Removing Demon Circuits and - Valence Commands SOP Step Three (500825)
Date: 25 August 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
This morning we take up Step Three. Before I go into it extensively, I should tell you that in the running of engrams there are quite a few tricks, quite a few observances. These can be learned mechanically, which is to say that they’re a mechanical arrangement of engrams.
The mechanical arrangement of engrams—now lets have this as part of an engram, “I can’t feel,” and as we go down the track, we’ve found it appears here—here’s conception, birth. We’ve found “I can’t feel” there, which is a somatic shut-off. So we go into, “I can’t feel.” Doesn’t lift. Anytime a phrase like that doesn’t lift it’s because it has phrases before it. We go down here, we find, “I can’t feel.” We don’t dare abandon this chase if we’ve gone this far with it. We’ve run these phrases several times, each one of them, and they haven’t lifted. And so we find ourselves coming down here and we find the same phrase here. We’ve already learned this, when an aberree says something once, he’ll say it again. So this was, perhaps, Mother’s dramatization. And we get down here, and down here, “I can’t feel.” Now we’re getting into this basic area stuff. The chances of lifting are better. But we may run across a condition whereby we send the person to the earliest. “I can’t feel,” and he lands at the fifteenth or twentieth. He has to have that run for a few turns, two or three turns, before he can get to an earlier one. It’s as though we were unstacking. And we don’t see the lower one until we get one off. And “I can’t feel,” it takes two or three runs, they’re not deintensified particularly.
However, in this run down, at any time that you find the preclear is in a convulsive state, which is to say, it’s “I can’t feel,” and he starts to jump around, take the charge off of that engram right there. Because the convulsions will come off of that engram and that will deintensify. Follow me? But you keep on going down till you finally get an “I can’t feel” that reduces.
Now, it’s not necessary to come back up on this. “I can’t feel.” You’ve got the lowest one on the run, so forth, you have deintensified the sequence. If you try to go back up, you see you’ve just gone lower and lower on one phrase, if you try to go back up the line again, you are going to run into—this engram at the bottom said “I can’t feel, I have a headache’ or the next one up the line said “I can’t feel, my shoes are too tight.” The next one up the line says “I can’t feel anything today, I am just numb,” the next one up the line says. “I can’t feel it, I don’t think there is anything in there.” Uh-oh.
Well, we haven’t anything much out of the basic area at this time, let’s say, and we are going to get into a situation there where we are restimulating these things enormously. Because by reducing—you get this lowest “I can’t feel,” of course you reduce. When the “I can’t feel” reduces, you can reduce the whole engram. All of that. So you want the stuff before “I can’t feel,” and you want the material after. “I can’t feel.” You want to reduce the whole engram. So we start down to get the bottom one, the earliest we can get on this. And then we reduce the whole engram. Now if we start back up the line on “I can’t feel,” we are doing something very wrong. Because you know, these various phrases, “I can’t feel anything, I have two shoes on” or something of the sort, that’s not going to reduce perhaps because “I have two shoes on” may be lower and earlier than the first “I can’t feel” we had. So we would find ourselves in a terrible interlocked complexity there, which Alexander might have solved with his saber, you know, when he cut the Gordian knot. But I think preclears should be left relatively uncontused! And the solution on this then is to reduce the earliest UI can’t feel” engram that we can find, reduce all of it, and then start in on something else.
We are trying to work into the basic area. Now if we find, for instance, a dramatization here, a lock—this fellow is saying, himself, perhaps, “I can’t feel anything. I am just heartbroken, I am numb,” something of this sort, he is moping like this over a girl. All right, we start to run this dramatization of his mopery. And having run it a time or two just to get him into it nicely, we tell him to go to the earliest engram containing these words and he’ll quite often wind up down there at the bottom of the track just on a skip, so that you don’t have to walk down the bank. Walking down the bank is very difficult, you see. But skip down, that’s fine.
I have already mentioned to you running a moment of sexual pleasure or courtship up here in the adult area or teenage area without the preclear telling you anything about it. He’s just in the incident and we don’t ask him any data. But he’s in the incident and we realize he is settled into the incident and we tell him to go to conception, he will quite often wind up in the conception sequence.
In such a way, we can treat any dramatization. If we can find a place where Papa is telling him, “Yap, yap, yap, yap,” we can run the yap, yap, yap, although it’s just a lock, you see, and get his emotional tone up a little bit and then tell him to go to the earliest time his father said these words, and he’s liable to wind up at the early part of the track. In such a way, we can spot any engram down there by a skip down.
All this is very necessary and it’s all very interesting and gets engrams out of people much faster. But you will find in lots of cases you can do nothing but a walk down the bank. Now I’m taking this up particularly because we are entering in here the most delicate and at the same time most—well one might say fraught with difficulty phase of processing, when we go into analytical demons, demon circuitry on the one hand, and valence shifters. Because we are trying to find, let us say, a “control yourself” circuit someplace in the case, and the only way we can get this thing out of the case is start tracking down the bank. And maybe nobody said “control yourself” before the sixth month post-conception. That leaves a person rather hung up there. It’s very doubtful that that would happen. But you see that there is a difficulty with regard to this. And here we have the most skilled operation in Dianetics: is searching for the control circuitry and looking for and knocking out valence shifters. That’s very important.
Now, there is a method of doing this which I just mentioned. And you should connect this method very intimately with control circuitry, analytical demons, and valence shifters. And that is this method of running a dramatization and then telling the person to go to the first time this appears in the bank. He’ll very often do a skip and he’ll go right down to the first time.
Therefore, your biggest target and your most trouble—if that will work out all right, and it quite often will—then your most trouble would be getting enough Straightwire data to find that dramatization up here, the lock. So you can run the lock—you follow me now—you can run the lock and go into the first time it appeared in an engram. Because running the lock isn’t going to give anybody any therapy. You get a momentary release sometimes on locks but it’s not real honest to goodness therapy. The man is in reverie and we run the lock, then we say, “The file clerk will now give us the first time this is said, and the somatic strip will go to the beginning of the incident.” So there’s the matter there of locating a source of trouble, a bad source of trouble, and making this source of trouble surrender as quickly as possible.
Well, you get into a case where the dramatization—we get Mother says, “Control yourself” chronically, “I’m ashamed of you for crying, control yourself,” and she says it here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here. And we finally crack into this sequence by Straightwire. Then we get down and we run the incident we discovered. The preclear has this in full view And we run the incident just as—its a lock—we run it just like it’s an engram and we run it two or three times now as an engram. We now have all of its wording. We take very careful note of that wording because it may not be just “control yourself,” it may have some others salted into it like “Get a grip on yourself and “Bite it down” and “You’ve got nerve, now calm down and stay calmed down,” and so on. And we run that, then, as a lock, as a dramatization and we jump. Tell the file clerk, “File clerk, give us the first time this appeared in the bank.” Well, he’ll go whip and quite often land up.
Of course, that lock is sitting squarely on the engram. So actually, he is not doing any jump, he is doing a line, just, the line is riding right on top of the engram. Here is the dramatization lying there, and here is the engram lying here, although the lock might appear to be chronologically in this place. By returning the preclear to it, we actually find out that the lock is sitting, perhaps, on top of a basic area engram.
Male voice: I am not at all sure whether in cases where it’s top-heavy with grief you would do this right away or wait maybe three, four or five sessions.
Ho, ho, ho. Let’s not be precipitant now. I covered Step Two. I am now covering Step Three.
Male voice: You really get all the grief off first?
This has nothing to do with grief. Now, look here. We are over here. This is Step Two, see, first we take an inventory of the case. Then we go through Step Two, right here. Then we have running engrams there. And then we have Straightwire here.
Now I’m entering Step Three and talking about running engrams in connection with Step Three. We go into the case, inventory, next thing we do is try to open the case. Then we’ll find out lots of things about the case. Now maybe the case will run engrams. Okay, case will run engrams, fine, let him run engrams. Get basic area engrams and go right on with your erasure. But now, I say in this case, when we started into this and we tried to do this, we got analytical demons and we got valences. And the trouble with such, that it left us no recourse but to go to Step Three.
Let’s say the case has dub-in. All right, the case has dub-in, the only thing we can do for this case, then, is to knock out the control circuitry. Control circuitry is the basic cause of dub-in. All right, we knock out the control circuitry, then we knock out the valence shifters.
We find that Mama has a dramatization there that says, “I can’t be myself around you,” and we find one of those dramatizations somewhere up the line, we run that, and we skip down into this.
I’m just giving you a fast review here, right at the beginning of this before I go into it in more detail.
You’ll notice that this Standard Procedure Chart is set up in such a way that any place you stall, anywhere you stall, you go immediately to this. Now it’s this process, about which I am speaking which is Step Three of the Standard Procedure Chart. If we try to put the case in reverie and he comes up immediately off the couch and he says, “Get out of here, I don’t want to talk to you, I’ve decided not to go through with this,” what do we do?
Male voice: Step Three.
We don’t send for the cops, we just do Step Three. We sort of surround him. We want to know something about his history. We get him to talking quietly. We perhaps here managed to establish a rapport with him and everything went well. But the second we told him to close his eyes and lie down—as a matter of fact, it’s interesting that the opening run on a rape engram, usually, is “Lie down,” and so on. And it’s one of the reasons why the psychiatrist is so often plagued with a psychotic’s belief that he has been raped while he was under narco-synthesis and so forth. He has restimulated a rape engram. Follow me?
Because there’s lots of rape engrams. They are not rare. Of course, I suppose there are parts of this society, such as the Christian Temperance Union, would like to have us believe all is sweetness and light in this world but unfortunately, at this state of our barbaric civilization, it is not true. I say barbaric and this pops into mind some cases, juvenile delinquent cases, rape cases and so on. And if you want to go out in this society, down on South Main Street, and if you want to go down to the detention homes, and if you want to go around instead of walking on the boulevard which is all polished and clean, why you find out that there is a tremendous amount of mire scattered around this world. And there’s a lot of things happen. We walk by people every day who have the most fantastically involved, brutal personal histories, and there they are, they’re still alive and so on. What I’m trying to bring home to you is just because something is against the mores of the society is not a reason to believe that it does not happen. Your credulity will be stretched at the first of your career as professional auditors.
Male voice: Mr. Hubbard, the people who live on exclusive boulevards, after you get them in Dianetic reverie, are just as brutal and just as aberrated.
What do you mean, “just”?
Male voice: More so.
On working in a small town in the southern United States for a period of time, working with Dianetics and not letting anybody in on what I was doing, it was very remarkable to me, very remarkable, that the Negroes who came to me—they were supposed to be on the seamier side of life, you know. They were open-hearted and cheerful, most of them, but they were a little bit sad over something and life hadn’t been treating them quite right.
We run a couple of grief charges out of these people and then we run down to the bank and we get conception and we knock it out. Not necessarily conception but we get a basic area engram, knock it out, deintensify the case. And even pick up an AA or two or something and occasionally—they had a habit down there of trying A As with turpentine. And it’s quite remarkable, as an oddity. But these people were not very bad off, although they were poor and lived in shacks. In other words, measuring the background of one’s life in terms of outward manifestation is very unreliable because the very bad cases I got came out of the very nicest homes, the very nice homes. And here we got some poor guy who has—well, let’s say he was a drunkard and he had absconded with the funds, and he had done a lot of things. And we start running this fellow’s case and we find Mama’s lover, then Mama’s other lover, then the A A done by the minister—I found one!—and the rape accomplished by the scoutmaster. And here we have the mores of the society but violated violently.
I’m not trying to say that the nice facades invariably cover the worst people but I am saying that there isn’t any common denominator here by which one can judge.
My grandfather would never trust a minister’s son!
There is something about the pattern of contagion, for instance, where the most sincere parents may yet express that great sincerity—he has gotten this on an educational level—may yet express these things around an injured person in such a way as to make that injured person terribly aberrated. You don’t get a constant contagion.
I’m warning you, if you start into cases, you are going to find a lot of secrecy, a lot of coverup, a lot of malfeasance, mayhem, arson that you maybe never suspected of the human race before. And as you go further and further into cases, you’ll occasionally find a case which is a chronic “I’m ruined” case where he will run off 26 times that he was run over by a railroad train, the 462 times that he was shot, the 875 times that he was stabbed in the back, and you’ll find that there is a consistency, though, to these engrams. He, in other words, is doing a royal case of dub-in. And sometimes he has a command which makes him cry over everything. So he is not feeling grief at all All that he is doing is just dramatizing an engram which makes him weep. And this case is very interesting. However, when you finally run down the five or six engrams that he has been running in twenty or thirty guises, you will find there were folk there each time. If he keeps talking about having been run over and then he tells the next thing—“Oh, yes, there was another time I was run over. The wheels ran across my chest and stove it in, broke both my arms.” And we find out that in each one of these things somebody pulls him out from underneath the wheels of the truck or something of the sort. Each time, we find this happening. So there is an engram there someplace where he was rescued from some vehicle by somebody. And although he may have run it off in many guises at many ages there is a basic on this delusion chain.
So, I’m not trying to persuade you to buy everything a preclear tells you. But I am trying to demonstrate to you or to prepare you in advance for the fact that the data you get in Dianetics is very often highly incredible. And it may give someone just a little tendency there to invalidate somebody’s data. Don’t do it, because on a point as critical, let us say, as Mother’s lover, an invalidation almost ruins the preclear.
Male voice: Mr. Hubbard, what do you mean by a rape and a—you mean where conception occurs because of rape?
No, no. A rape engram—it means an engram which is occasioned by a rape, just that. It could be conception, it could be midway of the prenatal period, it could be the person being raped himself or herself, postpartum, as a little child, as a teenager or as an adult. I mean, it’s an engram.
A rape engram usually has a lot of charge on it. “Yow, yow, yow, yow” see and “get away” and “don’t” and so on. It’s got all sorts of denyers on it. “Leave me alone, let me get up,” so on. You try to get the person into this engram and, wham! wham! Its very difficult to hold them down into it. And you start to put a person back down the track, you just tell them to lie down. Mama said, “Let me up, I don’t trust you, I. . .I. . .I think you’re doing wrong, I . . . I hate you.” So you say “Lie down.” “I. . .I think you are doing wrong, I’m not sure about this, I don’t know whether I want to go into Dianetic therapy or not. Now let me up.” Giving you some of these aspects. So this happens to the person. You try to put this person down on the couch—took me a long time to get this fellow down on the couch. We put this person down on the couch and he bounces off of the couch again, bang, bang. Don’t sit there and try to persuade him. You’ve just triggered an engram.
You get such behavior as this, it isn’t that this person is naturally skittish. As a matter of fact, you can take that word naturally; take it delicately by the tail on the Y, hold it up, go find a garbage can and drop it in. Because saying that somebody behaves “naturally”—”He just naturally didn’t like this” or “He naturally didn’t like that.” You’ll find your preclears using it, “Well, I just naturally don’t like to . . .” “I am just naturally averse to . . .” and so on. Don’t buy any of it. Unaberrated conduct is quite obvious. And anything that is not unaberrated conduct is very far from natural. It’s caused by engrams. So never let yourself be persuaded by a preclear that there is something wrong as he tries to rationalize; wrong with you, wrong with the room, wrong with this, that he just naturally doesn’t like. And if you then go along this line you will try to make some sort of an adjustment for him. The second you do that you’re saying to the engram, “Okay, you can have him.” Further, you shouldn’t go on restimulating this engram by asking and saying the same things that you did. You take a different tack. A case where you say, “Lie down” and he bounces up, you’ll immediately go into Step Three. That’s how quick you go into Step Three. You don’t say immediately to yourself, “Well look-a-here, I’ve got to go to Al and A2 before I can go to Step Three, therefore it is absolutely necessary to get this person to lie down.” No. Anytime this case interrupts anywhere along the line of Standard Procedure—if you can’t get an inventory on this case, for instance, he won’t let himself be inventoried, and you’ll run into such people—go to Step Three.
Actually there is another bracket, another division for Standard Procedure, that was not written up because it belongs actually to the field of Institutional Dianetics. Institutional Dianetics has the terrific problem of accessibility. Going to give you a talk on psychotics before we’ve finished here. But Institutional Dianetics has this problem continually and it takes a clever auditor to deal with it. And will, at least until we get things a little straighten. We’re still working on Institutional Dianetics. We have got to put a weapon into the hands of people in institutions that are running them in order to create this accessibility and create it rapidly.
A Dianetic Auditor working carefully with any one of these people can produce results. Accessibility is on the order of the psychotic tearing around the room but on every fifth whirl he will look at you and repeat what you tell him to, every fifth whirl. And he’s going around saying, “Oh well, calm down, calm down, calm down, calm down.” And you say, “Repeat that.” So he won’t pay attention to you maybe that time, but the next time you get his attention you say, “Would you please repeat ‘Calm down’?” And he’ll say, “Well, if you want me to.” And “Do you want me to?” And you say, “Yes, yes I want you to.” And you say, “Well now, all right, repeat ‘Calm down.’ “ “Well, you didn’t say, ‘I want you to.’ “ “All right then, I want you to say ‘Calm down.’ “ “All right, now how shall I say it? Shall I say it here in the middle of the floor or shall I say it sitting over on the bed or shall I say it leaning on the bureau? Now where shall I say it?” “Well, say it on the bed.” “Aha, you didn’t say ‘I want you to.’” This is a problem in accessibility.
Eventually you can get this person, if you keep at it, and you’re very calm about the whole thing, and very much in possession of yourself, you can get this person eventually to say, “Calm down.” And if you get him to say, “Calm down” a few times and get him to roll it over, why you may get a little false four, you know, a little laughter off of the thing, “ha-ha-ha.” Of course, “calm down,” that’s a terrific suppressor, and then you get the holders out of it and the bouncers and so forth, because they’re running an engram, you see, all the time they’re around. Just get them to repeat those things and then get them in another valence and so on. You can work it out. Even a catatonic can be worked. But it’s a problem of accessibility. Now, the fellow who bounces up off the couch every time you try to ask him to lie down, that is a problem in accessibility. Actually accessibility should lead the list. If we can’t get an inventory on this person, we can go to Step Three, working a person who is at all approachable, who is normally fairly rational and who can perform routine tasks of one sort or another. We’d just work them this way: go to Step Three.
Put preclear on straight line memory and look for demon circuit and valence commands in memories of parents and possible allies and so forth.
You’re trying to inventory him, you see. You’re trying to ask him what happened to him. And he can’t tell you what happened to him. And the odd part of it is that there are little dodges, there are a lot of dodges that you can use to try to get this. Misdirections. Get him to talking about something.
Take it up on this order. The fellow says, “Well, I can’t remember.” And you say, “Well, let’s see. Well, let’s remember this morning when you got up. Well, let’s remember it.” “Can’t do it.” “Well, let’s remember the moment when you came down here.” “No.” “Well, let’s remember when you were here and just walked in. Just walked in the place.” “No.” “All right. Let’s remember when you walked into my office here just a minute ago. Not just into the building. Let’s remember when you walked right into this office and sat down in the chair. Let’s remember what I said just a minute ago.” “Oh, you said remember about when you walked in, that’s easy.” “Well, now let’s see if we can’t remember a little bit more about this.” The first thing you know, you’ll have him remembering. And you sometimes have to work quite hard to get a person to remember. It sounds foolish to you perhaps, but there’s always this gag of creeping up on it. You take a little tiny portion of what you want him to do and then you make him do that. And then you extend that portion out that far and make him do that. And then extend it that far and make him do that. He keeps reaching, reaching, reaching.
In a case which refuses utterly to remember, there are fear and grief charges in this case that are very, very heavy, and actually “I” has been chased out, you might say, and it keeps getting chased out up into—he’s actually frozen on the track, but “I” sort of has the feeling that he simply can’t touch any of this stuff. “If I start remembering, I’ll be overwhelmed.” So you coax him into it and you’re demonstrating to him that it’s safe to remember. That’s all you’re doing.
He says, “I can’t remember people.” You say, “Well, now do you remember your wife, huh, you remember what she looks like?” and so forth. He kind of shudders off on that. Well, you can even carve it down to the point where “Well, you remember me, don’t you?” The fellow says, “I can’t remember names.” He refuses to remember names of four or five years ago. All right, you can boil it down to a point where he remembers—you ask him to remember your name and if he can’t do that, ask him to remember his own name. At any one of these points, why, you say to him triumphantly, “Now you see, you can remember names.” Now when you’ve made him remember his own name he has now the point that he can remember a name. Now let’s make it two names. Now have him remember your name. Now have him remember his wife’s first name. Have him remember his children’s names, and in such a way—his boss and this one and that one and it’ll get ridiculous to him after a while. Here he is piling off name after name. He told you all this time that he can’t remember names. Well, after a while he sort of surrenders on the whole thing and he says, “Well, hell yes, teacher in the first grade’s name was Elsa.” What’s happened there is that “I” has crept back down the track with a few attention units, “Well, well, never been in here before, I wonder . . .” Like a little kid fumbling in the dark.
Using straight line memory on that basis, you can reach enormous quantities of data. You can really start to get data, if you just sit down and ask the person to remember this and remember that and this creep-up process of things that are easy and then things that are a little harder to remember. I dare say if this were set up as a research project and a person were worked on nothing but straight memory, let us say, for fifty or a hundred hours in small ingredients, let’s say, of a straight memory on the basis of maybe half an hour or forty-five minutes a day, for fifty or a hundred hours, you’d probably have him up to a point of rehabilitation as far as memory is concerned of saying, “Well, what did you eat on August the 4th, 1916?” He’d say “Spinach. That was for supper. Maybe you meant breakfast? That was shirred egg.” This person with a bad memory.
Because you keep whipsawing him between making him remember things and trying to find out “Who said that you had a bad memory? Who had a bad memory in your family?” You’re trying to find a source of contagion.
Here we must understand the principle of the contagion of aberration. You’ll find it covered in the book. In straight line memory it becomes very, very important to understand those principles. The contagion is in the exact words.
Somebody says, “You know I’m awfully, awfully apprehensive.” Don’t look for an earlier moment in the person’s life when somebody said, “You have an anxiety complex.” Look for somebody saying, “I am awfully nervous.” Or look for a valence shift to somebody who said continually this. You get the idea. I’ll make this very positive.
In order for a person to feel the aberrations of some member of the family, there’s usually some sort of valence shifter at work that may be the kind of a valence shifter which shifts them precisely into the valence of that person who used to worry. It may be a valence shifter which shoots them into the valences of all the members of the family. It may be a valence shifter that shoots them into the valences of everybody in the human race. And it may be a valence shifter which shifts them out of a human valence entirely and just lets them idle here in a synthetic valence. No specific individual.
I have seen people fast and solidly in the valence of a dog. Matter of fact, it is often commented upon that dogs and masters very often look alike. Well, of course the dog is very devoted to the master, but the master is very devoted to the dog and here’s an ally and it’s too common to have the ally picked up as a valence. So this fellow has lived with this dog for five years, and imagine if he was living with a bloodhound . . .
Now, the contagion of aberration is complicated by valences, very much complicated by valences because somebody . . . Ah, here was a case in point. A young lady who I was giving a cross-questioning to yesterday—put the Indian sign on her to pick up a little data. She said, “You know I used to . . . when I was psychoanalyzed all of my friends had the same experience. We were psychoanalyzed, all right, but when we came out of it you know we still hadn’t regained any vivacity or anything.” Well this is fine, “All of my friends,” boy, was that a generality. “All of my friends,” she says, “feel this.” Well, we start to tie this thing down and we find out that, well, she felt it anyway. And then we tie it down a little bit further and we start to find out this: that she had lost her vivacity because she went into psychoanalysis. She had mislaid that point. And then as we go further in this case we find out that Mama was not vivacious at all. Further research finds that Papa left Mama when this girl was seven months postconception. She’s never laid her eyes on Papa. What kind of a person is Papa? “He was vivacious.” “Oh? Well now, who said you were like Papa?” “People said I resembled him most.” But Mama said not to be like him. Papa was vivacious, everybody said she was like Papa. She had just heard a description of Papa and of course she had a lot of engrams back there early that she could emulate and then Mama said not to be like Papa. And of course here’s your suppressor setup. But this data is all very interesting but we couldn’t do much for the case just with this. Straightwire in this case didn’t happen to give her any relief I found all sorts of early circuits and locks all over the place and so on, and she just kept sitting there wringing her hands.
Well this is peculiar to a case which has had a definite and large sweeping shift in his life. That is to say the personnel present during the prenatal period is changed postnatally or in childhood, very early childhood. So you don’t have a trace really on the dramatizations of one of these persons. Somebody has probably keyed in these engrams, somebody like Papa, but it would be a sort of a gunshot thing that maybe hundreds of people have talked to her and one after the other keyed in something. But we don’t have Papa there. We don’t have any of Papa’s locks. So we can’t find what Papa did say. All we can find out is what Mama said. Well, this is fortunate. It is better than not having any parents around the child as far as our processing is concerned because we can now find some of these locks and discover some of Mama’s chronic dramatizations.
However, we run the risk in this case of having Mama shift valence once Papa had left her. So that she is not pulling off the same engramic language she pulled off when Papa was there. Maybe Papa reminded Mama of Grandpa, you see. And the valence of Mama around Papa was the same as it had been toward Grandpa. Perhaps that might be Grandma’s valence she’s in. But now postpartum . . . I know it sounds like it starts to get complicated, but it does. So that after Papa has left Mama, we have a long period then of Mama sorrowing. Maybe she was in Aunt Agnes’ valence who was an old maid. And then all of a sudden Jameson Thorpe shows up and curls his long black moustache and Mama shifts over into somebody else’s valence. Actually Mama can shift all the way over to be in her former husband’s valence, you see, so we wouldn’t get constant dramatizations up the line.
This case responded to straight line memory just exactly as you would suspect that it would. There’s not enough data on the engrams. Although the engrams are restimulated, we don’t have specific targets.
We found a couple of times where teachers had spoken to her and had restimulated some of the basic engrams, and yet by straight line recall, nothing happened. This girl just sat there continuing to wring her hands. However, she is a pianola case and the cases which haven’t had the parents around are more apt to be pianola than the cases which have. It’s a great commentary upon the American home. So she should have just been put down the track, wham, basic area. She was already open. I don’t know why I was playing with straight line memory, except I was amusing myself. But she could have gone right down to the bottom of the track and probably run out conception and started an erasure. That was really the state of case she was in. She had excellent recall. She had heavy control circuitry, but just the same she would work. Her control circuitry was so heavy that although she was on track with full perceptics, when you asked her to remember anything, she didn’t remember—she returned, and she had all of her life. So you say, “Well, what happened to this teacher, how old were you when the teacher said . . .” “I was about five, no six, yeah, six.” And “What did she look like?” “Well, so-and-so.” “What’s she saying?” “Oh, such-and-such.” “Give me an age flash.” (snap) “Six.” See, she has returned down the track. This character is not remembering at all.
Male voice: Is this bad on a straight line?
Well, it sure defeats it. So you had your control circuitry, but the control circuitry was operating in the auditor’s favor. She was coasting up and down the track and had been all of her life.
Now, the reason why she had a hard time in analysis is not very hard to discover. The analyst was running a case in reverie. And the analyst was saying, “Now tell me about the time you drowned your grandmothers kittens.” And she was right there drowning a kitten. And he’d say, “Well, let’s go over it once. Now, let’s tell me about it.” And she’d say, “Mama said so-and-so.” “Well no, no, just give me the idea about the whole thing.” “And well, so I went out and drowned the kittens and after a while . . .” “Well, that s too bad, that’s too bad. Now let’s go. . .” So of course the analyst, poor guy, had a patient sitting there coasting all over the time track, going into anything, going into everything. Naturally that sooner or later some engrams would get restimulated, naturally she’d be worse off for having gone through the experience.
Some say it was a risk, an unknown risk before.
I’ve run into several cases like this, by the way, that all the analyst would have had to do is say, “Go to the earliest moment of pain or unconsciousness,” he would have got conception, wham! Wouldn’t that have surprised him! No, he’d have told her it was delusion.
An interesting thing: two chaps up at Columbia University about a year ago had gone to a psychiatrist and they were doing sort of this automatic return proposition, coasting around on the track, and the psychiatrist—they ran into some prenatals, about a year ago. And the psychiatrist told them, “All is delusion, after all, you know this is delusion.” They got furious with him. They said, politely speaking, “To hell with you,” and went home and thought this over. And they said, “You know, it might do a great deal of good to remember these incidents.” So they worked on each other, and they had pains here and pains there, but they didn’t know what they were running, they didn’t know how to run it. And they had been remembering—they called it remembering—and they said that they would remember this and they would remember that, one to the other. They were sort of doing a strange job of co-auditing. And they were down there in the prenatal area, and they were remembering this and that, and of course they didn’t know enough to go through the thing a few times. They didn’t know enough to try to find the earlier engram. They didn’t know anything. And here was a locomotive running on the track with a wide open throttle. They were in terrible shape. One of them was just that far from a psychotic break. And talk about aches and pains and everything else, they were in a mess. One of them had developed spinal arthritis. An auditor sat down, he worked for five hours, two and a half hours on each one, got them straightened out, got some stuff off the basic area, you know, and knocked some grief off the cases and got them cleaned up a little bit, the tension off. He put a copy of Dianetics in their hands, and he said, “Now, it says right here this is the way you do it.” And they went off and sinned no more.
I don’t know how many cases of this character there have been in the past, or how much of the grief that has been attributed to psychoanalysis—like “Psychoanalysis, it’s well known that psychoanalysis can trigger a neurosis,” and so forth. How much of this automatic return proposition had to do with that, I don’t know. But it must have had considerable to do with it. Because I have found a pretty good proportion of people are skidding around on their tracks without knowing what they are doing. Perceptics full on but discharging nothing. And “Let’s remember what was said” and so on. By the way, the bulk of them skid around on the track and yet they have doubters as to their own data. Or they have doubt as to what they’re reading, “I can’t believe it,” something of the sort. And they can see the book. They know that it was the book and so on and can’t read it. They have a hard time.
All right. What I’m telling you is that you’re sometimes going to get Straightwire cases that are not Straight wire at all but are returning on the track. And you’re not going to get much therapy from them but any time you have somebody who is returning that easily on the track, you don’t need Straightwire. See, all you do is to slam them into basic area, run out conception, sperm sequence, run out the ovum sequence, run out the first part of the douche chain, run out the morning sickness chain and you keep on. And by that time you’ve run five, six, ten engrams, something like that, the rest of them are starting to erase. And they’ll start erasing automatically all the way up the line. Then you get up some grief discharge and you run those off and then you get back and run off the early stuff and you’ve got a Clear.
This is a pianola case in earnest. Actually, most pianola cases that you see run, and so on, do to some degree control themselves and they’ve still got circuitry in them. For instance, this girl was just loaded with circuitry.
Now, your straight memory is then the process of recovering data, springing locks by straight memory and setting up the case in such a way that it will go into reverie.
If you have a case which is very recalcitrant, you can generally do enough for this case on straight memory processing. Actual processing, getting your earliest locks, getting him to remember this and remember that, remember the bad things he thinks about himself, who said them. “You know I’ve always failed in school.” “Well, who used to claim that you failed in school?” “Well, as a matter of fact, my father. But then of course I never could study. Well, he said that too as a matter of fact.” And you get data, data, but you’re springing locks at the same time and you’re opening up somebody’s recalls.
Don’t let the person wander. You want specific data. You want to knock out the key-ins on the aberrations, if you can, that’s preventing this character from cooperating with you. That’s very important.
You want to free enough attention units. You want to turn on the analyzer enough so that it will work with you. At any step here, then, anywhere along the line the case breaks down, if you can’t get accessibility in any other way, try to get it in straight memory. If you can’t get an inventory, why, go into Step Three and try to find out if we can’t key out some data which prevents this person from telling you.
It may be that he has a secret, a tremendous secret of some sort and starts to tell you about his own life, and we find out eventually that he had a secret all right but the engram causing it was “I don’t dare tell you about myself, you wouldn’t listen anyway,” something like that. We can key out stuff enough to clear up the case, ease it down. First thing you know the person’s in reverie and you’re running engrams with him.
That is the cycle then, at any point in Standard Procedure where you are unable to proceed, you go over here to Step Three. Put him in straight line memory and you get your analytical demons in sight, the control yourself mechanisms like, “You’ve got to get a grip on yourself,” “You’ve got to do it yourself,” “I have to do it myself” and “You’ve got to learn how to do it yourself too.” That’s all control circuitry- That’s “control yourself.” (Recording ends abruptly)