View source for Spectrum From Psychosis to Clear (500828)

'''Date:''' 28 August 1950

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

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Here we are at the beginning of the third week. My comment is that normally the first two weeks are always the hardest. This morning a great many more auditing tickets and permission to audit will be granted.

The beginning of the third week should find you with at least a knowledge of Standard Procedure well enough to adjust in it so you can’t make serious errors, I wish to remark to you that the worst errors that you can make are exactly two. Two errors. One, invalidation of your preclear’s data. That is an error, a serious error which can lead to a great deal of trouble. The other one is the simple time-worn phrase, “Failure to reduce engrams.” When you are running an engram which you find will not reduce, there’s only one reason why it won’t reduce and that reason lies in the fact that there is an engram similar to it earlier in the case. Practically, that is resolved by finding the earlier engram and running back; and if that won’t reduce, a still earlier engram and running back. Now, naturally, there’s such things as misdirectors. Such a misdirector: “Well, I can’t go back at this point,” sends the person slowly on forward—rather operates as a bouncer. You can run into these phrases. The thing to do is catch that phrase either by hearing it and then running it several times rapidly to deintensify it, or by getting the phrase which is causing the bounce by means of a flash answer. Those two things will generally get you why the case is not proceeding properly.

In addition to that is non-coitus chains; the non-coitus chain, the chain of coitus where no coitus takes place. Johnny Campbell and Dick Saunders labeled it this and I think it’s very apt too. The statements in the non-coitus chain, of course, are very simple and very emphatic. “Go away,” and so on, and “Leave me alone” and “I don’t want it.” “I don’t want you.” “I want nothing to do with you.” And complicated by the fact that somebody may be saying, “Oh, come on,” and so forth. In other words, if you find a case unable to enter the prenatal area it’s a very good, wise thing to look for non-coitus. Let’s discover by Straightwire, investigate it, find out how Mama or Papa stood on the subject of sex, and having found that out let’s scout along the line and see if we can find any of the predramatizations of the sex.

Now, it s delicate going for these things. One doesn’t, in this society, take into account that procreation is the very stuff of which the future generations are made. That has somehow or other been overlooked. So we must have a sharp eye on this.

Now, we gave a stage demonstration one day and found a young man stuck somewhere in an engram which had to do with a boom! and Mama says, “I can’t get up,” and “I’ve got to get up”; “I will lie here for a while,” and “Oh, dear, lie there for a while,” and “I am coming in now,” and so forth. Getting the same effect, you see. This doesn’t mean that the only bouncers indicated are the non-coitus chain, but you see, sex is a common thing, too, so the gene has a sort of tendency of being sealed in.

Now, the whole job is to follow Standard Procedure. It was a very good review for you to read about Standard Procedure. You will find out that is the review we have been going over at length. There is a great deal to learn about this.

I think right about now you are in a state of agitational jitters which can best be resolved by trying to supply some of the matter and digesting it. Nothing for digestion like application. I remember the first time I ever put my hands on a twin-screw vessel. They are rather complicated. Trying to dock one of these things without taking out all the pilings and without knocking off all these plates from the side of the vessel is quite a target. Now, a sailing ship alongside a dock has its tricks but one always has brakes on a sailing ship. He has always got a nice set of rigs in the form of sails and if he comes up to the docks expertly enough he can always back the wind in the sails, even in a fairly large vessel. So that’s not difficult. But here’s a thrashing demon, a twin-screw vessel, and at that a war vessel—very sensitive.

You say, “Starboard engine, back one.” And you know, just back a little bit. And with enormous enthusiasm you hear this big wheel under the counter go crump! crump! crump! and all the water goes rushing up forward.

You know, I know what we’re up against to see this preclear start backing down the track. You have to be able to estimate your wind, current flows, et cetera. That’s the way it will look to you at first. Actually terribly easy. You have to know what you are listening to and you have to have a good idea about it. That’s a most important thing, and the best way to get a good idea about it is to run some minor engrams.

After you have opened a case more or less—I don’t mean that in terms of getting a case open so it’s running but I mean when you have started a case so that you are—well, you have tried for a little bit of a painful emotion, you have tuned up the perceptics, you have done this and that. If you find yourself a little bit nervous about what an engram does, your hands full from the time he fell down and bumped his knee— now, that isn’t going to hurt anybody. You can leave the engram half-reduced and miss all the bouncers and you will do it up royally, a bad job thoroughly—nothing is going to happen to this preclear to amount to anything. Particularly when you bring him back up the track; he is stabilized with the pleasure moment and the somatic will drop out.

Now get the time he went down the hill with a tricycle and is upset. Get the time when her doll was broken. If you can’t at all get him on the track then you have the best opportunity of all standing there and trying to find out about Straightwire, about where this person’s located on the track—because if you can’t get them moving they’re obviously stuck somewhere. And if you are unable to get them to contact any pain in the engram, find out whose valence they might be in. In other words, just go at it Standard Procedure. Try for your painful emotion and so on.And if you get real—if the case is moving, see if you can’t pull off as number one trick to get into the basic area, the running of a coitus or a courtship, kissing somebody or something, without a word being said about it in description by the preclear. In other words, take him to that stimulating moment and run him into that stimulating moment and without asking them what is really happening, but just making sure he is there and sending him right to conception. And see if you can get conception out of the case like that.

Remember, conception has a sperm sequence and an ovum sequence. Sometimes the ovum sequence doesn’t have much charge on it. Sometimes only the sperm sequence doesn’t have a great deal of charge on it, or vice versa. Sometimes the whole sequence, sperm or ovum, has no pain at all. A matter of fact, at a casual glance I would say the bulk of these have no pain in them. But occasionally there’s a yawn. Once in a while you’ll find three or four incidents that appear to be before conception. Conception doesn’t lift. Then get the bouncer earlier that will give you something to lift-Look over your case and see what you have got. But I think it’s high time you do some auditing. Mind you, there are still some of you that will not be released by your operator (PAs) because, after all, they are responsible for you. Sometimes, though, it happens that a person’s case is not sufficiently opened. The operator may feel that a high degree of restimulation may take place or something like that. So I think we can turn loose, from what I have heard, the bulk of the people here. It’s about time you got your hands dirty You can talk an awful lot about Dianetics. There’s a lot of talk. But beyond a certain point you start to pile up on a logjam there. It’s about time you started putting some of it into action. Now, let me see how enterprising you have been. May I see a show of hands on this? How many people here have made a test of Straightwire and have practiced it? Well, that’s fine. Now, how many people here did actually run an engram out of somebody? Fine, fine. How many people have gotten basic out of somebody?

You know, it’s a funny darn thing, but as you look across those hands you will be probably looking at your leading auditors. That’s a funny thing; I have noticed it right at the beginning. That will leave some of you people a lot to catch up with.

Now, how many have run a grief discharge out of somebody? Oh, good class! Let’s find out now how many have started erasure on a preclear? Now, let’s ask about your cases. How many here have unconsciousness off the basic area? Do you want to know what I mean? An engram—running the basic area with yawn full. How many have had a grief discharge off his case? Gee, by all reports you are running madly. This is a higher percentage than in Elizabeth. Oh, that’s all right. How many people here have obtained a possible release? Well, that’s about fair. How many people now have neither run off a grief discharge or anything in the basic area with yawns full? How many cases have not done that? Oh, that we’ll catch easily. We have got two weeks to go. The first thing you know, somebody around here is going to be cleared.

Male voice: How about those who haven t had five months’ experience in getting audited?

That’s just what I was talking about a minute ago. Your PAs have been jammed and holding back a lot of people, and by the way, this is an interesting thing. The professional auditor, of course, doesn’t always tell the person why he isn’t doing this—trying to save somebody’s feelings. But in Elizabeth we had quite a bit of trouble with cases being opened badly, opened so badly with breaks of the Auditor’s Code and so forth, that it required almost the full time of a professional auditor for a while to straighten the case up again. So it’s possible to involve a case up. That’s why we are being processed. They’re being cautious for your protection, actually.

Male voice: There are a number of us who haven t had five months’ experience in being able to be auditors; we haven t had any opportunity to be auditors.

That’s just what I am talking about. You may or may not have been picked by your PA. People taking the extended course are the lucky ones. Now, occasionally one can’t find a preclear that’s willing to lie still. There’s always that.

I want to talk to you now about the series of goals, again. You have a certain series of goals for which you are reaching in a preclear. Now, that’s only, of course, one series of goals. This applies to Processing Dianetics, Individual Dianetics, whatever you want to call it, auditing people to bring them up to the state of Release or Clear. Now, in this branch of Dianetics, the first goal, the second goal, the third goal, fourth goal or fifth goal and so on, these are important to you as a list.

Now, the first thing that you try to get off the case—you try to reduce it—or erase in a case, is a grief engram or a basic area engram, with yawns and so on. Erasure of the basic area engram, that’s the first goal—one or the other of those. It doesn’t matter which comes first-then both of these—that is to say, whichever one comes first. Then you get the other one. In other words, your grief engram is one and a basic area erasure is two, or basic area erasure is one and a grief engram is two.

You can erase an engram, by the way, and take everything off of it except its unconsciousness. Its anaten is still on it. It is a clear sign that there is an earlier engram which is holding down unconsciousness. That’s something for you to know. Now, that’s one and two.

Now, the next thing, in the matter of a goal, is to be getting an erasure. You say that this case is beginning an erasure. The next thing is—and by the way, you say this case is beginning an erasure, you can call that case well opened, well opened. Running off and reducing one engram out of a case, by the way, you can say there that the case is opened. Well, that’s just this fellows moving. That was your first one, actually, but these two are the better to watch. So that your next step then is a Release. A Release has most of the painful emotion off of the case, or he has had eradicated from it its chronic somatics. One or the other is a Release. Actually, one or the other takes care of the other pretty well.

The next step up is a Clear. The next step up—well, pardon me, I said a “Clear.” Now, just a modified word. Lets call it an erased case, that first one, an erased case. Now let’s have a ninety-day checked Clear. Because one frees enormous numbers of attention units in this process of erasure up the bank, and freeing these attention units gives the mind so much verve that nothing can restimulate for a while, and there may be some minor grief discharges or there might be some odds or ends left on the case that you wouldn’t ordinarily get at that period. You will get these in the ninety-day check. The case should be run for a few hours. The case should be run for a few hours at about ninety days, and then you have got the six-months’ check which is when its checked at six months after the last point of erasure. If that case checks out there, you have a certified Clear. Certified. That case absolutely will not relapse. Anyway, there will be no curve on it. You get an erased case, people— we call it loosely, generally call it Clear. But it’s a long way from a checked Clear and a certified Clear.

Now, another thing which you should know, those are the goals we are trying to attain. You get up those goals, one, two, three, four, five, six, and you will know that your case is doing fine. If the case, by the way, doesn’t move into one of these stages or doesn’t improve markedly, doesn’t seem to be increasing potentiality over any fortnight of auditing, or you are getting in six hours a week of auditing or something like that, if you don’t see a jump-up on the line, something has gone wrong.

This case should be opened all over again.

You will find a case will start in sometimes, go along fine and then suddenly bog. Now, there are reasons for bogging. There may have been some bad auditing there. There may have been some bad environmental changes. Somebody may be around saying, “All is delusion, and you are just imagining the things,” so continually that the person more or less folds up on you. But by and large it’s usually caused by just a new computation suddenly rearing its ugly head in the case. And if you watch it, you can get that new computation when it comes up. Bang! Up it comes. You knock it off. You have to treat these things sometimes as case openings. Once you get some unconsciousness off a case, though, it gets easier and easier to get material out of the case.

Now, there is a spectrum here which you would find, I think, very interesting. It is the psychosis-neurosis-normal-Release-Clear spectrum. Now, we are mixing up a lot of psychiatric jargon over here with a lot of Dianetic jargon over there, but I think that we still get an idea of what we are talking about.

Here, let’s say, this line, we are going to run the spectrum this way. This is psychosis. Now let’s say the width of this line is the measure of improvement in the case. Here we have neurosis. The next thing we have here is normal. This would be normal right about in here. And here would be the Dianetic Release. Here’s your Clear. Now, here are your comparative jumps. I am just drawing this more or less arbitrarily, but this is a fairly good graph of the jumps.

Now we will take a graph of the time. This is a graph—states of being, I will have to draw you another graph of time. The graph of time would be psychosis, neurosis, normal, Release, which is about the same as a Clear. Psychosis to neurosis. There isn’t any difference. The people are attributing—I wonder if you are aware of the fact that a person will automatically run without Guk. A person will freewheel without Guk. Yes, it works, and it even has a therapeutic value. It doesn’t work as fast, but it works. Now, all right. This would be a Release, normal, neurotic, psychotic. There’s the graph from the standpoint of time. You will notice here—I will make this graph integrate one to the other.

You will notice here that here’s a very small time degree. We are plotting this whole thing against time, and we are plotting this whole time against state of being. This is the increased stability of a person, to the length of time it takes to achieve it. Now, is that clear to you?

Psychotic to neurotic, if it’s going to happen, happens on the average—and you will call this an average of let’s say fifty cases to just give you some sort of result like this—it would happen in a very small amount of auditing. To be colloquial, a “psychotic bleeds” fast unless he falls into the inaccessible paranoid bracket, and somebody is dull enough not to find out who was the fellow who felt everything was against him. There is somebody in that family who is definitely pushed by the world and so forth. “Against me,” as part of the content of an engram, has a very markedly solving effect on any paranoiac case. Lots of people have “against me” without being paranoids, but if you have somebody who shows up paranoid, by the way, run “against me” on him. You will find there is somebody on him who felt all the world’s “against me.” Poor guy.

You see, this shoves all the engrams up against “I.” When this computation is triggered, “I” is deluged and sort of drops out of the case. Knocking out that one chain is an example of this, produces a marked effect. It’s an astonishing effect.

Now, this doesn’t mean that all psychotics are easy to treat, easy to break, easy to handle. They are not. You take that psychosis which one finds and which our society calls criminality, which is a psychosis. The person is very evenly balanced. I am going to give a talk on that later. A person seems to be conducting himself well in the society and so on. At long periods of time he is doing all right; then, all of a sudden, why, he murders or robs or does something like that. That’s psychotic. Well now, that gentleman is occasionally very hard to crack.

Into this same category would run a great many paranoiacs. The paranoiac is distinguished from a paranoid by the fact that the paranoiac has a specific thing which is after him, or is against him, and a paranoid just feels that things are generally against him. That differentiation has been made by psychiatry. We can still use that. It’s a very nice thing.

Now, the paranoiac, like most psychotics, is (to be technical) lousy with demon circuits. He is under a heavy battery of controls. Large sections of his analyzer are generally sawed off by circuitry, and you are occasionally made to feel that you are talking to a person who is very convinced, who has a great deal to offer and so on. And you sometimes feel there’s a little something wrong with this person. You don’t quite know what it is, and that person may not be a psychotic paranoiac, but the person probably has psychotic tendencies. He causes a great deal of trouble. Very often disguises it by trying to be a great deal of help. But the help which he gives causes enormous trouble.

You take a very clever paranoiac—Hitler was a paranoiac. He was going to help everybody out. But he winds up with everybody dead. It just sort of happens that way. These gentlemen are the hardest psychotics to detect, and they’re a special psychosis of criminality. That is one that gets sort of neglected. They have parked this over here and they have said, “This is none of our business. This belongs to the police.” And they left the police forces with this whole problem on their hands. But there is a definite psychosis, and it is a psychosis and it is contagious and it is thoroughly as dangerous as any other psychosis running round loose in society.

Well, so we get these groups. We will find that there are quite a few of them that are very, very difficult Dianetically. These fall into two classes. One is the inaccessible psychotic who is in a state of mind there and—by the way, this is a comment here: I am going to give you two lectures this morning, two subjects. This first one I am going to finish off, the psychotic, which is what I am leading up to, to give us the state on the spectrum; and the other one, right on the break, I am going to give you a paper here on the analytical mind. So we find out that although this is time on the average, this doesn’t mean that there are not psychotics around who have not been psychotic for a very long time, who are very, very difficult cases. They fall into the two categories: the inaccessibility because of irrationality, and inaccessibility because of uncooperativeness. The second breaks down into two classes of uncooperative: obviously uncooperative and unobviously, covertly—the covertly uncooperative. You substitute that for “covertly hostile” and you will have a clear understanding of that psychotic. The covertly hostile has permeated psychiatry for a long time. They talk about this covert hostility and so on, when it comes up to a point where it’s in psychotic classification. That is to say, the person is no longer—and the definition of “so psychotic” might be this: the person who is no longer able to handle himself in the environment. That’s a terribly general term, I know, but so is “psychotic,” only you know them when you see them.

The mind can measure these things sometimes when definitions can’t. The mind is very good at saying how red is a red bicycle, and in just such a way, it can say how psychotic is a psychotic. The whole state of your rationality, of course, is one long spectrum, which, at its bottom, finds a person unable to solve at any time, ever, any problem relating to his own existence in his own environment. And just above that, the person who is just occasionally completely unable to solve any problem of any kind in his environment. We are running in Dianetics a new type of psychosis. That is to say, acute psychotic—only occasionally psychotic; he is just as much a psychotic as the chronic psychotic, the person who is psychotic all the time. So you have two there. The chronic psychotic and the acute psychotic. The psychosis in its acute state, restimulated and so forth, is fully as dangerous as the chronic psychotic. In fact more so, because we are warned about the chronic psychotic. The acute psychotic baffles us. A person goes into a screaming rage suddenly and does something, then the law says the crime passionel or something of the sort. That is an acute psychosis. It’s a temporary break. The break will patch up afterwards. We find this most prevalent in this bracket over here of criminality. Criminals are normally acute psychotics. That is to say, they will occasionally break, and in the psychotic break they will do antisocial things.

Now, there are two other classifications of psychotics. One is the psychotic who is—this is very, very Dianetically speaking—the psychotic who is dramatizing one or more engrams, and the psychotic who is computing. That is the analytical psychotic or the dramatizing psychotic. Just the two types. You know what a demon is.

All right, an analytical demon psychotic or an engram psychotic. The engram psychotic does nothing but run the engram. You go into most institutions, you will—these are the most prevalent. You walk around and no matter what the person is doing, why, you will find yourself—and by the way, any of you who go into an institution are in for this little shock of seeing an engram. It is an engram. It’s a beautiful engram. It is being run off over and over and over and over. There it is. And it falls into two substates now. The engram can be in the process of continual dramatization, or the preclear, the psychotic—who will be your preclear if you start him into therapy—the psychotic can be in continuous state of obedience to it. In other words, he either dramatizes it or obeys it, as we know very well can happen. In either way, he escapes the pain of it.

This is how a psychotic gets locked down—if he failed to obey this, or if he failed to dramatize this he would have to take the full pain of it. One or the other. He is going to get the pain if he doesn’t either way: one, dramatize or two, obey.

By the way, these two classes of psychotics—the subclassification of the one who is running the engram is the engramic psychotic. The analytical demon psychotic, he is pretty monotone. If this demon isn’t obeyed, that is to say, the pain will turn on. But in this case we have a rather hideous picture.

Here are a couple of valences—valences are very important in psychosis—where this, lets say, is Papa/Mama. I am drawing a graphic picture now, of the brain and “I.” Now, this is a valence, and valences are allied to circuits, as you know. We have clarified that before. Valences are allied to circuits, so that the engramic psychotic goes over here. I will show you how close these are together, although the manifestations are different. Engramic psychotic will flick from this and dramatize what he is saying over to there, and dramatize what she is saying. In other words, you can get two dramatizations there. There actually can be fifteen or sixteen dramatizations there. You see how it can be. They dramatize these things, or in trying to remain as “I” they obey the commands which are handed out by these engrams. In any case, in any psychotic, “I” is swamped; “I” has been more or less pulled out through the bottom of the case; “I” is no longer powerful enough to control the body. Other control circuits have taken over. So this person is being continually pulled by this valence or that one.

Now, as you run a psychotic, you will find out these valence walls are very sharp. As you swing a psychotic through valences, you can almost hear the clicks as they go across these valence walls. They are completely inside these things. They drop over, there’s no “I” left to monitor, and that again is the characteristic of a psychotic—no monitoring “I.” So, we get a lower common denominator than we had here—no monitor. The monitor has been absorbed by valences and circuits.

Now, in running an engram, this little tiny scrap of “I” may be in complete obedience to these engramic commands, or T’ may be picking up a residence in this, after which it dramatizes the one engram as Papa or it takes up residence in this and dramatizes that same engram as Mama. Now, you see, that’s your psychotic at that standpoint. And now we will take the demon psychotic. And here’s, in the demon psychotic, no “I” at all. “I” has taken up residence in that demon and is that demon. An identification takes place between “I” and the analytical demon center. You see that? So you are listening to an analytical demon with such a psychotic. You are listening to that demon.

Now, if you ever go down a case and you experiment a little bit, you will find somebody has a demon and you can talk to the demon. It’s very much off line on Standard Procedure. I must comment. This is all research. You get close to the demon and you get back some weird answers. Now, if this person were ever swamped enough to become a psychotic, that demon would be the only thing which was talking. He would have control of his mouth. You get back on the psychotic, down the track, and we will find probably several engrams causing these demons. It’s a complex problem but we don’t find it complex in this instance. “I” is always inside the demon. In other words, the demon is the person. Do you follow that? So in order to break one of these people—they appear rational, they’re computing all the time. They say, “The Western Union Telegraph Company, you know, today they ran wires into here. And they’re listening to what I am saying at this very, very moment at the White House.” Now, you get that sort of a computation. They’re explaining all this to you. Or, “You know, I am actually president of this whole institution, and I am very busy. I am very busy,” and they start picking up mythical phones and so forth. And they give orders. In other words, they’re computing. That is the difference between the analytical psychotic and the engramic psychotic. The engramic psychotic does not compute. He just acts or obeys.

So, this is the personality of the many valences being—we won’t use the word personality in connection with this because they’re not personalities. They’re just slums of the analytical mind.

Now, the demon, because of control circuitry and so on, can set itself up and there may be somebody—they found somebody with five personalities, they said. Thought it was absolutely marvelous. Well, I found a psychotic once with twenty-eight personalities. It was fantastic, the force and power of these personalities. Each one was completely different. Why not? These were the valences and the demons left in the person through past moments of unconsciousness, aided and assisted by a command which let the demons alternately take over one after the other and be the person. In other words, they could play—all you had to break in that case was control circuitry. It was not trying to find even the identity of these people. When you tackled this case, you wanted to know who said “Control yourself.” You wanted to persuade this person into repeating these various things. “You have got to do what I tell you. You can only think what I tell you to think,” and so on, and other commands which caused analytical demons.

You will get quite a list of those commands as you get experienced as auditors. I couldn’t stand here and give you the whole list. There must be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these commands. “Get a grip on yourself” “Fight it down.” “Calm down, calm down.” “Control yourself; snap out of it”—various lineups of words. They set up artificial “I’s” pounding against “I.” In other words, terrific demands against “I,” which was here one time, but there are no attention units left here anymore. What you want to do is to try desperately to get this little zero of attention units filled up again. You want to get some attention units to the person’s own valence.

Running one of these analytical demon psychotics is one of the most thankless, arduous things which I know, unless you quite happily and quite by accident clip into a grief discharge. And that’s the way you really solve off psychotics. If you want to solve a psychotic, get a grief discharge. Get a grief engram out of the psychotic and the case will start to come back, because it seems to be grief which does the final conversion on the psychotic.

Naturally, we have this triangle of affinity, communication and reality. Cutting off his communication by control circuitry, repressions, will destroy his reality and affinity. The act of cutting off communications, of course, affected affinity. We have got that triangle at work there, and the three of them combined together and out goes “I.” “I” goes out as the monitoring unit, and we have in its place, in the one type of psychotic, the analytical demon (and there are many demons, or a few demons) or we have the person who is the subclass of just the engramic psychotic who dramatizes valence to valence of the engram. Now, this person is always held on the time track. The engramic psychotic is always held on the time track. And if you can get this psychotic pried loose from the holder, there is a possibility that he may come up to present time sane, which always startles one and all. He’s always held on the time track. We’re not that fortunate with the analytical demon psychotic; he is held in place by control circuitry; engrams have become restimulated, grief has ordinarily poured over him and swamped—has converted the anaten in the case (if that’s what grief does). And we’ve got a much broader picture because this guy is agile. We start talking and we find out today he is being—he even may have a different name for himself; he may say that his name is George today, or tomorrow he may be Peter, and a few days later he may be something else. He has distinct personalities; they’re not personalities, just analytical demons, just stuff set up by commands.

Now, we have these three types of cases going over there already. We have the analytical demon—the way we resolve these things is—we have the analytical demon, we try to knock out the control circuitry. Always first try to get some grief off the case. We try to knock out this control circuitry. The engramic psychotic (of course, they’re all engramic psychotics except it’s a specific type)—the engramic psychotic who is doing nothing but dramatize, we try to get him to repeat the holders, bouncers and so forth in the engram which he is dramatizing, and to shift over into other valences. Particularly, get the bouncers and the holders out of this engram. Of course, you also want the denyers and the rest of them if this doesn’t work. But sometimes if you just shoot the bouncers and the holders out, he can come up to present time.

Now, you get him to repeat these things and with what fine art you do this—”I” is obeying the engram; the “I” is still there a little bit but in obedience to this engram we have more or less the same problem. But sometimes this person is not really held in an engram but is merely being—I mean, not 100 percent in the engram. The one who is dramatizing it though is 100 percent in the engram; there is nothing left over. It’s a reliving of the moment. The other side of the picture is the one who is obeying and you’ll find out this one who is obeying can move— ordinarily he has a few little attention units, can still be moved on the track—and that one is the easiest because if you can get that—usually these cases are so hot, they’re so live that you start what’s left of “I” down the track into a grief engram and you get a real explosion.

Now, there is your spectacular psychotic. If you want to walk into an institution and do tricks, you pick one of these that can still move a little bit on the track and can get into a grief engram and it’s like monkeying with a 10,000 volt switchboard, you get sparks all over the place. It becomes very, very interesting. Even a catatonic schiz, what they call a catatonic schiz—although I’ve never quite been able to figure out why; I don’t think they have either. The catatonic schiz, by that I just mean a person who is lying motionless or more or less inert.

You see a little gradient of a catatonic would be somebody who maybe couldn’t go out of the house. You see, he’s restricted motion. So you get less and less motion, less and less motion, finally the person will lie there in a complete state. You’ll sometimes walk in and you’ll see— you’ve taken preclears down the track, you’ve seen them go into this and go into that state, you’ve seen them roll up in a ball, you’ve seen them do various things. You’ll find the psychotics are doing these things, only they do them all the time. Or they do them from 10:00 to 2:00 every morning, afternoon. You’ll find psychotics run on time clocks; very accurate time clocks, they’ll have to be in wet packs and so forth all morning long, and in the afternoon, want to go shopping. You see, the engram has a time clock on it. This engram happened every morning and the time of this engram, the time tag on it says from 10:00 to 2:00 or from 8:00 to 12:00 or something like that. All right. One engram of which I became the—made an acquaintance with, had a time check on it for 10:51. At 10:51 at night it triggered, and it triggered at 10:51 every night but it was worse on Mondays. And it did this as a cycle. Of course, this was the time tab on the engram. You see, you can work out how many variations of it.

Now, I’ll give you a couple of short tips on treating psychotics; I’m not going to give you an awful lot on the treatment because actually there isn’t an awful lot to say. You get to them or you don’t, sort of a thing. It takes you a long time or it takes you a very short time. You have to establish their accessibility and so on. These depend on your winning their confidence, these depend upon your patience. And, oh Lord, can you be patient with one of these people. You may work on this person for two hours on Monday without getting a single response. You may work for two hours on Tuesday and get the response of two words. You may work on Wednesday, and for three minutes of your two-hour period, you get response and you actually get them to repeat a holder. They go over the holder a few times, over the holder a few times with no results. Thursday you contact this holder again and you get them to repeat it now five, six, eight times and all of a sudden they laugh, “Ha-ha, that’s silly.” You get a psychotic to repeating something by working continually. I worked one here a very short time ago who had this as the circuitry and this was a circuitry psychotic: an analytical demon psychotic. And the command which made her one was “You’ve got to behave yourself.” That was the command, there it sat all over the case: “You’ve got to behave yourself; you’ve got to behave yourself.” This case was salted with it from one end to the other, probably all through the prenatal bank and so on. And I actually got her back to an early “You’ve got to behave yourself” and got her to repeat it. Now this is a triumph because this person was a transvestite, five years a psychotic—one hundred electric shocks with curare, an undetermined number of insulin convulsive shocks and a very large number of insulin comas. I’d say this was triumph because enough—not enough attention units are left after treatment of that character to bother about. So I actually got her to repeating, “You’ve got to behave yourself” And she went over it: “You’ve got to behave yourself, you’ve got to behave yourself, you’ve got to behave yourself. You’ve got to be . . . Doctor, why do I have to behave myself?” she asked me suddenly and at that moment dived off into an irrationality. Actually, old man pain was standing right there ready to come through the second she questioned this engram.

What kind of a beating accompanied that phrase 1 don’t know. Her attention units were so few, for instance, she’d go through a normal conversation—you’d get her back to a normal conversation and it would go through a, “Well, I think I’ll leave now,” Just somebody talking casually, and she’d bounce, and you couldn’t get her back down on the bouncer. You’re working with practically no force, so you really have to cope when you’re in there with a psychotic.

Psychotics are not, properly speaking, our business, and in Preventive Dianetics we have very definitely the tool which will prevent psychosis, will prevent psychosis. Our biggest job is to prevent future psychoses rather than to go charging out in the world today and rescue every psychotic. In the first place, many of these psychotics have been put completely beyond contact. Electric shocks are quite often remediable; they are not fatal. If a person comes through a few of these shocks and can still pilot himself around in the world, he can still be squared around by Dianetics. But now we start into one hundred shocks, electric shocks, convulsive with curare. Nah, it’s just getting too much. I mean the point of no return has been reached, easily. Now, how far we can rescue this person—too bad.

In a similar way, this is not only iatrogenic. Iatrogenesis (that means caused by doctors) is not the only reason why the psychotic is a tough problem. Your psychotic, about 30 percent of them or more are organic psychotics. That is, any psychosis or aberration they demonstrate is running on engrams, but something has happened to the nervous system on an organic level. That something is not peculiar; I mean, you can lay your hands on it but it would be like paresis. It would be, well, I don’t know, somebody gets a bullet in his brain. Somebody goes through the wall and he has a fractured skull; he has a broken spine or something of this sort happens and it deranges his nervous system. [At this point there is a gap in the original recording] You mean a punch-drunk fighter?

Male voice: Yes.

He’s talking about punch-drunk fighters; they’re not so bad. They come out of a remarkable amount of stuff. You can work a . . .

Male voice: A brain tumor.

Oh, yeah, a brain tumor often sets in with them. But an awful lot of the stuff that makes a punch-drunk fighter look punch-drunk is just an engram. “Get in there and fight, you bum. Get up! Get up! Kill him! Kill him!” They’re listening to this; they’re being slugged continually Anytime a man would adopt a profession which had around him a large ring of maniacs and who permitted himself to be hit and jarred—the guy is crazy in the first place.

Now, we are working hard at this time on mechanical aids to increase the accessibility of the psychotic, and we have got Guk. Guk is not well tested on psychotics at this time but by demonstrations there is a hope that got enormously improved; may be able to resolve the problem rather easily, so that we can get remissions easily I reemphasize a point that the psychotic is a ward and has ever been labeled as such, is a ward of the states. He very properly belongs in the hands of a psychiatrist. My sympathy is really with the psychiatrist when it comes to the psychotics because I know of no more thankless or horrible or nasty job or profession than handling psychotics. Your institutional psychiatrists have really been holding that line with a two-bean shooter.

Of course, psychiatry means the practice of mental healing. It doesn’t mean a school of healing. Now, an institution such as Virginia Medical and some others are becoming increasedly interested. We are getting correspondence quite readily from Menninger in Topeka, Kansas. We are doing our best of putting in the hands of psychiatry a better weapon. That is actually, in my belief, all function and duty toward the psychotic. I believe it should go straight through the hands of psychiatrists, but you are professional auditors.

You are going to be called in on many, many cases by psychiatrists and by family. If you are called in on a case of a psychotic by some family, the first thing you do is to try to find out what psychiatrist has been treating this psychotic. And then you contact that psychiatrist, or if a medical doctor has been treating that psychotic you contact that medical doctor. And you handle it 100 percent with the psychiatrist or the medical doctor. The reason for this is very, very definite.

The family, quite often, doesn’t know anything about the case. The case may have had many things happen to it from various channels of which you would know nothing. Just to hit one of the cases with no knowledge is dynamite. A psychotic will occasionally break. He has broken in the past. He will break in the future. Somebody may come along and say to him, “Do you know that the caves of this world are filled full of little men who are seeking to rule mankind?” That he will be very interested in and maybe the next day have a break. He goes down to a bar—somebody lets him out of sight—and somebody gives him a drink and then they give him a restimulative word, and there he has a break. Or his wife, halfway down the course of treatment, suddenly decides that he has to be bawled out again, and you have a break. Or the husband decides to leave her and you get a break. In other words, here you are dealing—any psychotics can be expected to fluctuate above the slight line of rationality—ambulatory, able to open doors and maybe even talk to people—and on the other side of the line, into being a precipitation. All psychotics are cyclic this way. There are very few of them 100 percent of the time day in and day out. So when you handle a psychotic—somebody says, “This person has been institutionalized”—or after you have asked for some psychometry on this person, find out here you have a history of breaks. You go ahead and treat this person? A doctor would not think of touching somebody else’s patient without finding out what had gone on. You, in the capacity of an auditor, shouldn’t think of testing a psychotic without a very close liaison with a psychiatrist or medical doctor that has had this case.

I know that you will occasionally be sparked up to a feeling of great gallantry, a feeling that something must really be done about this person. And you may feel that the emergency is such that, because here this person may be clinging dramatically to a ledge about ready to take the plunge down into the canyon of the street, and you think, “Well, here I am, an auditor. I should know how to push his button in order to get him back into the room.” I will tell you how to push his buttons. There’s only one way in which I know. That’s to take a pistol down on the street and start shooting at him. He will go right back inside. Don’t start using Dianetics suddenly on this character. You may all of a sudden find that you have somebody on your hands who’s going to take seventy-five hundred hours of your time. I mean, the case looks so easy, that there you are with no time to spare, with a job one hundred hours long—would bring this person up to a full release. Maybe he’s possibly one of these analytical demon psychotics. And boy, that really takes some work! So, the psychotic really belongs to the psychiatrist. (Recording ends abruptly)

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