Institutional Dianetics (500623)
Date: 23 June 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
The fifteen-minute session could be defined very briefly as follows. It is the utilization of the direct memory channels to deintensify some incident of the past. A direct memory channel, if opened to some past incident, very often serves to knock out a lock, a heavy lock, without erasing or reducing the lock by standard Dianetic therapy.
The way one discovers the lock is by asking what is wrong with the patient. His words will express, usually word for word, what he has been told is wrong with him by somebody. And it goes down on a channel more or less—it is either straight to one of the parents or grandparents or relatives or teachers. That is, it’s just a straight circuit there which is in restimulation at the moment, or it is a circuit via a pseudoally. So the person, for instance, has married pseudo-Grandmother and Grandmother used to be very nice to the boy but she used to consider him not too bright, too. And now he has married a woman who reminds him of Grandmother. It is only necessary sometimes to get this person to use a direct memory circuit which demonstrates to him that his wife does remind him of his grandmother, and because the upper analytical sphere of the mind is able to differentiate, suddenly this illusion is pulled apart and the identification is correct. So all of a sudden wife is wife and grandmother was definitely grandmother.
What we’re doing here is putting something straight into the computer, not via any other technique at all. The fifteen-minute technique will take some very decent percentage of your cases and put them into pretty good shape rather hurriedly.
Oh, 20, 30 percent, you’ll get pretty good alleviation on it. The technique is extended into diagnostic technique. By the use of this fifteen-minute technique one can very often discover what has destroyed a person’s sense of reality, why a person is not progressing properly, what the general diagnosis is and so on. In other words, actually what it is is a diagnostic technique. But in the application of it, it will sometimes become a therapeutic technique and if you’re terribly rushed for time, you will find out that you can use it more or less exclusively as a therapeutic technique.
Now, it’s used as a diagnostic technique. You’ll very often find the person unable to recover and deintensify a lock, or find the person sliding straight into an actual engram. You extend the technique to the point of letting him slide right into the engram and then you handle that just as you would Dianetic therapy. Then you bring your patient back up to present time again, ask them to remember on a straight memory circuit what they have just gone over. And in such a case you again produce a quick alleviation on a case.
It actually looks like a miracle to some people when they see this thing working. It is nothing to be slighted just because we have something a lot better in standard Dianetic therapy, because it has actually triggered out things like Parkinsons disease and suicide attempts—a person who is chronically on the verge of committing suicide. It’s done quite a few things just in fifteen minutes.
Yes?
Male voice: It’s very useful in a case that’s too bad to handle quickly—you don’t want to take it on, or in the case of pregnancies.
Yes, those two are very good. I think you have had the second one, haven’t you?
Male voice: You mean pregnancy?
Mm-hm. Well, that’s a good idea; there is a way you can handle a pregnant woman and keep her smoothed down about the situation.
Second male voice: I wanted to ask some questions about standard medical and psychiatric tests. As a standard procedure, not for research purposes, standard procedure in handling patients you want to find out—at least I would—about his heart and syphilis. I mean if the guy’s got half a brain gone, rotted out with syphilis, I wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time, waste a lot of time on him.
Yes, you can find sometimes these things. Those are best left in the hands of a medical doctor.
Second male voice: Yeah.
If you’re suspicious of any such thing, you should call for a medical examination. On the one hand, it’ll save you a lot of work and on the other hand it’ll save you somebody who is beyond recall. However, don’t depend upon a medical diagnosis of the mind too much, unless the person’s very well acquainted with Dianetics. Because you will sometimes find a (quote) moron (unquote) who will come up very rapidly in IQ and start up somewhere around—of course when cleared he’ll be about normal—but you can take a lot of feebleminded cases and do things with them. Whereas the doctor has a rather definite habit of saying, “There’s probably something organically wrong with this person’s nervous system/’ Male voice: What tests should we ask for specifically Wassermann, Kahn . . . ?
Oh, you should ask for a full physical examination. Wassermann, Kahn, blood pressure, urinalysis, the works. The full laboratory examination. And you also want his medical opinion of the case; and it’s best to get all that in writing and signed, if you’re working a large parade of people.
Male voice: If I can make a little suggestion there, Ron, as soon as you try to do anything which savors directly of medicine it’s better to ask the doctor for a complete physical and it’s up to him what he does.
Okay. Well, of course there’s another thing this will do for you, and one way you could get around it; you just want to tell the doctor, “Well, we’re adding to our case records, and you could assist a great deal if you would give us your professional opinion on this case before it is entered into therapy.” Male voice: That’s all right Yeah. All right, that answer the . . . ? Good.
I want to talk this morning about the treatment of psychotics by Dianetic therapy. You have heard something about Institutional Dianetics, but we have never gone into the subject very thoroughly.
In this subject more than any other, the auditor must use his imagination, his perseverance and his nerve. Because in the treatment of the psychotic one encounters, one might say, engrams in the raw. They are right there and in many psychotics that is all that you observe to be there, is just the engram. The person has no higher sphere of consciousness working, you might say. Therefore efforts to attract his attention, to make him concentrate, to treat him, very often met very, very slow results. The accessibility of the patient must first be obtained. That accessibility is very often denied because the patient is highly restimulated by his environment. He is not called upon to do anything. Whether we observe it or not, the fact that he is behind bars or restrained is very often sufficient to knock out the last small effort to maintain association and reason within himself.
As a consequence, an auditor who is approaching a patient in an institution or a psychotic in his own office is put straight on his mettle, and quickly. He has to use his head because you see an engram in a sane person, you’ve seen what it does in a sane person, and now supposing we had nothing but this engram to work with. Now that’s very often the problem which is posed.
It is not as hopeless, however, as it might seem. And consistent effort on any case which is not suffering from actual physiological brain damage will produce results. Sometimes you can produce a result on a psychotic in a matter of minutes, and sometimes it’s going to take days and weeks of patient effort.
Let’s take the case of a manic-depressive. The case had not had a break for about two or three months, two and a half months. The case was capable of enormous strength during one of the manic periods, the remainder of the time was extremely depressed. But this case was a very strange one since the overall manifestation of the case was a jolly, pleasant, old lady. One could look at this case and say, “Well, here’s this hail-fellow-well-met character that doesn’t give a damn for anything,” and so on.
That was another dramatization. And it was the carry-over dramatization which went along more or less continually. So when the person would go into this jolly, hail-fellow-well-met dramatization, the psychiatrist in charge of the case would pronounce the case “a remission” and then try to turn the case loose and so on. And the next thing we could get would be one of these enormous physical strength exhibitions while she was in the manic state. And then as soon as this was blocked and she was cowed on that, she would slide back down into a depressive state and she would sit there and cry and cry and cry.
Well, the way this case worked out actually—the jolly person was her grandma. It was all in one incident. The jolly person was Grandma who had walked in immediately after an attempted abortion. The person who was crying was Mama, who didn’t want to get rid of the baby. And the strong person was Papa who, boasting of his strength, was attempting an abortion upon Mother. [gap] . . . was bragging of his strength, attempting the abortion, holding Mama down, very forceful, talking about being the strongest man in the world, nobody’s going to put anything over on him, he’s going to go ahead and do what he pleases, nobody can stop him, nobody, not even God himself, could stop him. And Mama’s saying, “Oh, no, please, please, please, I want my baby, I would just die, I’d go crazy and lose my mind if you took this baby from me.” And there’s a doorbell rings after this altercation—with the baby practically dead by this time—and in walks Grandma. But there’s no vestige of the fight now. Everything is very hurriedly hush-hush. So here’s Grandma who says, “I’m going to stay for a while and visit with you” and so on. She lives about four or five doors down the street, but she can stay for a while. And “I thought I’d come right back,” when she’d gone downtown because she was worried about Elsie, “but that’s all right, ho, ho, ho. Everything’s going to be fine,” and she’s so happy there’s a baby. And holy cats! This is one consecutive dramatization. No part of this dramatization is sanity, but Grandma appears—that valence appears to be a sane valence. But if you listened carefully to the patient, when she was being very jolly about it and so on, was very disconnected since she would mention the fact that she’d dub in more or less rational phrases into Grandma. It was a baffler! Because of course one had to get Grandma out of there and had to get Mama’s protective mechanism out of there before you could touch this manic.
The first efforts on this case—one didn’t realize of course, he didn’t know what the engram was. He tried to get a case history on the thing and he got the standard psychiatric yak which had no bearing on it, except that the patient experienced remissions and had been released many times and had been shortly afterwards returned to the institution. So in going into it, one knows that there is a dramatization there that says “strong.” Well, there is also a dramatization there that says something to the effect that “I’ve got to keep it,” because right away the second you touched this patient, “Nuh-uh!” The second that you said, “Give it to me!” of course you became Papa. The second you said, “I’ve got to keep it,” you became Mama, and turned on her . . . And the second you were rational to her, she became Grandma. So the three things that you could do to this patient was to twist her into the three valences present in the engram. And you could do this, just one, two, three, one, two, three, just by assuming other valences. Now, that is a trick which is not too new. But the mechanisms of it have never been known till Dianetics.
You assume another valence. You hear the patient talking about something or other, assume the other valence and then you get the rest of the engram because it would start to dramatize that. In other words you can keep doing a valence shift on it.
That is actually a method of diagnosis, believe it or not. It is not a very good therapeutic measure, because pure 100 percent dramatization does not occasion a release. You can keep this person dramatizing till kingdom come1 and they will still go on being psychotic. So here was a case of having to use one’s wits. One wrote down what was more or less the engram after about two or three hours of observation. What was the engram? The engram of course is complicated by the fact that Grandma is a demon circuit to some degree. Some of her conversation has set up as a demon circuit which can dub in rationality. Now, out of the engram, then, was selected all of the holders and bouncers and all of the call-backs. These things just sorted out of the engram.
Now, by very patient, friendly persistence, trying as far as possible to stay out of any of these valences that she had, but by a new approach on the thing, a changed tone, just testing it till a tone that one had was finally met more or less lucidly. Just testing it, then repeat the holders. And finally repeat the holders a little bit, repeat the bouncers, repeat the call-backs. Getting in maybe fifteen, twenty minutes of effective work out of every hour. The patient jumping up and running off and going into one of these dramatizations and then coming back and settling down again on persuasion, with the most irrational arguments, “I’ll give you lollipops if you will,” so forth. Because already she was getting unstable in the engram and she was more or less flipping into other engrams so that she’d be a little child of about two, seven, something like that for a moment, and then she’d come back and be something else. So you’re unstabilizing the case.
Yes?
Male voice: In cases of psychotics like this do you still have a part of the mind working with you even though it may not be recognized in the patient?
Mm-hm. Oh, a tiny amount of cooperation present. It can be so slight that an auditor can practically sit down and weep himself.
In this case we could really tackle Grandma, try and get Grandma. Because the sympathy end of the thing is holding it up. I’m talking about a specific case, now. This is not a standard psychotic case.
Well, after a little while, about, let’s see, I guess it was about three sessions it took to diagnose the case and just start getting some fraction, getting a little fixation, establishing a small amount of accessibility. And the patient all of a sudden repeated a bouncer and began to laugh. Repeated the bouncer about fifteen times on this basis: “You and I will play a game.” “All right.” “I bet I can say this more times than you can” “All right, well play the game.” Very cheerful for a moment, you see. So you say—in this case it was, “Lie down there and stay down and don’t you ever get up!”—all right so you say, “Lie down there and stay down there and don’t you ever get up.” And the patient would say, “Lie down there and stay down there and don’t you ever get up.” Well, after she’d done this about twenty times all of a sudden the thing started coming loose and she started to laugh about it and get rather hysterical, got up, raced around for a while, sat down and laughed some more and then she became attracted to this mechanism and started repeating it over and over. She must have repeated it over and over about two hundred times. And the first thing you know, it didn’t interest her anymore. That mechanism didn’t interest her. But she’d found what she thought was a game.
So, now we started on the call-backs. And repeated out the callbacks, one at a time. Each time one of these phrases was out of there she was more accessible. It was in about the fifth session from the first moment there that she came back up to present time and the engram was out. Now, the engram was still there. That is to say, it had earlier material and so on. Fortunately, this thing had very little ahead of it in the terms, in the same voices and the same actions. It was more or less the basic on the chain. She came back up to present time and she manifested an entirely different person. Tired! A tired individual.
Yes?
Male voice: But at that point she was more or less normal?
Oh yes, after that she was accessible.
Male voice: Easy to work by regular Dianetic technique.
She was accessible, but you had to be very careful, as you do with all psychotics, not to work her when she was too exhausted and not to work her too long. Because you work a patient, even a normal patient when they are exhausted, and you’ll get a heightened dramatization when they go through an engram, so that they should be fairly fresh if you can manage it.
Now, just to finish off this case, the matter of accessibility was cared for there by the inventiveness, so to speak, of the auditor. Of course, the next step, the very next step on that case was a quiet, orderly effort to get up the painful emotion, the last painful emotion that had charged that case into a psychosis. And the painful emotion incident worked out rather easily in spite of the fact that it had problems. Oh, there were tears, tears, tears, tears.
There’s a little motto in this that unfortunately does not always hold true and that is to say, a psychotic bleeds quick. If you can really put your fingers on the charge, why, you can generally get it off the case because the case is so far from normal and an operative organism that you’re getting a spill of charge there, rather easily accessible. Unfortunately many psychotics don’t bleed quickly. You get into the case and you can flounder around with painful emotion and so on.
Now, that’s a case of a manic-depressive. An auditor can become very depressed working a manic-depressive. Because sometimes it appears to be the most thankless task imaginable. He isn’t getting anything. He isn’t sure what he’s doing with the case. The case is maybe very closed in, in a deep apathy, he is unable to secure cooperation and so on.
Now, in the case of a paranoid, a paranoiac and so on, he has a little bit easier task. In Dianetics these are the easier cases. People used to throw up their hands in horror about it. But the hard case in Dianetics as far as I’m concerned was the old-time “easy case” of a manic-depressive. The easy case in Dianetics, as far as I’m concerned, is the paranoiac.
Male voice: Just what are the manifestations of the paranoiac? “Everybody’s against me.” A paranoid is “Everybody is out to get me. The Western Union Telegraph Company has rigged up special wires to my brain and I can hear those messages going by there and they are telling me so-and-so.” In other words, you’ve got a case rigged up on demon circuits, completely aside from Western Union.
He says, “I can hear these people whispering around in the corners all the time. I know what they’re going to do to me and I know why they’re going to do it.” But he hasn’t any idea why they’re going to do it. He’s working on a demon circuit setup. That’s a paranoid.
Now, a paranoiac is usually—he’s been considered a very dangerous fellow, because he’s more or less intelligent and he has a specific thing that is after him, “my family” or so on. In other words, he is—this is sloppy terminology and I apologize for using it, but it does sum up a certain type of case. The paranoiac has picked out a specific target. And if he has a specific target then that is what the engram’s about, of course. If the other fellow has just vague ideas about it, you can be sure that his engrams are very vague about who is after him, who is talking about him and who is trying to get him.
Those two cases, however, are normally approachable just on the idea of “against me,” “out to get me” and so on. You can get these cases pronouncing these words in repeater technique, you can very often get some very explosive discharges from them. They’ll cry and so on and you’ll normally find this stuff in the prenatal bank, just by directing the patient usually, from father or mother [gap] If possible, you should get the painful emotion off any psychotic as fast as you can; the painful emotion. If you can locate that painful emotion by any means whatsoever, get it relieved in the case, you have accomplished something very definite. Because theoretically if you could just discharge the painful emotion in the case only, you would have a sane person. You’ll find in such a case that the psychosis succeeded some very definite disasters and loss in the person’s life and so on.
It hasn’t taken place by accident, in other words. Or they weren’t just suddenly walking down the street one day and . . . We can get the data on what makes a psychotic break in Dianetics. You can go back over the case after you have the person fairly neurotic, just a neurotic state at last, and you can go back over the case and you can trace back from moment to moment what immediately preceded these breaks and you will find that it was something shocking, something that’s very heavy on the loss side.
Now, there’s another way of treating psychotics, is by the use of a mechanism known as psychodrama. We’re adapting here some of the methods which have been used in institutions over a long period of time.
Psychodrama is merely an effort to get the person to dramatize. You just get the person to dramatize. The odd part of it is, if you can start them dramatizing, you can quite often shift them from engram to engram. Now, you’re not going to achieve an awful lot with this shift because it’s just dramatization after all. But you can get them into painful incidents, you can tease them into them, wheedle them into them and, “Oh, I bet you can’t possibly tell me about your grandma’s death. Oh, you wouldn’t be able to tell me about that.” “Oh yes I could too.” “All right.” “Who do you want me to be?” “All right, you be Grandma.” “Oh, I couldn’t be Grandma because she’s dead.” Little tears. “Well all right, well, then be Mama.” “All right, I’ll be Mama.” Yakety-yakety-yakety-yakety-yak. Goes into a full dramatization of what Mama was doing around there, about the death including all Mama’s foolish remarks to the child when the child was disturbed about the death and so on. “And now let’s be the doctor,” or “Let’s be the undertaker.” Or let’s be somebody else. Only you just keep running them through these valences. What you’re doing is valence shifts on them, until you finally get them to run out themselves. They’ll fight around about it a little bit before they’ll run themselves out ordinarily. But you’ve gotten them into their own valence!
Now, if you can work a psychodrama—and it can be a very noisy affair—on a patient to finally get them into their own valence, the least you will get is the history that is recorded there in the reactive mind. Now, there are other methods, all of them depending upon inventiveness, all of them depending upon discovering the chronic engram, the engram. In a psychotic, you can pretty well count on the fact that there is one engram which is worse than any of the others and which is doing the damage.
You can get them into this in various ways. You can discover what it is and get out the bouncers, the holders and the call-backs. The person sort of possesses a reservoir of push to get up into present time, and if you can free him out of that, you can get them out.
Male voice: Just by repeating these bouncers, holders and call-backs, even though they may not be very thoroughly into it, does it take some of their charge out?
Mm-hm. Oh yeah, they start to laugh after a while, or giggle. A hebephrenic is a person however you should distrust on that. A person who is giggling, that may be the psychotic manifestation of some portion of this case and you may think you’re getting false fours. Don’t make the mistake. It’s very easy to distinguish, once you’ve seen it, but don’t mistake a hebephrenic giggle or hysteria for a false four. A false four has—you can hear the sanity in it, is the best way I could describe it. And in hebephrenia you can’t hear any sanity at all. It’s insane.
Now, here we have an enormous number of manifestations of psychosis. There are as many manifestations of psychosis as there are engrams—types. That’s quite a number. This was what gave Senior Craeplin—C-R-A-E-P-L-I-N—gave him a great deal of trouble. And he spent a long time thinking about this and he finally classified all the manifestations of psychotics. And if you look at his list you will be staggered, because it finally winds up and then it puts a trash bin for everything that wouldn’t fit into the rest of them. One is trying to classify a manifestation without knowledge of such a thing, of what is causing the manifestation. And that type of classification is very poor. But there are some psychiatric, as I’ve just been saying, psychiatric classifications which are of some use. There’s a manic-depressive. We know that the manic is something that makes a person feel strong and powerful, and that it’s just adjacent to a depressive part of an engram which contained the danger. And they’ll fluctuate between those two. So that is a definite aspect of an engram. And that is fairly common. Then there’s a fellow that everybody is against him. That’s fairly common. And then there is the hebephrenic who does nothing but giggle. And then there is the catatonic who is just limp, dead, so on; motionless. And you might include in that the apathetic case. Then there is the physiological psychosis whereby the person is simply physiologically a moron. And you don’t get dramatizations like that off of a moron. And you can tell the difference between a moron—a physiological moron—and an engramic moron very easily because the engramic moron is dramatizing, and will dramatize. Even though the dramatization is just being superstupid. And the physiological one is just plain dull. This is no real test for an auditor at all. You can look over a few of these patients in a home for the feebleminded and any one of you, without previous practice, could just sort them out into their two respective groups. You’d probably have a center group there that you’d say these people are dumb and are dramatizing. They are morons and they are dramatizing, but not very much dramatization and pretty much moron, so you’d have three pens in which you would put the people. And the ones that were strictly engramic, these you would want to do something about. The others you wouldn’t care much to do anything about. But regardless of whether a person is a physiological moron or not, remember engrams are still present, but remember you’ve got to have analytical mind machinery in order to express the engram. So if the person is not expressing any of these engrams, you can be sure that the machinery is broken down somewhere.
Male voice: Where on the difficulty list do these engramic morons come, on the difficulty of treatment?
Oh, I don’t know, very often they’re quite cooperative. There again, you’re just dealing with all the manifestations that engrams can take. Man’s desire to classify into tight little compartments all of these things has in the past led him astray. Well, we don’t want to be led astray on the thing. I’m just demonstrating that there are these general classes of manifestations you’ll see, and psychiatrists will point them out as so-and-so. And I’m just taking up these classes one by one.
Now, you take your catatonic. There are various ways that you could do something about him. One of the ways to do something about him is set his bed on fire or other heroic measures. He won’t stay there. That is a strange thing. A hypnotist is fully acquainted with this manifestation. This is the same mental manifestation—well, a similar manifestation—as the boy who is hypnotized. You hypnotize a boy and you tell him you’re going to give him a red-hot poker. Then you hand him a broomstick. And he will take the broomstick and he will pretend that he is burned and actually the tips of his fingers will sometimes blister. That’s the kickback on it.
Now we take the boy, hypnotize him, and we hand him a red-hot poker. And we say, “This is a red-hot poker, take hold of it.” He’ll jump back and say, “Why, you son of a bitch!” He’s no longer in a hypnotic trance.
You can take these people and take a hypnotized person and say, “Now, this is a window that is 480 stories above the ground. And you’re going to jump out and fall to your death.” Which would be, at best, we know in Dianetics, one of the foulest things you could do to a man. But anyway, he stands there to the window and, “Now open it up and jump out.” And of course the window is just a mock-up. He steps through the window and he’s on the floor on the other side of the window. And he’ll go through the whole thing and he will step through the window and pretend to jump (careful not to hurt himself), and he will scream as though he’s falling and so forth and he will even land with a crunch, sometimes, for you. But now you take him over to a real window which is maybe four or five stories above the ground and you say, “All right, open the window and jump out.” Of course you want to be careful on this, because he may have a dramatization which says, “I have to open the window and jump out” and in such a case he might do so. But all this aside, the usual reaction is he opens the window all right and he takes a glance out, and he says, “Why, you son of a bitch” and “you’re trying to kill me.” And bing he’ll come out of the trance. You see how that is?
Male voice: In other words, necessity brings the level of analytical power up to where he takes . . .
Very good, very good. That’s actually the mechanism of it, functional mechanism. So in a catatonic, there is a whole string of rather heroic tricks that can be played on a catatonic to make him accessible. One should not indulge himself too freely in these tricks and he should use quieter and softer methods before. We know that the catatonic is sitting right there on a “can’t move” and “hold still” and so on. He is in another valence and obeying a command.
Male voice: Couldn’t you just run him on repeater on this where he’s stuck?
Yes, if you can get him to move his mouth.
Now, one of the ways you can take a catatonic and raise his necessity level artificially is to feed him full of Benzedrine. I don’t care how you give it to him. He may not open his mouth and want to swallow it. But you can give him Benzedrine. Benzedrine could be given to him anyway. And it will bring up his attention level. And you can sometimes work him over the engrams. In fact, almost any person who is disassociating badly and so on will present a different aspect when he has been given a stimulant such as Benzedrine. We’re trying to find better stimulants. [gap] Male voice: Incidentally, are we allowed to give Benzedrine? No. No, you’re not allowed to give Benzedrine. You do that in liaison with a medical doctor. As a matter of fact, I don’t expect any of the people who have been certified by the Foundation, in a very short space of time, to have any difficulty whatsoever working with a medical doctor. As a matter of fact, they will probably be very pleased to work with some of you gentlemen.
Male voice: Should an obsessive compulsive be classified as psychotic? Working with a psychotic, can you hypnotize them?
An obsessive compulsive? Well . . . He tried to hypnotize him? Male voice: He had been trying to hypnotize him before . . .
That was mistake number one. That was mistake number one. Mistake number two would be to try to assume any state with the man which was even suggestive of taking command or control of him. Maybe I should have stressed that a little bit more. You don’t give a psychotic the idea that you are taking over control of him when it agitates him in any way. Make it out to some degree as though you’re sort of playing with him a little bit. Sometimes you will find, and it’s very good when you can, that he is accessible to your taking control of him. Now, when that’s possible it will demonstrate itself rather rapidly, and then you can do so and then you will achieve rather rapid results. But trying to place him in a state before you do something else and trying to go through any orderly procedure, is of course throwing organization against chaos and they just don’t mix. In consequence, you have to catch a person like an obsessive compulsive, sort of catch them on the fly. There are certain things they are doing and certain things they are saying, you can attract their attention one way or the other and you can do things with them. [gap] . . . just because the person is psychotic is no reason to believe that the general human laws have been suspended. Which is a sad and serious mistake on the part of anyone trying to treat a psychotic. There’s part of that person who is reasonable. One might not be looking at any part that is reasonable. But part of the person is, and any of the things that will upset or will be effective upon a normal patient are equally useful in the treatment of psychotics.
Second male voice: Well, this psychologist didn’t say that Dianetics had failed, he just said he didn’t know enough about it or what other expedients to use to get them into reverie.
All right. I’d know quite a bit about Dianetics before I started cracking down on psychotics. In other words, I would work a lot of normals—a lot of normals, a lot of neurotics, and then take a deep dive into the psychotic end of the picture.
That’s one of the reasons that’s going to keep institutional—make it a little bit backwards compared to the rest of it because in the institution one has before him mainly psychotics and as a result a doctor will—may read the book and say, “Oh, yes” and generally he’ll go down and he’ll assume immediately he knows all about Dianetics, see, because this dovetails in and he’ll use parts of Dianetics and so forth. He hasn’t organized it at all. And he’ll go down and he’ll invariably pick the patient that he couldn’t do anything with by any other method. Then he will tackle this patient with some strange version of Dianetics and he’s going to have failures on his hands, very definitely. But if he would just content himself with working a few neurotics, working with a few accessible patients, handling people long enough for him to get a good command of auditing and then start tackling the tough ones, then he can break them. But it’s a process of education otherwise.
Male voice: This is a little off the subject of direct psychotics, but what do you see of the practice of Dianetics on the numbers and violence of institutionalized cases over a period of years in the future?
I don’t know, because I don’t know how many iatrogenic psychoses are in existence. I imagine Dianetics . . . [gap] . . . prefrontal lobotomy cases, electric shock. Well, we don’t know how cerebral hemorrhage will retard Dianetic therapy and so forth. We’re without data, but with Dianetics in the public domain, we have two factors at work.
One, we have Preventive Dianetics which is very, very important and should never be overlooked because with the use of Preventive Dianetics you can keep a psychotic from a break. And the other one is the fact that many neurotics and so on who are, ordinarily—they get all confused with psychotics, there’s no precise definition and so forth. They can be very easily released. And another thing is that psychoanalysis will eventually cease to make attempts upon these people. And that isn’t offered as a derogatory statement but as something of which we must take cognizance: that psychoanalysis in practice very often precipitates a severe neurosis or psychosis and in many of these very large clinics, it is a byword of the people in the surrounding country that a man goes to the clinic for psychoanalytic treatment and as long as his money holds, why they treat him, and then they ship him across the river to the state institution. You won’t get that kind of a case. So the thing in any way you look at it will get marked down. Then the people in the institutions who can be reached rather easily with a cursory knowledge of Dianetics, that person can be freed. Furthermore, people coming in for a very short period, they can watch the case settle, they’ll know what to expect of it and they can release what’s troubling the case and send him on his way again. I would say it would markedly decrease the institutional population of the country, very markedly decrease it.
It will decrease more swiftly the criminal population of prisons. That will decrease much more swiftly because the criminal has quite a bit of time on his hands. And very few of these people are inaccessible. And they will do almost anything to get out of prison. And as soon as parole boards learn that they can only guarantee a Release—a Dianetics Release—with a parole, they can only guarantee that individual, there will be a lot of prison Dianetics practiced. Our criminal population will go way down.
Well, anyway—to keep on talking on the same line—the psychotic will challenge anyone’s ingenuity. One should know, number one, his Dianetics thoroughly. He should have had practice on sane—(quote) sane (unquote) people, neurotics and very easily reached psychotics before he starts to graduate it up the line and take the cases that could never be touched by anyone.
He’s able then—more able—because the tools are easy and familiar in his hands, to use his imagination and to change off from one thing to another and work it as an art. Because the treatment of a psychotic becomes a fine art. One has to be able to recognize the engram in the raw, see it, know it for what it is and invent methods instanter to take care of this engram of this particular patient, because there’re so many manifestations of psychosis.
Now, the next thing he should do is to know the effect of hypnotism and drugs. He should know this pretty well and he should have observed this, actually. In hypnotism one can reach the basic personality and he can work out the emotional charges, certainly, from a psychotic case if the case can be hypnotized. So he must be prepared to use hypnotism. He must know how it works, what he should do to make it function, know how to regress a person in hypnotism, so on. Not terribly different from—in its regression angles—than Dianetics, but very definitely different as you produce the trance, the production of that trance. That is not hard to do.
There’s a little book by a man by the name of Young written about 1899, which contains in it about as much hypnosis as you’ll ever want. It’s Twenty-Five Lessons in Hypnotism and costs two bits. And it’s really a nice full little pamphlet.
Male voice: Can you give us the name of the publisher?
Yes . . .
Second male voice: That’s Young?
Yes.
Male voice: Is that one of those paperbound ones?
O. N. Ottenheimer. O-t-t-e-n-h-e-i-m-e-r and Company, Publishers, Baltimore, Maryland. It’s Twenty-Five Lessons in Hypnotism.
Second male voice: Bound in blue paper?
Bound in blue, sometimes bound in red. By M. Young.
Male voice: With a picture on the front of one guy hypnotizing another guy?
Two women. Yeah. Yeah, well that’s an interesting little book. And the funny part of that book is practically everything in it works. And there’s clairvoyance and so forth, all delineated, mesmerism and so on.
Male voice: Even hypnotizing animals.
Yeah. Well, you have the methods there of hypnotism and a fellow treating psychotics should know them.
A few things can be added to those techniques. One of the things is fixating attention with mirrors, spinning mirrors and light. This could be reduced much more easily on a technical basis by having a sort of a mask that fits over the face that has a spot of light in front of each eye that flashes. That will produce a trance and so forth in the patient. And then there’s the proposition of setting up a carrier wave with a—pounding monotonously on a dishpan, let us say, with a spoon. And saying with each one of those things “Sleep” or some such thing, as part of the carrier wave. And you could often take a catatonic and you can put him into a hypnotic trance.
Although it’s—mind you now—it’s very difficult to produce hypnosis in a psychotic for this mechanical reason, that it is hard to hypnotize anybody who is regressed on his time track. The person should be in present time. Nevertheless, you can effect hypnosis at times on psychotics and particularly when the psychotic doesn’t happen to be regressed.
Male voice: If you can—if the person who’s regressed can be hypnotized, can you bring him up to present time under hypnosis?
Mm-hm, and hell be back in the engram unless you have tackled the engram.
Psychotics will very occasionally settle. They will have short periods when they’re quiet and rational Sometimes a psychotic will run on a time clock. [gap] . . . in other words, between the hours of 8 o’clock and 10:30 at night any effort to work this patient, although the patient was more or less normal, were quite unavailing. Another patient can’t be worked between 2 o’clock and 3 o’clock in the morning or something like that. In other words, that’s the time of the engram and that’s just too much of a good thing to make the time of day fit with the engram, and they get quite disturbed on it. So in such a way you will find psychotics who are very psychotic during three days of the month. Some coincidence with moon periods. It’s fascinating. Also the fact that lovers go walking around in the moonlight and that lovers talk about the moon is equally fascinating to me. Which demonstrates conclusively the fact that radiation from the moon brings about lunacy. (laughter) So anyway, the psychotic during the phase of the full moon, for instance, in the month he may be a raving maniac, you might say, and on the remaining twenty-some days, he is quite placid and accessible. But because he goes off every time there is a full moon, he is retained in the institution. Well now, you have to work him on the days when he’s accessible.
Now you will find that another psychotic will be more accessible at 2 o’clock in the afternoon than he would be at 10 o’clock in the morning. That’s because of the time tab on the engram. So at 2 o’clock in the afternoon this patient, who all morning had to lie in a cold pack or something of the sort, can be found walking around conversing very cheerily with everyone, but next morning she’ll be back in a cold pack And then at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, why, she’ll be quite accessible and seemingly very rational. She is up in present time. You might say this is because there’s a call-back for a certain period of the day—in other words, a time stimulation. See, she’s restimulated by the hour of the day. And incidentally, you can put a person in a dark room and you still get the chronometer showing up.
Male voice: “You’ve got to come back here by 2 o’clock,” or something like that?
Well, it’s not even that specific. It may be at 10:30 at night was when Papa and Mama went to bed and had coitus, and maybe they did that very regularly. So that 10:30 at night, that was a nonsurvival hour.
Second male voice: How about working the preclear at a restimulative time. Wouldn’t the engram be more accessible then?
I haven’t made sufficient observation of this to come to any conclusion but I have found some preclears were completely unworkable when certain periods of the day came around. Usually late evening, along about bedtime, that seems to be the pet hour for . . . And sometimes in the morning, at 9:20, something like that, something very precise. Nine o’clock was when Papa left the house and said goodbye and so on. So at 9:20 Mama said, “Well I got to get rid of this baby.” Jab. Well now, this might have been a standard dramatization of Mama’s. And there might be thirty, forty abortion attempts lying around whereby she’s throwing herself on the bed or banging herself up against the door or doing something or other that will sort of—she’s very hopeful of getting rid of the child. So that at 9:20 in the morning you will find some people in a high state of restimulation. You see how this would work? Again, it varies with the engram. Not by any other function.
All right. Now, in the matter of drugs, you should be apprised of the relative uselessness of drugs and the danger of their use on the psychotic. It is the favorite stunt in an institution to give sedation to a psychotic. This is very dangerous, and although it is—it’s one of these things whereby they think it’s better to do that than to do something else. It’s the lesser of two evils but it’s not much less. Here is a person who is violently disturbed, amid people who are violently disturbed. Now, what would you think of hypnotizing this person there and telling this person, “Now, every word that you hear in your surroundings is going to enter your engram bank.” Now, would you do that to a person?
All right, it does exactly the same thing when a patient is under heavy sedation in an institution. You will pick up the most fantastic variety of locks when you’re finally finishing up the release or clearing of a psychotic. Because he has nothing around him but high-powered engrams sufficient to hold up a person on the track, sufficient to do everything else, and these are being poured into him while he is—although he is walking around—he’s still in a suggestible state.
Male voice: Have any institutionalized psychotics actually been cleared all the way through?
I never have cleared one all the way through, but I have brought them up to a point where it was so obvious that they were stable and could go on through to Clear. Just brought them up to that point. One has only so many hours in his life. I consider them Clear and stable as a result of those observations when one has removed all the painful emotion from the case. Then they’re stable. They’re not stable up to that point, though. You can’t take out a lot of prenatals and clear away a lot of other stuff around and leave the painful emotion in place and not expect something else to happen to them. Because they’re liable to collapse and have a relapse or something. The next moment, something reactivates.
Painful emotion is the dynamite pushed into the bank. And you take the dynamite out and you can practically leave the other undisturbed, as far as a release goes. Now, another incident of painful emotion of course will affect this person badly but not to a psychotic break, because usually the psychotic has broken only when he’s taken—he’s lost about everything he can lose in his life. But now to get back on this drug proposition. You can be very easily deluded in the administration of soporifics to a psychotic. It appears that the psychotic, after the drug has been administered, has a return of rationality. You can take sodium Amytal, give it to the psychotic who is raving, disturbed, and within a short period of time find in his place an individual who is fairly rational. So because when an individual is fairly rational one doesn’t have to guard what he says to him, it is a tendency to just talk to him as though he were rational.
He is not rational in its finest sense. He is in a highly artificial state. Let us postulate that the charge of engrams breaks down the insulation amongst the memories and that a psychotic is therefore identifying all the way across the switchboard. Everything is hooked into everything else on the switchboard. As a consequence, any stimulus-response even remote from what we would consider in normal people to be a good reason, will set him off and keep him going. Just the fact of being alive perhaps might be restimulative to him. So he has, you might say, short circuits all the way through the memory bank and anything will activate his engrams.
Now, by the administration of sodium Amytal, sodium pentothal, and many other drugs—hyoscine, scope (that is hyoscine)—by the administration of these things, we seem to temporarily restore the insulation. Just put it on an analogue of that character, you can see it more readily We have an airplane engine which won’t start. And, the reason it won’t start is because it’s soaking wet. Its magneto and spark plugs and wires and so on, like the old radial engines, all short-circuited. Now we take out the pyrene gun, because carbon tet has an insulatory effect upon the wiring, we take out the pyrene gun and we squirt the engine over with pyrene. We drench the spark plugs and the magneto and the various wires and connections with pyrene. Then we go back and throw her on, contact, pull the prop through, and the engine’s on its way. Then because it gets hot, it will keep on running because it’s dried itself. Well, unfortunately the analogy doesn’t carry all the way through on the administration because the engine in this case doesn’t get hot and the wiring doesn’t dry out. But what we’ve done is restored the insulation amongst the memory banks temporarily.
Now, when we’ve laid in a statement there and we’ve said something to the psychotic, it of course is received as an insulated and isolated memory, at the moment when he is under the influence of the soporific. Now when the drug wears off—this is still an analogy—when the drug wears off, that is hooked into the circuits too, so that all the dramatizations that he observes while he is under sedation, all of the things said to him while he is under treatment or sedation, those things become part of the short-circuited package in his mind.
Male voice: In the case of an institutionalized patient who has often had a given drug used to sedate him, if you gave him that drug again, would that not have a tendency to restimulate the other times when he had had it?
There is some possibility of this but—because it produced before the same mechanical effect it will keep on producing it. The resistance to soporifics on the part of certain human beings has been a subject of great puzzlement to psychiatry for many centuries. One person can get drunk on a smell of a glass, and another person doesn’t get drunk on a gallon.
The rather careless statement has been—I’ve overheard amongst psychiatrists being made—“Well, anybody can throw it off if he wants to.” Now that’s not a good, solid, scientific statement. It happens that some of the engrams in which the psychotic is existing at the moment, some of those engrams carry with them a resistance to: a resistance to drugs, a resistance to alcohol and so forth. “Alcohol doesn’t affect me,” “Don’t give me any more drugs because they don’t do me any good.” That’s good enough in an engram to practically nullify soporifics. So these people have to be very heavily sedated before they succumb. They will succumb somewhere along the line. They’re eighty and they’re almost dead, but they will stay under the influence of the drug only at the peak, which may be ten minutes, half an hour. So there is a great tendency then, because this person is resisting, willfully and maliciously, resisting and guilty of mopery and dopery on the institution floor to keep pumping him full of sedation and in an effort to produce an amenable state of mind. “It does it on some patients therefore it should break down and do it on others.” Well, I don’t know what effect heavy sedation of that character has over long periods of time. [gap] . . .I do know that sedation, any of these things are poisons. I know that they can inhibit control mechanisms of the body, do something to tissue, to the protein balance and so on. And it is possible that continued sedation over a period—a long period of time, very heavy dosage and so forth—might bring about physiological breakdown of the nervous structure. There is a possibility of that.
I haven’t seen it, but the data on this subject seems to predict the fact that it might exist, since I have treated an alcoholic whose brain was (quote) so far gone (unquote) that the cellular batteries didn’t seem to be able to recharge themselves. And he was in sad, sad state. He had been drunk nearly all of the time for many, many years, very heavily drunk. And he could be worked, by the way, when he was drunk. And so one got him drunk and worked him. And it went along all right. But the fellow had lowered himself down to a moronic level.
I meant to observe that case; many other things were much more pressing at the time. I wish I had taken close observations, long periods afterwards. I would have had something more of an answer than I have now on what various drugs can do to the human nervous system in the way of destruction. But it is possible that you may encounter in institutions people who have been under sedation so long that the toxic effects of it plus the fact that engrams are going in there continually render them almost hopeless as cases. The volume will just be so enormous.
Now, working a patient with narcosynthesis is not terribly difficult when the narcosynthesis works. But you give a patient narcosynthesis sometimes, and you will find him merely unconscious. You give him narcosynthesis, then he goes unconscious. There is no period of accessibility there, or if any, it’s so brief, so fleeting, nothing can be done about it. A very good reason for this: The patient is caught in some sort of an illness or a delirium; he’s caught in an engram which has underlying it enormous layers of unconsciousness. One chap of which I have a record was in a mumps—I finally established what he was in after a couple of sessions, and he was in a mumps engram. He had been unconscious for about three days, a very serious illness, with Mama and Papa holding him down and pleading with him not to move and thresh about. And they did this for three days, telling him they would take care of him, and he was not to worry and so on. Well, this patient, by the way, did let them take care of him. His father was a shipping clerk and made a very small amount of money. And the boy was not loath to pick up over half of his father’s salary and spend it on his own living. And he was twenty-seven years of age, which I think you’ll consider rather remarkable. They certainly did themselves proud, those parents, when they held this boy down for three days. Because he was still there. “Get back on the bed,” “Lie still,” and so on. Why the devil they just didn’t let him thrash around I don’t know, because what he was obviously fighting was them. So whenever you gave him sodium Amytal, he went right straight into mumps. A high fever turned on, glandular changes took place there in his jaws, he became very restless, very wary, frightened, and would pass that strata into straight unconsciousness with no period of accessibility. All it did was turn up the engram. So don’t depend on narcosynthesis to do anything spectacular for you, and be leery of it because it may do something very, very bad for you. It is possible for you to enter a case with narcosynthesis and start through a late-life period of unconsciousness, restimulate it 100 percent, not lift it or deintensify it because it just is right there and it has too much ahead of it. You may not be able to get earlier than that incident because of the extreme weakness of the mind at the moment. And you may succeed in permanently restimulating it.
Because when the narcosynthesis wears off you haven’t approached this thing as you have in reverie. You’re trying to get “I” in contact with the reactive mind. You’re trying to get “I” in contact with the reactive mind, and in contact with the standard banks. When you use narcosyn-thesis you’re not working with “I” You’re working below the level of “I” So when the narcosynthesis wears off and the bank gets all short-circuited and connected again, you have added, with full strength, the engram which you have restimulated artificially. And that doesn’t wear away. That will not rebalance. And it’s possible for you to enter a case with narcosynthesis and drive the person insane, who has not hitherto been insane.
Male voice: In this case of this fellow, that you could work only when he was in a drunken state, what’s alcohol doing to his brain?
The same analogy can be applied here on alcohol that can be applied on drugs. The alcohol, by changing the carbon-oxygen battery setup in the mind, makes it possible for the various memories to stay in their own compartments more or less in an orderly fashion. But when the drug is off and has worn away, why, you can have the whole thing all short-circuited again.
That’s why drunks, by the way, become worse and worse and worse. Because they’re around bars, and people push them around and “You bum,” and “Get out of here,” and insults and arguments and so on. And all this time they are, you might say, under sedation. So they have rendered themselves terrifically liable to the receipt of enormous numbers of locks. [gap] Don’t think that I am warning you on the use of narcosynthesis, I am just warning you on the possible consequences in using it. Any use of narcosynthesis without a full knowledge of exactly what engrams are and what they can do, is nothing short of, well, I was going to say criminal—I will say irresponsibly adventurous, as many of the past therapies have been. Irresponsible in the extreme, because an inspection of the clinical records on the score of administering narcosynthesis will demonstrate clearly to anyone that a percentage of those cases, a good, sizable percentage of those cases were much worse afterwards, and stayed worse. It was the fact that narcosynthesis was a variable which made me investigate it.
Now, you will find people who are using narcosynthesis without any knowledge of Dianetics rather anxious to justify themselves in its use. And therefore they will disclaim any responsibility for the fellow. “He was crazy anyway, and so on, and narcosynthesis didn’t do anything.” So the actual figures have a tendency to become buried.
What we have to guard against when we treat psychotics is that we do not worsen their condition. And that can be done rather easily by this mechanism of narcosynthesis, without any responsibility of yours. It would be possible for a patient to be in an institution, psychotic and apparently accessible—for you to believe that she was apparently accessible and for that patient to be under very heavy sedation of which you would not be apprised. You see immediately the danger that this poses. This means that you start to work a case which is under sedation, you slide, whether you want it or not, into a moment of unconsciousness and pain, physical pain late in the person’s life. You do not succeed in relieving it, or you accidentally touch it, restimulate it and the patient doesn’t get any better. But on the contrary when the sedation wears off, is much wilder. Because of the apparent accessibility of a patient under sedation there is an enormous temptation to use it.
Now, if you have to work a patient who is under sedation, work her with the full knowledge, or work him with the full knowledge that the curve of progress is not going to be smooth or all upward. It is going to be a roily coaster affair, where occasionally the condition of the patient will suddenly seem to be much worse than ever before, and where it will go up again and become better than it had been before. And then right there you think you’re winning and off it goes again. This is a case that you’re working under sedation. It’s an amnesia trance! A thing which you might overlook. And the whole operation of amnesia trance is unsatisfactory at best, even when it is done with hypnosis and without drugs, because the basic personality, the attention units, which we can postulate are down somewhere around the standard banks, have very little force. They find it very difficult to buck into incidents at the beginning of the case. They get more and more powerful, by the way, as the case goes on. But the more of them that are evidently released, why, the more the man can do in amnesia trance. But the person has no recollection of what’s happening when he wakes up. So there is a definite danger that we are running in the treatment of a patient in an institution. You should be aware of that danger and you should be prepared to take the wild emotionalism of these men of science in these institutions concerning the changed state of the patient. “But the patient has to be under sedation,” they say. They say the patient has to be under sedation. You want to work the patient, you know what you’re going to get.
All the way out of this sedation, and if possible on a little Benzedrine, you’re not running any risks. You can stir that case up as much as you want to stir it up. You can go in and take half of an engram and chew it up and maybe not get the other part of it, and leave that and go on to something else, as you will do with a psychotic. And although they may appear pretty wild the following day, a week, ten days later, the case will have rebalanced. And you can go on with this rebalancing cycle all you want to.
The amount of cooperation which you will get at this time in an institution is slight. The attitude of a gentleman out in Chicago is perhaps representative of this. He was far too busy because he had too many psychotics on his hands in order to look over Dianetics. He was just going day and night eighteen hours a day trying, doing his best for these psychotics. But he didn’t have time to look over Dianetics. Oh, he was in a bad state, this fellow was. He looked over, finally, the basic tenets of Dianetics, and got terribly upset.
It seems like this fellow had a bad case of ulcers. Oh, a furious case of ulcers. And he had been free from these ulcers up to a certain moment when he was walking through a corridor of an institution and a gentleman who was somewhat bereft of his wits leaped out of a cell, jumped on him and mauled him a little bit. Didn’t hurt him any. And after that, for some peculiar reason, he had ulcers. He had ulcers from right that minute right on forward.
Of course, this by the way, as an aside, adds up rather interestingly. He doesn’t want to get rid of his engrams and he can’t because he’d die. Well, that’s him. The ulcers tell you immediately, one AA. I’ve never had an ulcer connect with anything else. It’s actual pain to the fetus itself. It’s an actual injury to the fetus, it’s not a secondhand injury to Mama. The next thing it tells you, that Mama considered Papa a maniac. The next thing it tells you is that Papa jumped Mama about the whole thing and it tells you immediately the key-in contains the words, “you maniac” or “he’s crazy” or “get him out of here” or something of the sort. There is a shock key-in there. So there’s the case lying there nakedly when this fellow was rushing around madly and doing things for madmen. Madmen are a great worry to him.
Ulcers are all AA as far as I’m concerned until I find a case with an ulcer which is not an AA. I may find one someday.
Well, here’s another thing you must watch for in Institutional Dianetics, is the use of positive suggestion during electric shock as practiced by many psychiatrists. They do not call it positive suggestion since they don’t recognize it as positive suggestion. They’ve never compartmented the thing up or analyzed it. But it’s quite ordinary to take a patient immediately after a convulsive shock and tell him “Well, you’re all right here, you will be much better” and, “we’re your friends” and “people are taking care of you here” and I suppose, “stay here,” “don’t move,” “come back” and all the rest of it. But that is worse than hypnotism because there’s physiological damage going along with it, even if it’s just a disturbed electronic balance to the body. And one psychiatrist naively remarked to me not too long ago that after the patient had been issued forth from the hospital as a remission, the patient very often said that they had a recollection of this touching moment and it had helped them; it had helped them a great deal I don’t know how many of these patients were remitted only because of the positive suggestion which, by the way, would not have needed a convulsive shock since the convulsive shock would have been completely unnecessary in his case.
In short, you have people playing around—what I want to sum this up to—people playing around in complete ignorance, with an enormous number of variables and a great many learned observations. As a result, when you go into a case you can find almost anything and probably will. It is not a happy picture. Institutional Dianetics is complicated, not so much by psychosis, but by psychiatric therapy. And that is not a bitter statement or anything like it, I’m just asking you to confront this fact for what it is. Patients who are under sedation, patients who are turned in with a bunch of people who are going to lay in engrams left and right on them, patients who have been given electric shock therapy, convulsive therapy, no record of what was said around that patient at all.
You don’t know what kind of an engram you’re going to suddenly trip into. You may trigger one of these things. You may put the patient right back into the convulsive shock suddenly, because some psychiatrist as he turns from the machine (the patient is still convulsing) says to the nurse, “Come back here a minute; now wait till I’m through.” And you just trigger this thing and whack! the patient goes right into a convulsion. But that electric shock engram which is, after all, only an engram, is not susceptible to removal at that moment.
Furthermore, there are freak side effects on these things which you can’t predict. That is to say, the electric shock may pull the whole engram bank up into one place. And you find yourself working through a chronic somatic which is the electric shock. Everything you do to this patient takes him into a convulsion.
Okay. On the positive side of the ledger, you know what you’re looking at. By close observation you can detail the engram or engrams. By the use of your tools and a very good command of them and by using them with great imagination and observation, you can produce spectacular, miraculous results on psychotics. But don’t go into the treatment of psychosis, particularly people who have been institutionalized, with the assurance that you’re going to produce positive results in a very short space of time with great ease and with no complications, because the complications are going to be there. In any case, you’re going to have to work very hard. It’s sometimes going to be a very long track for you. You will eventually produce results but you cannot predict how long it’s going to take to produce those results.
If you could just get the person at the time of the psychotic break or before, if you could just relieve the painful emotion at that time, without that person ever going near an institution, you’ve got a fine chance of getting a fast release on this case. Hours. A few hours of work.
After that patient has been placed in the environment of insanity, under sedation, electric shocked, has had psychoanalysis or something under sedation or narcosynthesis and so on, and maybe years of such an environment have elapsed since the admission of that patient; when you run into this, be pessimistic because you may not want to spend all the time it’s going to require to produce that result. And if you’re going to, because of personal attachment or so forth, know that you can fight through this maze and this cordon and that you can win. But know also that it may take a lot of time.
Certainly for the first part of your practice and so on in auditing you should avoid psychotic cases which are institutionalized. You can do quite a bit for somebody who has not yet been institutionalized, but you’re going to get into an institution, you will find yourself dealing with people who have now been deprived all civil rights, who are wards of the state, who are actually the property of the state, people who by their psychosis are making it possible for other people to be employed. There’s economic values being entered in here. And you’re not going to get a very pleasant reception.
I have a feeling that there is so much work to be done in this field of the mind, there are so many people to be treated, that unless one has a definite personal attachment for an institutionalized case and is going to carry forward just on that line alone, one should leave them alone. Because that is a problem into which psychiatry has busily dug itself and that’s its problem. They’re perfectly satisfied with the problem. I think every effort should be made to keep patients from going into institutions, but once they’re there, once they’ve received treatment, I think it’s up to the psychiatrist. He got them that way; on his head be it. It’s very well to take over the responsibility of all the sins of the world. It’s quite another thing to have enough hours in the day to remedy all things wrong.
Male voice: What might one typically meet in an electric shock case in opening and working the case?
That’s a very interesting question. There are two gentlemen right here who know more about that actually than I do. Because when I have encountered an electric shock case before—I encountered two of them, one after the other—I found their memory banks and so forth in very poor condition. I found them quite difficult. I read up on the subject as much as I could and studied the cases and understood that cerebral hemorrhages possibly had taken place, that we were dealing with something that was very wild and very artificial. I labeled it iatrogenic psychosis and after that left it alone, because I had enough to do without that. A lot can be learned in that field. This gentleman from Tampa has a friend who is working a paranoid who has had a great many electric shocks and getting results.
Male voice: I haven’t done very much work yet, but I’m going Sunday—my sister’s had forty-nine electric shocks.
Forty-nine.
Male voice: But I certainly entered the case very easily and got what they called a . . . what’s the word?
Remission?
Male voice: Remission. We got it in three weeks, fifteen days of work.
Yeah?
Male voice: It bounced back down and I haven’t had much chance to . . .
How many hours did you work this case per day?
Male voice: About forty-five minutes.
You worked the case forty-five minutes?
Male voice: Under constant interruption and so forth. Sunday I have a chance to work it longer.
Fine. What?
Second male voice: The only case that I mentioned is a woman who was being treated for “free-floating’ anxiety neurosis. She had had some psychiatric counseling and nine convulsive shock treatments. A psychologist who worked on her thereafter using Dianetic therapy said he found no evidence of the time track being scrambled. And the three sessions that he’d done on her when he talked to me had done her more good than all the previous therapy.
Well, I’m very glad to hear reports on working on electric shock. There are possibly many aspects of this. I was unfortunate right at the beginning, I didn’t carry out a long series and said it was equivocal A man can only research the whole of mankind in—after all, I’ve had only a few years and there are many things in the field of man’s activities which have not yet been inspected. [gap] . . . take what seem to be the most open and natural manifestations of man. And to treat those on a comparable level. Dianetics is full of compartments. That is, the first one we compartment out is mysticism. And we say, “Those are all blue chips with red spots and we’re only interested in white ones down here in this puzzle.” We compartment out that side of it, we find the other part of it resolves nicely, but we don’t disallow mysticism. We say, “That can possibly exist, we just don’t need it at this time.” So we have this setup here. Now, what is known about structure? Damn little. So what do we do about structure? Well let’s just put that aside because we can study function by itself. So we’ve compartmented it again.
Now, when we study man’s behavior, there are more sane men than insane men. So it’s . . . Yeah, yeah, that’s true, there are. They pass for it. And so we get the people who are sane, we study them. Then we study the neurotics, then we study psychotics and we find out their minds are all working the same, we’re finding the same manifestation on a functional level which goes on through.
Now, on the studies on that line, we’re on very, very solid ground. But when we start to introduce structure or anything which alters structure in the mind, then we’re not on solid ground. And an enormous amount of work has got to be done on this. But that’s the field of structure.
What has been done physiologically to the mind by an electric shock, by insulin, by metrazol, we don’t know. What is done to the mind exactly by a topectomy, a transorbital leukotomy, a prefrontal lobotomy, God knows. I certainly don’t and I know damn well no psychiatrist knows. [gap] The way I have worked in the past is comparing tapes—mother, child. Getting exact recordings from the mother, exact recordings from the child, word for word. And although they might have relayed a conceptual something or other—Mama says, “Oh well, you were such a terrible burden to me when you were on the way and so on.” Conceptual.
Mama is not going to, because she’s incapable in present time, give the child a word-for-word account of a moment when Mama was under anesthetic. As a consequence, the tapes can be checked and the series of engrams in the child are validated by running Mama through the same incident, but running them independently. So we find the recordings were there.
Male voice: About how often has this been done? Because that point has been raised time and time again, “Well, how do you know it’s not imagination?” Ah, well the reason we don’t know it’s not imagination is because a man named Sigmund Freud who did excellent work in his youth, particularly when he was connected with Breuer, blew himself a flock of fuses in 1911 and said all was delusion in childhood, because he had found prenatals. He could not account for them, although his tenet of longing for the womb stated clearly that there must be memory connected with the womb. And he got into a very confused state of mind, about as confused a state of mind as any person could get. And suddenly pronounced this business about “all is delusion in childhood” because he discovered seductions by parents. In Dianetics seductions by parents are so ordinary that you just lose count. Every coitus engram is a seduction by one parent or the other. You might translate it so.
Well, the number of times that this has been done—in the last year there’s only been one uncontrolled one done. But about three years ago, there was a series of eight that were done. And Mama was in pretty bad shape on one of those series and she was inaccessible to a large degree about any of this material. She was very emotionally overwrought. The rest of the series panned out perfectly. But the one in which she was overwrought, she had so much dub-in and so much delusion of her own, that my God, you never knew what she was talking about actually when you got her back along the track. And she was an awfully tough case, and I was awfully busy. So I kind of cracked up the case a little bit to make sure that she got her mild release and let her go home. But the rest of them panned out very well. In other words, the numbers of tapes I have checking birth against birth; there are lots of them. Because you treat a young man for a while, and he’s getting well, and then all of a sudden Mama gets wind of this, you’re liable to have her as a patient. And you can conduct this experiment any time such a combination shows up. I want to get a pair of twins separated at birth sometime, identical twins separated at birth. Of course, you realize that their engrams are not going to track 100 percent, because one of them might have been on the outside receiving the injury. There might have been an AA and only one twin was ever accessible for this AA. The other one might not have particularly recorded the incident. Well, he might have and he might not have. But on the track there you will get enough engrams in common so that there will be good tapes running word for word on a lot of engrams.
Male voice: What about after you’d worked the case to the point of Clear then going back there on the analytical level for any given periods in there?
Could do. You could. That’s a piece of work which somebody ought to undertake. I have validated it to my satisfaction by tapes, checking Mama against child.
Male voice: This business of prenatal recordings, why, there s a lot of people they just don’t see how it can be done. But I finally asked a friend of mine in Washington who knows some professor in genetics over at George Washington University—the name escapes me for the moment—if they would ask him how many words it would take to describe without the aid of charts or diagrams the amount of information contained in the gene pattern. That is, describe how the whole structural pattern of the body is determined. Or, alternatively, how many discrete bits of information. And I said that I didn’t want a snap answer but something that he’d be willing to stand behind.
I imagine it could sort of turn up so terrifically high that a mere matter of recording half our conversation would hardly make an impression on the sixty-seventh digit.
Oh no, it wouldn’t. Besides, there are a lot of papers that have been published on this subject in the past, which are not well enough known. The work of Hooker is particularly interesting in the field of morphogenesis. Hooker took embryos and by—I don’t know how he did this work, very interesting—but by stroking a fetus—an embryo, five weeks after conception, stroking it on the back with a single hair, the embryo straightened out and went back into position again in half a second, and he could get this reaction. In other words, you had nervous muscular control five weeks after conception.
As a matter of fact, what would be actually incredible about all this, utterly incredible, was that an organism could record nothing, knew nothing, until a certain period of life, let us say two years of age. That up to that moment the organism was not recording, was not doing anything, couldn’t think, couldn’t act, couldn’t guide itself in any way. Because the most cursory examination of a baby a few hours old, will demonstrate many abilities, many recordings.
I tested a baby (unwittingly) on the subject two weeks after birth whether or not an engram could be restimulated in that baby I didn’t do it, it just was an accidental observation. A loud—a phrase was uttered loudly in the baby’s presence. Many loud phrases had been uttered in the baby’s presence. But on this one phrase the baby flung up its arms to protect its face, two weeks after birth.
That was interesting to me, so guided by science rather than humanity, I promptly threw in with the same intonation, many other phrases. No such reaction. I came back to that special phrase, threw it back at the child and you got the same reaction again: arms flung up over the face. Thought that very curious, so I went back in memory, knowing this child’s prenatal background vividly, being my own child, I went back in my own memory up to the time when that phrase might have been uttered. Mama had fallen at the time that phrase was uttered and the child had been jarred severely. And that was the push buttons working. It’s like paint—if a man’s cough turns on, if you can make him cough with the word “painted.” You can tell him “paint,” “painter,” “painting” and you get no response. But the second you say “painted,” you get his cough. The push-button mechanism is very accurate.
Male voice: I’ve had quite a hard time making some people see that the embryo does not understand language, it simply records a bunch of noises. If they happen to be words, well, all right. It records those noises. But it doesn’t understand.
I don’t congratulate those people on their ability to reason.
Male voice: Well, neither do I but it’s quite frequent in people.
Yes, and you get a delusion on some people when you’re working with them. Their present-day analytical mind will get back into the prenatal engram and they’ll start telling you what they thought about it when they were a fetus. Of course, they’re rationalizing information as it comes up. They can say, “Yes, every time my father came home I used to so-and-so and such-and-such.” There is some possibility, by the way, that a child knows quite a bit of language by the time it’s born. A possibility. [gap] I’ve been looking for a something that was scientific enough to be used to act as a means of establishing the character of affinity and the role it plays in raising a child. And I have run across several experiments which advertisedly were conducted with “the gravest and greatest scientific care” and on looking at them a little more closely found out that they were just random observations that somebody had optimistically assigned an answer to.
Now, any questions on all of this? I have not told you today, perhaps, with the force and precision most desirable in science, the exact push button to push in exactly which psychotic beyond telling you that the rendering of the psychotic accessible without sedation is the most desirable thing that you could do in approaching any of them. It is even possible that some type of shock—metrazol or something of the sort in very, very light dosages—might bring a psychotic into a short period of accessibility There is some slight evidence. But as far as electric shock is concerned, the look-over on the field of the insane has not demonstrated much hope for it.
Male voice: Ron, a case I had yesterday had thirteen electric shocks, apparently it has had no effect whatsoever on her abilities to recall She got back to an early prenatal incident, I suspect in the basic area, within a half-hour of starting therapy. She has got good perceptic recall straight across the board.
Well, I’m glad to hear of a lot of these successes in this field. Not because it has anything to do with any validation of the work in Dianetics—the day I get interested in my personal reputation ahead of any data of Dianetics is never, I can tell you flatly, going to arrive. Because this science is as good as it can be applied, and no better. There’s an enormous amount of work to be done, enormous numbers of case histories to be collected in Institutional Dianetics before big, wide statements can be made about it.
I’ve treated enough psychotics to know that when I wanted to I could produce a remission in them one way or the other. But I have used, in doing that, some very interesting devices.
Much more interesting than my own devices was one I heard which was employed by Homer Lane over in England many years ago. He had some trick of accessibility which he was developing. So he went into a—he was not a doctor—and he went into a large institution in England and just said, “I want to work on one of your tough—give me the toughest patient you’ve got. I’m going to cure him.” The superintendent of the institution looked at him aghast and said, “Oh, no, and besides you’re only a layman. You therefore could know nothing.” And the fellow says, “Well now, after all, the worst patient you have is undoubtedly hopeless, isn’t he?” And the superintendent said, “Yes.” And Homer Lane said, “Well, he’s certain to die, isn’t he?” And the superintendent said, “Yes.” “Well then, let me have him. What have you got to lose?” “Well, all right,” So they pushed Homer Lane into a great big padded cell where an enormous brute of a man was in raving homicidal fury and expected Homer Lane to be torn to bits on that moment. And Homer Lane said in a soft voice to this fellow, “I hear you can help me. I hear you can help me.” And the psychotic turned around to him and said, “How did you know?” Rather tricky. Institutional psychiatry is comparable to . . . Well, let’s put it this way. Standard Dianetic therapy is administered to the normal and neurotic patient. It can be fairly routine, something like repairing a radio set which has gone bad in the home, blown out a tube, something like that; do a little bit of something or other for it. As compared to, in treating psychotics—treating psychotics could be compared to somebody in a war area who is called upon to reestablish the communication systems of a city that has been bombed into rubble.
The psychotic, as far as I am concerned, does not vary greatly in ability or dynamic from the normal or the neurotic, at this time. But I have some evidence that he is essentially a less dynamic individual and essentially less capable, genetically, of stability. That does not argue that his stability, such as he has, cannot be restored to him. But it does state that he is not capable of the cooperation that you can expect from a neurotic, because the content in the psychotic bank is not necessarily more than the content in a neurotic or a normal bank. The recalls of the psychotic are not necessarily more occluded. On the contrary, you’ll find a large percentage of your psychotics walking around with emotion, pain, sonic, visio on full. An incredible state of affairs. And evidently no greater amount of aberrative content in the bank than a neurotic or a normal person. But in this case, on “fixing the radio set” analogy, the data which has come into the reactive bank of the psychotic has had the effect of laying the town flat; and in the neurotic, of only knocking off a few blocks of it; and in the normal, just deranging a few circuits.
Yes?
Male voice: I had one case I have some idea on—the fellow, the way he explained it to me was that he had no short-term memory He could remember back what happened yesterday or the day before or when he was a child or something. But when he was reading a newspaper article, said he’d read one paragraph and then read paragraph two, and by the time he got through paragraph two he wouldn’t remember what was in paragraph one. Does that mean anything particular?
Well, yes, that is a special type of demon occlusion circuit which is not uncommon, and which is probably right here in this room with us this minute. It is common. But in his case it was more heavily restimulated. There is the fellow who has the “good old yesterdays” complex: He can remember pleasure as having been present six months ago or two years ago or twenty years ago, but not now. And yet, three or four years from now, he is going to look back at this moment as being pleasurable.
Okay, that’s about all I’ve got to say on the subject, and let me state this: that as many contacts as you gentlemen make on the subject of psychotics, please let us have all the data relating to them.
We’ve treated lots of psychotics, but until several thousand of them are on the books, we won’t have a good, thoroughgoing standard procedure; a nice, thorough, standard procedure whereby even a psychiatrist will be able to treat one successfully.
Thank you.