Processing Children (500715)
Date: 15 July 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
Give you a brief talk on treating children with Dianetics. Although this problem has been, in the past, touched upon, there’s been no very definite statements made about it. Probably the impression has gotten around that children are almost impossible to treat by Dianetics, They are so far from being untreatable that the Dianetic auditor who tries it is going to be most astonished at his success.
The, you might say, warnings and so forth in the book are directed toward those people who will try to handle the child the way you would handle an adult preclear, “Lie down, close your eyes, go back to . . .” A child does not work this way Handling a child requires a great deal of personal charm. One has to be able to interest the child. He will take Dianetic therapy as a game, when he will not take it actually I have worked a child slightly over four years of age and have achieved very marked results with the child, I’ve worked them at eight, nine, ten, and have found that in that bracket they are much more accessible, that results seem to be more certain. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen years of age, the child seems to be a trifle less accessible, but nevertheless is quite treatable.
At seventeen and eighteen, of course, you’re dealing with an adult, actually, and he can go through and do almost anything you want him to do. But it is at that bracket—let us say, at the age of sixteen, seventeen—that you can first expect as a general rule a person to be able to undergo therapy just as anybody would—any normal person. “Close your eyes, let’s go back to the earliest moment of pain and unconsciousness.” In the early years a child’s mind is not completely formed physiologically. It is still growing. You see evidences of this in a certain lack of concentration which is not engramic. You see evidences of it in their lack of ability to handle themselves physically. And something else which is not physiological enters in as a very important datum. The child has a limited supply of data. Therefore, having such a supply, his ability to relate what he discovers to his own reality is limited One must recognize that this lack of data first manifests itself in overuse of the imagination, A mind is constructed to supply with imagination what it lacks in information. If this course is interrupted by some uninformed person in, let’s say, psychoanalysis, where all is delusion and so on, or by mothers who say, “That’s your imagination, you’d better be careful about using your imagination,” you get your worst case of childhood, you might say, dementia.
The brain has to have imagination. If it doesn’t have imagination, it cannot take from a few isolated data any conclusion. It has to fill in the gaps. Further, if one had no imagination and his imagination was not in its fullest play, he could not make an accurate prediction of tomorrow.
Imagination is a fine predictor mechanism which I think is its basic purpose. If you want to upset a person about the future, take from him his ability to use his imagination.
In children that you treat you’re going to find the problem of imagination very acute, in many of these cases. The child has come into the world, has looked around at a bunch of sour-faced adults for a while, has a few data (not too many) on this subject and that, and has tried zestfully to recompose this data into something which looks to him like a logical picture.
Well, of course a dinosaur romping down Hollywood Boulevard is a logical picture to a child. Few data. So the adult comes along and he says—oh, scornful, “That’s all in your imagination. You shouldn’t use your imagination,” And the child may be trying to tell somebody a funny story.
As you treat children you really get a beautiful cross-index of the adult world. It is dumb! It is stupid! I’ve never failed to remark on this in treating a child. The child was quite bright. And in relationship—that is, when he first comes in, the usual child, first comes into the world he’s quite bright, he has an acute sense of what is real and what isn’t real. But he’ll try to tell adults jokes. And he has a very playful look toward life. And the adult says, “Oh no, that isn’t so,” Honest, I imagine that many a child feels like a comedian who is talking to a house that is absolutely flat.
The social aberration here is that a child is a—well, there are several ages of human being. The first age is the age of protoplasm. There is no life, no feeling, no sensitivity up to birth. It’s just protoplasm and that’s that. But the next age happens and begins magically at the moment the umbilical cord is cut. This is, “Oh you dear, sweet, cute little thing, you.” And this means the child is very sweet, quite pure, quite innocent and all in all a very wonder of a thing. But not a human being, of course, but a thing which is, you know, nice. Coochy-coochy-coo.
The next age of childhood is when a child is unlucky enough to try to learn the English language from a bunch of people who don’t know the English language. This is the postspeech period of childhood, which is very trying. The child discovers here the social aberrations in full force.
He wants to know what such and such a word means. He finds out merely by uttering this word that people fly off at tangents, look at him scornfully, stand him in a corner and so forth. But he can say “cornflakes” and nobody does anything to him, which gives undue emphasis to language. So he gets punished because of language. Ah, language is very dangerous stuff.
Female voice: Do you have any cases doing that—undoing that process?
Oh, yes.
Female voice: Going back and fixing it?
Oh, sure.
Female voice: How do you fix it?
That’s straightening out a child’s semantics. That’s not too hard.
Female voice: No, I meant in therapy—Dianetic therapy . . .
That’s right. In Dianetic therapy, straightening out his semantics. I’ll get around to that.
Female voice: Okay.
That’s why I’m bringing in this next period. But he’s still cute and people can still bear with him. But this is because he is dependent. Now, dependency has a high value in the society. It has such a high value that today people down in Washington are willing to sell out the whole United States and all of its philosophies and past glories for the great privilege of being depended upon by the mass of the populace.
During the 30s, people down in Washington were avidly creating indigency. The WPA was no effort to rehabilitate the self-respect of an individual, it was an effort to coax his dependency into being so that then somebody could be smart and important.
In the family scene, very small family scene, you will find out that the child is something to bolster up the ego of. People have dogs for the same reason. Now, therefore this child must be—I don’t know, I’ve seen children that the parents had mistaken for an army private, or for a sailor in the navy. I’ve seen children who have been mistaken for almost anything that would act as a sop to the engrams of the adult. But seldom have I ever seen a child taken for a child, very seldom. It doesn’t occur to people that the child is a live, living, thinking organism possessed initially of enormous self-determinism. It is the first goal of the normal adult in this society to break, utterly and forever, if possible, the self-determinism of the child.
I’ve become convinced of this by listening to the cant that goes on around, “Oh now, elders know best. You must do this. Now, just mind.” Now, I will admit that a child is noisy, and that a child breaks things, or a child, because of lack of data and coordination, may be a bit trying on those who have a blocked second dynamic. But I have found this to be the case: that any child who was engaged in breaking things, in being bad, was in a high state of revolt. He was in a state of revolt which would not admit of an immediate surrender to anything, save what would be heavy corporal punishment.
We have, by the way, the reverse of this in what is laughingly called modern psychology. I say “laughingly called” because this is the most insidious undermining influence on children that I know of.
In the first place, a child has to have a goal. There are many ways to handle a child—I go over this brief survey here—there are many ways to handle a child, of course. And certainly a child has to fit in as a social unit in a family as soon as possible. Because of course the quickest way to make a child an antisocial unit is to punish him. That follows. The pain-drive theory always adds up into an antisocial state.
The child, by modern psychology—actually it adds up to the fact that he is more or less denied, in his early stages, his self-determinism, and yet is told continually that he has all of his self-determinism. And when he gets his brains rocked thoroughly by this, then they can call him an anal type.
That’s hideous, but it’s true. The child has to have a goal. His goal is growing up and being an adult. As long as he has this goal he does pretty well. He can come through almost anything. “Someday I am going to . . .” That’s hope. That’s the mind—overcome obstacles toward a known goal.
Now, any system which would seek to convince a child that being a child—I mean, this system knowingly or unknowingly seeks to convince the child that the thing to be is a child, is going to lead this child away from a goal and is going to make his wits rot just by that and by that alone.
Therefore you will find some of your worst cases, in Child Dianetics, those children whose self-determinism has initially been undermined because by lack of skill and parental intolerance they have at the age of two or three broken things or cried a little loudly, and been punished. The child goes into revolt, the Gestapo up there at the top doesn’t like to be revolted against.
This is actually a totalitarian regime. There’s no court, there’s no justice for a child. He has no recourse to law. He goes against totalitarianism and he gets slapped flat. So he revolts again and he gets slapped flat. And he revolts again and he gets slapped flatter. By the time this is kept up—this Tone Scale I was drawing on the board last night—he finally gets broken down.
Well, when he’s sufficiently broken down so he’s about the most dangerous character you could look at, down inside, why, then they say he has now been given social graces.
The child would learn naturally by mimicry and by a desire to become an adult. But if he doesn’t see any profit in being an adult, if adults aren’t enjoying being adults, if he finds a great deal of profit in being a child, his goal is stripped from him. This is all on a wide computational margin. But the process of breaking a child into harness in the society is a process of breaking abreactions. Now, this child has engrams. At first they’re not badly restimulated. After Papa has vented his pet fit (which may only be sullen, discouraged silence over the whole thing) a few times, this is a restimulator. And it is being used now as punishment on the child. And the child, healthy, growing—or even unhealthy but still growing— will try to break loose in this environment somehow, which is hemming him in and it will hem him in closer and closer. For instance, I was thinking of the idea we have in this society that a child has to play and have a good time. I have seen the most disgusted children you ever saw in your life who had to play. It’s tough. “Now, go out and play.” It’s a sort of a punishment.
Well, this child who has to go out and play, he has no responsibility. Nobody looks to him for anything. Besides, nobody’s bothered to define what play was.
Play is actually a training process. It’s a natural training process built into the mechanism. A child goes out, he learns to handle himself, coordinate himself and so forth. Well, instead of using it that way, it’s used in others.
A child learns by mimicry. Most children, unless they’re severely aberrated, are very good mimics. And they look at the adult and they try to use the adult as a pattern for their own actions. This is natural. Unfortunately, most adults around children have quite a few dramatizations. So the child may start now to mimic the dramatization, little witting that he has this same dramatization back of him many, many years or months in the form of an engram which has a lot of pain to it. So the second he starts to mimic this dramatization, wham. It’s like Reichian convulsosis—what is it?
It’s very technical A very technical field. You mustn’t touch this guy Reich, he’s sacred.
Male voice: You mean his therapy?
Yeah, yeah. He’s coaxed, then the dramatizations will come up to the surface. Now, the second this dramatization manifests itself—let’s say it’s the fight chain, he sees Papa fighting. He decides, “Oh, that’s the way an adult acts.” And so he fights with his little playmates and occasionally tries to fight with Mama. Only he uses Papa’s dramatization. And what does this do to Mama? This has been setting her off her rockers for years. So Mama at this point departs rationality even further and promptly breaks the dramatization, naturally. Now she can break it. She’s been trying to for years, but there it is and she can smash it.
If the child goes into Mama’s valence, does the same thing toward Papa. I ran into one little kid that I was treating that had been very clever about this, very clever. He used the parents’ own dramatizations against the parent who had the dramatization. He practically broke them. He had very high survival value. Definitely a survivor type. But you get this—crosscurrents of broken dramatizations one after the other, one after the other. First thing you know, the child goes into an hysterical state. This hysterical state—great nervousness, indecision, inability to do what he’s supposed to do, know where he’s supposed to be, everybody changing his mind around him all the time, and unable to mimic the target that he’s supposed to mimic and thereby learn—he can’t do any of these things so he goes crazy and this is known as modern childhood.
If you ever see a flock of children playing and you notice the high hysterical scream lying back of that voice and you notice the number of times they get hurt, you’re dealing with somebody in a temporary break. You’re not dealing with a little child.
Female voice: Ron, to be very specific, I know, or I’m pretty sure of the engrams that I have installed in my oldest boy. When I was nine months pregnant, it was about that time, and one day I stood in the kitchen and smacked myself, not hard, I was not destructive about it (laugh), but I said, “You get out and get on your own.” I’m sure this will not disturb him very badly.
Female voice: Ron, where you have a youngster and there aren’t any AAs in the bank—you re definitely sure of it, and there was a very calm situation during the carrying of the child but yet the child is born and he’s terrifically nervous and argumentative and so forth, where did he get that from? Is it inherited from the grandparents? Or . . .
No, no. You look back over a childhood bank, over the period of gestation, just in straight memory sitting right there and maybe it’s a little bit difficult to pick up just those spots where, or just those moments when. But the actual truth is you go tracking this down and start picking up what the word content was and so on. The child does not have to have enormous violence back down the track in order to make him nervous. Now . . .
Male voice: It takes about fifteen seconds to install an engram and louse up a life.
That’s right, that’s right. The coitus chain is particularly severe on a child. And that is one of the most severe and that is an innocent one that nobody would ever suspect actually, and almost impossible to avoid because one doesn’t know the child is there for the first weeks. But those are the most aberrative moments.
I just want to give you a review—perhaps a little sarcastic about AAs—what I have learned in treating the children of America.
You can spot the child immediately who has quarrels in the home. It is a truism that the child who comes from a broken home is nervous. But that is one of these shortsighted surface views of the thing. Why did that home break up? That’s the reason the child’s nervous. The dramatizations which have thrown one parent against the other brought about a highly nervous condition in the child. This home was doomed to break up. That it broke up sort of added another lock onto lots of locks. Preventive Dianetics aims toward keeping engrams out of a child and particularly toward no restimulation. Don’t throw the same phrases at the child that you know he has in his bank. Now, this is number one.
Female voice: In other words, take away as much of the restimulative environment . . .
That’s right, that’s right.
Female voice: We’ve tried very hard to do this.
Now, for instance, Mike’s little boy at the age of about four and a half or something like that was addicted to bed-wetting. And he had no clue as to what this could be or how it could be. This child goes to sleep, thud . . . [gap] . . . in the review of the moments of—prior to the child’s arrival in the world, there lay the engram in the first many contractions—tough birth—of “Lie there now and go to sleep. Don’t get up.” And somebody says, “But the water’s breaking.” “That’s all right, just lie there and let it come.” Well, this little boy of four and a half was obeying these injunctions 100 percent. He was wetting the bed, can’t be awakened, do nothing with him. Trying to reach this birth sequence in him at the age of four and a half, though, is impossible. So they suddenly realized that every night they’d take the child in and they would tell him the exact words that would key in the engram. And they’d been keying it in every night, night after night. “Go to sleep.” And lay him down and tell him to go to sleep and then talk to him about the water. You see, caution and warn him. Of course, the second they caution and warn him, why, he immediately gets it on the basis of, well, it’s all right to lie there. I mean, it restimulates the command in him.
Well, Mike didn’t know too much about how one dramatized an engram until all of a sudden this thing flared up in front of him, bang. Here was the whole sequence, here was the exact cause. He himself had installed it. And there every night he’s reinstalling the thing in the kindest possible way. So they don’t tell the child to go to sleep anymore. And they don’t talk to him about water—”Don’t drink any water before you go to bed” and so forth. They just delete all these things. They just tell him now, “Good night.” I haven’t had a report on the improvement. I could forecast that it’d probably go off on a curve, become less and less frequent. So they’ve been putting the child back into the anesthetic of birth. The child hasn’t been sleeping, he’s been lying there drugged every night for years and years and years. That is treatment number one.
Female voice: What about working a child who is asleep?
Better not, better not. The treatment number one is just prevent restimulation of the child. It’s quite important.
Treatment number two is breaking locks on the straight memory circuit.
Treatment number three is releasing painful emotion, from places you would never believe were painful.
Female voice: I did get an emotion reduced on a youngster taking his boat at two and a half and he really went all the way through that He was standing near the window looking out We had moved away at the age of three, from this particular house. And he stood there and he said, “But there wasn’t a window in that house.” I said, “You’re right there, what do you see?” And he kept looking out the window and the youngster was taking the boat I’m mad. I’m mad, somebody took my green boat” And through running it I reduced this till finally he yawned, “Oh, somebody took my green boat.” And the sixth time he laughed, he thought it was a big joke that he should be worrying about a youngster taking his boat at the age of two and a half Now, that’s a good example and a fine example of the sort of Dianetics you do in reverie on a child.
Female voice: And I happened to pick that up on a day when he was going around and everything he did he got angry at.
Mm-hm.
Female voice: So we had this “I am mad” sitting right up on top and I ran it immediately.
Now, here you have probably in the child’s bank very few, ordinarily, of his basic engrams keyed in.
Yes?
Male voice: That brings up a point where in the child you quite often get strong emotional discharge on what are apparently minor factors. Now, what happens as life progresses? Do these lose importance enough so that they will not be picked up in the adult?
Evidently they’re rerationalized. But you take a child, for instance six, seven years of age, you can still get an emotional discharge, grief And once a bit of grief comes off the child’s case, you would be amazed at the improvement in the child. But the grief is very strange grief. It’s the boat. It’s the child is going to school the first day.
Female voice: It was a chain of about five things where he was angry. He was angry at camp at a bunch of youngsters, angry at school because of something the teacher had said and then ran it right down to two and a half I couldn’t get it any lower than that though at that try.
It was his first attempt at reverie, by the way.
It’s awfully hard to get a child early. But here’s the way you get him into reverie. You don’t have to make him do anything very special or spectacular. But you start playing a game with him. Most child’s recalls are pretty wide open.
This gave rise to the theory, by the way, which is quite prevalent even in the advanced schools of California, that a person who has wide-open recalls is either a child or a moron. Well, they’ve observed the fact that a child has wide-open recalls. That’s direct data.
You try to get the child to play a game with you. You don’t have to be too doggone saccharine about this game, either. It’s trying to find out if the child can go sleigh riding, go walking, go hiking, go swimming: pleasure moments.
Find a child will go through these things rather easily. And after the child’s gotten the idea of doing this—well, this is particularly good if you can pick a moment when the child has been bumped. You make the child pick up the bump. They’ll pick up a recent bump very quickly, usually. They’ll pick it up and they’ll run it out with all perceptics.
Well, this is fine. We can get rid of the pain. You go on picking up recent bumps, little bits of pain, recent emotional upsets where the child was scolded and that sort of thing, until you’ve deintensified the bank near present time. But at the same time you have educated the child into an ability to return when you want him to return. You haven’t undermined him in any way.
You handle the child, by the way, with the same sort of approach, you are very careful not to give him positive suggestions, very careful. Try not to give the child a lot of advice. It’s no good anyway. You don’t know what he’s trying to think up or resolve. You haven’t enough data to solve his problems for him, actually. Because he may have various conflicts and engrams and so forth kicking around that have to be steered around and you don’t know anything about these. So no adult could solve a child’s problems. Then you educate the child a little bit further into picking up an illness, running through an illness. Let’s say two, three years before, something like that. Getting him back along the line. Usually this stuff will actually blow off, it’s so light. The child’s brain—it throws this stuff off so easily, it’s so active.
Female voice: Can you pick it up when the illness was before he could talk?
Yes. Yes, you try to get back into that period if you can.
Male voice: How about taking a child of about five, tuning his perceptics, going in and getting him into a few pleasure moments, then stopping unless you run into something? You would have sort of a pre-course so that by the time the child was twelve . . .
Yeah, well, that would be a long period of education. But you’ll find out that you will knock out the dramatizations—and you will find the dramatizations just on standard diagnosis, standard procedure, just as if you were doing that. Don’t go for the engrams, go for the locks and knock out those locks. You can very often get emotional discharges on them. And so you go for the locks, you deintensify those and then you try to make sure that the things are not restimulated later. And the next line is education in another way. Trying to teach the child to handle himself a little bit so that he can throw natural discipline in on himself, rather than aberrated discipline. Natural discipline, of course, has to be within certain established limits. Never upset a child’s decision. But try to make him handle himself.
You give him the reward—reward or a little bit of pain, on the . . . You assign him tasks, skills and so forth. And you make it quite inexorable that these things take place. And you never install an engram when you punish the child. You could punish him, give him a little corporal punishment, it won’t kill him, a little switch. But you don’t say anything.
You say, “Well, too bad. I assigned this to be done by 2:30 this afternoon. It isn’t done.” Just pick up your switch, switch him lightly. You’re setting up life in vignette. If we don’t do things in life, if we miss them, we get punished. Life punishes us. But it’s not that tough on a child because we’re standing, as adults, as an interposition between life and the child to a large degree, so we have had to substitute just a trifle here. Don’t be angry with the child about it.
After this has happened three or four times you’ll be amazed at the amount of self-determinism within this that the child begins to pick up, since his self-determinism is now being directed toward handling his own organism.
Female voice: Well, may I tell you what I do to see if it’s Dianetically correct?
Mm-hm.
Female voice: I have two boys, two and a half and one year, and there was no need for any punishment of any kind until the little baby came along. Then there was a certain aspect of jealousy, of feeling that his place was being usurped for a short time in this one. And well, whatever . . .
You mean the broken nose theory?
Female voice: You mean out of joint?
Yeah.
Female voice: Anyhow, he felt—he goes and sits on Tony, the little one.
How many times has he been told not to?
Female voice: Well, I don’t tell him not to. What I do is say, “Look, Tony has his area of privacy and of inviolability the same as you have. Now, if you violate Tony’s, then I’ll have to put you into your room and be alone if you re not going to live as a member of the society.” Very bad Dianetics.
Female voice: Is it really?
You’re making this little kid—that he would naturally try to look after, eventually, because little kids take care of younger kids—you’re making this child a bone of contention.
Female voice: He never does it but when I’m present lie never, never does it except when I’m there.
All right. He’s got a revenge motive against you. And you can solve this very easily on straight line memory.
Female voice: Oh?
Sure. We find out why. What did you do to him that convinced him that this infant should be punished when you were around? Or what did you do to this infant that made you—who is he mimicking? It’s not a question of jealousy. A child actually, unless he’s really shoved in the face and warned and so on, he won’t do anything to a little baby. He’ll sit around—he’s just very interested. But parents get the idea that the child will be out of joint about this and then they try to take measures one way or the other and they do the whole computation for him and then say, “This is the way the child reacts.” And the child doesn’t react that way.
Now, a baby has a rough time around an older child. Babies fortunately are practically indestructible. Actually, they are. They’re very hard to hurt.
Now you’re trying to work somebody who is what? Two and a half years of age?
Female voice: Well, he’s very bright!
Okay, very bright two and a half years of age. Okay.
Well, you’ve got this problem when you’re dealing with a child. You’re dealing with an aberree. He is a little character in a world full of giants.
Female voice: Sure, I realize that And what you say to them has weight far beyond what you intend it to have.
Female voice: I also realize that. That’s the reason why I don’t talk, Ron. I want to know about that I just simply sweep him up, take him upstairs and say, “Now, if you’d like to play properly with Tony then you may come down.” When he says, “Yes, I will,” then he comes down.
Oh, but look, you’re introducing Tony’s name into every single punishment.
You’ve got identical thinking now. Tony equals rejection Mama. Mama doesn’t like me Tony.
You can knock that out. You could scold him on the basis of the fact that he ate porridge. It’s just coincidental that he was sitting on Tony.
The problem is, then, observing departures from what you would consider rational conduct. And not throwing these things off or assigning them to the idea that he’s just a child, after all. Children will act fairly rationally. They’ll act as good as they have data. They’ll figure it out just as well as they can. But they don’t have much data sometimes and they get some very peculiar solutions to problems. Such as a little boy I ran into. He had been—boy, he’d really been punished. Everybody had been furious with him, he’d been ostracized, kicked out of the house, Papa had come home and beaten him up and so on and he was in bad shape. And after all he was just trying to be helpful. He had buried the silver in the garden in nice rows because he wanted to grow some more silver. Good solution.
He couldn’t understand it. Nobody in the whole course of the conversation bothered to tell him that when you plant metal you don’t get metal. Missing datum. Of course Mama, all she could think of at this time was the fact that her silver had been—that it was practically lost forever.
The discovery of the missing datum when we’re handling children is very important. You’ll find out some of the strangest concepts in a child. Particularly if you’re dull enough ever to give him access to Eugene Fields. That character has probably led to more misery—and Grimm’s Fairy Tales, that’s another one. Eugene Fields is terrible because he adds all this pathos and oh, boy! The little boy, you know, and he’s dead but he’s laid out his toy dog and so on and then an angel comes—yeah, no kidding.
Female voice: Ron, in my crib days, my parents said, “We’re just going to have to sit on Muriel.” And I spent five years wondering when they were going to do it.
That’s right. Now, there’s data. That’s good data. It’s not—has insufficient relationship to the real world to be properly differentiated. I’m talking now about what the child reads. But it’s just the same of what the child is told.
There’s another. Little Orphan Annie. That one . . .
Male voice: “The goblins will get you.” Yeah, that one, ‘The goblins will get you,” That really should be taken out and burned. Oh, that’s a rough one. I have picked up more charge out of more people off of that poem in childhood and in three children have practically straightened their lives out just by picking up the emotional charge of this poem.
Now, let me give you a brief resume of the computational, you might say, neuroses and even psychoses you’ll find in a child. Here’s one of them. This wondering when they were going to do it. That could mount up to quite an anxiety.
One not only has to learn how to think like an engram when he’s dealing with children, he also has to learn to think without data. And you just set it up so that. “Let me see, if I knew no more than this child, what would I think about something?” And he’ll come up with some remarkable computations.
It takes some practice to think that way. One little girl was in a neurotic state. She would run, and she did nothing but run. She would never walk. She could never be persuaded to walk. And in the course of running she would inevitably fall and bung herself up. She was an accident-prone. She was always a mass of contusions. Well, I treated this little girl and in the course of about an hour picked up the following data: There was an engram someplace in the bank which laid down the proposition that one was liable to take roots and grow. Somebody had to move around, you see, and he was a globe-trotter and so on, “Take roots and grow,” that was the key.
Now, the child had read a story in school about a little boy who was a laggard. And this was a moral tale. This is the way we fix up children. We get moral about the whole thing. Every story must have one. So this little child was a laggard and he lagged and lagged and lagged. And one day, he lagged so much and he fell so far behind, and he stood so still that although the family told him, “Come on, come on,” he didn’t do it. And there he took root. And his roots came out of his feet and they went down into the ground, and he turned into a tree. And the family went back to find him and they couldn’t find him because there he was standing as a tree. And he was never thereafter able to attract anyone’s attention but he just stood there.
Well, this is standard. You’ll find this story in—down in the bookstores, and the best regulated families give this one to the child to read.
All right. The engram said, “Take root and grow,” The child didn’t dare stand still, she would stand like this. When she was standing she couldn’t let her feet stay down. Because roots were going to come out of the bottoms of her feet and attach her to the earth and there she was going to be forevermore. And she was in a state of terror about it.
Now, the felony was compounded by Lewis Carroll, a rather innocent source. Papa was saying, “You have to run to get—just to keep up and you have to run twice as fast if you want to get anyplace.” Female voice: And “off with her head.” Sure. And he said this and the other data was there and this poor little girl was in a bad way So I just started back down on more or less straight memory, started locating something or other and finally found out by a little adroit cross-questioning (that didn’t appear to be cross-questioning) that she was liable to take root and grow. And Papa said this continually in quarrels in the family. He wanted to go out and travel, he wanted to move around and Mama wanted him to settle down and take his job and stay there. And “Do you want me to take root and grow?” he would say. This thing was keyed in, keyed in, keyed in, keyed in. So I went back and found the earliest dramatization of this quarrel and booted it out. Now mark that: I didn’t go back and find the story as such. I went back and found something that would have to do with the story after I got just the vague outlines of this story. Didn’t go to the moment when it was being read. You’ll waste time by doing that. Try to go to some live bait.
This story is just an indicator. Go find a dramatization or a punishment or something of the sort and knock that out. Now you can spend a great deal of time. For instance, a child starts worrying about the little tin soldier is covered with rust “as sturdy and staunch he stands.” (laugh) Okay. Come up to present time.
You go back and try to find this thing, you will find probably late at night, the child’s sick and somebody’s saying, “Now, say your prayers.” “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Yeaaaaaaa! Tin soldiers, toy dogs and so forth lie right around in this proposition because an angel’s liable to come and he’s not going to be there anymore.
Female voice: And people used to criticize me because I didn’t make my children pray!
Sure. Now, the child says, “What is an angel?” You can tell from the questions of the child what is disturbing him. He finds somebody that he thinks has data, he’ll start asking questions. And they will sometimes appear to be very illogical, irrelevant questions. But they’re not. You’ll follow them along the line and you can sort out of these questions what’s troubling the child. “What is an angel?” “Well,” you say, “that’s a natural question for a child to ask.” The hell it is. An angel belongs in metaphysics, mysticism, someplace, but not in a child’s bank, not on that level. Because this child is really interested in the definition of an angel, he’s interested in the definition of something that doesn’t exist. Well, this must therefore preclude the fact that there’s this little tiny disturbance around there on the subject. Now, it might not be very great, but I’m just giving you the type of thing.
What would the child be interested in? He’d be interested in food, clothing, shelter, good companions, being loved, playing games, imagining things to do, to think of, so on. That’s what the child will engage in.
When you find him off, way offsides asking questions about things that belong in mysticism, when you find him asking about the behavior of certain people: “Mama, what is a crazy man?” You say, “Well, a crazy man is insane, of course, Reginald. Go along.” Hm-mm.
This kid’s just bumped into something . . . [gap] . . . bumps into this way time and time again, but if you’re doing therapy on this child, get interested. What does this child ask questions about, what does he want defined? And particularly, what question does he ask that nobody can satisfy? What question does he ask chronically?
Female voice: Ron, you know there’s something I’d like to put in there that bothers me terribly. People give fifteen minutes, half an hour, an hour a day, to the children deliberately.
Nine out of ten of these so-called “good parents” give that hour in telling the child more and more and more and practically never listen to it. It ought to be fifteen minutes of listening to the child.
Yeah, ordinarily. It points up the fact that when you’re doing therapy on the child, you practically do nothing but listen. You can gain the confidence of the child because he finds he can talk to you. You will find him a gushing geyser of conversation, even if he’s rather mute.
Now, I have taken a child at the age of six and knocked out locks and things like that and worked with the child and had considerable success. Because there’s something that’s working on your side. The organism at that state is growing. It has a goal as an organism. It is not yet static, it is still changing. And you’ve got enormous resilience. The child will pull out of almost anything.
It is very difficult, however, when a child has an enormous amount of emotion in the prenatal bank. Somebody’s died in the prenatal bank. Somebody’s been left in the prenatal bank. Something very emotional has occurred. There you’re going to discover a great difficulty. A child will face physical pain before he will face emotion. Don’t ask me why, but the endocrine system is triggered up so that it’s very high power.
Male voice: I guess were all children then, under the skin.
Uh-huh.
As a matter of fact, man himself is a very emotional beast. Very, very emotional. But the society says, “No.” Male voice: Ron, I would like to ask you a question concerning what is your attitude about childhood and sexuality? How much of it do you consider is natural, and how much engramic, and what’s the outlet for natural sexuality?
Well, that is quite a mouthful. When we consider that a child has, along the coitus channel and so forth, all sorts of chains, has all sorts of dramatizations that he can throw in the line of sex—when the child is surrounded by older children who have engram banks to dramatize, some of which are quite remarkable, and when one considers that sex in this society is supersecret, top-secret, never to be relayed or talked about, one can expect a great deal of trouble in childhood along this line, a great deal of concern.
The engram which has in it a suppressor is the worst engram that a person can have, as a general rule. You start shooting out the forgetter mechanisms. This is why straight line therapy has such a marked effect. It’s taking off suppressors off information. And when you put the suppressor in on something, it seems to double up the power. Now it can’t release itself straight and it seems to just try to press up underneath and can’t get free, and dramatizations occur.
The amount of perversion which is leveled against children will astonish you once you start working in this field. The child who is subjected to such an atmosphere, because of the aberration of this society, not because there’s something very remarkable about sex, is liable to manifest, in this society, the worst aspects of mental instability.
You get situations where the child is prohibited in communication.He has learned a few words. He’s found that these words are bad. Already the words are suppressed, bad. The next thing, he does something or he is made to do something by some other child or teenager or adult and—much outside the home—and this is very, very severely suppressed. So that you’re getting a fund of information here on an analytical level which is still suppressed and it will go out of sight and it will trouble the child a great deal. Free communication has a definite index with sanity. And you can put that down to—for anything in the field of the mind. Free communication and sanity are partners. And inability to communicate or suppressed data or communication is a partner of neurosis. Now, the reason why group therapy works as well as it does lies in the field of communication. That all by itself, freedom of communication, is a therapy. So in a child, the first thing that you can expect to establish—I’ll go off of the sex line because you see it’s just a specialized type of suppression—the first thing that you’re going to establish is communication with the child. And by establishing communication with the child, understanding communication, sympathetic communication, you’re delivering more therapy per square inch than may be needed to release the case.
Male voice: Sympathetic or understanding?
Both. Now, the last thing I want to say on this is semantics. When all else fails on the child, you can’t get early, you can’t find really bad engrams, the locks are evading you and so forth, just start back and start squaring up semantics. You can do it in reverie or wide-awake. But it is best done on a semi-reverie basis even though the child’s eyes are open.
You teach the child how he can get better in school, if we’re taking school-age children, by showing him how he can go back and take a look at the word in the spelling book. And he gets the idea rather rapidly. And after that his spelling grades come up, so on. But start looking over the semantics. Find out when he first had defined for him the word so-and-so. When did he first have defined for him the word so-and-so? What does this word mean? What does that word mean? Put him through—general semantics people would love this, but it’s very efficacious—put him through a little quiz, not formal, but a very informal quiz.
You’ll discover that where he has improper definition, he—very far from always, but commonly—has emotional stress. There is emotion, emotional upset or disturbance in the area where that word was poorly defined. And although the word was defined improperly at the—when the child was two, and defined properly for him at the age of five, he will compute basically upon the definition he received at two.
In full clearance this sort of thing goes out as locks. But semantic orientation with reverie is a big study all by itself.
All right. In reverie, let’s go back to the times when things were misdefined for him. Let’s say he is concerned about something or other. You can tell his concerns from his questions. Now, take the words in which he is expressing these questions and run them back to find their first definition. Somebody had to define these words for this child.
Those words which are most concern to him, if he’s really concerned, in—he thinks he’s concerned about the object. Don’t mistake— he’s not concerned about the object, he’s probably concerned about the word. Find out where these words came up, but particularly where they were defined for him, because his orientation and understanding of the world depends upon the definition of these words. And it’s very difficult to define words for a very little child who has very few words. As a consequence you get a crazy house of language built into this child’s mind—interdependent, badly related, thoroughly upset. And this again—and I call this to your attention—impedes communication with him.
Female voice: Isn’t it better to not define them for him at all and let him pick them up just by their extensive use and not bicker about it if he uses them incorrectly?
Well now, let’s not go off—let’s not miss the basic therapy level here. The therapy level is just to get words that he is concerned with because those words contain, commonly, an emotional disturbance area which will lead you straight to a lock with repeater technique and so on.
You will get the child back to a period when this word was used and it meant pain, or when it was defined to him in some way crossly or otherwise, so we’ve now suppressed communication.
Utterly free, unimpeded communication, understandable communication in this world, all by itself, might very well resolve the problem of sanity and insanity all by itself.
Male voice: With repeater you have to be very careful not to get back down into the engram.
Well, if you get into an engram in that fashion, why, run it. But you ordinarily won’t with a child. He doesn’t like to go back to that area.
Once in a while you’ll have to run the birth out on a child to cure his asthma if it’s terribly bad. But I would certainly advise against it.
Try to knock out a few of the locks if possible. Find out what he commonly believes and thinks about his asthma. Try to key out. You after all are working on a short span of years when you’re working with a child and you can hit those locks and you can knock them out.
Female voice: Would it be all right to go through birth with an eleven-year-old?
Oh, sure. That’s old age.
Male voice: How about eight?
Hm?
Male voice: Eight years.
Try it with eight but try it by first trying to find out if he can go through his tonsillectomy, something like that. You can—by the way, you have to handle a child very, very carefully, very patiently. Yes?
Male voice: What kind of—I just thought of the problem of—in normal therapy on adults you seldom try for late pain engram.
That’s correct.
Male voice: Now, what constitutes late pain engram in a child?
Well, the bank gets pretty thin when you’re down in childhood, if you will look it over. You’ll find out that it is actually late life, really late life, when they begin to stiffen up. What constitutes late pain? The engrams which have happened about a year or so ago. The rest of them are rather immediate engrams and they haven’t—you can knock them out sometimes quite easily and quickly. See what I mean?
The engram has not locked in with a lot of locks, it hasn’t been superimposed by grief, the locks . . . [gap] I would normally avoid moments of pain or unconsciousness with a child as a general rule. Normally would avoid those things, unless one discovered as he worked the child—and through educational process, eventually get the child so the child could hit basic-basic. Coax him down and let him run basic-basic out. Let him get some unconsciousness off the bank and start your erasure and bring him up to Clear. If you can hit basic-basic, you can clear him.
Male voice: Do you redefine the terms for him, by the way, when you . . .
You do not define anything for him—that would be evaluation, which would be a break of the Auditor’s Code.
Male voice: Oh.
Second male voice: This business about encouraging Dianetics on children, in talking to them, what you say is awfully important but the way you say it is equally or more so. They pick up attitudes and gestures and stuff awfully quickly and interpret them. And they very often interpret them quite accurately. If you show an awful lot of concern, you re putting down there—you re somewhat upset about these things, yourself concerned over it . . .
Yeah, that’s right. Now, when you get a child—when we get a child, by the way, challenging—you’ll find this is a standard (you better make a note of this if you’re really interested in this subject)—you’ll find a standard upset amongst children is data invalidation. What he brings up here, I ran out a whole chain of these on a child one time. Everything the child said was invalidated. Why, this—this was: “You’re mad at me.” “No, I’m not, dear.” Well, he couldn’t evaluate who was mad after a while, because . . . That was one manifestation of it. This child was surrounded with people who did this continually. And “You’re feeling happy today. You’re happy” “No, I’m not happy.” Bang, engram keys in, see? But it’s been singing a moment before. “Gee-whiz, this is wrong. I mean, I’ve said something wrong. My communication is wrong.” Upsetting factors. So the child gets (quote) corrected (unquote) continually although the child has made a correct instinctive diagnosis of many things. And then the adult, in an effort to mask from the child this or that, draws the curtain and says that no, this is not the case. And it’s obviously the case. And you’ll see a child going around for hours after something like that. No punishment involved or anything. His communication has been shut down on him.
Now, you get the child communicating with you and you start picking up the early moments when miscommunication went out, you get some emotional charges off the child and you normally have a well child. Unfortunately we can’t treat children with straight line anything up until certainly the time they can talk. But Mrs. Muhl’s been mentioning to me a possibility of keying out an engram in another fashion on the theory that if the engram sets the somatic strip up in a certain place, it will cause muscular tension. All of this is fascinating to me, by the way, because if the current is going to go that way, it may possibly be headed back the other way. If not in all the cases, it’s certainly in a few of them.
This would be the background of osteopathy, and why osteopathy would work. I was very interested to hear about this. I’m just waiting to get hold of a few osteopaths and so forth and give them a terrifically learned lecture on why osteopathy works. It’s so obvious the engram, somatic strip is there and muscle reaction takes place. EEGs do a wonderful job—they do other things too, undoubtedly there is some brain current they measure, but to whatever extent, it works. Some work done in this field on a research-level basis on adults would give you the clue to how you could key out an engram on a little child and there may be, there just may be the magic push button.
Female voice: When you said key out—when you say keying out an engram, Ron, do you mean erasing it?
No, no. Key-out. Key-in, key-out.
Female voice: If up to that point it does not erase, then it could be later keyed in?
Now wait, you know what a key-in is?
Female voice: Yes.
Here is the engram sleeping nicely. Now at this period of life we suddenly get an analytical, conscious-level experience. This triggers this engram into action. It puts it up in the ready box, you might say. All right. Here we have—the engram here is activating the somatics. Right? [drawing on blackboard] Any engram has somatics. It has two portions: it has somatics and it has aberration. It has the two. Now, either or both can come forward. But when the aberration is forward, some portion of the somatic also comes forward with that aberration. That’s something to remember on this because, boy, does this raise hell with EEGs.
Yes?
Male voice: Must there be anaten for the engram to key in?
No!
Male voice: Thank God! I have been pounding this point for weeks now.
They key in better when a person is a little tired or when a person is slightly ill. And you will get your really severe key-ins during very mild illness or weariness. But an engram can actually key in without any anaten at all.
Male voice: On a purely analytical basis.
Purely analytical basis, all of a sudden.
Male voice: By restimulation of sounds and phrases that occur in the engram.
Right.
Second male voice: Could that be done on this first time the darn thing wanted to—keyed in?
The first time the engram leaps into view?
Second male voice: Yeah.
Yes.
Male voice: So, Ron, one more question on this, a very logical one I think in the face of this, that my wife asks. What in the hell keeps people from going around in a complete psychosis all the time? There must be millions of words in that bank, every one of them in an engram.
The utterance of the word . . . Mind you, to key in an engram you must match up, match up the situation pretty well. There must be many similarities to the engram.
Male voice: Okay. So this was my answer. But her answer to this is, if words, let us say—if there are a number of factors involved in it, let us say sound of some kind, let us say a number of words of some kind and an emotional experience of some kind—she asked me, would one of these factors alone be enough to do it. My answer to this was it might if there was some kind of—well, it just might, I don’t know, it might.
Well, I would put it further than that, as I’ve never seen a key-in on an engram with total consciousness present and so forth. And remember this, that nobody who has engrams is ever totally conscious.
Female voice: Oh!
Male voice: Excellent point. Wonderful Because that’s the common denominator to them. But you have many of these factors, many of these perceptics suddenly happening in a bundle here. Now, the most important point of this is perhaps if the person’s current emotional tone happened to coincide with the engram’s tone level. And bing, bing. Now everything will add in there quick. And you get a key-in. And all of a sudden this person thereafter doesn’t feel quite as good.
Male voice: So the somatic is there, how do you go after it? You just ask him what engram’s keyed in? Do you try to find out what caused it or what? I’m trying to get back to this point.
Oh, well, you’re trying to get back to this one.
Male voice: Yeah.
Let me tell you about this. [gap] I knew a whole chain of engrams, in fact a whole prenatal bank that was keyed in on practically only one thing. And once that one thing was heard, encountered, this whole thing went out. This is important to this discussion here. And that was the sound of streetcar wheels turning at a corner, where the wheels scream as they go around the corner and bangity-bang as it goes across the cross track. And every period in this person’s life that was serious or emotionally distressed or disturbed was triggered by streetcar wheels. And one of these monotone—I mean there’s only one factor that here is common. Not only unconsciousness was common to all of these severe engrams but also streetcar wheels. They lived in a house at the corner where the streetcars turned there every few minutes.
Female voice: Can’t you get a very little key-in from just a little thing . . .
Sure, but that’s the first key-in. Now it can happen again, and it can happen again, it can happen again, it can happen again, till this thing is starting to get high priority.
Male voice: You know, I think there’s an awful lot of confusion, from what I’ve found in talking to people, about the phrase “key-in” and “restimulation.” I’m asking this question for people who . . .
It’s in the book.
An engram lies dormant until its first key-in. It lies dormant, it does not activate. You can have all the words of the engram flying around the person. You can have even the emotional states of it flying around the person. But we arrive at a period when enough perceptics happen at the same moment to bring that thing into action, where it can be restimulated, and it can thereafter be restimulated as long as it is keyed in.
Female voice: Ron, if it keyed out, can it be keyed in again?
That use of the word “key-out,” if you’re going to go over this very precisely, would be better said as “destimulated.” So let’s use the word “destimulated.” Let’s coin one.
Now, an engram has to be keyed in in order thereafter to be subject to restimulation. It can’t be just restimulated into view. Actually as you go back along a life, you can find the exact instants. They’re really precise. Up to this moment this little kid . . . Do you mind if I use a very severe example of this? A big A A bank—little kid walks in on Papa and Mama when they are doing it. He hears the phrases which are uttered as their standard dramatizations. And of course, wheeew—ptock! Now, he was not unconscious at the moment this happened. But the impact of it, bang, practically by just stirring it up a little bit, suddenly stirred it up a little bit more and this whole AA bank went into key-in at that time. Bang. The child was not well thereafter. [gap] All right. Here’s your engram. Your engram causes somatics. They cause aberration as well. [drawing on blackboard] But you see these two arcs? That’s a twin. Now, in any aberrations it keys in, you’ve got your motor strip in activation there which is riding with the sensory strip. If you want to be technical about this, here they are, riding more or less together.
You’ve got sensory, somatic are in phase, it’s going into the muscles, in other words. You’ve got muscular tension quite in addition to an ache in the bone. Now, theoretically you should be able to destimulate this engram simply by addressing the muscles in some way, so that you take the tension out of the muscles, you get a backlash and agitate the motor strip, which kicks back and—the somatics in the engram, it kicks back against them without just breaking the dramatization, it just kicks back on a bioelectrical level—and knocks the engram into destimulation, theoretically.
Where osteopathy works, it probably works along in this channel. There’s only one trouble in addition to this, that you haven’t got the whole—you can’t reach the whole aberration, pain and so on. So it would take quite a lot of restimulation—I mean it would take quite a lot of agitation of the muscles in certain places to set up a current which would backfire against this engram.
Female voice: That’s the limitation of osteopathy.
Yeah.
Male voice: Serious question, is there a danger in preventative Dianetics of an ally computation being set up where the child gets so dependent on one person for information, validation, or his evaluation, communication? What steps should be taken as an ally . . .
Now, let’s recall how an ally is really set up. An ally is not set up by being nice to the child. Here’s one of these broadsides that got into the field. They said—it seems that the child gets upset because—and it seems that people are nice to the child. Now, these two factors then must add up. Boy, is this sloppy logic! The whole field is full of it. “Therefore if one is nice to the child, the child is therefore being spoiled and will get sick.” Aw, this is just this stuff.
I ran into a Navy admiral who said, “You know, I don’t know what’s the matter with my daughter but I’m doing all I can to help her.” “Well, what are you doing, Admiral?” He says, “Well, you know, after my wife and I separated, I went to see somebody in the field of psychiatry and he told me exactly what was wrong.” And I said, “Yes, yes, go on.” Because this little kid was sick and I knew what the kid was sick from. “He told me that I would have to be very, very careful about my affection so that I didn’t set up an Electra complex. So of course I haven’t been able to really get at the root of this problem because I can’t talk to her a great deal because I—she’s liable, you see, to start loving me and so on and I don’t dare be affectionate toward her, because you see this would disturb her enormously” The little kid’s practically dying because she doesn’t think her father loves her anymore! Her mother’s gone and her father doesn’t love her either! And she was shot straight through. I’d like to meet that psychiatrist. So this kid had spent four years crying herself to sleep every night. Now, let’s not do sloppy logic on this.
The way it does go is that the ally gets around the child when the child is ill and establishes an engram which is a sympathy engram by saying things to the child at that time which are engramic. And because the adult—the ally—loves the child, the computation on the part of the child is that we must then accept everything which is said here. And this is the kind of engram that you find that creates an ally computation. “Stay right here with me and fight it out with Mary Don’t go, don’t die, please stay here.” That’s a swell computation. The best meaning person in the world, trying to save the kid’s life, kid’s skidding off, high temperature and all that sort of thing. All right. That’s an ally computation. It’s what is said to the child when the child is injured, when anaten and pain are present, when actual engrams can be installed in the child. All one can do for a child at that time is to be pleasant and silent. And if one goes through that period, those are the moments that become difficult and which you will find extremely difficult to find in the child, because these moments become protected. Because here we really needed the ally, and there the ally is. It says so right in the engram. That type of engram is terrible to get through. Gruesome.
Male voice: Ron, you have a child, goes to a hospital, you have no control over what the nurse says, doctor says.
That’s right.
Male voice: All right, let’s continue on. The child comes back from hospital A little direct memory there and—immediately?
Sure. Try to knock it out if you can. It’s a funny thing how many nurses get married in this society—married to their patients and that sort of thing it—there are some interesting figures on this. But don’t ever—don’t let me go away from this point—don’t ever fall under the delusion that love ever aberrated anybody.
Male voice: Ron, would you give us a dramatization of what might be said to the child when he’s in pain? And he said . . .
All right. I’ll give you a dramatization of what might be said to the child in pain. (period of silence) Full dramatization.
Male voice: How does that tie in with what you said a moment ago about the admiral being silent or almost so?
You’ve made the same mistake.
Male voice: Yeah? What is it?
Is that girl sick?
Male voice: No.
No! You’re misinterpreting this word “pain.” Yeah, semantics. Let’s call it “pain.” This child is in anguish because of something. Now, that isn’t an engram. An engram is a moment of loss. The moment when it was announced to her that her father and mother were being divorced and that her mother was going away, and when her mother said goodbye. These are engrams and moments of loss. But everything else lying on this line is locks.
Those are not moments of pain, those are just plain locks. Now, we’re talking about moments of physical pain . . .
Male voice: That’s what I’m talking about.
That’s right, moments of physical pain and particularly when unconsciousness is very marked and deep. Demonstration of affection toward the child at such moments and word content of such a demonstration are not just aberrative, those are the things make the very heart of a very difficult case. But when the child is not in pain—that is, not in physical pain and not unconscious—to deny the child love and affection because of this very slap-happy observation that just sort of covered the field and didn’t isolate the parts—that will make a child miserable and unhappy, and on a totally analytical level set up a highly undesirable situation for the child. So the withholding of affection from a child who is well, even if in sorrow, there we have another aberrative factor which is now thrown in on the child. Is that clear?
Male voice: Yeah.
Good.
Male voice: But the child had his—has his leg broken in an accident. . .
Right.
Male voice: . . . and you go over to the child and the child is still slightly conscious and says, “Daddy, do you still love me?” [gap] But don’t say anything.
Male voice: Just answer questions.
Second male voice: Nod your head.
A “yes,” by the way, is not going to be terribly aberrative in his bank. But if you just, say, give him a pat on the shoulder . . . But it’s the aberrative content of what you say, it’s the words as they form. You say to the child, “Yes, I still love you, dean Now lie quietly and let—until the doctor comes. He’ll be here in just a moment. I’m going to stay with you. Everything is going to be all right now, honey. Now, don’t worry about a thing. You’re a very, very good boy, I love you very much. Now, stay here, lie quietly, I know it hurts, I know it hurts a great deal. Oh, you poor kid, you poor kid,” That’s murder!
Male voice: Supposing he says, “Daddy, what happened to me anyway?” What happened to him? Answer it very, very briefly.
Second male voice: “Tell me about it.” Yeah, that’s a fine one. Good for you, Greg, “Tell me about it.” Male voice: Then don’t say “later,” huh?
That’s right. You just watch your words, because there you have an engram going in and you could stand right there and put it in. You’re the boss man right there as far as that engram is concerned. But be careful, be awful careful. Because, God almighty, the engrams I have run after just scores of hours of labor trying to find the darn thing where Mama is saying, “Oh, my poor, dear little child. There you lie dying and nobody to help you! Oh, why doesn’t the doctor come? Why doesn’t something happen? And you are such a beautiful child,” Usually she hits the child. But now the child is sick, that’s Mama’s dramatization. You’ve tried to find this thing, it takes you hours. If she’d just kept her mouth shut for five minutes, [gap] Female voice: Can’t you say, before you say anything else, “You can remember what goes on here” at least?
Hm-mm, Hm-mm, Look! Let me put this across in the clearest possible words I can, because it’s being misunderstood. You are not talking to a mind that is thinking! It doesn’t matter whether you recited the alphabet or flew to the moon on a washboard at that moment. It doesn’t matter much what you do . . .
Male voice: I think Susan means that if the child is hurt . . .
Yeah, and the child is screaming, Male voice: . . . and there’s anaten present and phrases have already been mentioned in the presence of the child.
Oh, is that what you meant?
Female voice: Yeah.
Oh, sure, Male voice: Should you be saying, “You will remember this”?
At the hospital the other day a nurse said to Romaine Ceppos—said in so many, “Why, she can’t remember anything.” Art was saying like this to the nurse, with (gestures) and Art went like this to her and she became enraged. She had heard about Dianetics and she says, “She doesn’t know what’s happening to her. She can’t remember anything. She’s unconscious!” And Art and Nancy turned to her with one accord and said in a very loud voice—two allies—said to her in a very loud voice, “You can remember this, you can remember this, you can remember this.” And the nurse looked at them like they were slightly nuts. And a little bit later—I think I told you this story the other day, but I abbreviated it a great deal—a little bit later the nurse had come in when Romaine was slightly conscious and gone out again. And Romaine then said in front of the nurse, many hours afterwards—the nurse was saying something about “couldn’t remember anything,” Romaine said, “But I remember everything you said.” This nurse was, “Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh!” Second male voice: Ron, one thing on what Gene said there, you got the wrong words on it. Do not say, “You will . . .” Male voice: Yeah, “You can remember this.” Second male voice: Be careful of the semantics on that one. “You can remember.” Second male voice: Yes, that’s right.
Male voice: This still has something to do with the fourth dynamic since I’m interested in television and radio and movies. Have you ever caught expressions out of radio in diagnoses, I mean, in removing engrams?
Not to any great degree. They form a background yak.
I haven’t found these things happening very much. People go to be amused, and it puts an entirely different alignment on the analytical mind, so that the analytical mind is very braced against these things.
Male voice: I was talking about a radio playing in the next room while . . .
Yeah. I pulled a radio out of an exodontistry not too long ago and it was going on and on and I was saying, “Oh boy, am I glad this wasn’t soap opera.” Gee. “Will Aunt Gertie’s broken leg heal by tomorrow? Will she remember little Benny that she put in the oven? Will George get out of the murder rap? Listen in next week to hear the adventures of the family down the street.” Second male voice: “Next week we will know.” Yeah.
Okay. We’ll call this thirty.