View source for Diagnosis Data (500724)

'''Date:''' 24 July 1950

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

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These cards which you have contain most of the data you’ll require in questioning a case. This merely gives you data. It should be filled out right down the line getting a person to give you hearsay evidence or actual evidence, get him to thinking about it. This way the auditor has a record of various things that may turn out to be engrams.

Now, in view of the fact that the patient will be answering you to a large degree on hearsay evidence, the data which he gives you here is not the final word, it’s a long way from the final word. I’ve run a case that responded somewhat in this order: “How many times did your father beat you? Did he beat you severely?” and so on. “Oh, yes, yes, yes. Beat me all the time.” “Well, now let’s remember one specific beating.” “Oh, I can remember lots of them, I’m sure.” “Let’s remember one specific one.” A lot of thought, no specific beating turns up. And a check of the case finally, as it’s brought in toward a Release, demonstrates exactly no beatings ever took place. A lot of threats of beatings took place and the threat added up to the fact as far as the child is concerned.

Now on the other hand, go through the same routine; a person says, “Lots of beatings, lots of beatings,” but he can’t remember one. You go halfway through the case and you at length become convinced that this child was not punished by Father and then you crack a large beat-up in the prenatal area of Mama on the part of Papa which was occluding the whole chain. And suddenly there leaps into view a hundred and fifty engrams; punishment by Papa.

Well, it’ll go in the reverse, “No, my father never laid a hand on me, never touched me. He was a sweet man, he was very good to me, he was always good to me, always good to me.” And you get back into the case, begin to thrash around in it for a while and we suddenly discover that Papa made a nightly habit of just beating the tar out of this kid. And then, of course, we have the case which said, “Papa never laid a hand on me, he was very nice and he was very sweet to me,” and so on and Papa was. All I’m telling you is that at the beginning of a case, when you’re just asking for this information and before you’ve gotten the persons straight wire recall in good working order, don’t trust the information too much.

Now, if he has told you that Mama says that it was a very bad birth and so forth, generally there’s some smoke here. She may have talked in terms of fire but there was at least a little smoke. Or she might have talked in terms of smoke and here was a blazing conflagration. Mama’s evidence is never very good. Neither is Papa’s evidence.

After all, you’re listening to evidence which itself is given by a person who is to a large degree occluded and aberrated. You run into case after case, if you work people, where the individual tries to get his evidence validated. He says to Papa, “Did we do so-and-so?” And Papa says, “No, that was when you were two years of age,” and “I remember it very well,” Papa says.

First couple of times I heard this I was rather inclined to trust the parents. However, I got a couple of mothers in therapy whose children, grown children, I was treating. And the check back from one to the other showed some astonishing holes in her memory. And I can get a reaction somewhat on this order. I picked up an engram, an actual engram out of the child, and then I have placed Mama in reverie and just reached back into the notebook and say, “Well now, let’s go over the phrases so-and-so and so-and-so.” Try to wind her up in the lock and wind her up in her own engram on this subject and then eventually go back and get the lock of her performing this, whatever it was, around the child, all of which was terribly occluded.

People are apt to remember complimentary things, complimentary to their own conduct on behalf of their children, and rather prone to forget the other things they’ve done to their children. The child, unfortunately, has a tendency to remember the unpleasant things, so you get an unbalanced picture both ways.

Parents are very seldom demons and ogres. They’re also very seldom equipped with an excellent clear recall on everything that happened. Life has a habit of being rather tough on people occasionally and parents go through many vicissitudes. This is peculiarly true of early married life where things are economically unstable, unsettled, where their parents have not yet fully consented to the state of things or are trying to disrupt them, and you’re liable to get a different aspect of life entirely around the childhood of your preclear than there is around his adulthood from his parents. There may even be two or three periods of wide change in the patient’s life. The prenatal bank may add up to and close off a certain period of quarrels and activities on the part of the parents that don’t thereafter reappear.

It’s very interesting to note that a woman who is pregnant has a tendency to dramatize her own prenatals if she is in her mother’s valence. You will sometimes discover this: first pregnancy on the part of a woman, she is just getting along fine, no trouble whatsoever, no morning sickness, nothing, carries along very beautifully, nice birth, child very happy, everything’s fine. Child number two, all of a sudden Mama has done a shift in valence, through this period something has happened to unsettle her. She goes through the second birth with terrific morning sickness, all kinds of upset; quarrelsome, ornery, mean.

Now this condition could happen: Mama could have gone all the way through life very nicely without any of this being keyed in. And at birth something happened in her own delivery engram, her engram received when she delivered the child, which keyed in her own line. Thereafter she’s a changed person. She’s got a whole array of engrams keyed in that were not there before. Perhaps her own birth engram keys in and on a dwindling spiral the rest of it keyed in.

Now, this all follows a general law: that when an engram is keyed in, it can thereafter restimulate. And in the process of restimulating, it lowers the general tone of the individual. So long as the engram is keyed in, the general tone of the individual is slightly lower than it ought to be.

The next step, because of that lowered tone, is to receive restimula-tion or a key-in of a second engram, which of course lowers the tone of the individual slightly. Now, this makes it more possible to key in engrams and we’ll get a third keyed in. And that lowers the tone again and then a fourth, fifth and sixth key in and then all the engrams from ten to a hundred and fifty—severe ones—key in with their chains and locks and engramic locks. And this is the old dwindling spiral at work, down we go, tone 0.

Because of the natural resilience of life most people settle down here in about the second to third band. You know [marking on blackboard] this diagram from the book. Here’s 0, 1, this is apathy. Next up the line up here is anger, starting in with barely able to show any resentment; this is called covert hostility, and comes up finally and crosses over the line here from being angry into the line of merely being bored.

A person who starts out way up here in childhood, up above the line actually, can gradually shift these things and just start it down the line and wind up around here.

Now, when he’s down here, because of the, you might say, logarithmic deterioration curve, he’s pretty hard to pick up. Of course, your reverse process is just try to pick him back on up again. If you release quite a few attention units you will do so.

I’m just demonstrating to you here a change that may take place in the life of a parent, your preclear’s parent. Here for instance is Papa getting along just fine along here, no business reverses, everything going along fine. When the child is five years of age he loses his position and he loses an investment, maybe simultaneously. And after that it gets a little bit tougher. And he has a lot of engrams just waiting for him and he starts down here. We may find Papa in the late bank as an old, sour grouch dramatizing, being mean, ornery, so on. We go back into the early period and prior to five years of age and we find him a very, very nice guy. And the reverse can happen. An engram can be keyed out by some tremendous personal triumph, a person’s resurgence in life, so that we may find Papa as a very shaky young man—that is to say, he’s shaky financially, he’s gotten married, he doesn’t like it, up to that time he’s been free as a bird. Here he is suddenly burdened with all the cares of the world and most apt, at this moment, to go into his own father’s valence. It doesn’t mean that he will—he may go into his mother’s valence. So, talking to you about the constancy, the manifestation then of the human being from period to period during his life is not constant. But the dramatization of engrams is fairly constant; that is a constant.

If Mama dramatizes an engram during the prenatal period, some part of that engram will display itself postnatally. Now, it’s true that she may dramatize one half of it prenatally and other half postnatally, but still, she’s dramatizing more or less the engram. She’s dramatizing Mama’s half of it when she’s pregnant and then she goes over into Papa’s valence and dramatizes his half of it after she is a mother Shifts of valence account for changes in dramatization. But if an aberree will dramatize something once, you can count on it being dramatized again. In other words, the general tone of an individual may be high or low, but the dramatizations are constant. There isn’t an awful lot of change in a dramatization.

Now, this may seem odd to you but it’s not. In the good periods, why, the person will dramatize it just a little bit and in the bad periods dramatize it a great deal. And as you get a descending spiral on the thing through this area, you most likely will get rage dramatizations. But if these dramatizations are broken, that is to say, if people will not permit him to dramatize, he then starts to drop into the apathy bracket. When he starts dropping into the apathy bracket, here, where he’s just blunted on his dramatization, he’ll still dramatize, but in a very much milder tone and usually with another valence. So the same set of engrams are at work, but there’s different valences being dramatized in; they are being dramatized with different intensities, so forth. You can watch this in patients as you look back over their lives, [gap] The great bulk of the patients that you will treat you will find here—apathy. When you get down close to 0 there, that’s insanity. That’s the catatonic schiz. That’s person with fear paralysis.

People up close to this range—the person who looks at you sometimes out of the corner of his eye and kind of under his lids like he’d just like to tear your guts out but he’s being so nice—he’s dangerous, this character. He’s dangerous as hell because he can’t dramatize straight so he dramatizes circuitously. So as long as one is talking to this person, why, he is completely unable to dramatize it all the way and they—go off by himself and because the presence of another human being maybe tended to lower his tone, his tone will come up just a little bit when he’s off by himself and he’ll think, “Mm-hm, How do I get even with him?” And he’s not quite sure why he has to get even. But perhaps some fancied statement there is wrong. But he may be very, very nice, even servile.

This is the phenomena: covert hostility. You’ll see a lot of it, it’s easily broken as an engram, but it’s broken on the Tone Scale, Talking to you about tone here and its importance as a prelude to telling you about diagnosis. Now, it would be very, very nice, wouldn’t it, if, when you found the patient down around tone 0, still able to communicate, who couldn’t be worked very well, it’d be very nice if you had a method of bringing up his tone rapidly, so that he is easier to work.

Now, there’s one principal way of doing this. That is by deintensifying locks. As you know, an engram—this comes back on what I was saying a moment ago—what an aberree does once, he may continue to do in the way of dramatizations. An engram here on the time track will gather locks. [marking on blackboard] This will be the key-in. This may happen from the time he is zero years of age, it may be keyed in right straight on up; that is, at birth, right on up to the time he’s seventy.

The engram, this engram, the basic area, let us say, may slumber all these years with no restimulation. Then one fine day he hits a situation which is similar, similar—he is—of course already has engrams so he’s already a little bit analytically reduced and he has some others in restimulation.

He may on that day be tired—he doesn’t have to be if the circumstances are very sharp and very similar, he wouldn’t have to be. But if he’s very tired and they’re only vaguely similar the thing will key in. Or if he’s not tired at all and the situation is very similar, it’ll key in.

All of a sudden, bing, the engram keys in. Now, this is apparently the moment when his grandfather kicked him out of the house. He was twelve years of age, let’s say, and his grandfather suddenly walked up and kicked him out of the house. His grandfather told his mother that if she didn’t straighten up, mind herself as a good wife, that he’d see to it that she got kicked out. Maybe something like that happened, this is a very vague one. And his grandfather dramatizes on this fellow the same dramatization. “I’m going to kick you out of the house,” is the dramatization. So, from the same person—it doesn’t have to be from the same person, but we’ll make it very close this time—the same person comes along and you go back to this person’s life and you say, “Ah yes, now let’s see, you liked your grandfather?” “No, I hated my grandfather.” Now we start fumbling around in the case and we find out his grandfather took a lot of care of him. Furthermore we find this person manifesting certain tokens of his grandfather. The token, let us say, of wearing a hat in the house, just a little thing like that, using a certain vocabulary.

Well, why would he be doing that? Why, he’s using the tokens—he’s obviously in the valence. Now, he could most easily go into an ally valence and yet here we have an engram restimulated somehow. This engram is liable to be out of sight, by the way, unless you really use some pressure to get ahold of it.

This engram is not an engram at all, this is just a lock. But he will attribute all of his woe to the moment his grandfather turned on him, you might say. This was when it all began, when he was twelve. Oh no, [marking on blackboard] clear down here is where it began. Nevertheless, that engram is holding attention units.

I keep calling it an engram. Actually it’s an engramic lock if there was any punishment involved with it and it’s just a plain lock if he had no physical pain. The lock contains no physical pain. The engramic lock contains physical pain and unconsciousness on its own behalf but is so similar to one earlier that it is just part of a long chain. In order to get at any part of that chain you’d have to get the first engram in the chain. See what I mean by an engramic lock? All right.

Here then is a lock, let’s just call it a lock, no pain connected with it. Or engramic lock if maybe a little spanking was administered with it—there was enough there. Okay. This was when everything went wrong. There’s attention units here.

You want to release attention units on this case. The more attention units you release on this case the easier it’s going to work. You can spend quite a bit of time and well afford to, take a case which is down in the apathy range and release units.

By close questioning we discover this incident, in a straight line memory. We don’t go back and run it out. We discover it from straight line memory, we force him to remember it and at the moment the preclear remembers it, it blows. In other words, it kicks out as far as its key-in was concerned.

Doesn’t kick out very thoroughly, but it kicks out enough to release attention units out of it so he stops worrying about it. And the most astonishing changes will take place in people just by kicking out a lock.

Therefore, diagnosis has some very important aspects. The first part of diagnosis, just filling out this sheet. That’s for your record. But you already have the person thinking about his own life when he answers the questions on this sheet. He had to think about himself.

Now, your next step—of course if you’re using straight line diagnosis—is to find out whether or not the person is in his own valence, find out what circuitry he has, find out who invalidated his information— that is, rehabilitate his reality—all of these things can be done on diagnosis.

A lot of the auditors working don’t immediately go from filling out this sheet to running straight line diagnosis. However, if I am tackling a new patient, I generally run some straight line diagnosis on him just to find out what I am working with. But you don’t have to. You can put him down on the couch immediately and start going in for engrams. Your time is sometimes saved by doing this.

You make that initial test, you may find yourself with what we call a pianola case on your hands—just plays itself, somatic strip is very obedient, file clerk gives you exactly what you want, you’re getting engrams on the thing, you can discharge grief off the case. In other words, that case will work and work rapidly and work well. So just as a matter of saving time you can do this to a patient. The number of patients who will do this at first glance are not many. Percentage—I wouldn’t know what the percentage is—I would say in looking around certainly not more than 30 percent will do this first crack out of the box.

If you want to make that test, all right, you’ll save time. If you discover anything wrong with that case, what I’m telling you here is of the most vast importance to you. I’m entering here upon the field of diagnosis, valences, circuitry.

Male voice: How important is it that the preclear realizes the computations in some of this diagnostic material . . . ?

Well, I’ll give you an example then if you like. His recognition of exact mechanics of it is not important. You can work people who are quite ignorant of any of the mechanics of life, much less the mechanics of Dianetics, who would not see any identification, would know nothing about identification, differentiation, somatics, they know none of these things, they have no concept of them.

We just pick some boy up in the backwoods who barely knows his reading perhaps and we start shooting these things at him and we’ll get exactly the same reaction. I was quite pleased down in Savannah, picking up people there who were carried through on what the South considers an adequate education for a Negro.

By the time he gets through a Negro high school he is about as well educated as our third graders; it’s pathetic. And they wonder sometimes why they’re a little bit backward down there, but they—if they’d pay attention to that educational quota they would see that country advance.

Now, these people were responding not on an educated basis at all. I would try to explain Dianetics to them sometimes without calling it Dianetics. I would just explain it to them, how the mechanism works. “Yes, yes,” very polite, very polite, “yes. You’re an awful smart man, Mr. Hubbard. Yes, sir. Yes, doctor.” “I’m not a doctor.” “Yes, doctor.” That sort of a reaction. And yet I would ask them to give me flash answers, (snap) ask them this, ask them that. “What’s the first thing that occurs to your mind when I ask you bing!” (snap) so on. Take them down, break a couple of locks, usually breaking them on the track. I had not used straight line diagnosis as such as often in the past as I have recently. And you get these blow-offs and smiles and feeling very cheerful and happy about it. And you ask them something, “What are you laughing about, what’s so cheerful?” “I don’t know. Naw, I don’t know, doctor. It just seemed funny. Ain’t it supposed to be funny?” And yet they get to thinking over it, they were laughing about their mother’s death or something. The mechanic, in other words, was working on them.

Male voice: Suppose you got an “I can’t remember,” case.

Yeah.

Male voice: A—yeah, it’s solid “I can’t remember.” Yeah.

Male voice: “I can’t remember anything.” Remember, that’s just an engram.

Male voice: Mm-hm. Right It isn’t a fact that he can’t remember.

Male voice: Right. So, they can be questioned through a lot of memory, near and far, all over the place. And you sort of run a couple locks in the process, and you want to leave them. And he feels pretty good, but if you were to ask him about his memory he’d still say it’s variable—he can’t remember a thing. Now, do you make any effort to get across the validity of his memory?

No. All I would get across, then, was ask him who had poor memory in his family. [gap] You may have somebody who lucklessly—and God help you when you get this case—was born of one set of parents and was from that moment forward raised by another. Where these things get restimulated, when they do, so on, you have a very tangled situation. Your straight line isn’t going to do you a bit of good.

Now let’s suppose that his foster parents never told him that he was an adopted child. Now let’s suppose that he was adopted from a family who spoke a foreign language which he has never seen or heard of since. The chances, by the way, of this person having a sonic turn on are excellent and you depend on that for your one saving grace. He runs off strange syllables throughout the case. And his case will progress rather rapidly. But supposing by the fact that his foster parents were not particularly good to him; that they managed to get everything into restimulation one way or the other, bullied him, punished him, twisted him around and gave him a fine sonic shut-off. Well now, we’re trying to run a case that we don’t even know, let us say, is solid Slovenian, all the way through the prenatal area—solid. And neither you nor the patient knows that it’s Slovenian. That is a very interesting case. I’ve had one and I don’t want to fight through another one—sonic shut-off, all twisted out of valence and everything else.

His foster mother was so terrifically aberrated that every time the child became a little ill—the child had had a very abused prenatal life, it turned out finally—every time the little child became ill, Mother would just hang over the child, telling him the most terrifically engramic things that you could imagine. She would just wait till the baby’s temperature, you know, went up to about 103, 104, and then say, “Oh, he’s going to die, I just know he’s going to die, I feel it in my bones. He’s going to die.” This fellow had a lot of trouble with his bones. And she’d go on and she’d cry and plead and fling herself dramatically on the bed and so on. None of this early data compared with the prenatal data but it was severe enough in itself to cause it. So I had to work this case just as though he had one time track here and one time track there. Solve two cases in order to get to it.

Male voice: What if the auditor spoke the language? Would it make it any easier on the case?

Yes. Yes, if you found out. Most bilinguals, however, know they are bilinguals and in such a way it’s not so difficult. I’m just talking about extremes. But the usual run of the cases will follow this line.

Now, it so happens, let us say, that Grandma lived up to the eighth month of the child’s gestation; here’s birth, she lived to here. And she is solid in the bank from basic area right on up and maybe she hated Papa. And all through the bank she’s busy saying, “He’s just like his father. He’s just like his father. I hate him, I detest him.” You know, that’s Grandma. And then she gets up here to the eighth month and she steps off a streetcar backwards or has a heart attack or a stroke or something and dies right there. Now we’ve got a big grief charge sitting in here. Here a person has been around on whom the preclear has never set eyes. We got a bad grief charge there and that is the source of the valence shift. And we can’t reach this valence shift on straight line memory. We don’t know of anybody who said, “You were just like your father.” Nobody said it, throughout the whole bank. This becomes a mysterious case. However, when you get down into it and start running these engrams off you find out that here was an ally that died, an ally of the child’s.

Let’s say she was always telling Mama to be careful of herself and not bump into things and not fall off things and eat just so and she had to be careful of the baby, and so on. So we’ve got an ally all the way down the bank here. Now, that can be a masked case that wouldn’t come in very easily.

That sometimes is saved by this, however: that Mama dramatizes Grandma’s engrams. Now we get a proposition of up here [tapping on blackboard] we would find the dramatization in Mama’s mouth. Mama after Grandma died was more or less in Grandma’s valence solidly and was dramatizing very heavily things that Grandma said but up to that time was perhaps in Grandpa’s valence, you see? So I’m just showing you some of the traps that are laid for you. I’m warning you that all is not sweetness and light on diagnosis. And this is one of the reasons why this technique works only a certain percentage of the time. I don’t know what the percentage is, I would—50, 60 percent, something like that. I all of a sudden got a much better opinion of the percentages on this.

Now, we’re going into a case now, let us say, which does not function in the optimum fashion. The optimum working of a case would be this: “Close your eyes. The file clerk will now give us the engram necessary to resolve the case. The somatic strip will go to the beginning of the engram. When I count to one to five and snap my fingers the first word of the engram will appear in your mind. One-two-three-four-five.” (snap) He says, “I can’t tell.” “I can’t tell,” repeat it, repeat it, repeat it, repeat it. He gets solidly into the engram and then—run the rest of the engram off. It reduces. Believe me, don’t monkey with this case, just keep it rolling, keep it going. We tell him, “Now let’s go to your grandfather’s death.” And he says, “Okay, somebody’s giving me the news. I don’t know where I am at the present moment but, uh . . .” And then you say, “Well, which room are you in?” “Oh, I’m not in the room, I’m in the office.” “Oh, yes. Well, what part of the office are you in? Sitting down at your desk, of course.” And he says, “No, I’m standing by the water cooler and somebody calls me to the phone. And they say, ‘Your grandfather’s dead.’” And maybe we have a little trouble there for a moment, and then we pull this trick on him—we can’t get the grief off right away, so we go back early when Grandpa was being very nice, when he was playing with him, amusing him and so on. He gets very interested in Grandpa and then all of a sudden we bring him straight up into the death again and we get a grief discharge. That’s just standard technique.

You get a grief discharge off the case; we can run engrams out of the case, so on. Don’t monkey with this case, it will run right on through to Clear, unless somebody invalidates his data or beats him over the head or does something with him to upset him. And you can still fix this case up without too much trouble.

I’m talking now about the kind of case which doesn’t do this. And if a case doesn’t do this, this is what you do with that case: you start asking him questions and blowing out locks. You’re simultaneously accomplishing the freeing of attention units by blowing locks. You are picking up data out of the dramatizations of the people around him and out of his own dramatizations which of course will be the wording of the engrams which he has in him.

You are picking up the reasons why he is out of valence. And you will know all these reasons and then by picking up those exact words you can with repeater technique now take him back down the line or just send him down the line to the moments these engrams were implanted in him, in the earliest part of the bank.

He’ll repeat them down, you get maybe an engram here and an engram there which won’t reduce. Every time you get one that won’t reduce you take him earlier on the same line until you finally get that line where it will reduce. And then you reduce the whole engram in which you find it. It’s very simple —it is, it’s very simple. But a person has to be on the qui vive with this stuff. He goes on the general law that that thing which a person thinks about himself which is derogatory or suppressive in any way is something which has been said to him and which is contained in his engram bank. And we are going on the knowledge that by remembering a specific incident when this happened, which will be a lock on the engram, we can free for his use attention units now contained in that lock. That’s the whole theory behind this. Now I’ll give you an example.

A gentleman called me today from a place down in Mississippi, He was detained in a hospital because he had last night tried to commit suicide. They had picked him up and pumped out his stomach and he had thought it over for a while and because he didn’t have any money in his pockets he called us collect. He also asked me to send him the bill which I probably won’t do. But he said, “I tried to commit suicide last night, I’m very worried about myself. And you must do something to help me, and I’ve read your book,” he said, “I can’t get anybody around here to believe in the book. Nobody here will audit me or even try,” He said, “I’m desperate, now what can you do for me, please?” He is scared. All right. Here’s a person who is talking to you who is about, I don’t know, twelve hundred miles away. No auditor anywhere in sight, big empty state of Mississippi, I don’t know of any auditors there, I don’t know of anybody interested much in it. Got a couple of names down in Biloxi, Nobody at Gulfport, which is the nearest thing to him.

Well, this is a moment when you use the fifteen-minute technique by phone over a distance of twelve hundred miles. And you fix him up so he won’t blow his brains out or do something else to himself. You free enough attention units and take enough tension off his grief so it won’t spin on him. This is the way it’s done.

I said, “What’s happened to you recently?” He says, “My wife left me about a month ago. We have a little daughter, two years of age. Honestly it’s the child, it’s the child I’m worried about.” Now I said, “Well, anybody in your family ever separated?” “Uh . . . no.” “Anybody in your family ever commit suicide, tried to commit suicide?” “No, no. No,” “Were your parents separated?” “Uh . . . no! No, never were.” “How long is it since you’ve been married?” Taking his mind off of it for a moment.

All right, he tells me. “Four years, something like that.” “All right, how many times did your parents separate?” “Twice.” You see, there’s just this jog, the jog there. He actually couldn’t remember it the first time. There’s the jog, now you take him off the subject. Now the subject pops back in again.

All right. “How old were you when the first one occurred?” “Five or six.” “Which is it, five or six? Which is it?” “Five.” “Now, where were you?” “Uh—I was just a little boy of five. I remember sitting in the lawyer’s office.” All of a sudden he says to me, (chuckle) “Yeah, I was sitting in the lawyer’s office. And,” he said, “I remember my mother very clearly. She said, ‘He’s led me a dog’s life,’ very clearly.” And I said, “What did your wife say to you when she left you a month ago?” “Oh, she said I was a drunkard and a dope addict and so on. My mother had gotten hold of her and I didn’t know it and had told her a lot of things about me that weren’t true.” See, he starts to tell you all his woes. Okay, that doesn’t take any tension off the case. What you want is to knock out a lock, that’s what you are up to. So all of a sudden you say, “What did your mother tell your father about it?” “Ha-ha, dog’s life,” and he’s laughing. All of a sudden he gets a laugh. Same scene but that, of course, doesn’t last but a moment. And I say, “Well now, who worried about the child?” See, you have staked out the initial data that’s important there. Here you put him in a certain dramatization when his wife left him. “Who worried about the child when you were being separated?” “Ha-ha, my father.” “What did he say about the child?” “Oh, let’s stay together.” I said, “Who said you were like your father?” And he said, “We have the same name actually.” “Who said you were like your father?” “Almost everybody.” “Well, remember a specific incident, somebody said you were like your father.” “Oh, my aunt Isabel, ha-ha-ha-ha,” a little more laughter. Here’s attention units coming right up to the top. He’s coming up to present time on this stuff And, “Well now, is there any similarity between your mother’s and father’s parting and the parting you’ve just gone through?” “Ha-ha-ha, yes.” He said, “I crawled on my knees, I begged her, I begged her not to leave me. I crawled on my knees. I said we shouldn’t think about leaving each other. We don’t have to live together as husband and wife but think about the child, think about the child.” And I said, “Did you ever see your father do that?” “Ha-ha-ha, yes.” He said, “Gee! I feel a lot better.” All right. And I gave him the name of these couple of fellows in Biloxi—one an army captain—I don’t know what they can do about it. But there is the case. He felt a lot better. Sure he did, he got a key-out on some of this stuff—we just knocked out some engram, so on.

He won’t blow out his brains. He won’t blow out his brains for two reasons: there was somebody interested in his case, me, but more importantly, he got attention units back and he got the similarity of computation. I gave him as homework to remember every person who had ever said he was like his father, to remember the moment it happened. So I kept his mind busy.

Every time he remembers one of those he’ll get a chuckle out of it and he’ll probably go on wondering why he’s laughing. The reason he’s laughing is because being squeezed over into that valence is practically murder as far as he’s concerned.

The natural mechanism is to go to the winning valence. But by engrams a person can be crowded into a secondary valence and Papa was the losing valence in this case, very feminine character, very soft, wishy-washy. And Mama was very dominant, very piercing, so on. Mama, of course, had ruined his married life on some computation of her own running along the same line. “Every wife,” I guess, “leads a dog’s life at the hands of her husband.” I suppose that’s the standard engram.

Yes?

Male voice: Does that lead you to believe that a person can blow some of their own locks?

Oh, yes! Oh, yes, just by straight line memory. And by the way, going over the words in an engram, when you’re not on the site of the engram, or going over the locks without remembering them on straight line memory, but just repeating them in present time, will of course result in no more therapy than a replay, just a replay.

You get a person going over an engram but not in it, just telling you what words were in it, but not going through it, experiencing the so-matics, you get a replay That’s not therapy, it won’t release. But by repeating these words which suddenly turn up as probably in the engram, a person could actually suck himself down into the engram itself, get it into artificial restimulation and then it won’t release. That’s what’s the trouble with auto and control circuits.

A person thinks he can control himself. Well, he isn’t controlling himself. What he’s got in there is a pseudoauditor that says, “You’ve got to do this yourself, control it yourself, you’ve got to control yourself.” That sort of a computation. It’s a pseudoauditor inside the fellow’s head, you might say.

It isn’t “I.” And the person will chase up and down the time track and restimulate himself. But anybody here could pick up something he knows that he says chronically and just start repeating it. One of two things will happen: He will either fortuitously land up in some point that will release—can happen. You sometimes get a bit of a chuckle when one does that. Or he’ll suck himself down into an engram which won’t release easy, he’ll hit the top one in the bank, his analyzer will flip off, he’ll stop repeating. He’ll put that top engram on the chain into restimulation. Here’s your chain of engrams. [marking on blackboard] He gets down to here with his repeat and he’s got to get to here in order for that engram to release.

That’s why you have to have an auditor, so if he gets here, his analyzer shuts off [taps on blackboard] and he can’t repeat anything he gets.

Male voice: Might not be a bad thing for some of these people with tough cases to get them restimulated—they might work better Well, I don’t know who’s been spreading that around but that is bad therapy, bad therapy. The only time you want a person to restimulate himself is when you’re clearing him, when you’re driving your own brains out trying to find the last of his engrams. And here’s this guy feeling sane, feeling beautiful. He doesn’t know why he has to have any more therapy. And you say, “Well now, look-a-here, there may be some more engrams there. Now, let’s try.” “All right, I’ll try.” “Let’s go to this engram,” and so forth. “All right. Now let’s run it through. What are you doing?” “I’m sitting here eating a turkey dinner.” “Let’s go to an engram!” “I’m having too good a time.” “I” has gotten so much in control of himself that people talking to him don’t affect him.

They don’t influence him. He becomes the real altitude problem. He’s a real altitude problem at that time.

Now, I’m not wandering afield from this at all. I’m just showing you here that you could sit in present time and remember the things that have happened to you in spite of the social aberration that unpleasant things are best forgotten. And if you just set yourself the project of remembering the things that have happened to you on this basis: you have found yourself doing something, or you found yourself thinking something that you didn’t like about yourself, think back to a time when somebody told you and you will blow the lock.

Male voice: You just have to remember it once?

Yeah, just once. There is the specific difference in this. Instead of just thinking generally about how wrong—let’s say some fellow will start to do this and he’ll say, “Oh, I’ve been so wronged in life and my God, I wish I could get my hands on those guys,” and he may go on and on, on this line. And the next thing you know, the person is doing this astonishing trick of restimulating himself because he’s going over an actual incident where he himself was doing the dramatizing. It doesn’t do any good. “Oh, I wish I’d told that guy off, I wish I’d told him off. Oh, my God, why didn’t I say it when I was there. Now I’ve got all this and I don’t know what was wrong with me!” That sort of thing, that’s just dramatizing.

A person sets himself up and he says to himself sharply, “Who the hell used to be sorry that they didn’t say something to somebody when they had a chance? Who was it? Ha-ha, my father.” Out goes the dramatization.

It’s quite a nice little mechanism, by the way. A person can do this and he can start clipping off his own dramatizations. He can clip off his own dramatizations; he will, too.

If he can find himself dramatizing, if he’s got enough attention units left to pull himself into a recollection of the dramatization, “Who used to dramatize like that?” he can do self-therapy. And that is the only way I know that self-therapy can be done. Not done by repeater technique, not done by going over engrams one thinks he has himself—it won’t work, because the second he gets into the engram, that engram contains, as part of its tabs, unconsciousness. This is the mechanism: every time the mind has gone back to try to remember this it got this close to the engram and the engram has this miasma of fog around it of unconsciousness, the attention units come down here and then they blank out. (descending whistle) They’re right in the engram and it’s restimulated now and the person will just sort of drift out of the thing groggily in the next two or three days. And it takes two or three days. And by the way, anybody who keeps telling you, “I can run this out myself, why don’t you let me run this out myself,” or “I can handle this myself.” He’s talking—that’s a circuit. And you’ve gotten the words of the circuit right there, which if you take the person back down the track near the prenatal bank [tapping on blackboard], you can track that thing down to the earliest time it’s ever been the case, reduce an engram and he hasn’t got that circuit anymore, poor guy. And you’ll work the case better.Anybody who autos, who goes around saying, “My, it’s a beautiful day. I wonder who said that? My, it’s a beautiful day. My, it’s a beautiful day. My, it’s a beautiful day. My, it’s a beautiful day. My, it’s a beautiful day. (sigh) I don’t know.” You’ll find them like that. That’s circuitry at work. But the other is very valid therapy. If he can find himself suddenly controlling himself like this or if he finds himself right on the verge of saying to the auditor, “I can handle this myself better,” and he can think not in terms of, “I can handle this myself better,” but he can think, “I wonder who used to state to me, ‘I think I can handle this myself,’ or ‘I have to do all this myself,’ or something? Yes! That’s my father! Yeah.” Now force himself to remember a specific incident when his father said it. And remember where his father was standing, so on, straight line circuit, he’s still in present time. All of a sudden, “Yeah, he was standing by the kitchen table! Ah, he was bawling the hell out of me because I didn’t sweep off the back porch! He had to do everything himself. Oh, yeah. Sure. Well, that’s where I get that thing from.” As a matter of fact, that thing is not going to bother him much anymore. He can actually knock it out himself. So there is a self-therapy. But it is not the same as auditing oneself. One can’t do that without getting into severe trouble.

The people who practice Huna—I have seen that wind up people in more interesting conditions of restimulation than anything else I know. It’s not very tough but some of the people who know Huna at the present time have undoubtedly said to themselves, “Well, we’ve been getting away with it all this time, we’ve been drifting back through the centuries and we’ve been having a good time of it. Well, heck, we can run engrams out ourselves. ‘It’s a beautiful day, it’s a beautiful day, it’s a beautiful day.’” There they’ll go because they’re going into a part of the mind they’ve never run into before, although Huna does include some information on traumatic experiences. It’s an interesting field of thought.

Male voice: Ron, does straight line memory have to draw you into an engram though?

No. [gap] The first thing you should do on a case—actually you can have a choice here—but the first thing I would do on a case is try to find out whose valence the person was in. That’s number one. I would check it up because the valences are very bad in shutting off cases.

Number one, I would try to find out who said he was like who— “Anybody ever say you were like anybody else?” So we draw a blank on it, it’s too general. Next question you ask him: “What’s your chronic psychosomatic?” And you get as a reply, “Well, I have this dermatitis.” Ask him, “Who died of cancer?” “That’s a funny thing, my grandmother did.” You get that sort of reaction, “Who died of cancer?” “Who used to say you were like your grandmother?” “Nobody. Oh, yes they did. My mother used to say it. Yeah, she used to say I took after my grandmother, I was just like her.” “Let’s remember a specific incident.” We have, with this approach to the problem, started knocking out the locks on the valence shift commands. And we’ve started at that moment to knock out dermatitis in the case. Okay. So the first thing we try to get would be circuitry or valence shifters. We’ve gone into valence shifting here, circuitry, both the same. Sometimes you can’t work a person very well about valence shifts so you work circuitry, and vice versa.

Now we start asking him who used to tell him to control himself. And he comes up with, “Nobody, nobody.” “Well, who was the most self-controlled person in your family? Who was the most self-controlled person in your family?” The fellow will say, “Oh, my grandmother.” This means if Grandma was self-controlled, Grandma had self-control engrams. She had self-control engrams, she would dramatize them. So, where do we expect to get the self-control engram? Grandma is an ally. That means her words are very potent. So what will we do? Got to find a specific instant when Grandma says, “You’ve got to control yourself.” You try to remember it.

You see, you know the answers as to how the bank goes together and what it does, so you ask the leading questions which pries it all apart; and you ask them properly, you ask them cleverly and the whole case will fall down like a house of cards right in front of you. You’ll get the circuitry. You’ll get the valence shifters. You’ll get the general condition. The bank will start to open up. You can get a person actually remembering right straight back to birth, if you really try.

Now the person keeps telling you, “I can’t remember that. I just can’t remember it.” “Who used to tell you that you couldn’t remember?” “Nobody.” “Who had a bad memory in your family?” “Oh, my mother. She used to lose things all the time.” “Oh, yeah? What’d she used to say?” “Oh, I can’t remember where I put things. Can’t do this, can’t do that. I can’t remember, so on.” “Let’s remember a specific moment when she was saying it.” The guy’s liable to come up suddenly with something like this: “You can’t remember a damn thing. You’re the awfullest boy alive.” Now, her demon circuit was dramatized toward the preclear and as a result he got it full blast. New demon circuit came in through him. You expect—and you can plot out—the commands to come from the people who are most likely obeying those commands. Follow that?

Here you’ve got Grandpa. Grandpa, let’s say, is a very bombastic character. He was always snorting about the tax situation, something like that, always blowing off about the tax situation. He has a dramatization in there which he will utter as a justification of his right to blow off. But actually it will be the engram which causes him to blow off. So he’s liable to have uttered it some time down the line, such as, “A man’s got a perfect right to speak his mind.” Somebody gets him upset, you see, there’s a dramatization—”A man’s got a perfect right to speak his mind. I’ve got a right to say what I please. I’m a free American citizen.” Mm-hm.

That engram you will find in the child. It’s there. It may have gone in postpartum or it may have gone in via Mama or Papa or whoever parent it was. You see the channel of contagion?

By following this channel of contagion expertly, you’ll recover the engrams and you blow out the locks. This requires a bit of cleverness on the part of an auditor. He’s got to be able to add up. And he’s adding up on an equation: what the aberree does, he has engrams which makes him do it (to be ungrammatical but precise).

What the aberree says about himself has been told to him. A man does not believe bad things about himself unless he’s been told those bad things. As a matter of fact, whatever is wrong with this man has been put into him and told to him. We’re working, you might say, in a pretty clear field, until we run into that.

Now mind you, it won’t go to the extent of finding a burglar and trying to run him back because he has dramatized the robbing of a bank that somebody told him that he had to rob banks. That would not be what the engram would be. The engram would probably be something like, “You’ve got to take it. You’ve got a perfect right to it. Why should I work all my life for nothing? I have a right to some of the goods of this society. Nobody’s going to stop me. Actually I hate people.” That sort of thing will come in on the line. And you will find the criminal series of engrams.

I saw a criminal series of engrams once start out on a very innocent line: AAs with sixteen statements of “Take that and that and that and that,” sixteen times, “Take that, take that, take that.” That was rough; fellow was a kleptomaniac.

He had a demon circuit in there that told him to take it. He also had another set of circuitry that told him he didn’t dare spend any money. He also had some that told him to steal, but these were mild. It was this AA that brought him that far up off the couch and right after which he stopped kleptomaniacking. So circuitry, then, the problem of circuitry is first the problem of diagnosis to one, free attention units; two, discover the dramatizations of the people who surrounded the life of the individual and the dramatizations of the individual himself.

The next thing you do after you’ve freed some attention units, discovered some of this material, you run the patient back into a dramatization— in other words, a lock. You start to run a lock just like it’s an engram. You run this lock through and you will get the whole content then of the engram.

Now you use this as repeater and this is the only time you start using repeater on a case. I got a letter in this morning that made my hair stand on end. “Everybody around here has been getting excellent results in Dianetics except my brother and myself. At the beginning of our case we thought we had good sonic and good visio, both of us. But now we have no sonic and we have no visio, in spite of the fact that we have used repeater technique continually ever since the beginning of the case. We use it on each other all the time and we still don’t get any engrams.” Oh! Some poor auditor has got to take those two cases apart, and all in 100 percent restimulation. I suppose you leave them ten days, they may settle out. But they won’t settle out to a point where they were before, because they brought into restimulation and keyed in engrams which were out of sight heretofore. “Yes sir, we’ve used repeater technique continually and we’re not getting anyplace in Dianetics.” Boy, those two things would go together like a hand in a glove. So, you use repeater technique when you have something specific that you know is in the bank. It can’t miss being in the bank. You know it’s there.

Now it says, “I’ve got to take a hand in this. You’re helpless. I’ve got to take a hand in this. Why don’t you think?” We’ll say we have a dramatization and we can get these in very, very, very cunning ways. One case that was extremely closed in on me, I fooled him, I got ahold of his wife and I ran his dramatizations out of his wife. And I took them down word for word and when I finished up I practically had a record of this fellow’s engram bank. And then I went in there and figured out about what it would be and started shooting holes in his case. And boy, that case gave up the ghost fast. It couldn’t help it. Only he himself couldn’t be forced into repeating anybody’s dramatizations because one of the key dramatizations was “I don’t dare tell anybody, they would be so ashamed of me and you’ve got to keep quiet too.” He would tell this to his wife at the least provocation. But he had married her when she was twenty-one. The person who had that dramatization around him had handed it to him when he was in the first month of gestation. As a consequence, it wasn’t aberrative enough with his wife to make an occlusion. But it was aberrative enough with him to make a complete occlusion. So you could get it out of his wife but you couldn’t get it out of him. This is a last resort sort of thing. And I did this insidious and horrible trick. This is a mean trick. The parents, both patients, had started fooling around with each other on the job and got themselves pretty badly snarled up. Stepped in—they were playing pat-a-cake, tacit consent, using repeater technique, nothing else but, getting into an engram halfway and deciding it was too cruel on the other one to go through it, so they would draw off of it and leave it restimulated. And neither one of them would give up. Both of them had secrecy circuits galore. But they had a three-year-old child. So the child was sitting out on the porch one day and I left the pair of them sitting inside the office and I went out and I said I was going to be gone for a few minutes. I went out and gave the kid a lollipop. (laughter) And I came back in in about fifteen minutes with a nice list of engramic phrases. “Your parents ever fight? Well, that’s all right. You can tell me. It isn’t like telling everybody.” “Oh, okay.” His engrams weren’t keyed in enough to really do a block-out on him. So he could tell me about Papa throwing the piano stool at Mama, a lot of things that probably, socially, would have been better left unsaid, but Dianetically had better be known quick!

Well, the secrecy, by the way, the whole secrecy engram was in there. They had spanked him and spanked him and he still kept telling people things. See, he hadn’t been broken yet. So there’s ways to get information on the worst of cases. They really block you down—why, start being surreptitious about the whole thing and you’ll get the data, not necessarily the horse’s mouth but perhaps the wife’s mouth or the child’s.

When I get engrams out of dogs—when I can find out what engrams are in dogs, I will really be able to tell what they are in their masters. Dogs accumulate quite a few engrams.

Well, you see what this valence proposition is. I’ve given you an example of it with valence and circuitry straight wire diagnosis, that is, straight to the memory bank. You see what this is. First you start in— straight memory, next you pick up dramatizations, then you use that in repeater technique—you go right on down. [gap] . . . I keyed this person back to the phrase “I can’t tell.” We’re looking for it here, [marking on blackboard] But for some peculiar reason or other, this one doesn’t want us to remedy it, or you’d walk down the bank to it. So “I can’t tell” will—appears there as that part of the engram, here as part of that one, part of that one, that one, that one, that one, that one.

This one started to reduce. Up to this time, you ran them over five, six times, but somatic on it just kind of builds up. And you ran only “I can’t tell,” you didn’t run “I can’t tell, I can’t tell anybody, I don’t know what I’m saying.” You just ran “I can’t tell,” because you don’t want that whole engram restimulated. “I can’t tell, I can’t tell,” you get a little somatic turned on, something like that and then you go earlier, to an earlier “I can’t tell.” Run that a few times, go earlier, earlier, earlier, earlier, earlier, earlier, till finally you get down to “I can’t tell, I can’t tell anybody,” and the darn thing will erase or reduce.

When you’ve got that off the case, particularly if it’s low enough in the bank—you get unconsciousness off the case with it, this person will now tell. Because it’s not necessary to go up the bank here again [tapping on blackboard] like this. Although those are in slight restimulation, the basic on “I can’t tell” is out so the whole chain to some degree is deintensified.

Furthermore, if you managed to get an “I can’t tell” with a yawn, you got the unconsciousness off the area that contains the phrase and it’ll go all the way up, take off a little unconsciousness.

What you want to do first and foremost is to, one, get the grief off of the case and, two, get basic area unconsciousness off the case, get basic-basic out if possible. Grief is very important but this is even more important in the long run. This is where you’ve got to get. These people who say, “Dianetics is wonderful; I haven’t played around with prenatals though,” are way offside. They’re not going to get any results out of Dianetics. Oh, sure, they’ll cure up somebody’s ulcers or something, maybe by just busting locks. They’ll have to bust a hundred locks, run them out if they can get them out. And when they try to run off these locks—postparturn locks—they’ve got the same content down here in prenatal. And if they run over the lock five or six times, you’ll see this, and some of you have probably seen this—I want to tell you what it is—a person starts to recount a lock, and he recounts it four or five times and all of a sudden he starts to get a tough somatic. And you say, “How old are you?” And he keeps trying to tell you that he’s five years of age but he’s not five years of age. He slid dow7n the bank. And he’s still trying to keep abreast of this lock, but you’ve pulled the engram and the lock close together and you’re actually running the patient in the engram. The thing to do then is to try to scale on down the line and get the bottom of the chain. This really requires picking and choosing. It is this little step of Dianetics—trying to knock these engrams out—that’s broken the heart of many an auditor. But it not only can be done, it is relatively easy to do but it requires persistence, patience, good sense.

A little element of luck enters in here. You may run into an engram which—let’s say it’s a different chain of engrams—you may run into an engram which comes down to there, [marking on blackboard] There’s its basic. This was actually Uncle Oscar who sailed into the scene at the age of seven months after conception.

He sailed into the scene and his pernicious influence makes itself felt there. He’s a vast ally of the child postpartum and one of his principal statements is “You’ve got to do it yourself if you want to be a man. You’ve got to learn to stand up to life, that’s what.” And he’s told the child this constantly.

Only it’s in the bank here where he was telling Papa when Papa was boo-hooing about a business failure. And after birth, why, everybody said, “Isn’t it funny, this child . . .” — it just happens; this wouldn’t be as a consequence—but people kept saying, “You know, he’s just like his uncle Oscar, He isn’t—anybody else like him—I mean he’s just exactly like his uncle Oscar, though. He’s mean and so forth, just like Uncle Oscar.” Valence shift, this proposition, we hit it up here and we hit it down here. And seven months prenatal won’t lift. So we’ve run the engram down to here and it stuck right there. Do you see what you’re shooting at? You would have been remiss then not to have discovered that it was Uncle Oscar you were shooting for.

Because if you’re shooting for a relative, the relative isn’t Mama. Mama’s in the basic area. At least so far in Dianetics I’ve always found her to be in the child’s basic area. She’s always there. It’s not even true that Papa would be in the basic area. I have found Papa at three months just then marrying the girl and not the father of the child. Papa’s first appearance—Papa’s been away on a trip for four or five months, something of the sort, and he was supposed to marry his bride when he came home, something like that. She’s pregnant.

That is really a nice louse-up. Because now we have strangers down here in the basic area. We don’t know what their dramatizations really were because Mama was old enough at the time they showed up not to receive a very hard transplantation of engrams—so she isn’t dramatizing what they said. We’ve got a lost set of engrams down here in the basic area.

In that way, use other mechanisms such as running a fight, where you pick up the emotion in the patient till the patient all of a sudden feels like he’s fighting. Pick up a time when he himself was fighting, go over it a few times, see if we can get that turned on. Then skip him down to the first fight we find in the bank. Just have him go down straight to the first fight. See if we can get that kind of a fight.

We may turn up with personnel we never suspected were there. By the way, Kinsey is going to have to revise most of his figures when he learns about Dianetics in full. He already knows about Dianetics, by the way. He was talking over it with chief of the Public Health Service down in Washington and the chief of mental hygiene clinic was talking it over a few months ago. And if Kinsey doesn’t grab hold of the source of data here that’s available in Dianetics, his statistics will be just completely off, utterly wrong.

This material, he’ll invalidate it maybe at first to the quantity that it will appear. But if he checks it back for the subjective reality and for what has occurred, checks his cases and checks enough dates, hell find out that an engram won’t lift unless you’ve got the engram, the content of it.

Now, I’ll take an example here in point. Who used to wear glasses in your family? (pause) Female voice: I don’t think anybody.

Who had an awfully bad memory in your family? (pause) Female voice: My brother has.

Your brother has.

Female voice: Well, my mother used to say he had a built-in forgetter (laughter) Let’s remember a specific moment when she said that.

Female voice: Yeah.

She said that to him. (pause) Now let’s remember a specific moment when she said it to you. (pause) Female voice: I think I reacted more violently to the things my mother said to my brother than I reacted to what she said to me.

Is your brother older or younger?

Female voice: Younger.

He’s younger than you. Mm-hm. Who told you you had to take care of your brother when you were a little kid?

Female voice: What’s there—I—I cant recall it but I know that it must have been because of the things she’s said to him.

Uh-huh. You like your father?

Female voice: Not particularly . . .

Who used to say you were like him?

Female voice: Nobody ever said that I was like my father.

Who said you were like your mother?

Female voice: I’m not the least bit like my mother.

Did they say so?

Female voice: Well . . .

When did your mother say you were different than she?

Female voice: Well, she never did but it’s very obvious. Shed . . .

Who said it was very obvious?

Female voice: Well, that’s one of her phrases but I don’t remember her recently . . .

What’s one of her phrases?

Female voice: “It’s very obvious.” One of your mother’s phrases—it’s very obvious that what?

Female voice: Anything is very obvious. “It’s very obvious.” Female voice: My mother also said that my father never says anything I—I never can get anything that my father ever said but I can get practically anything that my mother . . .

What’d your mother say your father never said anything about?

Female voice: Well, when he—she said that he never says anything when he’s disturbed.

She says this?

Female voice: Yes.

You remember a specific moment?

Female voice: No, it’s kind . . .

All right. You can remember that as homework.

Female voice: Yeah.

Remember a specific moment when your mother said your father never said anything except when he was disturbed. Okay? All right . . .

Female voice: No, he—he said—he never says anything when he’s disturbed.

Oh, I thought you’d catch me. That is a small sample of it there. You gain an awful lot of computation out of the case in an awful hurry.

Yes?

Male voice: Suppose what you ask us to remember, besides just giving people homework, happens to be not in any place except in the prenatal area?

That’s tough. (laughter) Male voice: That will restimulate them, right?

No!

Male voice: Why not?

No, it won’t restimulate them. Are they going to stand around then and say, “Let’s see, I said I can’t remember, I can’t remember, I can’t remember, I can’t remember, I can’t remember”? Are they going to do that?

Male voice: As Dick Saunders said, they do it all the time.

What?

Male voice: As Dick Saunders said, he thought of doing that all the time, even naturally. There’s lots of people . . .

Well, Dick Saunders might say that he does it naturally but Dick Saunders has got a fancy lot of circuitry. It’s sort of like “everybody knows when you get drunk, your ears burn.” That’s all right with Dick; he would naturally incline toward such a thing. But it would be a very unhealthy thing to do. You haven’t asked the person to do that. You’ve asked the person to remember a specific incident when it happened.

I gave a preclear some homework one day and he came up with the doggonedest incident all along the line. Very interesting. You remember now that a file drawer, you might say, is sticky. It hasn’t been used for a long time and they get sealed up and you ask the person something today—this is an interesting datum: if you examine a student on a subject he has not had for some time, if you examine him on this subject on Monday, and then examine him again on Wednesday or Thursday, he will get a much better grade on Wednesday or Thursday usually than he will get on a Monday because he got the file drawer out. Now the thing restimulated a little bit and the next time it’s easier to reach.

This is a very definite mechanism of the mind. So that if your straight memory technique doesn’t work too well on a person today, keep asking him questions, keep hammering at what you want, keep crowding their memory down on the standard bank. Ask him again tomorrow. Don’t be afraid to ask him the same question because tomorrow you may get the answer. If they don’t answer tomorrow, get them the next day and you may get the answer there.

If you let a week go by, however, the file drawer has gotten all stuck, all over again, because it’s a three to four day period, maximum. Actually on the fourth day, the file drawer starts to get stuck up again and on the fifth day is about right back where it was, unless the thing has been actively remembered on straight line. Then there is a record of it and it is in sight.

You can break the occlusions in a bank with great thoroughness if you keep this up with a patient. One of our auditors was working just nothing but straight line memory on a psychotic not too long ago. And this psychotic didn’t remember whether it was raining or Tuesday. And finally, just on straight line technique, after six hours the fellow was remembering all kinds of things clear on back to his early childhood. That was, I say, six hours of therapy, a period of therapy every day for three days, two hours each. On the third day his memory had picked up remarkably. You’ll find all sorts of combinations on this sort of thing. [gap] Male voice: . . . on individuals confronting their own prior death—has there been any painful emotion associated with that prior death?

Oh, brother. Yes sir, painful emotion, plenty of it. One young lady recovered the moment when she was rocking a cradle and—this case, by the way, had been pretty jammed up in one quarter—and she was sitting there rocking the cradle and she was asked for her death. And she says, “My child is dead, my cradle is empty, my lap is empty,” she’s going on. And she’s at some town I’d never heard of in Pennsylvania about sixteen something or other. So she started to spill painful emotion. Her auditor was right on the ball. He knew he’d been waiting for this late-life incident. He had painful emotion turned on here. He didn’t take it off there, he shot her right straight ahead into this lifetime and knocked off a painful emotion incident there and he got it for the first time. So he knocked this thing off.

Now she’s going around complaining because she hasn’t been taken back to the other one which is in restimulation.

Yes?

Male voice: From a different standpoint, I ran a fellow through the sperm sequence up to conception, and he was working very nicely so I had him step right inside the ovum and said, “What’s happening now?” He started to explain to me the change of the head of the sperm into a chromosome and started to give me a description of the physical structure and then I was torn: therapy or research. Finally I went on with the therapy but Yd like to try that sometime.

Yeah, I’ve gotten quite a bit of data, by the way, of this kind and have gone to a textbook, without telling the patient till afterwards-sitting there, “Yes, yes,” and gone to the textbook and looked it up when I didn’t know anything about the process and he didn’t either. And we were picking up stuff—I’m ashamed to say so but I first found out about mitosis in this fashion. Because the fellow says, “My God, I split in half!” (laughter) Male voice: When he came back up to present time, he volunteered this piece of information: he said, “I saw a motion picture on this process a while ago, put out by McGraw-Hill, and it’s all wrong.” Oh yeah, goddamn, when a guy gets ahold of data like that, he really gets opinionated. You can disturb a patient in this life about his material fairly easily. He’s running through this thing to know when his father died, it’s all in the newspapers, everything. It’s all validated and you say, “Well, you know very well your father didn’t die that day.” And he thinks it over for a moment, “Well, probably he didn’t, I guess, I don’t know.” Then you take him back to one of these former deaths and he says, “There I am lying there. And this guy has just put four feet of rapier through me and here I am lying here,” and so on. And you say, “Well, you know that isn’t true.” Don’t do that, by the way. But you say to him, “You know that isn’t true,” something like that. And the guy says, “Who the hell are you talking to? What’s the idea?” He gets up off the couch and looks at you with the four feet of rapier through him and explains how it is. (laughter) Okay.

Male voice: One more question. Is there only death incidents in this?

No, no, no, no, no. There’s all sorts of incidents. A gentleman the other day was having an awful lot of trouble with his leg. And he had to go back to the Revolutionary War to clear up a somatic.

Another little datum that comes through on this—this datum was just reported to me. I have no validity of it one way or the other— was just reported to me. I don’t know whether my report was straight. I’ve got to check it. That is that a person had had a double eye somatic all the way through the prenatal bank and having trouble with this, carrying this somatic with him. And his auditor slammed him back down the track and evidently picked up this thing where he’s having his eyes burned out and knocked it off, and did he have the somatic afterwards?

Female voice: Well, I don’t know. I thought everything was perfectly fine.

Oh, you haven’t checked him yet, whether or not he’s still got that somatic. By the way, would you check it and see if that somatic’s been relieved?

Female voice: Sure.

Good.

People get much more beautiful perceptics back in that period, by the way, than they get up in current life.

Male voice: Oh Ron? You might be interested. That was Myron. This afternoon, Ted was running him and he came in quite happily, laid down on the couch and Ted said, “Well now, has any late emotion been taken off you?” And he said, “No,” and Ted said, “All right. Let’s go to your grandfather’s death” and Myron didn’t remember a thing about it. Ted got him to talking about it. He talked about it quite happily. He said, “Well now, tell me, what color dress is your mother wearing now that she says he’s dead? Go over ‘He’s dead.’ He said, “He’s dead, he’s dead.” “What color dress is your mother wearing?” “It’s blue.” And he laughed for one and one-half hours straight. The line charge just kept pouring off. Throw a word at him after he’d stop, and he’d start all over again.

Yeah. In other words, if you can get a line charge going like this, this is very desirable, that particular reaction, although it looks awfully crazy to somebody who doesn’t know anything about Dianetics.

If we can, by running such incidents off, shorten cases, speed up cases that are moving slowly and so on, you will hear about it in due time.

Meantime it’s just a research project. I like to keep the classes abreast of what we are doing.

Male voice: Is it worthwhile taking the toughest of cases that won’t open and . . . ?

Sure, sure.

Male voice: Right into that.

Sure, why not?

Male voice: What have we got to lose?

Sure. What have you got to lose? That’s right.

Okay, that’s thirty for tonight.

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[[Category:Lectures 1950]]