View source for DMSH 1950 Book 3 Chapter 4

← [[Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950)]]

== Diagnosis ==
One of the most important contributions of dianetics is the resolution of the problem of diagnosis in the field of aberration. Hitherto there have been almost unlimited classifications; further there has been no optimum standard. As one researches in the field of psychiatric texts, he finds wide disagreement in classification and continual complaint that classification is very complex and lacking in usefulness. Without an optimum goal of conduct or mental state and without knowledge of the cause of aberration, catalogues of descriptions alone were possible and these were so involved and contradictory that it was nearly impossible to sharply assign to a psychotic or neurotic any classification which will lead to an understanding of his case.** The main disability in this classification system was that the classification did not lead to a cure, for there was no standard treatment and there was no optimum state to indicate when treatment was at end; and as there was no cure for aberration or psycho-somatic illness, there could be no classification which would indicate the direction which was to be taken or what could uniformly be expected of a case.

This is no criticism of past efforts surely, but it is a source of relief to know that the classification of aberration is unnecessary along such complicated lines as have been used and that the cataloguing of psycho-somatic ills, while necessary to the physician, is unimportant to the auditor. In the evolution of the science of dianetics there were several stages of classification until it finally became clear that the label on a pathological condition should only be whatever the auditor had to overcome to achieve cure. This system, as now evolved through practice, makes it possible for the auditor to “diagnose” without any more knowledge than is contained in this chapter and his own future experience.

The number of aberrations possible is the number of combinations of words possible in a language as contained in engrams. In other words, if a psychotic thinks he is God, he has an engram which says he is God. If he is worried about poison in his hash, he has an engram which tells him he may get poison in his hash. If he is certain he may be “fired” from his job any moment even though he is competent and well-liked, he has an engram which tells him he is about to be “fired.” If he thinks he is ugly, he has an engram about being ugly. If he is afraid of snakes or cats, he has engrams which tell him to fear snakes and cats. If he is sure he has to buy everything he sees, despite his income, he has an engram which tells him to buy everything he sees. And in view of the fact that anyone not released or cleared has upwards of two or three hundred engrams and as these engrams contain a most remarkable assortment of language and as he may choose one of five ways of handling any one of these engrams, the problem of aberration is of no importance to the auditor except where it slows therapy.

Most aberrated people talk in a large measure out of their engrams. Whatever the chronic patter of the individual may be, his rage patter, his apathy patter, his general attitude toward life, this patter is contained in engrams wherever it departs even in the slightest degree from complete rationality. The man who “cannot be sure,” who “does not know” and who is skeptical of everything, is talking out of engrams. The man who is certain “it cannot be true” that “it isn’t possible,” that “Authority must be contacted” is talking out of engrams. The woman who is so certain she needs a divorce or that her husband is going to murder her some night is talking out of either her own or his engrams. The man who comes in and says he has a bad pain in his stomach that feels “just like a #12 gauge copper wire going straight through me” has quite possibly had a #12 gauge copper wire through him in an attempted abortion or talk of such a thing while he was in pain. The man who says it “has to be cut out” is talking straight out of an engram either from some operation of his own or his mother’s or from an attempted abortion. The man who “has to get rid of it” is again possibly talking out of an attempted abortion engram. The man who “can’t get rid of it” may be talking from the same source but from another valence. People, in short, especially when talking about dianetics and engrams, give forth with engram talk in steady streams. They have no awareness, ordinarily, that the things they are saying are minor dramatizations of their engrams and suppose that they have

concluded these things themselves or think these things: the supposition and explanation is only justified thought — the analyzer performing its duty in guaranteeing that the organism is right no matter how foolishly it is acting.

The auditor can be assured, particularly when he is talking about dianetics, that he is going to hear in return a lot of engram content; for discussion of the reactive mind generally takes place in language which it itself holds.

Recall that the reactive mind can think only on this equation — A = A = A, when the three A’s may be respectively a horse, a swear-word and the verb “to spit.” Spitting is the same as horses is the same as God. The reactive mind is a very zealous Simple Simon, carefully stepping in each pie. Thus when a man is told he has to delete the content of the reactive bank, he may say that if he did, he is sure he would lose all his ambition. Be assured — and how easily this proves up on therapy and how red-eared some pre-clears become — that he has an engram which may run something like this:

(Blow or bump, prenatal)

FATHER: Damn it, Agnes, you’ve got to get rid of that God-Damned baby.

If you don’t, we’ll starve to death. I can’t afford it.

MOTHER: Oh, no, no, no, I can’t get rid of it, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t! Honest I will take care of it. I’ll work and slave and support it.

Please don’t make me get rid of it. If I did I’d just die. I’d lose my mind! I wouldn’t have anything to hope for. I’d lose all my interest in life. I’d lose my ambition. Please let me keep it!

What a common one that engram is: and how sincerely and “rationally” and earnestly an aberree can be in supporting his conclusion that he has just “thought up” the “computation” that if he “gets rid of it,” he’ll lose his mind and ambition, maybe even die!

As this work is written, most of the engrams that will be found in adults come from the first quarter of the 20th century. This was the period of “Aha, Jack Dalton, at last I have you in my possession!” It was the period of “Blood and Sand” and Theda Bara. It was the period of bootleg whiskey and woman suffrage. It covered the days of “flaming youth” and the “The Yanks are Coming,” and bits of such color will be demanding action in the engram banks. Dianetic auditors have picked up whole passages of the Great Play “The Drunkard” out of prenatal engrams, not as a piece of funny “corn” but as Mama’s sincere and passionate effort to reform Papa. Super-drama, Mellerdrammer. And not only that but also tragedy. The hangover of the Gay Nineties, when the “business girl” had just begun to be “free” and Carrie Nation was saving the world at the expense of bartenders will be common fare in engrams found in today’s adults.

Yesterday’s cliches and absurdities become, tragically enough, today’s engramic commands. One very, very morose young man, for instance, was found to have as the central motif of his reactive mind Hamlet’s historic vacillations about whether “to be or not to be, that is the question.” Mama (who was what these colloquially-minded auditors call a “loop”) had gotten it by contagion from an actor-father whose failure to be a Barrymore had driven him to drink and wife beating; and our young man would sit for hours in a morose apathy wondering about life. To classify his psychosis required nothing more than “apathetic young fellow.”

Most of engram content is merely cliches and commonplaces and emotional crash drives by Mama or Papa. But the auditor will have his moments. And when he suddenly learns about them, the pre-clear will have his laughs.

In other words, aberration can be any combination of words contained in an engram. Thus, to classity by aberration is not only utterly impossible but completely unnecessary. After an auditor has run one case, he will be far more able to appreciate this.

As for psycho-somatic ills, as classified in an earlier chapter, these depend also upon accidental or intentional word combinations and all the variety of injury and unbalanced fluid and growth possible. It is very well to call an obscure pain “tendonitis” but more probably and more accurately, it is a fall or injury before birth. Asthma comes fairly constantly from birth, as do conjunctivitis and sinusitis, but when these can occur in birth, there is generally prenatal background. Thus it can be said that wherever a man or woman aches is of minor importance to the auditor beyond using the patient’s chronic illness to locate the chain of sympathy engrams, and all the auditor needs to know of that illness is that some area of the body hurts the patient. That, for the auditor, is enough for psycho-somatic diagnosis.

It happens that the extent of aberration and the extent of psycho-somatic illness are not the regulating factors which establish how long a case may take. A patient may be a screaming lunatic and yet require only a hundred hours to clear. Another may be a “well-balanced” and moderately successful person and yet take five hundred hours to clear. Therefore, in the light of the fact that the extent of aberration and illness has only a minor influence on what the auditor is interested in — therapy — classification by these is so much wasted time.

Oh, there are such things as a man being too sick from heart trouble to be worked very hard and such things as a patient worrying so continuously as a manifestation of his usual life that the auditor finds his work difficult, but these are rarities and again have little bearing on the classification of a case.

The rule in diagnosis is that whatever the individual offers the auditor as a detrimental reaction to therapy is engramic and will prove so in the process. Whatever impedes the auditor in his work is identical to whatever is impeding the patient in his thinking and living. Think of it this way: the auditor is an analytical mind (his own) confronted with a reactive mind (the pre- clear’s). Therapy is a process of thinking. Whatever troubles the patient will also trouble the auditor; whatever troubles the auditor has also troubled the patient’s analytical mind.

The patient is not a whole analytical mind: the auditor will find himself occasionally with a patient who does nothing but swear at him and yet when the appointment time arrives, there that patient is, anxious to continue therapy; or the auditor may find a patient who tells him how useless the entire procedure is and how she hates to be worked upon and yet if he were to tell her, “All right, we’ll stop work,” she would go into a prompt decline.

The analytical mind of the patient wants to do the same thing the auditor is trying to do, fight down into the reactive bank; therefore, the auditor, when he encounters opposition, adverse theory about dianetics, personal criticism, etc., is not listening to analytical data but reactive engrams and he should calmly proceed, secure in that knowledge, for the patient’s dynamics, all that can be brought to bear, will help him so long as the auditor is an ally against the pre-clear’s reactive mind, rather than a critic or attacker of the pre-clear’s analytical mind.

This is an example:

(In reverie — pre-natal basic area)

PRE-CLEAR: (Believing he means dianetics) I don’t know. I don’t know. I just can’t remember. It won’t work. I know it won’t work.

AUDITOR: (repeater technique, described later) Go over that. Say, “It won’t work.”

PRE-CLEAR: “It won’t work. It won’t work. It won’t work... etc. etc.” Ouch, my stomach hurts! “It won’t work. It won’t work. It won’t work ...” (Laughter of relief.) That’s my mother. Talking to herself.

AUDITOR: All right, let’s pick up the entire engram. Begin at the beginning.

PRE-CLEAR: (Quoting recall with somatics [pains]) “I don’t know how to do it. I just can’t remember what Becky told me. I just can’t remember it. Oh, I am so discouraged. It won’t work this way. It just won’t work. I wish I knew what Becky told me but I can’t remember. Oh I wish...” Hey, what’s she got in here? Why, God damn her, that’s beginning to burn! It’s a douche. Say! Let me out of here! Bring me up to present time! That really burns!

AUDITOR: Go back to the beginning and go over it again. Pick up whatever additional data you can contact.

PRE-CLEAR: Repeats engram, finding all the old phrases and some new ones plus some sounds. Recounts four more times, “re-experiencing” everything. Begins to yawn, almost falls asleep (“unconsciousness” coming off), revives and repeats engram twice more. Then begins to chuckle over it. Somatic is gone. Suddenly engram is “gone” (refiled and he cannot discover it again. He is much pleased.)

AUDITOR:

PRE-CLEAR: where...

AUDITOR:

PRE-CLEAR:

what the hell is she doing? Why damn her! Boy, I’d like to get my hands on her just once. Just once!

AUDITOR: Begin at the beginning and recount it.

PRE-CLEAR: (Recounts engram several times, yawns off “unconsciousness,” chuckles when he can’t find the engram any more. Feels better.) Oh, well, I guess she had her troubles.

AUDITOR: (Carefully refraining from agreeing that Mama had her troubles, since that would make him an ally of Mama) Go to the next moment of pain or discomfort.

PRE-CLEAR: (Uncomfortable) I can’t. I’m not moving on the time track. I’m stuck. Oh, all right. “I’m stuck, I’m stuck.” No. “It’s stuck. It’s stuck that time.” No. “I stuck it that time.” Why damn her! That’s my coronary trouble! That’s it! That’s the sharp pain I get!

AUDITOR: Begin at the beginning of the engram and recount, etc.

Each time, it can be seen in this example, that the patient in reverie encountered analytically the engram in near proximity, the engram command impinged itself upon the patient himself, who gave it forth as an analytical opinion to the auditor. A pre-clear in reverie is close up against the source material of his aberrations. An aberree wide awake may be giving forth highly complex opinions which he will battle to the death to defend as his own but which are, in reality, only his aberrations impinging against his analytical mind. Patients will go right on declaring that they know the auditor is dangerous, that he shouldn’t ever have started them in therapy, etc., and still keep working well and efficiently. That’s one of the reasons why the auditor’s code is so important: the patient is just as eager to relieve himself of his engrams as could be wished, but the engrams give the appearance of being a long way from anxious to be relieved.

It will also be seen in the above example that the auditor is not making any positive suggestion. If the phrase is not engramic, the patient will very rapidly tell him so in no uncertain terms and although it still may be, the auditor has no great influence over the pre-clear in reverie beyond helping him to attack engrams. If the pre-clear contradicted any of the above,

Go to the next earliest moment of pain or discomfort.

Uh. Mmmmm. I can’t get in there. Say, I can’t get in there! I mean it. I wonder

Go over the line, “Can’t get in there.”

“Can’t get in there. Can’t...” My legs feel funny. There’s a sharp pain. Say,

it means that the engram containing the words suggested is not ready to be relieved and another paraphrase is in order.

Diagnosis, then, is something which takes care of itself on the aberration and psycho- somatic plane. The auditor could have guessed — and kept it to himself — that a series of attempted abortions were coming up in the above example before he entered the area. He might have guessed that the indecisiveness of the patient was from his mother. The auditor, however, does not communicate his guesses. This would be suggestion and might be seized upon by the patient. It is up to the pre-clear to find out. The auditor, for instance, could not have known where on the time track the pre-clear’s “coronary pain” was nor the nature of the injury. Chasing up and down looking for a specific pain would be just so much wasted time. All such things will surrender in the course of therapy. The only interest in them is whether or not the aberrations and illnesses go to return no more. At the end of therapy they will be gone. At the beginning they are only complication.

Diagnosis of aberration and psycho-somatic illness, then, is not an essential part of dianetic diagnosis.

What we are interested in is the mechanical operation of the mind. That is the sphere of diagnosis. What are the working mechanics of the analytical mind?

# Perception. Sight, hearing, tactile and pain, etc.
# Recall. Visio-color, tone-sonic, tactile, etc.
# Imagination. Visio-color, tone-sonic, tactile, etc.  These are the mechanical processes. Diagnosis deals primarily with these factors and with these factors can establish the length of time a case should take, how difficult the case will be, etc. And we need only a few of these.

This further simplifies into a code:

1. Perception, over or under optimum.

(a) Sight

(b) Sound

2. Recall: Under

(a) Sonic

(b) Visio

3. Imagination: Over

(a) Sonic

(b) Visio

In other words, when we examine a patient before we make him a pre-clear (by starting him into therapy) we are interested in three things only: too much or too little perception, too little recall, too much imagination.

In Perception we mean how well or how poorly he can hear, see and feel.

In Recall, we want to know if he can recall by sonic (hearing), visio (seeing) and somatic (feeling).

In Imagination we want to know if he (recalls) sonics, visions or somatics too much.

Let us make this extremely clear: it is very simple, it is not complex, and it requires no great examination. But it is important and establishes the length of time in therapy.

There is nothing wrong with an active imagination so long as the person knows he is imagining. The kind of imagination we are interested in is that used for unknowing “dub-in” and in that kind only. An active imagination which the patient knows to be imagination is an extremely valuable asset to him. An imagination which substitutes itself for recall is very trying in therapy.

“Hysterical” blindness and deafness or extended sight or hearing are useful in diagnosis. The first, “hysterical” blindness, means the patient is afraid to see; “hysterical” deafness means he is afraid to hear. These will require considerable therapy. Likewise, extended sight and extended hearing, while not as bad as blindness and deafness, are an index of how frightened the patient really is and is often a straight index of the prenatal content in terms of violence.

If the patient is afraid to see with his eyes or hear with his ears in present time, be assured there is much in his background to make him afraid, for these actual perceptions do not “turn-off” easily.

If the patient jumps at sounds and is startled by sights or is very disturbed by these things, his perceptions can be said to be extended, which means the reactive bank has a great deal in it labeled “death.”

The recalls in which we are interested in diagnosis are those which are less than optimum only. When they are “over optimum” they are actually imagination “dubbed in” for recall. Recall (under) and imagination (over) are actually, then, one group, but for simplicity and clarity we keep them apart.

If the patient cannot “hear” sounds or voices in past incidents he does not have sonic. If he does not “see” scenes of past experiences in motion color pictures, he does not have visio.

If the patient hears voices which have not existed or sees scenes which have not existed and yet supposes that these voices really spoke and these scenes were real, we have “over imagination.” In dianetics imaginary sound recall would be hyper-sonic, sight recall — hyper- visio (hyper= over).

Let us take specific examples of each one of these three classes and demonstrate how they become fundamental in therapy and how their presence or absence can make a case difficult.

A patient with a mild case of “hysterical” deafness is one who has difficulty in hearing. The deafness can be organic but if organic it will not vary from time to time.

This patient has something he is afraid to hear. He plays the radio very loudly, makes people repeat continually and misses pieces of the conversation. Do not go to an institution to find this degree of “hysterical” deafness. Men and women are “hysterically” deaf without any conscious knowledge of it. Their “hearing just isn’t so good.” In dianetics this is being called hypo-hearing (hypo = under).

The patient who is always losing something when it lies in fair view before him, who misses signposts, theater bills and people who are in plain sight is “hysterically” blind to some degree. He is afraid he will see something. In dianetics this is being called, since the word “hysterical” is a very inadequate and overly dramatic one, hypo-sight.

Then there is the case of over-perception. This is not necessarily imagination, but it can go to the length of seeing and hearing things which are not there at all, which happens to be a common insanity. We are interested in a less dramatic grade in standard operation.

A girl, for instance, who sees something or thinks she sees something but knows she doesn’t and is very startled, who jumps in fright when anyone silently comes into a room and can be so startled rather habitually, is suffering from extended sight. She is afraid she will encounter something, but instead of being blind to it she is too alive to it. This is hyper-sight.

A person who is much alarmed by noises, by sounds in general, by certain voices, who gets a headache or gets angry when the people around are “noisy” or the door slams or the dishes rattle, is a victim of extended hearing. She hears sounds far louder than they actually are. This is hyper-hearing.

The actual quality of the seeing and hearing does not need to be good. The actual organs of sight and sound can be in poor condition. The only fact of importance is the “nervousness” about reception.

This disposes of the two perceptions in which we are interested in dianetics. As the auditor talks to people around him and gets their reactions to sights and sounds, he will find wide variety in quality of response.

Recall is the most directly important to therapy, for it is not a symptom, it is an actual tool of work. There are many ways to use recall. The clear has vivid and accurate recall for every one of the senses. Few aberrees have. The auditor is not interested in other senses than sight and sound because the others will be cared for in the usual course of therapy. But if he has a patient who has no sonic, watch out. And if he has a patient with neither sonic nor visio, beware! This is the multi-valent personality, the schizophrenic, the paranoid of psychiatry with symptoms not acute enough to be so classified in normal life. This does not mean, emphatically does not mean, that people without sight and sound recall are insane, but it does mean an above average case and it means a case which will take some time. It does not mean the case is “incurable” for nothing can be further from the truth: but such cases sometimes take five hundred hours. It simply means that such a case isn’t any stroll through the park: there is drammer back there in that reactive mind, drammer which says, “Don’t see! Don’t hear!” Some of the engrams in this case demand reduced or no recall. The organs of sight and sound may be highly extended in their reception. This does not mean that anything need be wrong with the way this person perceives sound or light waves and records them. But it does mean that after he has recorded them, he cannot easily get them back out of the standard bank because the reactive engram bank has set up circuits (occlusion demon circuits) to keep him from finding out about his past. There are, of course, greater or lesser degrees of recall.

The test is simple. Tell the patient wide awake to go back to the time he was entering the room. Ask him what was being said. If he can “hear” it wide awake, he has sonic recall. The auditor knows very well what was said, for if he means to use this test, he utters a certain set of words and notes the actual sounds present. Therefore, if the patient falls into the following category, the “dub-in,” the auditor will be apprised of that.

The sight recall test is equally simple. Show the patient a book with an illustration. After a time interval, ask him to “go back” while he is wide awake and look at that book “in his mind” and see if he can see it. If he can’t, this is hypo-visio.

More tests similar to this will clearly establish whether or not our patient is recall blind and deaf or whether he falls into the next group:

The over-active imagination which enthusiastically “dubs-in” sight and sound for the patient without knowledge is something which is definitely a hindrance to fast therapy. There are many demon circuits which snarl up thinking, but these particular “dub-in” demons mean that the operator is going to get a most awful cargo of what the auditors colloquially call “garbage.” There is, as they further use some of the doubtlessly disgraceful terminology which, despite anything one can do, keeps rising up in this field, something at work in the brain which is a “lie factory.”

The patient asked to recount the conversation as he entered the door by “hearing it” again may confidently start in to give forth all manner of speech which was entirely paraphrase or utterly fictitious. Asked to tell about the picture and page he is shown, he will “see” vividly a lot more than was there or something entirely different. If he is doubtful about it, that is a healthy sign.

If he is certain, beware, for it is a demon circuit “dubbing in” without his analytical knowledge and the auditor will have to listen to more incidents which never happened than he could begin to catalogue and will have to sort out and pick his way through this “garbage” continually to get his pre-clear to a point where the data is reliable. (And it isn’t a matter of grading “garbage” by its improbability — truth is always stranger than fiction; it is a matter of trying to reduce engrams which are not present or by-pass engrams which are present and so on in a tangled hash.)

The optimum pre-clear would be one who had average response to noises and sights, who had accurate sonic and visio and who could imagine and know that he was imagining, in color-visio and tone-sonic. This person, understand clearly, may have aberrations which make him climb every chimney in town, drink every drop in every bar every night (or try it anyway), beat his wife, drown his children and suppose himself to be a jub-jub bird. In the psycho- somatic line he may have arthritis, gall-bladder trouble, dermatitis, migraine headaches and flat feet. Or he may have that much more horrible aberration — pride in being average and “adjusted.” He is still a relatively easy case to clear.

In the case which has sonic and visio shut-off without “dub-in” we are dealing with engrams which have shut down some of the primary working mechanisms of the mind. The auditor will have to slog through hours and hours and hours of trying to contact engrams when the patient cannot hear them or see them. A case which merely has a shut-down sonic recall still means that the auditor is going to do a lot more work than on an average case. This case is very, very far from impossible to resolve. That is not the idea here, to frighten off any attempt on such a case. But this case will only be resolved after a great deal of persistent effort. Such a person may be apparently very successful. He may be enormously intelligent. He may have few or no psycho-somatic ills. Yet he will prove to have a crammed engram bank, any part of which may come into restimulation at any time and swamp him. Usually, however, this type of case is quite worried and anxious about many things, and such worry and anxiety may put a little more time on the worksheet.

In the case of the “dub-in” who doesn’t know it, where circuits are giving him back altered recall, we have a case which may very likely prove to be very long and require artful treatment. For there is a “lie factory” somewhere in that engram bank. This case may be the soul of truthfulness in his everyday life. But when he starts tackling his engrams, they have content which makes him give out material which is not there.

Sharply and clearly, then, without further reservation or condition, this is dianetic diagnosis: The aberration is the engram content; the psycho-somatic illness is the former injury. The perceptions of sight and sound, under-optimum recall, over-optimum imagination regulate the length of the case.

If the auditor wants to be fancy, he can list the general tone scale position of the individual mentally and physically. The woman who is dull and apathetic is, of course, around Tone 0.5, in the Zone Zero part of the dynamic scale earlier in the book. If the man is angry or

hostile, the auditor can mark him down as a 1.5 or somewhere generally in the Zone One range of the survival scale. These markings would apply to the probable average tone of the aggregate engrams in the reactive mind. This is interesting because it means that a Zone Zero person is far more likely to be ill and is a slightly harder case than a Zone One person: And, as therapy raises tone to Zone Four, the 1.5 is closer to the goal.

It is difficult to estimate time in therapy. As mentioned before, it has several variables such as auditor skill, restimulative elements in the patient’s environment and sheer volume of engrams.

The auditor is advised, in his first case, to seek out some member of the family or a friend who is as close as possible to the optimum pre-clear, which is to say, a person with visio and sonic recall and average perceptions. In clearing this one case he will learn at first hand much of what can be expected in the engram banks of any mind; and he will see clearly how engrams behave. If the auditor himself falls into one of the harder brackets and if he means to work with somebody in one of these brackets, that poses no great difficulty, either case can be released in a hundredth the time of any former mental healing technique and they can be cleared, if any skill at all is used, in five hundred hours of work per case. But if two cases are particularly difficult, before they work on each other each would be wise to find and clear a nearly optimum pre-clear. That way each will be a competent operator when the rougher cases are approached.

Thus, diagnosis. The other perceptions, recalls and imaginations are interesting but not vital in measuring case time. I.Q., unless it falls down into the feeble-minded level, is no great factor. And even then the I.Q. of any patient goes up like a skyrocket with clearing and rises all the while during the work.

There are organic insanities. Iatrogenic psychoses (caused by doctors) are equivocal in dianetics, for a part of the machinery may have been wrecked. Nevertheless, with many organic psychoses a case can be improved by dianetics even if an optimum cannot be reached. And so all an auditor can do is try. Insanities caused by missing parts of the nervous system have not been extensively investigated by auditors at this time: the reviving of corpses is not the end of dianetics: the bringing about an optimum mind in the normal or merely neurotic person has had the main emphasis. Dianetics can be otherwise used, is being and will be. But with so many potentially valuable people who can be made highly valuable to themselves and society, emphasis has been placed on inorganic aberrations and organic psycho-somatic illnesses.

Cases which have been subjected to pre-frontal lobotomy (which saws a section out of the analytical mind), the topectomy (which removes pieces of brain somewhat as an apple corer cores apples), the trans-orbital leukotomy which, while the patient is being electrically shocked, thrusts an ordinary dime store ice-pick into each eye and reaches up to rip the analyzer apart), and electric shock “therapy” which sears the brain with 110 volts, as well as insulin shock and other treatments, are considered by dianetics to be equivocal. There are ordinary organic insanities such as paresis, but most of these, even so, can be benefited by dianetics.