liable to be very cagey about it. He is running square in the middle of a demon circuit. He is apparently talking very rationally and you’ll find everybody around reasoning with him.
Well, he’s about in the shape to be reasoned in as any other psychotic: he is not there to be reasoned with. You say, “Now, please, don’t commit suicide. Now, this is all nonsense. After all, your wife loves you and so on, and look, you have a nice family and you have everything to live for and so forth. And now, promise me you won’t commit suicide.” And he’ll say, “All right. I’ll promise you I won’t commit suicide.” And you turn around and walk out the door.
He goes through the window and lights fifteen flights below. They scrape him off the cement.
This data right here doesn’t seem to be terribly important, but some medical doctors from the United States Navy didn’t seem to know this. A fellow by the name of James Forrestal was permitted to do just this! They were unable to tell a computational psychotic. All they needed to have done was to have talked to him enough to find out that he wasn’t computing. Instead of that, they talked to him and he seems to be giving a response that is not too abnormal. Actually, if they had started asking him what twelve times twelve was, he’d have probably fallen all over himself. If they’d asked him whether the sun was shining brightly every day in Maryland and a few other things like that, they would have picked up non sequiturs.
They were talking to a demon circuit. They weren’t talking to James Forrestal. James Forrestal had submerged, and so these happy little chuckleheads walk out and they leave a very great and brilliant man in the hands of a demon circuit. Well, this takes real genius! And they walk out and James Forrestal goes out the window and that was the end of him. Interesting that anybody could make this much of a mistake.
They’ve whitewashed the whole thing, by the way. I understand now that a big hearing and so forth was finally conducted long after anybody had ceased to be interested and they found out that it was nobody’s fault. Actually, it was nobody’s fault. It was the fault of ignorance. They didn’t know that there are two types of psychotics. So don’t underrate the value of that datum: don’t try to reason with a demon circuit.
The time that you can waste sitting around trying to reason the psychotic into doing something is just time badly spent. The chances are, if you suddenly start to talk cheerfully about something else entirely different, completely ignoring his woes and things that he keeps talking about and so forth, the darn circuit will pick up or another circuit will cut in. And even “I” might start to talk to you. But you can’t sit there and focus and concentrate on a demon circuit.
Do you know what’s wrong with talking to demon circuits in human beings? It’s actually something you shouldn’t do much of because you start paying attention to the demon circuit, you start validating it, it’ll start building up and taking over more analyzer. Isn’t that interesting?
So, if we start validating BP, BP gets stronger. If we start validating “I,” “I” gets stronger. And if you don’t believe that, look what happens to a fellow who has some small success. He’s more important, he’s more himself, he’s less nervous. Isn’t that right? That success has validated “I,” hasn’t it? The society is validating “I” to some degree. Therefore, he should be better balanced. He is. “I” gets validated.
Now, one of the main lines of psychosis in this Anglo-Saxon society is invalidating T’ continually. “You’re your own worst enemy.” That’s a great one. “You think you’re the big ‘I Am.’ Well, what you should learn is a little modesty.” Yakety-yakety-yakety-yakety-yak. In other words, the invalidation of “I” in this society is responsible in a large measure, for the fact that the “I’s” in the society very often lack sufficient stability to overcome demon circuits.
All right. The validation, then, of these various entities in the mind practically creates them. If you negated a part of the mind hard enough and long enough, it would cease to exist. Now, this is rather obvious. So when it comes to the validation of “I,” let’s look at it and compare it to the validation of a demon circuit. So this demon circuit is busy running and saying, “I’m going to kill myself. Life is just not enough to live for. Yakety-yakety-yakety-yakety-yak.” This is not a rational line of conversation. It really isn’t. That’s a demon circuit talking. So you say, “Now, look. Life really is worth living.” Demon circuit starts setting up and getting tougher. You’re validating the thing, you’re paying attention to it. Don’t! You pay attention to basic personality.
Of course, if you invalidate the demon circuit to the degree of paying no attention to it whatsoever, it’s liable to fall in on you, too. But let’s not go into a big, sympathetic rapport with a demon circuit when we’re working on a psychotic. And let’s not go into a big, sympathetic rapport on a dramatization.
You know, a person in a psychotic dramatization pays no attention, you see, to the environment. It just runs off this record. And it’ll be an engram and, usually, half of the record will be missing. The half that is missing is suppressing the half that is there. Usually the missing half contains control circuits and hold-downs and things like that—the part that isn’t being dramatized. The other part—you’ve got a whole record here and you’re only seeing that much of it—dramatizing psychotic. Well, you start paying attention to that and you just restimulate it.
Now, it’s on a perfectly mechanical basis. The person says, “I am a small baby and I don’t know what’s happening to me.” Or, “You are a baby, you don’t know what’s happening to you.” Something like that. And you say, “Now, look, you aren’t a baby. Now, be reasonable, you’re not a baby.” How the devil do you know you aren’t exactly approximating the other part of the engram? Because if you are, you’re just going to build it up and build it up and build it up and you’re going to make the dramatized part of the engram tougher. And even though the person is saying, “I am just a baby,” and you say, “You are not a baby,” remember that your use of the word “baby” at worst is just restimulating that word “baby” in the engram. So you’re picking up the restimulation of it. You’re validating an engram!
Now, let’s look at what is happening with the circuit and you see the same thing is taking place. You start reasoning, you’re actually talking to an engram, only this engram’s computing. See? So you start taking all of these things that the person is saying into account and so on. And the best thing to do is pretty well ignore it. Talk about the weather, horse races, anything that’s fairly well off the subject. You can just keep on talking about it monotonously, if you want to. You’ll produce results. The second you start talking in the same terms the psychotic is talking in, you’re naturally restimulating his engrams. You should recognize that.
Now, another thing is the fact that many psychotics have been given electric shocks and insulin shocks. There are peculiarities about these that I’m not going to cover now. You should know something about the procedure of giving an electric shock. I don’t advise you to go and look at one. I get kind of queasy myself over them. And you should know, however, that evidently you treat the last shock first, and that the shocks have to be reached before anything else can be reached in the case. So there are these procedures. They’re going to be written up, going to be a monograph out on them shortly, and will be published in a bulletin. So I won’t cover them at this time.
The main thing which I have tried to talk to you about today has been, rather than giving you techniques, precision techniques, is trying to let you be the gainers by a state of mind toward the psychotic. This, above all else, is something that you will have to pay attention to.
An auditor has to have courage, if only to this degree: that he gets the preclear into an engram, then he has got to have nerve enough to run it, no matter what it does to the preclear. Because if he doesn’t run it, the preclear is going to be in bad shape. You can’t go into an engram that looks violent and then pull out of it. You’ve got to run that engram. The safe thing to do is to run the engram—that’s safe. To back out is very dangerous. As a matter of fact, you can fold up a whole case by losing your nerve, on running an engram. So you’ve got to be courageous. And this is peculiarly applicable to a psychotic.
I can normally expect that your first psychotic or two, you’ll probably have to have run out of you afterwards! So, just take a brace on your nerve, and put a good face on it.
These people can be helped. These people should be helped. And the Foundation is doing all it possibly can to make it possible to help these people, instead of just abandoning them out across the countryside.
Now, let’s take a break.