View source for A Summary of Standard Procedure (500710)

'''Date:''' 10 July 1950

'''Speaker:''' L. Ron Hubbard

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The procedure here is Standard Procedure. Now, you needn’t write this down because these will be passed out to you in a revised form on Wednesday night. And the revised form will contain this step which I’m going to read out. I’m merely reading this to you for your edification tonight.

Step One: Diagnosing the case. After this, go to Step Two.

Step Two: Opening the case and running engrams. If case won’t open or case bogs down, go to Step Three.

Step Three: Knocking out demon and valence commands. After this, go to Step Two.

The elaboration on it consists of: Step One: Diagnosing the case. In diagnosing the case the following information should be obtained: 1. Name, age, height, weight, foreign language, so forth. 2. If hypnotized, psychoanalyzed, shock therapy. 3. Neurosis, psychosis, dramatization, psychosomatic illnesses and so forth. (There is meant dramatizations which plague the people around the patient and worry him.) 4. Operations, illnesses, accidents, electric shocks, nitrous oxide. 5. Obituary list: father, mother, grandparents, uncles, aunts and so forth.

Childhood, school and recent environment, pleasant and unpleasant. 7.	Perceptics, occluded people and so forth.Step Two: Opening the case and running engrams.

A. Opening the case. Put the preclear in reverie and run pleasant incidents. Check perceptics and if moving on time track. 1A. Tune up perceptics with pleasure incidents. If poor, go to Step Three. 1B. Test file clerk and somatic strip. If these do not work well and reliably, go to Step Three. 2. Try for an emotional discharge. 3. Try for basic area engrams and failing, go to Step Three.B is running the engrams, 1. Direct   somatic   strip,   work   with   file   clerk,   reduce   all engrams contacted, compute at all times, detect and deintensify all holders and denyers and so forth. 2. Start in basic area and proceed to present time, erasing all engrams on the way. Keep at it until you have a Release or Clear. 3. If case bogs down, try for emotional discharge. Failing, go to Step Three.

Step Three: Knocking out demon and valence commands. 1. Put preclear on straight line memory and look for demon commands and valence commands in memories of parents and possible allies. 2. Put preclear in reverie and try to establish demon commands and valence commands by running dramatizations of parents and so forth as engrams. Use repeater to reach and reduce the first engram containing this command. 3. Try for emotional discharge on moment of grief, sorrow or loss.

And 4. Keep repeating Step Three until case is opened and engrams are running.

There is only one other thing to be added into there and that is the rehabilitation of reality. Right here in 1A—there should be another step there in Step Two—is test the patient for a sense of reality and if it isn’t there, why, go down to Step Three.

Now, these will be made up and passed around to you. You’re quite welcome to this form here which will be of assistance to you. But it isn’t absolutely necessary to have one of these because you’ll have the others Wednesday.

The first thing necessary in a case is, of course, accessibility. Accessibility of a case is not a point which is limited only to psychotics. Don’t think for a moment that it is. Many people will resist therapy who have to have therapy and are yet not psychotic. You will find many people intensely skeptical of Dianetics and intensely combative sometimes, particularly when hubby says the wifey is crazy and he wants her fixed up. And she doesn’t want to be fixed up. She has decided against this.

Now, whenever we have had trouble like this in the past, it usually stems from the fact that the husband has been intensely critical of the wife’s sanity or vice versa. Or the patient has something against going to anyone in the field of mental healing, due to some relative or some failure in old schools of mental healing, and at first they may not consider Dianetics anything else.

You can overcome that. As a matter of fact, that one is the easiest to overcome I know, because patients who have been intensely resistive towards psychoanalysis have, within a very few minutes after contacting Dianetics, become very cooperative. That is not a tough one to overcome. But the next one is tough to overcome. An engram which says “I won’t have anything to do with the doctor. I hate the doctor. I know what he’s going to try to do to me and so on. And he thinks I’m crazy” or “If he finds out that I’m crazy . . .”so on. This type of engram is often very prohibitive. But you can still work against it if you are patient.

Particularly—and here we are in accessibility—if you work on a direct line memory with the patient, eyes wide open, sitting straight up in the chair, no slightest hint of the fact that you’re doing anything for them, and you begin to get interested in what life has done to them in their environment, very few patients can resist this very long. You are interested, you do want to help them, but you don’t want to help them on a basis of “I am going to help you in spite of anything you can do about it.” No. You could start accomplishing therapy right at the start, merely by talking to them, asking them questions, asking them if this or that happened in their lives and so on. Quite often an intense reaction from the patient, but that’s relatively rare.

You start your therapy then on what we’re calling here Step Three is put the preclear on straight line memory, look for demon commands and valence commands in memories of parents and possible allies. When accessibility then is poor, we start right in with troubleshooting the case on a straight line basis. And we’ll get results.

Of course just diagnosis is actually troubleshooting the case somewhat. You make him remember back to this and back to that. And first thing you know, why, his memory is a little bit more limber. It’s really quite astonishing how much people can remember, once they are pressed in a kindly way to try to remember it.

You have this as your ally in all accessibility: basic personality wants out. Furthermore, people don’t want to be sick. People are not unwilling to get well, they are very unwilling to be ill. But the engram says that the reverse may be the condition which has to be.

As a result, you are fighting an engram about such a thing and you couldn’t fight basic personality about it.   Basic personality is pretty tough. But you can combat an engram on the subject. An engram will succumb, they are weak, they haven’t much to them, truth be known. They may look awfully tough to some people.

In a psychotic your problem of accessibility is very extreme. Basic personality, “I,” are practically smothered. It’s as though they’ve been withdrawn from the scene entirely. But some psychotics will actually work on a straight memory basis, in moments of lucidity and so on. So if you have a psychotic who is, you might say, in between breaks, maybe an hour of lucidity, just asking them to remember this and to remember that without putting them in therapy, may accomplish enough therapy with them to prohibit the next break. It just may do so.

If you are dealing with a psychotic who is in the complete parade of an engram or dramatizing because of a demon circuit, you then have, as we talked about before to you, the toughest problem that you can face in Dianetics, which will require all of your patience and skill and imagination to combat. We are working, as I have said before, upon methods to increase psychotic accessibility. This is not an acute problem with any of you, I know. Sooner or later you’re going to face it.

The raving psychotic, where “I” and basic personality seem to be completely gone, missing from the scene—is a nasty character to come up against. Whether he’s in a catatonic state or talking wildly, dramatizing, shifting one valence to another, or merely obeying a demon circuit, whatever it is; that case is not easy.

The best way to get them of course is to find if they do have periods of lucidity, and work them during those periods of lucidity. And in such a way you are enormously aided. We’re trying to, at this time, get an easy enough method so that the psychiatrist will be saved a great deal of time in the institutions. We’ve got this thing fairly well along the line.

One of the things which astonishingly enough seems to be coming forward with great speed is chemistry. We had a very interesting experience Sunday which I will just mention to you in passing. I was at a point where I believed there were no drugs which could produce any great or marked effect upon engrams. It was my observation that every time you administered a certain set of drugs, undesirable characteristics went right along with the administration effect.

Which is to say, when you administered a drug which made the person very emotional, then the person would go on and dramatize with no therapeutic value, but they wouldn’t dramatize what you wanted them to dramatize. And when it came to administering Benzedrine, sometimes the attention of the psychotic in particular, and the emotional reaction from a neurotic or a normal person . . . [gap] . . . psychotic’s slightly more accessible. But it wasn’t very marked.

Sunday, Dr. Lewis who is in the Saturday night course—he’s the chief of research at Block Chemical—came over to Dr. Winter’s and we went to work on Dr. Winter and Dick Saunders and John Campbell, three likely guinea pigs. And we administered a drug which was a derivative of a couple of herbs from South America, the chemistry of which I will not plague you with.

Male voice: What kind of a drug?

Oh, he had some kind of a name for it. He had a number for it. It’s a drug which he himself has been instrumental in perfecting. It has occasionally turned off a somatic, that is a chronic psychosomatic illness, occasionally. One of the atropines, which is to say there are several— forms the center of it.

Well, the most astonishing thing took place. The demon circuits kicked in heavily, very, very heavily. Dr. Winter had just taken that drug when you people came to the door. And he says, “We’re terribly busy, terribly busy.” He went around, “Well, go ahead, put me in therapy. All right. I’m all ready now. I’ll run it.” Every demon circuit he had, and most of them have been kicked practically flat, was in high activation. Started to run engrams on him and were they accessible! Oh indeed, those engrams were terrifically accessible. He could go clear down into the basic area and he could go into emotional charges and so forth, run off the whole word content, and not a single, slightest, tiniest reduction took place on any engram, not a bit of unconsciousness would come off of any engram. And knowing his case well—he contacts them, reduces them, their aberrative effect goes down, the engram itself either erases or reduces very easily, unconsciousness comes off and he can’t find it anymore or it’s there but it isn’t anything. That is his normal running. And by the way, very hard to find anything—put your hands square on anything in his case. And here we have just exactly reversed the case. We have turned the behavior of the engram upside down. It could be found immediately, but once found it would not reduce. And in all three cases its behavior was the same. So that we ran over these engrams about forty, fifty times with no slightest reduction of any kind. And they weren’t restimulated. Brought the patient straight up to present time out of these engrams.

John Campbell was running the next one that he has to run in order to start his erasure going again. He was right there running it. He even started it into his own valence. He got into his own valence but that was all.

Now, this is strange behavior. And for the first time I have seen a reversal of effect, a very marked, pointed effect as the result of chemistry. And as a result, I believe it may be possible to find a proper combination of drugs which will permit the engram to be located—since this was a combination of drugs—permit the engram to be located, and when located, permit it to be reduced with ease. And furthermore if engrams can be this wise affected; if the chemistry of unconsciousness and pain can be so affected by a drug, the possibility of a one-shot Clear is closer.

Male voice: You look like a man looking for a volunteer.

I’d never run this one on you, Gene, never.

Male voice: Seems to be a great well of information here.

Oh yes, you can get lots of information with this drug if you can just put up with what happens.

Female voice: After we get that information can we then go back and run the engram?

Sure, you could repeat the guy back to the engram I suppose. This drug scared me though. Anytime a drug suddenly takes an engram and glues it down and then glues the unconsciousness down with it . . . And when that drug has the reputation of knocking out a psychosomatic which thereafter doesn’t return, I don’t like to give it to people.

Male voice: Why?

Well, its effect may be more permanent than we desire. We don’t know.

Second male voice: I wanted to ask you this question, does the obvious over-effect of the drug wear off rather rapidly?

Yes. But that drug, by the way, was very rapid. I worked Dr. Winter for a few minutes and the effect of the shot he’d had, since he had had it some little time before he started into work, wore off. I could see it wear off and he got off three or four yawns and the engram started to reduce, at which moment—he had had instructions to take the other one—at which moment I gave him the other pill and within fifteen minutes he was right back where he started from. The engram just stiffened right up and there it was. Very, very interesting. John, for instance, went through his non-coitus chain which ordinarily he just absolutely will not touch. Won’t have anything to do with it.

Male voice: Non-coitus?

The non-coitus—don’t you know the non-coitus chain? That’s “Get away.” “Take it out.” “Go away.” “Stop, stop.” “Leave me alone.” “I don’t want you.” “Go!” So forth and so on.

Male voice: Ron, one of the questions I have—on return to these engrams, I don’t know whether he did or not—on return to these engrams, subsequent to the effect of the drug wearing off, what result had transpired, if any?

I didn’t work them. I haven’t worked them since. I’m going to give them a couple of days and they said maybe the dosage was critical, but I want to see if I can reach this lowest engram on Campbell, which I know was completely inaccessible the last time I tried for it.

Male voice: Well, that sounds like you just give them a small pill, run them back to the earliest moment of pain or discomfort and start running it, and let the drug wear off and there you are sitting right there at basic-basic.

Yeah. That might be a possibility. But how long does it take for this drug to wear off? Dr. Lewis inferred that the dosage on this might be very critical, and it might be that a little less dosage or a little more dosage might have a completely different effect. I doubt it though, because we gave it to three people and it had identical effect.

Female voice: How was their analytical behavior?

The IQ seemed to be fair but we had no accurate test of it, so we couldn’t tell I think it went up.

Male voice: You say this is an atropine derivative?

Yeah. Oh, it’s been completely loused up. He showed me the chemical setup on it. I can see it but it wouldn’t do me any good to try to read it off. Nuts.

Joe Winter, by the way, talked to him for about an hour on this drug. And became very conversant with what it was. He was there for some time. I just appeared on the scene to audit these three people. I’d been told they’d been given this drug. Then I learned that it had several component parts and that’s all I know about it. But it’s evidence. Anyway, it’s no good merely hoping on something like that. The research level is going off sideways now into chemistry. We’re going to hit chemistry very hard, chemistry and the accessibility of psychotics.

There are other methods of making them accessible besides chemistry. That’s on an educational level which we have dreamed up, and we’re going to test.

This Standard Procedure which you heard about Friday night and which I just read to you again here, will form for you a standard technique which you can go through, pretty much by rote. You can follow these steps. If you follow these steps, you’re going to get engrams, there is no doubt about it. And this was in the interests of making a solution of a case inevitable.

Too many auditors become confused at some stage in the case. And by lining it up in this fashion, just exactly what we’re supposed to do, we have clarity. And you, by using this technique and procedure, will have results. Matter of fact it’s amazing in the Professional Course to discover how many of these cases are well cracked in respect to the amount of time the people have been here. Pretty good percentage. Of course there are a couple of people that are very stuck in the mud at the moment.

Yes?

Male voice: On the business of this Standard Procedure, Ron, I gave kind of a test run to a fellow who was here on Saturday. Found out that he’d had kind of a rough setup on the diagnostic evaluation. Definitely had a “control yourself” mechanism, forgetter mechanism, a doubt mechanism. He was blocked on the second dynamic. In therapy, in a brief run, there was something in him which caused him to refuse to divulge data. He felt that and described it. And when you ask for a denyer you get “no.” Now, where would you begin on a case of that kind?

All right. You’d go to Step Three, just like that. I don’t know whether you tested his file clerk, somatic strip or not You mean they didn’t—what?

Male voice: In pleasure moments his perceptics were pretty good. But on the whole . . . But his file clerk and somatic strip didn’t work with you?

Male voice: Not in therapy, no.

All right. Not in therapy. Okay. You’ve made that test, your next step on Standard Procedure is go to the third step of straight line diagnosis again. And you start clipping out locks on a straight memory and start locating the exact phraseology by scouting the dramatizations of his parents or even his own fight dramatizations with people or his own statements to people until you have data enough to plunge on repeater technique. And by repeater technique, using some of the phrases divulged which would find that stuff, you’ll wind up down low enough in the bank to a point where you can reduce an engram.

Male voice: Which one would you pick? I got phrases, such as . . .

I would pick “control yourself” Female voice: In reference to the business of tracking down demon circuits, I was wondering whether then and only then, it might not be worthwhile to find out about the patient’s dreams where he’d probably get the demon circuits talking undisturbed.

Well, I’ll tell you, there is a use for dreams. And that use is very valid. Go back in reverie to a moment when the patient was dreaming and run the dream, get him settled in the dream, see if you can turn on some of the emotion of the dream and then drop him straight into the engram which caused this. That has some therapeutic value.

Before you start to play with these dreams though, you ought to make sure that you have some of the basic material out of a case. Because—mind you now, anytime you get basic-basic out of the case, you get unconsciousness off the case, you enter a stage of therapy where you are on safe ground. Everything you touch, almost, will reduce after this has been done. And you don’t any longer have to worry too much about restimulation. Because if you land at six months or something like that—as more erasures take place,  this six months’ period—let’s say you’ve erased fifteen, twenty engrams up to the first six weeks . . . [gap] After we have this diagnosis, we have a pretty good idea of what we’re shooting for in the case. We know where the painful emotion should be located; if it’s there or not is another thing. We know what illnesses we’re trying to touch and we have a fair idea of the personnel involved. And we should know just by this whether we have a very bad case or an easy case.

Now, the way you tell if you have a very bad case is a jackleg method—by the childhood illnesses—the incidence of illness in childhood. And by the ability of the person to recall. These two things will add up into a summation of data which should tell you how severe the prenatal bank is.

Now, if you want to locate abuse to the child, prenatal or postnatal, you ask questions about whether he likes his father, whether or not he likes his mother, whether or not he was fond of his grandparents and you get an overweening fondness for Grandpa or Grandma or uncles and aunts and a detestation of Papa and Mama, and you have very, very good evidence there to a very severe prenatal bank.

Male voice: Ron, when you use this open memory in diagnosis and you say that the patient’s ability to recall is somewhat of a measure of how strongly reactive the mind is . . .

I said a rough measure.

Male voice: Yeah, sure. I wonder what the relationship there is of restimulation. If you have an engram bank that’s full but not very restimulated due to environmental situation, then you wouldn’t have so much occlusion, would you?

That’s right. That’s why it’s a rough measure.

Male voice: Yeah.

It’s something that holds fairly true. You get an idea. Since the number of banks which I have found that are fairly full and which have not impeded recall add up to exactly zero. But I’m always prepared to find one. It isn’t very logical.

Now, after we’ve asked a few of these questions of people, we of course want to find out how do they run in therapy. You may walk into a case that’ll just go bang and you’re off to the races. Now, you don’t want to spend any time on it, just on the off chance that the case will do just that, is no reason to fool around with this case particularly. But just go to work, find out what happens. (Recording ends abruptly)

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