View source for Handling of Cases (500619)

'''Date:''' 19 June 1950

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

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I want to talk to you today about two or three things of importance. One was just brought up, which is the handling of patients. As professional auditors you’ll be very interested in the patients who come to you for treatment. Now, we have already had a little dissertation on the way you handle a patient if you are only going to see him for fifteen or twenty minutes. You’re just sort of patting him on the back and wishing him well Male voice: Is that more or less an assist, that fifteen-minute—you call it . . .

More or less of a . . .

Second male voice: An assist?

Oh, yeah. And the records on that lecture are available for you.

Male voice: Well, as I understood that it can be used either as a short, simple assist, as he calls it, or to get into something . . .

I was going to go into that further. That by the way does have good diagnostic value, excellent diagnostic value, particularly for a case utterly unable to recall anything. Carl, last night was—I worked him, I guess, for an hour and a half, two hours using nothing but that technique in an effort to penetrate a case which was entirely occluded. That’s part of diagnostic procedure. I don’t know if I mentioned that the other day. You can get an enormous amount of material out of a patient and you can find what his late-life conflicts are.

You find his late-life conflicts, he’ll generally start giving them back to you in just the very words of the engram. Then if you go back to an earlier moment, still recent, when somebody is giving you this story, you go back to the moment when he last heard those words or saw the person who was speaking or find out whether or not the people around him are pseudoallies and he’ll suddenly come into a recognition of the fact that they are and you’ll produce an alleviation of the time. That is the first benefit of using the method. And the second benefit, probably to us the most important one, is the fact that you can get diagnosis on a case which is all closed in, the person hasn’t any idea what he’s doing.

Male voice: The other thing when you use that technique, the person doesn’t feel as though there s any pressure on him.

That’s correct.

Male voice: If the person thinks you re putting any pressure on him at ally well, he closes up like a clam.

Mm-hm. Well, it has its values. Now, you can actually use, however, that technique in getting enough material to produce an alleviation. It is not up to the auditor to produce insight into the case by telling the case what’s wrong with it. However, if you’re dealing with somebody in a very short interview sort of a thing you can point something out to him.

He agrees with it, okay. If he doesn’t agree with it, don’t try to force it on him. Because you’ll notice if he is agreeing with it that he will have a tendency to smile or laugh. He feels relieved about it. And if you don’t get that reaction from him you haven’t gotten any relief in the case.

Male voice: Just let it lie.

Just let it lie.

Now, I wanted to tell you that in that little system you can start diving deeper and deeper and deeper into the case and you will have achieved, at first, a moment of relief which if you just leave it alone now, will go away and feel fine for some time. And you can go beyond that point and you get immediately into real down-to-earth Dianetics and you’ve got the person in an engram. And then you’re going to have to work him. So there is a nice borderline there that depends on your judgment. This fellow all of a sudden seems to feel fine if you’re doing something like that; that’s okay.

On diagnosis what you’d want to do is use this material for getting in deeper and deeper into the material which is occluded from him. And you’ll eventually produce a somatic of some sort if you keep at it. Then you’re right off on the races on Dianetic therapy. Realize that.

Yes?

Male voice: When you get down into that engram, have you got the patient in a reverie state?

Well, a patient . . . A clarification on the reverie state is definitely in order to anyone who has not observed a lot of patients. The reverie state is actually just a name. A person can do this. It is a name, a label introduced to make the patient feel that his state has altered and he’s gone into a state where his memory is very good or where he can do something he couldn’t do ordinarily before. The actuality is that he is able to do it all the time anyway. And you’re not trying—it’s not a strange state. A person when he is wide awake, merely by asking him to close his eyes, he is technically and actually in reverie. He might be stuck somewhere on the track, he might not be able to move on the track, but this does not mean that he is not in reverie. The counting sometimes produces a light hypnosis back of the reverie. That is sometimes helpful on a case.

You take a psychotic and you tell him that you are now going to hypnotize him. You know he’s stuck on the track someplace. And just the effort to hypnotize him, you’ll notice he’ll very often giggle a little bit and try to swing out of it and so on. You’re just counting at him. You’re not telling him to go to sleep, just count at him. And he’ll giggle and make up some reason or other why he can’t go to sleep and so on. And you’ll find the material has been shaken a little bit. You’re not going to put him into a trance. You can’t put anybody into a trance anyway when he’s way back stuck somewhere on the track and is in general sort of badly aberrated against going to sleep. In the first place, hypnosis is not sleep, but is another mechanism. As a result, you can get things from a psychotic particularly, or a severely neurotic person by pretending to make the effort. You don’t carry the effort all the way on through.

Male voice: Suggestion rather than the fact That’s right. Suggestion rather than the fact. You will occasionally find severely neurotic people who don’t work extremely well, who are very upset with you and so forth and they will become quieter when you’ve counted at them for a while. But they are not in a good, solid, hypnotic trance.

In the treatment of a real, full-blown psychotic the use of deep trance is handy to have around. You’ll be able to use it occasionally. In such a state it’s even allowable to use actual hypnosis, if it is possible to procure any results from it. That is interesting to you that hypnosis has some value. But it has value only to a professional auditor who really knows what he’s doing. He should limit his statements mostly to questions. He should not attempt anything like a late, painful, physically painful incident. What he should try to get is painful emotion. If he gets painful emotion—he can spill painful emotion in deep trance or even in narcosynthesis—he has achieved a gain in the case. And the fact of the matter is that now we’re talking about a very special type of case that will not surrender, is not accessible, very tough case that has been upsetting you and so forth—this is another gimmick you can try.

You can additionally fix, on attention, a severely neurotic or psychotic person with flashing light. Whether you make the light flash by rotating mirrors or how, it does not matter, A little gimmick that is quite interesting here is a sort of a binocular effect, where these—this goes over the eyes, and pins around to the back of the head, and he’s looking forward at two lights which flash. Of course the front of it is blank; there’s two lights that flash in there and they go flash, flash, flash, flash, flash, flash, flash and the first thing you know he may start to manifest something new. He’s not being hypnotized. It’s as though the engram which is underlying the place where he is stuck on the track is now given the chance to penetrate through. And you’ll get some very thin, pale screams on a psychotic. You’ll get weeping and wailing on this device. That’s very valuable because you’ve got to find out what that thing is, Male voice: Let’s see, how much actual therapeutic value can you get from working painful emotion in a deep trance?

It’s pretty good. You must follow it however with releasing it again in light reverie. Release it then again in reverie. You know the content of it now. Don’t try to feed him back the content because this makes it appear that you know more than he does about it. And he will just feel that you’re cheating him by not telling him. So what you do is simply insist he go back on some repeater phrase and he’ll run into the repeater phrase and the next thing you know, why, he’ll be giving you the engram again. Get it in deep and then get it in light.

Let me clarify this with this statement that it is actually true that a whole case can be worked from beginning to end in amnesia trance. The recognition of the analytical mind of the data is of secondary importance. That rather blows things out, doesn’t it? One says the reason people get well is because of those insights. Can actually be worked from beginning to end, I have done so, and I would not like to do it again. Because the basic personality is quite weak in attention units and so forth—there are very few of them there—they go down very, very hard at the beginning of the case. The fellow hits some mild bouncer, very mild, not even very aberrative and he bounces on it. You can actually persuade a case through—this is something that you need to know for technical reasons—that you could push a case all the way through in amnesia trance.

It has many things wrong with  it. Many. The entire duration of treatment is—well, it’s very long, it’s very difficult. The patient ordinarily speaks very slowly, he is unable to contact incidents, his computational ability on his own life and so on is very poor and he will be uncomfortable during almost the entire period that you’re working on him. Eventually it will work out. Because you’re going to get engram after engram that will not reduce. You’ll get it up to a tone 3 in the reactive bank, you’ll get up to a tone 3 while you’re working him in amnesia trance, and apparently it isn’t bothering him; at least he’ll say so. It’ll appear amusing to him. And then he will awaken, or at least come to full consciousness afterwards, and you will find out that it’s now very badly aberrative.

You have picked up its somatics. Its somatics are still present. Its whole command value is still present. This doesn’t mean that it is as fearfully aberrative as it might have been before in full restimulation. But he is uncomfortable, he’s definitely uncomfortable.

The proper procedure in such a case is now to take him back in reverie and pick up the incident all over again. Now you’ve brought it all the way through and out. [gap] . . . there are other methods of working therapy besides reverie; definitely are other methods. Most of these methods have been very thoroughly researched. Few stones have been left unturned in an effort to find a fast method. Now they’re going to have to be all re-researched again. But the conclusion there about amnesia trance is substantiated by a large amount of experimentation.

If you have a case that is inaccessible, you can’t do anything with and so on at all, after a lot of trying—put that up there high, around fifty hours of trying, of good work and so on—if you can then produce a more accessible condition by amnesia trance, even by drugs or anything like that, that is allowable, very allowable. Some cases are so unwilling to be treated that extraordinary means have to be taken. A man’s imagination can be severely taxed by some of the weird computations you will find in the severely neurotic and the psychotic. Don’t mean to imply by this that a professional auditor will only be handling those two categories, but they offer special problems. They take your wits.

Now, another strange thing about amnesia trance is that a person can be awakened into it. That’s (quote) awakened (unquote). He can be sleeping very quietly and by someone coming up to him—doesn’t work in every instance but this works often enough to make it very interesting—someone comes up alongside of him and says, “I like you, I’m very fond of you,” an affinity starts to be established. And “You can talk to me. It isn’t necessary for you to awaken at this moment.” Don’t command him not to wake up, but “It isn’t necessary for you to awaken at this moment. You can talk to me without disturbing yourself.” Try it on three or four successive occasions and you will sometimes discover that the person is coming up into an amnesia trance out of sleep. He will have no recollection of what’s gone on when he finally awakens from that sleep. This is a limited method because a patient has to be asleep before it’s tried on him.

This has peculiar value between husbands and wives who sleep together since one of them can do it to the other one, usually with considerable ease. And one lady whose husband was a war veteran was instructed in this method. He had refused therapy utterly. He was very badly aberrated. And with instruction from me, she was able to awaken him into an amnesia trance and carry on his therapy. He never knew anything about it. He didn’t know that anybody was working on him. He had no idea of why he was waking up today with a pain and tomorrow with a pain someplace else. He didn’t know why today he was agitated and tomorrow he was not. He had no inkling of what was taking place or why he was getting well. And he was blaming it on Bromo Seltzer and folic acid and so on. And he was swearing by the doctors that he was seeing—he had a big doctor ally computation—and she had enough restraint to just keep her mouth shut.

It took a long time to do anything for him. It took many months to bring him up to a point where he could be considered a good safe Release. At that time he had become so pleasant and cheerful around the house, in spite of the fact these somatics were jumping, that he was no longer antagonistic toward her.

She was in this case, by the way, a nurse in a tonsillectomy who had said to him, “Lie still, you dirty little brat” and had slapped him many times and had shaken him. And after that had become somewhat kinder. And the context of her conversation was to the effect that he could not get along without her. So she was in a bad spot when she tried to work on him. The second he tried to go into any kind of a reverie for instance, around her, he was instantly in that confounded tonsillectomy.

Male voice: She actually was the nurse or pseudonurse?

Just pseudo.

Second male voice: How could you bring a person who has had anesthesia—a complete anesthesia—how can you bring them out, because slapping in the face and calling to them is the usual technique of a nurse now.

That makes it lovely.

Second male voice: Yeah. If you take . . .

A person who has had an anesthesia? Well, I would let him sleep it out, myself Unless somebody is running a butcher factory where he just wants to get rid of the patient in a hurry, wants to get him out of the office and on his feet and send him home, like exodontistry.

Male voice: Every hospital does that I would know of no excuse for it. There may be one, probably it’s an imaginary excuse.

Male voice: Well, it is a fact though that practically every person who comes out of anesthetic, there s always somebody slapping him on the face and calling and telling them, “Wake up now, wake up, wake up!” That’s great! Now when somebody says “wake up” to him in the future, he goes to sleep.

Male voice: What is the good technique for working someone who—to whom you are restimulative, through an ally/enemy computation and stuff like—like this nurse?

What’s a good technique for working with them?

Male voice: Yeah.

I just gave you one.

Male voice: Yeah. In reverie.

In reverie, you can work him in deep trance and so on.

You’ll find many times a team will go on the rocks, a husband and wife team, because one of these things is in existence and it becomes intensified by the therapy itself. All of a sudden the person will start to get angry with his partner or something; they’re getting toward the incident, close to it. And some very bombastic circumstances have taken place.

Male voice: Oh yeah, I’ve experienced that with my wife, when I was trying to run her a couple of nights ago where she was about ready to take my head off. I knew it was engramic, but the whole thing was so . . .

Really barking. Good! Well, she was angry?

Male voice: You bet! But she was really in there pitching She was angry.

Male voice: She wasn’t angry, she was in a rage!

Fine, fine. Did you get the material that she spilled during the rage?

Male voice: Well, I don’t know, I just—I knew it was engramic, yet it was restimulating the hell out of me! I was on the verge of retorting. I figured the best thing that I could do was to cancel and get out of it because I was getting madder, too.

That would have been fatal.

Male voice: Yeah.

Had you gotten angry at that moment you would have a sick girl on your hands right now.

Male voice: Yeah. Well, I didn’t. I knew that—I thought the best thing for me to do was to cancel and get the hell out of it because I was getting madder and madder and madder. I was just on the verge of saying “God-damn . . . I” (laughs) Well, when we have a . . .

Male voice: Natural (laughs) Now, that’s reactive . . .

Male voice: Yeah. . . . reactive mind stuff, that’s very bad. I’m just making this point here that there are other ways to work that are effective.

You take a man who is very badly knocked around, you take as crude an implement as a dishpan and beat on it with a spoon up close to his ear and tell him that he can talk to you or something of the sort, even when he’s been in a coma for some time, and you can attract his attention this way. You will have actually hammered him into an hypnotic trance and you can work him from that hypnotic-trance level. So as you work in this and do a little bit of experimentation with it, you’ll find out that the reverie is not the only tool that can be used. But you will also find out that the best tool to use, so far as we know at this time, is definitely reverie. It has its very distinct advantages. And even though one may struggle to—in the idea that this patient would be better off in an amnesia trance and so on, the second you have flipped him into amnesia trance you’ve lost ground in the case. You may then work him and so on.

It is easier just to accept the hurdles of reverie and follow them on through, particularly with this current theory of valence and so on which works pretty good. You can accomplish more with the case and he will feel better.

Now, just in discussing patients in general, you’re going to get patients who are very insulting, who are quite recalcitrant. Maybe when they came to you they were, oh, so meek. They wanted to be so helpful and the second you tossed them into reverie, just the feeling that they are now less responsible for their actions and that you are there— they will attack you.

Well, this is quite ordinary. They’ve been attacking the whole world in one way or another, slyly or otherwise, been attacking the whole world. And now they have a target. And they will sit down and attack the auditor. Scold and whine and get angry and so on. That’s not bad. It is hard on the auditor but it means a localization of their antagonisms. And by the text of their antagonisms and by their general demeanor, you can get some very valuable material The best system to follow if you are auditing professionally is an air of detached efficiency toward the patient, definitely detached efficiency After all, they are patients. They wouldn’t be there if they weren’t aberrated. Their conduct is hardly worthy of your criticism, or certainly it isn’t worthwhile getting restimulated by them. In short, teach yourself some altitude. You are the auditor. And what they’ve got to say for it, you occasionally will find restimulative but there’s no real good reason. You can tell yourself to do so and you’ll find out you’ll help yourself a lot by doing that.

In some cases where you become too sympathetic toward the patient, so on, that’s very, very destructive toward the therapy, Male voice: How about a slight sympathetic, more of an attitude before you re going into therapy and what not—is that helpful, or. . .?

Well, you know, feeling yourself all churned up, sympathetic, upset for the sake of the patient and demonstrating a quiet, professional concern for their good health and bad health and so on, are two entirely different things, Male voice: Yeah, that’s what I was talking about In other words, you can just be prepared to put on a very, very smooth bedside manner, Male voice: Yeah. And as far as you are concerned, it is about as deeply felt as touching your hand with the head of a pin, compared to sticking a nail through your fist. You see what I mean? There’s a wide difference between these two things, Male voice: But should you give the impression . . .

If they weren’t aberrees they wouldn’t be there, Male voice: What’s the impression that you should give to them?

That you are concerned, that you are interested, Male voice: But not too deeply?

Now, that’s something that one should make a remark on here. The impression which you should deliver to them is nothing that requires any acting on your own part. You know that if you work this case, no matter how difficult this case is, if you just work this case consistently, sooner or later this case is going to start moving on the track and sooner or later you’re going to start to find material. You know that when you find material and do something about it, the patient’s going to feel better. You know that you’re dealing with tomorrow’s missing engrams, no matter what you’re looking at. And that all by itself is quite supportive to your own morale. [gap] What this all sums up to is self-confidence. Exude self-confidence and exude a confidence—this helps them—that they’re going to be better and that it isn’t awfully serious. You’re concerned for it now but not tomorrow. This stuff is going to be gone one of these days. As a matter of fact in Dianetics most of the time these things are so transient that if you were to greet the patient at the beginning of a two-hour session and you were to say . . . The patient is weeping and saying, “My father has just rejected me and the world has all fallen in on me” and so on, you waste any time feeling bad about that, you’re just wasting time and you’re wasting your own nervous energy. Because you know that if something has just happened to this patient, your chances are pretty good that you can go right straight back to what has just happened and right at the beginning of the thing, deintensify it. It isn’t troubling him. He may even be laughing about it. One is handling such transient material that to become honestly and earnestly sympathetic about it is a waste of time. But at any moment when you begin to express grave doubts about your ability to do anything about it, then the patient will begin to doubt his own ability to recall and it has a destructive effect. Remember that we’re dealing with the human mind and that the human mind has many angles of approach. There are many angles of approach to the same problem.

One of those things is faith healing. In short, a professional auditor shouldn’t overlook any bets. There’s faith healing when that is not practiced on the hypnotic level of “this is not going to hurt you anymore.” It still has ingredients that you can use. Smooth confidence about the whole thing. And they sort of walk into an aura of confidence and they feel fine about it and they figure their troubles are going to be half over and the second they start figuring this, they are about half over. Now all you’ve got to do is pull the engram behind it.

You can put out an actual atmosphere to a patient. We’re getting almost mystical or metaphysical but it is something to consider. You don’t want to make your work any harder than you have to. You will find that in dealing with a large number of people you won’t have time to recompose your features and attitude for every patient that comes in. So all you do is take your own natural personality and play it. But don’t ever play it with anything but confidence. You have confidence and they have confidence. It isn’t a matter of faith, actually. You’re not dealing with faith; you’re dealing with nice, precision tools. But the mind can build up on the subject of faith, so don’t neglect it. Any angle that has ever proved efficacious in the treatment of the human mind is—or any attitude in such treatment is thoroughly admissible in Dianetics. We don’t mean now that we should go around wearing white robes and all the rest of that sort of thing, but a little bit of any of these attitudes is admissible; they’re all valid. There were a thousand roads to this same goal, and there’s something on every one of them that you can use.

Now, in the handling of the patient as far as what you’re going to give him, what you’re going to tell him, what fees you’re going to charge him, so on, I should give you a few pointers that may be of aid to you. You will find that a patient gets well, ordinarily, a little more swiftly if it’s costing him something. This is another one of those routes.

Yes?

Male voice: What about a person who has an engram on that?

Ah, I’ll tell you a case of a fellow one time—he didn’t dare get well because—this is all right on the next subject. He had been guaranteed that he would stop stammering. And he wouldn’t have to pay any—his fee was five hundred dollars—he wouldn’t have to pay any money if he didn’t stop stammering. Well, he had an enormous engram on how much he loved money; it was big! And this engram about loving money got in the road of his cure. So rather than hammer for a release on speech, about halfway through the case the auditor had to hammer away at this love of money, which was highly aberrative—the engram was—and had distorted his life considerably. And he relieved the engram about the money before he relieved the engram about speech. He could not have done the reverse. It was just one thing that wouldn’t have come out. Highly computational, this fellow was, on the whole subject.

Now, you’ll find that they will work better if it’s costing them money. You’ll also find them working better if you aren’t guaranteeing anything. Now, the second that you start guaranteeing something—and you know in Dianetics you can guarantee something—but there is no reason to make your work harder. And you will make your work harder if you do guarantee something.

You tell this patient, “Well, we’ll take this on a contingent fee basis. I cure your arthritis and you pay me a thousand dollars.” That sounds very nice, very neat, it’s good press relations, it looks easy. But it doesn’t work out well, because he is going to get as much treatment out of you as possible in all other lines than that arthritis. He’s going to go off into allied fields. He is going to hold on to that arthritis until he has just worked you into a froth2 over it. He is going to get you to cure up his dermatitis. You’re going to have to do this and do that. Basic personality in some of these cases starts looking out for number one and starts using engrams against the auditor, which is interesting.

Like when you break off, for instance, suddenly a treatment, as covered adequately in the book; basic personality is actually then rather joined up with engrams and as a result could cause you an enormous amount of trouble until you finally admit the patient back into therapy again.

Male voice: For an additional fee.

Well, in such a case it would be. But the flat guarantee of, “I’ll cure your migraine headaches and you pay me so much money,” you will find out that that is very expensive to you. The fellow will be practically Clear before he starts giving up or even admitting to you that he has received any alleviation of his migraine headaches. You’re working one against the other and that’s not good.

Male voice: When can you take a case and drop it? When the patient starts coming back, or do you have to tell him to stop coming back?

You tell a patient to stop coming—there is this contingent fee basis again. You can’t deny the patient access to you if you have made a contingent fee bargain with him.

Male voice: Right So he’ll keep coming back and coming back and coming back and slowing up your work in other fields. And he is—while aberrated, at least, will consider himself the only man alive on earth. Now, what was your question again?

Male voice: Well, if you’ve not made a contingent fee basis—you’re doing this now without guarantees, how far can you carry him and at what point you should drop him and how should you drop him?

That’s quite interesting, how far you should carry him; this is why you should have an hourly fee. All of you will undoubtedly have other people practicing with you. You will find yourself right in there with a group in a great hurry. Now, you’ll have other people who can treat him. As far as a professional auditor is concerned, you can drop his case then any time that you can drop it into the hands of one of your students or assistants. See what I mean?

Male voice: Yeah. But if you let him run all the way out of therapy, so that there is no chance of his having any more therapy, you’re going to have an unhappy man on your hands. And there is no sharp method of saying, “We can drop him at seventy-one and one-half hours.” No, we . . .

Male voice: I was thinking more in terms . . .

Don’t put him out of reach of aid. You were thinking in terms of how long can a professional auditor go along with a patient and safely release, and call it a Release.

Male voice: Yeah.

Are you looking for a definition, a precise definition of when you can call a patient released?

Male voice: I’m trying to get the feeling . . .

I would like to give you that definition, by the way.

Male voice: . . .get the feeling more of: here you take the man and here you’ve got him pretty well released; you’ve wiped out most of the engrams in the prenatal area. There comes a point when either he can’t afford to go on or it’s going to take too much time to go on. Who’s going to make the move to break off? Is the patient going to make . . . ?

You had better let the patient make the move. And you had better not alter or stiffen up as far as your accessibility to him is concerned. Don’t do it! That argues very much in favor of making yourself relatively inaccessible right at the beginning. A set fee basis is going to go along just such-and-such and such-and-such, so much per hour, appointments at such-and-such times of the day and no other times of the day. You have to set it up rigorously right at the beginning.

Male voice: Ron, do you think in a set fee straight across the board, or depending on circumstances of each patient?

That is something which is medical practice, very good medical practice to set a fee in accordance with the patient’s ability to pay. And the only way that deteriorates in Dianetics is that you can acquire a large number of low-fee patients. You can acquire any God’s quantity of low-fee patients and you can completely close up your day with them. You can get to a point where you haven’t any time for serious cases, no time for emergencies, no time for your own recreation. As a result, the feeling of sympathy on your part, of taking on somebody, has a limit.

Whereas you say, “Well, we’ll charge you—because you’re not too well off, we’ll charge you five dollars an hour.” And the next thing you know you’re going to be working just like mad and you’re going to be making not enough money to pay for your office.

Male voice: What about setting aside certain hours or certain days of the week for cases like that, nothing outside of that?

Okay. I would take all the cases which are almost on a charity—which are a charity-level case, I would take them more or less on this little fifteen-minute procedure. See them quick. And even then charge them a small fee.

Second male voice: One of the first rules of medical practice is never do anything free. Make them pay something even if they only bring you a loaf of bread.

Sure.

Male voice: You find that your charity work will go down just about one-tenth of what it was. But they have to bring something—bring you five tangibles, all right; but there s a big difference between a patient who’ll bring you five tangibles and a patient who will bring you nothing. You can get. . .

Yeah, that’s right. There’s quite a difference and it’s something that you will run into here. There is no point in, in other words, giving yourself away with great thoroughness. That’s bad. It isn’t that you’re being mercenary. Separate those words. People will get all confused. They will expect the fellow working in Dianetics to be entirely altruistic. Altruism. Altruism means that we knock the first dynamic out of the equation. [gap] . . . you can’t knock altruism out. And you can’t assume that there is such a thing as an altruism where number one is not to be considered. Maybe number one and number two are not to be considered. You’re not going to get an optimum solution to the problem if you just drop out two dynamics out of the problem and say, “We’re not going to consider me or anybody else. I’m sacrificing myself for the whole world.” Boy, that is a fine way to get everybody fouled up—the patients, yourself, everyone!

Yeah?

Male voice: This definition for Release . . . ?

Oh, you want this definition of Release. A Release is a patient who has been brought to a point in his case where it will not relapse without the receipt of a new, enormously painful engram or loss. You have stabilized this person so that he can go along with the normal rolly-coaster bad luck and good luck of existence without going into neurotic states.

The way to produce a Release is to take from the case all painful emotion engrams that you can contact. They are important in releasing a case. If you have a case where the death of two allies, the deaths of these two allies are still intact and undischarged, you can count on the fact that you will have a relapse in that case. You’re going to get a relapse. Therefore, how long it takes to bring a person up to a point of Release is quite variable, because it’s often necessary to relieve large numbers of prenatals and so on before you can finally get those last moments of painful emotion. But those moments of painful emotion have to be gotten.

A case recently had been pronounced a Release by an auditor and on an examination it was discovered that this case still had in full bloom, completely unrelieved, the deaths of Grandfather (ally), Grandmother (ally), Mother (ally). The three big death charges on the case had never been touched, and this case relapsed after a period of eight months.

Now, those who have had the painful emotional charges, the big ones, taken out of their lives, those cases have not relapsed and some of those cases are now four years old.

Male voice: Ron, seems to be one slight discrepancy Both in the book and in the lectures, the painful emotion has been volumetrically more important in generally releasing a case than the engram.

Mm-hm.

Male voice: However, the book makes the point, and the lectures are included of attacking primarily the early engrams.

Basic area engrams. That’s right.

Male voice: That is because you cant get at the other before you get those? Or . . . ?

Ordinarily. This is where you are trying to clear and where you’re trying to bring about a stable state of mind. If you’re trying to clear a person, you go into that case anywhere you can go into it, you clear up anything you can lay your hands on in it. You carry on through in any fashion possible. You’re not doing anything very selective; you’re just carrying the case as swiftly as possible. Now, it’s going to take a while. Because you’ve got to get everything out of the case anyway, get it all out as efficiently as possible. Therefore, basic-basic is terribly important. Of course, basic-basic can be very important in a Release if you can’t get the late painful emotion off of it. But now we’re talking merely about bringing a stable state of mind about. And when you do that, if you get the painful emotion off of the case you have achieved a stable state of mind. And this person may still be manifesting all manner of aberrations in conduct and so forth. He still may be. But this person is not going to go down into an anxiety state, not going to go down into the various neurotic levels that he was in before. He is now a normal.

Male voice: Well, it’s poss— on the last person, let me ask you—is it possible that you have a case which can work with a certain amount of success either late emotion or early pain, whichever you want to go out?

I’d blow the emotion out first. [gap] Male voice: . . . that you couldn’t treat When someone comes to you and you have your appointment book all filled up and no immediate . . .

Well, you’re talking about the fifteen-minute office call now? The fellow who comes in with a worry.

Male voice: Uh-huh.

The man who comes in with a worry and he is upset about it and you’ve got your book pretty well filled for the day and you certainly don’t want another patient at this moment.

Male voice: Uh-huh.

Okay. The best thing to do with him is just run this fifteen-minute treatment on him. You will undoubtedly pick up something in those few minutes there that will aid and assist him. As for a person with a persistent smell is—“My God, I can always smell that baby”—he may be walking around with the odor of excreta in his nose.

Male voice: Mm-hm. And this is very disconcerting to people. There may be an engram that is just like that. Well, you can knock that one out. You know what it is. You knock it out very rapidly.

Anything which comes up into an abnormal, a highly abnormal state, ordinarily goes off fairly rapidly. If a person’s walking around with an odor, all you’ve got to do is change his position on the time track and it will stop. Of course it will come back in a few days, possibly, but if you just change his position on the time track . . .Or if a fellow is walking around and he has a bad case of ulcers, the amount of treatment which you have to give him on the level of locks is sometimes very, very small. Because the thing is so unnatural that when you contact it, it can ordinarily be supposed to go away rapidly, too. You can do this without even getting him a Release.

Well now, we’re talking about fees and so forth in relationship to people. Therefore, you can sum it up this way: that it is better to charge; it is better not to underevaluate your services. Never.

Male voice: In advance?

Hm?

Male voice: Cash in advance?

Not in advance. Just take it standard but take it on call. After all, you’ll be dealing with aberrees, and they’ll have lots of aberrations about paying bills and so on. You don’t want to get yourself snarled up that Way. Just put it on a flat basis. Let’s say you’re charging as little as fifteen dollars an hour. “You want two hours worth of treatment? That’s thirty dollars.” You’ll lose a few fees but it’s better. And don’t let a man go ahead and get treatment and run up a bill higher and higher and higher on the thing, because you’re going to produce an eventual circumstance of high dissatisfaction. Just take this as counsel on it, it’s awfully smart, that if he doesn’t have fifteen bucks he won’t pay for his treatment. You see what I mean?

You’re going to find people that you have cured their bursitis and you’ve cured their sinusitis and you’ve cured their migraines and you’ve fixed it up so that they are again potent and so on, who will then turn around and want their fees back if you still haven’t clipped the key engram in the case. That’s right!

I cured up a young lady’s eyes, bursitis, a chronic throat condition which was very annoying to her; cured them up and she was quite ready to admit to me that these things felt much, much better, but she didn’t see any reason why Dianetics was any good.

You get what I mean there, the person is still utterly irrational. You say if anybody in this field— if there’s an auditor present who at the rate of twenty-five dollars an hour couldn’t run up a bill of five to ten thousand dollars without really producing spectacular results and bringing a person up very close, if not to, Clear, boy . . .

Male voice: He’d better come back to school! . . . my words are now being wasted.

Male voice: That’s only two hundred hours.

All right, it’s only two hundred hours but heavens on earth, you should be able to get that. Let’s say we take a terribly bad case with all sorts of sympathy engrams, that was very difficult to get to, who has great reasons—although he keeps coming to you for treatment all the time—he has all these reasons why he can’t get rid of his symptoms. This person will still propitiate you. He’ll still keep on paying you funds rather than give up the engrams. The engrams can be that strong. But if you can’t break this rather rapidly to a point where he’s very self-determined . . . And by the way, there is one of the tests. You wanted to know something about when can you turn a patient loose?

Male voice: Yeah, his self-determination, without getting any . . .

Yeah, his self-determinism starts coming back to him. And you call him up one day and ask him how he’s getting along, and—you haven’t heard from him for two weeks—and you’ll find all of a sudden he went out and got a copy of the book, and a fellow by the name of Jenkins and he are now working together and they’re just doing fine and he’s started two other cases.

Oh, why, that’s wonderful Look, you’ve gotten that fellow over the hump.

The phenomenon of transference is a reverse on self-determinism. It’s utter dependency. That utter dependency is something which, if you work at all in Dianetics, it will not last. It goes away. Dianetics is no field for somebody who wants control of his fellow human beings. Because that control’s going to blow up. And furthermore, their respect for you as their own personalities and so forth strengthen up and their friendship for you as self-determined people is far more valuable than a dependent state upon you. They’re of no use to one. Fortunately this thing works itself out as an auditor clears him.

Now, before we go on to the next step of this is there any further questions on this?

Male voice: One question, Ron. I’ve heard it around that the more you learn about Dianetics, the more difficult your own therapy is. To what degree is that true?

It doesn’t happen to work out. It does happen that a case which knows nothing about Dianetics is quite often easier to work than one that does. But now we’re dealing in very small degrees. It’s a case that wouldn’t cost you another twenty-five hours on a full Clear; it isn’t anything very difficult.

Male voice: My impression on the thing was that it would work in both directions, or up or down . . .

Yes, it’ll work both ways.

Male voice: How intensive can you work a patient?

How intensively? You can work him four hours a day, seven days a week.

Male voice: If he will work that long And you’ll get a dwindling spiral of results.

Second male voice: The optimum is two hours every few days.

Yeah, that’s about optimum.

Second male voice: And if you make it more intensive, you accomplish very little worthwhile.

Well, you’re accomplishing plenty, but you’re accomplishing less for the same amount of time. In other words, it’s not as productive.

Second male voice: Well, let me rephrase the idea, then. If you have a case that you want to reduce in the quickest possible time, how would you work him? From the viewpoint . . .

I wouldn’t take a bargain with him. [gap] Male voice: . . . shortest possible time to reduce, is it worthwhile two hours every day?

Well, I wouldn’t work against a deadline. Do you see what I mean? I wouldn’t work against a deadline, saying, “Well, I want to have this case all out of the woods in six weeks” and therefore work him kind of hard and so on. I would just tell the guy, “Well, it can be a long grind and we’re not sure what . . . You’re the only one who knows.” Boy, that is true. “You’re the only one who knows how many engrams you have, you’re the only one who knows how much time it’s going to take.” Settle it down to a routine of a couple of hours maybe every other day or twice a week and just let it roll These people who are so anxious to have this or that come about quickly, readily, may sometimes persuade you to place your chips on3 the fact that in six weeks they’re going to be all straightened out. And you’re going to work like the devil, maybe day in and day out for about six weeks and you find that in this gentleman you have encountered sympathy engrams which were hitherto lying dormant, but which have sort of stirred up and you’re getting—the things are resisting you and you’re going to be disappointed and so is he.

Male voice: Two hours every other day would be just about as intensive as is worthwhile from any viewpoint Yes.

Male voice: Two hours every three days is a little bit more optimum condition.

A little bit more, yes. But two hours every week, that’s bad because the case will fall off the fourth day.

Second male voice: Would it be true that the more effort . . . Say that somebody comes to you and gives you a big sales pitch on the acuteness of something and gets you all excited about it The more excited you get and the harder you try, the less effective you re likely to be, at least if you re aberrated yourself. Would that be true?

Yeah. You’ll find a lot of people who will do that to you, that’s why I was remarking on it. You tell them, “Listen, only you know how much is there and only you can know how long it’s going to take. But at this moment you don’t happen to be able to recall it. What do you think I am, a prophet? I’m not going to use a crystal ball. It may take you six years. How do we know?” In other words, be tough about it. You’ll find out that it will pay dividends to be tough about it.

Don’t make glowing promises to these people. Because you can’t count on two facts: one, their home environment, which can retard a case enormously.  You may not know anything about that home environment, not until you get fairly deep in the case. It may retard them. They may go home at night right after the session and they say, “Gee, I just feel fine.” And wifey for her best—that’s (quote) best (unquote) — interest thinks that it’s necessary at that moment for her not to let him get too enthusiastic. She believes that getting enthusiastic is very bad for somebody. So she says, “Well dear, why don’t you wait for a while and find out? You really don’t know that you’re getting better. It may be just that you’re interested in something. After all, you’ve been interested in something before. Now, you remember that radio set that you had and worked on so long, you felt better when you did that, too. Now dear, let’s not get too enthusiastic.” And, whee! The fellow has a terrible engram about getting enthusiastic. She’s banged away against this enthusiasm engram all their married life and now as he walks into something that she, in her stupidity, desires to call “a new toy,” she starts in the business of finishing him off. And actually she can finish him off faster than you can put him back together again.

Because the better he gets, the crazier she’s liable to get on the subject. She’s liable to be in abject terror of this man if he ever recovered his full ability.

Male voice: You’ve got a point there, Ron. I think that it could be expanded just a little bit. What other ways could a patient be sent down— degraded, faster than you can build them up? Home stimulation would certainly be one.

Home stimulation is one—that is the only one that I have encountered that sends him down faster than you can build him back up.

Male voice: How about locational restimulation? Square peg round hole, you know?

Oh sure, but that ordinarily doesn’t. He’s probably married a pseudoally and what she says is probably 100 percent command power reactive bank as far as he’s concerned. And if she were to take off on a tangent and say, “You know, you’ve been looking more and more like a dog lately. Half the time I expect you to bark.” And if she kept this up very long, why, the first thing you know he would be looking at himself in a mirror and saying, “You know, I—I—I do look more and more like a dog.” This is no joke, because you are handling somebody who is in an unknown environment as far as you are concerned. The persons around him may not start taking it out on him—well, maybe he’d be in therapy for three or four weeks and they’d say, “Well, gee, you know Bill has just got one of these new enthusiasms. It’s probably a cult of some sort and we’ll just let it ride.” And then one day Bill comes in and he doesn’t have any sinusitis anymore. And gee, they look at him and they say, “Well, this is very strange. But you know at this season of the year people very often recover from sinusitis.” And he says, “Well, damn it, no. We’ve been working on this, and it was an engram so-and-so, and I got it at birth and we got the birth engram cleared up and I feel pretty good these days.” “Well, at this season of the year, you know, you get things . . .” And he’ll start running into this and it’ll start sapping . . . And then if he starts really picking up, so he starts to get enthusiastic, cheerful and so on, there are actually lots of aberrees around who just resent the hell out of it.

Male voice: There’s one thing that they can’t tamper with and that is the emotional discharge. You get them out of the patient, but . . .

The what?

Male voice: You get the good emotional discharges out of a patient . . .

Oh, yes. That they can’t tamper with, no. All of a sudden he doesn’t care about these things anymore. You can work uphill against this and you can still win.

Male voice: In some cases, Ron, it may be highly beneficial in . . .

I was just going to come up to that: To remove the patient from his current environment, let him go and get a room someplace.

You’re going to get people who will come to you who are on the verge of being divorced—husband and wife—and they’ve got to think of the kiddies and so on, but if you could just do something for them and so on . . . And they may seem very sincere about the whole thing. And then an unknown factor starts popping in. You’re dealing with human beings, after all, and they’re all different. An unknown factor pops in here.

Male voice: You have another phase of it, too. If you have a child who has come in for the original therapy, the mother herself is very badly aberrated and the child has to live with his mother, it would be better to run the mother off first and then take the child.

Pretty well, yes, yes. Then you have Mama’s cooperation. Otherwise she’s liable to just tear the kid to ribbons.

Second male voice: Should it be made standard procedure to caution the fellow at the beginning of therapy in order to find out if this is going to happen rather than wait till you’ve already spent twenty-five hours on him?

Yes, as a matter of fact it’s important enough to inquire. Because he is worried about himself because somebody has been worrying him about himself And you’ll find in most cases where someone has been beaten down toward an apathy that people are working very industriously upon him, very industriously around him.

Let’s take a case here that not too long ago was processed. This girl was in a very bad state of apathy.  The husband wanted therapy himself but he went about it in the most peculiar fashion imaginable. He tried to make himself so obnoxious that he would be taken on before the wife. But she was very close to a psychotic break. She could not eat and she could not sleep. Now, there was a very bad situation since it actually threatened her life. And how did this fellow help out? Well, he was very concerned about his wife, oh yes. So she would appear for treatment and she would go home and right away he would start in by saying, “Now, how can you be sure you contacted that? How do you know? How do you know that’s what was wrong with you? How do you know that’s doing you any good? But can you be sure? No, of course you can’t. But at the same time there’s probably something in it. But you ought to be very cautious about what you believe about anything like that,” And the girl would come back to the next session and she would be in a spin again. And this fellow kept this up for some little time until the book was available. At which time he was taken by the ear and was shown the book, “If you want therapy you had better do something for your wife and get her straightened up, without any of your ‘How can you be sure?’ because that’s what’s wrong with you, brother. And you go to work on her now. And when she gets to a point where she can do something about it and she is strong enough in the mind to treat you, then you will get therapy, but not until,” And he saw the light. He saw the light shining there and he decided to be a good boy, and he did just that. So this all comes under the heading of guaranteeing. You’re taking a person out of an aberrated environment, you’re restoring his sanity, you’re sending him back into that aberrated environment again. And you might as well face the fact that it can very often impede the therapy considerably. He can be so thoroughly badgered that it is intensely destructive. And because he starts to get better the badgering can actually increase around him.

You could take a case actually with wide-open sonic recalls and everything else and you could start working him, and the first thing you know when—well, a husband or a wife or some fellow—the first thing you know, why, people say, “Aha! I can’t push this man’s buttons anymore, I told him day before yesterday that if he didn’t get me a new mink coat for my birthday I was going to leave him, and this has always worked before. And he isn’t worried about it!” Well, this will get them a bit frantic because they’d been handling this person on a push-button mechanism and now the push buttons are getting pulled out So they hastily begin to look very, very savagely for another push button. And then they become rattled because they can’t handle this person like he was a puppet. And the next thing one knows, the man is left, which may be a considerable emotional impact to him. You would be amazed how often this is going to happen, I know it’s happened before, in two particular occasions. One, the wife was encouraged to go over the hill because she had a number of lovers in her life and she was frantic on the subject of his finding it out. And she was just encouraged to pack her bags. Now, that is actually tampering with somebody’s self-determinism, but she was making him extremely ill. She finally got him to a point where he was just on the verge of going to the hospital. And then she left, and (snap) he came right back up again; the most remarkable advance took place in the following few weeks. All that was wrong with his life was one woman.

In another case of this—oh, this has happened several times, no reason to describe lots of cases on this. You’re going to run into it. And you’re going to run into it with little kids. You’re going to send little Willie home someday, at twelve years of age, and you’re going to send him home and he is walking about four feet off the sidewalk and he’s feeling beautiful and wonderful and the world is no longer lying upon him like a shroud. And he’s going to go home and his mother is going to say, “Now, wipe your feet. Wipe your feet before you come in. There, your feet are all dirty,” and so forth. And he says, “Oh, why don’t you please be quiet?” And she’s going to be very shocked about this whole thing. And that auditor, that Dianetic auditor is the one that’s doing it to him—he’s twisting him away from his family. If she had bothered to inquire a little bit more, why, she would find out that at that moment he had just uncovered. . . [gap] . . . he is operating at that moment on your advice to him. “Now, you can be as mad at them as you please, but don’t throw it in their faces because they’re only aberrees.” And he’s been trying to be nice about the whole thing. But he isn’t going to back up in the corner and cry and cower, which is what he is supposed to do, the second he is called upon.And this is going to be disturbing to somebody.

Male voice: What about childhood discipline?

Yeah, yeah. And Father again sails into him about his schoolwork and says, “You know, you never finish anything you start and you’re always going to be a failure in life” and so forth. And the boy looks at him rather solemnly and says, “Well, what successes have you had lately?” Parents are not yet adjusted to the fact that they have had born unto them human beings who are inherently self-determined, that love is not a biological situation with regard to parent and child, that a parent only gets as much love back as he actually deserves. Actually the kid tries to give him a hell of a lot more than the parent ordinarily deserves. And the biological orientation of love is so snarled up in old moral codes.

You’ve got the “honor thy father and thy mother even though they have tried to murder you all the days of your life.” That equation has been running in this society until you will find patients walking in and saying, “I’m just—I’m just all shot. I’m so anxious all the time I don’t know what I’m doing.” And you will find all of a sudden that he is being daily badgered about the fact that he isn’t demonstrating enough affection and therefore the world is liable to fall in on him and so on. He’s being harangued and harassed and controlled and hammered and pummeled until they—you go back over it and you find a history of childhood illnesses and all that sort of thing, and he’ll be crushed because he doesn’t love his parents more. And there has been no slightest effort on the part of the parents to earn anything. That shows the ledger gets unbalanced. You’ll be dealing with this. So it comes back to this one point again: When you undertake a patient’s therapy and you start to make good, solid, specific promises that “On the 22nd of Octubre you are going to be absolutely well” and so on, you are making a statement without taking cognizance of a very large number of variables which can enter the case. One, his own reactive mind may be far more crammed with material than you supposed. The diagnosis did not at first demonstrate all that is wrong with him. He may be in a restimulative environment and it may be necessary for you, actually, in the case of a child to start the child on educational therapy before you can do anything about clearing.

You may carry the child for fifteen hours and suddenly discover that this child has never been able to control anything about himself. He has been pretty badly shattered. He has been under constant criticism. And you want to give the kid a little bit of educational therapy and self-reliance because he can’t face any part of the world which is right before him. And how are you going to expect him to face any part of his engrams?

He’s not going to be able to. All he’ll do is dramatize. And the value of it will be slight. So you may have to enter in other expedients. That expedient I just mentioned in passing. There’s nothing wrong with discipline of a child so long as the discipline is leveled toward making the child more independent and self-determined: criticizing him for being dependent, trying to build up his own ability to handle himself, giving him the push necessary. In other words, actually applying pain or loss to the child in order to make him, within that periphery, self-determined. For instance, “If you don’t have all the floors washed in the house by two o’clock in the afternoon, of course, you will be switched.” A very bad way to put it. One should tell him, “Well, now I’m going to give you a number of jobs to do. I want each one of these done. When you do not accomplish these . . .” (Not being too critical, you understand, and not being critical of the work when it’s done either.) “But if you fail to accomplish these of course you will get a light switching. And if you accomplish these things you will get a ‘thank you.’” And you carry this along without any temper or rancor on the child and the first thing you know, the child starts to pick up some self-respect. The child has learned to handle himself. It’s very bad to put this out because in any punishment, the ordinary course of affairs is to punish the child and scold him. Well, that’s an engram. That has nothing to do with it. But if you tell the child analytically it’s going to happen and then give him a little switching in silence and then not be angry with him afterwards, there’s no emotional charge on it. This is working, by the way, in four cases that are running at the present time.

Male voice: Just what is meant by running an engram with dramatization rather than the way it should be run?

The child starts dramatizing, you mean, or somebody starts dramatizing when they’re running one instead of running the engram itself? In other words, you strike an anger engram and they start getting angry at the auditor?

Male voice: Mm-hm.

You see, the thing hasn’t been tapped to the source. You can dramatize an engram in that fashion thousands of times without helping the engram one bit, but . . .

Male voice: They’re dramatizing it in present time rather than in past time.

That’s right. So you take them back on the track to a moment when it was happening; they still may try to dramatize it towards you but the thing will lose some of its charge.

Yes?

Male voice: In regards to economics, how do patients generally feel when you turn their therapy over to students?

Second male voice: That is, how would they feel about paying the full fee . . .

I was going to go into this now, as the second phase of professional auditing. You, of course, as trained auditors with experience in the thing, you know what problems you’ll be facing—would be doing yourselves a grave disservice to try to operate as single treatment units. That is, just you working on the patient. Rather, if you’d do anything you should treat it on a clinical basis. You’re a professional auditor. Therefore you are more a supervisor than a treater.

Male voice: Of payers.

Hm?

Male voice: Try and get as many payers . . .

Oh, not only that, you just take a clinic. Just take a clinic and people are coming into the clinic. It is understood that they are being treated on a clinical basis rather than on a personal basis by you. Professional auditors are too scarce right at the present moment to do anything else. You could happily tie yourself down to five patients—five patients, ten patients—and then you could work for eight months on these cases, work yourself ragged. Now, what good are you doing yourself or doing the patient? You’re costing the patient a lot more money and there’s going to be no dearth of patients.

There are two ways to handle the thing, and that is to set yourself up as a clinical head even if you’re opening a single little office. Set yourself up as a clinical head and you have people there that are studying under you. Your main forte should be diagnosis, check-running, keeping things going, making sure that therapy is being administered properly, and standby for any time anybody’s therapy is upset in any way. You know you can straighten it out because you know what you’re doing.

Male voice: Take care of crisis.

Yeah, that sort of thing, and run the thing as a small organization rather than as an individual practitioner seeing large numbers of people and so on.

Male voice: Yeah. Should you or should you not encourage partnership?

Mmm! You should very definitely encourage . . . You will get, for instance, let us say a run of five people who want therapy and one of them is pretty psychotic. Well, you don’t want to mix him into the rest of them. You’re going to treat him, so you’re going to save him up for the clinic. But the other four, you’re perfectly willing to open their cases, to carry them on, to give them good, adequate training, to check them back and forth against each other, to coach them up and so on. You’re going to charge for that service.  But you’ve gotten two people and you’ve gotten them started in therapy, their therapy is going along and it’s not going to cost them an awful lot of money to do so. Therefore they’re perfectly happy to pay you well for what time you give them.

That is an economically sound way to run the thing. Now, you will find that wherever you are you will sit as an advice center. People will be asking you for advice continually and you will be of course advised as to the latest on this and that, and you will be able to straighten them out on lots of points. You could sit around all day long and do nothing else but give people advice for nothing. You shouldn’t run it that way. You should work with people. You should give advice up to the point of demonstrating the fact that they can enter therapy. And then you should open up teams and so forth and those patients that you’re treating regularly—you should have to hand people who are perfectly competent. And you say, “I have just tapped one in the basic area. Now George, run off the rest of that basic area. Next patient, please.” That should be the sort of setup you’d be running, not individual practicing.

Male voice: You know, all these people that come to you, patients as well as outsiders, and what if they ask you if you are Clear, do you have to admit that you are not!

Oh, admit it.

Male voice: But how can you rationalize with this when they will expect . . . I mean, it’s equivalent to this: that you shall be a doctor before you treat You . . .

All right, but that is not the same thing. That is not the same thing.

Male voice: I know that isn’t the same thing but that’s their train of thought.

Well, then you set them right. Because even when you become Clear you’re going to find yourself in a bad spot where people are concerned. They are going to start to treat you like you’re a museum piece or something. You’re something to be tested. They come around and they’ll set up little problems for you, and then you’re sort of a game to them because you’re something new.

Male voice: What happened on the 12th of October in 1937?

Yeah. Now, until there get to be a few more Clears they’re going to go on being very rare. They don’t expect the doctor to be rational. They don’t. They merely expect him to know his profession. And believe me, when you get through around here, you’re going to know your profession.

Male voice: Now, you suggested working with the doctor that . . .

Oh, yes. Now we are talking about legalities. Working as professional auditors, there is only one aegis which is recognized over the country by legislators and the law at large, and that is medicine. Therefore, for your own edification more than for your own protection you should have a liaison with a doctor. It’s not too hard to procure one.

In the first place, you don’t want to work the patient with no knowledge whatsoever of his pathology or general physical condition. You don’t want to work a patient that way. The fellow may lie to you and tell you all sorts of things. [gap] And there are these things which you yourself don’t want to be liable for, such as coronary disease. This person may be on the verge of a stroke, and that stroke will come along whether they are in therapy or not and you may not get to anything in the case. In other words, it’s a matter of self-protection. It’s a matter of protecting yourself from the medical angle of not treating patients who are unknown to you.

Male voice: How close is it necessary to have that liaison?

It doesn’t have to be very close. All you have to do is get an examination. Let’s say you want to give somebody a Benzedrine run and so on. It’s all right with the doctor. It can be a friendly relationship whereby he collects the fees of examination.

Male voice: He doesn’t necessarily have to be in your office with you?

No, no, no.

Second male voice: The situation I think is almost exactly analogous to that of clinical psychologists—the way they operate now. The way they’re set up with the medical profession.

Mm-hm.

Male voice: Here’s another thing Ron. Sooner or later auditors are going to run into this situation, I would think. You may have run into it You put somebody in an engram and they’re going to depart this world right in the middle of it or something like that. And . . .

Yeah, I’ve never had it happen. And it’s always been my finding that a person going through it is better off to be dramatizing in present time any part of it.

I don’t think the chances of it happening are very good. If you’re working a case with a bad heart, you should be advised of it. This comes under the same heading as medicine. You should know that this man has a bad heart, and if you are working this man you should have the materiel at hand to revive him if that heart stops ticking on you.

Therefore, working him then is a liability—you have recognized it’s a liability, he has recognized it’s a liability—although you don’t make a big suggestion that it will stop because the suggestion alone is liable to be bad. You have a doctor to hand with adrenaline and so on. If you couldn’t start his ticker going again—I mean if he couldn’t under those circumstances, he’d be a pretty bad doctor, the way I look at it. Because after all, the heart isn’t going to explode. Maybe it would stop.

Male voice: Is it your impression that he would be less likely to die during therapy than he would just going around just normally?

Yes, less.

Male voice: I mean, that’s what I said, that’s because he knows he’s getting better He’s actually fighting something Mm-hm.

Male voice: And he would—he’s on an upgrade rather than a downgrade.

On such a case I would get off, by the way, painful emotion, and I would work very hard to get the painful emotion off the case before I did anything else.

Male voice: Like Carl.

Mm-hm. Like throwing him into an engram or something of the sort.

Male voice: There s another thing too, Ron. Maybe a little bit extraneous to this meeting and I probably missed it, I don’t know—but I’m rather puzzled how to recognize these so-called cases you refer to, about ready to blow and you don’t want to get into therapy or into a forty-hour session and you cant get away from it. It completely eludes me as to what kind of a person it would be. [gap] He is not a case that is all ready to blow. You see a lot of psychosomatic illness resting on that guy. But this little fellow down in Pennsylvania, I took him back down the track and we got a line charge off, flying in all directions. Yeah, you’re liable to have to stay with him; liable to have to stay with him.

Male voice: Well, how can you recognize him?

You can recognize him normally by an hysterical, nervous attitude, rather than a ponderous, grim manifestation. He’s nervous, he laughs too easily. There can be numbers of these. Or a patient who cried too easily. But don’t dwell under the misconception that a case like that has to be stayed with over such a long period of time.

I see you’ve gotten this information from a chap here who has two or three times, by working far too industriously into a case and too late at night, has suddenly found himself with engrams on his hands that he never should have tackled at that period of the night, and who has had to stick with it then for hours. You take people at a reasonable time of day and they can normally carry on.

Male voice: Well, the solution to that highly charged case of course is have painful emotion run off I mean, isn’t that right?

Mm. Well, let them blow. The quicker they blow, the better. You open up any psychotic cases, by the way, and at any slightest sign that they’re going to blow, for heaven’s sakes get it. And by the way, it seems to be possible to shift valence on a person in a painful emotional incident. Shift his valence and get the stuff to blow, which would not otherwise blow. That’s under observation at the present time.

Male voice: On that, Joe was running a guy the other day. And before he could get him into it, he got him into his father’s valence to blow off some of the charge.

Mm-hm.

Male voice: So that when he put him into his own valence, the full charge wouldn’t come out right there. Would that . . . ?

Well yes, that’s an old method of working it. You want painful emotion off the case though, get it off at its highest level. That is, get it off at its fullest volume.

Male voice: As soon as he can get into it in his own valence, get him in it.

Oh, yes sir, and let him get rid of it.

Male voice: Let me just ask you a question. In a highly emotional scene where there are one or more persons concerned in the scene going through terrific emotional furor, when you say by valence shift the preclear has to go in his own valence, describing it, but he’ll still retain emotion of the other two who were present in the scene?

Uh-uh. If he can get into his own valence, he can just experience what he felt and the whole thing will run out.

Male voice: Yeah. If he goes through one of the other valences . . .

He won’t get it.

Male voice: . . . he will not blow his own.

No. He won’t blow his own.

Second male voice: It will just take a little bit off so he can get into his own valence, that’s all.

Hm.

Male voice: That’s your valence shift.

Well, it’s important to know about painful emotion because as I say on a coronary case, something like that, and particularly in the case of the psychotic, so forth, those are the people that you want to get painful emotion off fast. And it will normally come fairly fast.

Male voice: I recognized that in my case where I was really charged when I got here.

Second male voice: When you get a lot of charge off of painful emotion, does that follow to any extent that you will have less charge on your pain engrams below it?

Well, you’re liable to have more somatic on them.

Male voice: More somatic. And that’s what you want on them. You want to get all the somatics you can get on them.

Yes?

Male voice: What would you say about the severe diabetic?

Severe diabetic? Evidently diabetes is curable by Dianetics, but no case has been run in Dianetics to date, no diabetic case has been run to this moment although one is in progress, and therefore an opinion couldn’t be advanced on it at this time. It seems likely, but that’s all.

Male voice: What is the danger? As much as a coronary?

Oh, the danger of the diabetic as opposed to a coronary? No, I suppose it would be something you should watch. I haven’t had much experience with these people. This brings it back to the fact that working in liaison with a medical doctor makes it possible for the man to be treated physiologically if necessary. And that is very definitely in the process. After you’ve treated two or three patients, even a skeptical medical doctor will be very happy to work with you.

Male voice: Aren’t there certain stages through which a diabetic goes which would be safer to work than other stages?

Well now, you’d have to ask a medical doctor about that. I’m not expressing any opinion. It’d have to be regulated by a doctor. You’ll understand more of this with a close study of it.

In any event, I want to close this particular session, I’ve just covered here loosely, trying to give you information intimately related to practice. We have some more specific things coming up tomorrow than this.

Male voice: Just one thing What about pregnant women? If someone wants you to run a pregnant . . .

Oh, someone wants you to run a pregnant woman. Now, you know very well that if this pregnant woman blows an emotional charge that it’s going to transplant. And you’re going to have a very strange sort of an engram in that child. And that engram is going to run off, “Go over it again. Boo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo,” and you’re liable to have actual emotional connotation, the very words that are going to have to be used against the child. I would say one is caught between the devil and the deep blue.

If the child is to have an easy birth, you must take out some of the tension off the woman’s birth and her having given birth before. This will ease any possibility of a postpartum psychosis. But if by any means whatsoever you can persuade the woman to go on through with it, calm her down about the whole situation and get her on through to the end of term and get the child delivered in silence, very soothingly and very quietly, then you can start to work on the woman before she has a chance to mess up the child’s life. That’s pretty desirable.

I wouldn’t make a practice of treating pregnant women.

Male voice: Just an aside off here, wouldn’t one partial solution be to use this ten-minute technique once in a while to knock it off?

Hmm. Hey, you know you’ve got an idea there. Yes, keep her flying level. Keep her flying level and advise her to keep her damn mouth shut when she gets into morning sickness and when she’s sitting on the John, and to stop arguing with the husband and just give her a general idea of what’ll happen, if.

That child is not going to pick up everything said to the woman. What is going to go through is when it’s implanted by an emotional disturbance within the woman. A high emotional disturbance will become transplanted, and a moment of shock. For instance, the woman falls down and everybody around her becomes very vocal. Or she has gone through a long ride and she is tired. Don’t talk to her because that is transmitted to the child. The child gets tired, too. So a woman should get rest and she should be treated at any moment when she is feeling badly even when she has a cold or something like that . . . [gap] . . . has a tendency to monologue, if she goes around the house—and how many women do this—they go around the house, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak, and then they sit down in a chair and pull themselves up against the table and there’s a thunk, see, they’ve bumped themselves on the table. “Oh my, I shouldn’t have done that. I just don’t know how I could possibly be so clumsy, I’m always so clumsy, I’m always falling into things, gee-whiz, I just can’t seem to help it.” Oh, boy! Now you’ve got a good engram, that’s a full-fledged, talkful engram. If she could just be persuaded not to talk to herself. If her husband could be persuaded to keep her calm and not upset hen Male voice: How about coitus?

Yes, yes, how about coitus? Up to the first missed period it’s absolutely impossible to tell whether or not she’s pregnant. All right, this means simply that it poses a terrible picture for the morals of the world because it means that men are going to have to do without coitus during many months of every pregnancy Eight months of every pregnancy It’s obvious that every man should have to take cognizance of the fact that there is no reason why coitus has to be painful It doesn’t have to be vis-a-vis, he doesn’t have to practically squash the child every time coitus is had. A certain gentleness as a practice is advisable. The kid’s a lot better off though when there’s no coitus.

I can point straight out to several examples and they are at hand because of the war. The mother conceived and the father went away before the first missed period and didn’t come back for a couple of years and in every instance those kids are healthier. They’re definitely healthier. Coitus is damned painful to the child.

Male voice: Well, how about the—just the mild clitoral contact and the positions that lend itself to that, anterior side and so forth?

Well. . .

Male voice: And the orgasm itself will knock the child.

It’s—yeah, the orgasm is bad enough. If coitus must be performed it had better be performed in silence, that’s a good point. A mother’s masturbation by the way is quite engraphic—the orgasm which follows it and so on. Mother very often does a lot of monologuing during masturbation, too, which makes it very interesting.

There is no doubt but what some Dianetic therapy can be administered safely to the woman in pregnancy. That’s the answer.

Well, let’s just call this session closed and see if we can’t get it at twelve o’clock tomorrow.

Okay.

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