View source for Starting Off a New Preclear (501102)

'''Date:''' 2 November 1950

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

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The dividing line between aberree and preclear is a very sharp one. It is the moment when you make up your mind you are going to run the person. You have looked him over and decided he was not too bad off, you have decided you had a little time to invest, and it would not be too much of a strain one way or another.

The first thing you do is look him over dianetically. Find out something about him just by looking at him. First we want to know if this person is accessible or not. That is important. People who are not accessible are hard to run! This may be a beautiful, wise point of obviousness but there are many gradients that are not quite so obvious. Would it occur to you, for instance, that a person who would talk to you apparently perfectly normally would be inaccessible, and that you would have to do something to create an accessibility? The definition of accessibility is whether or not engrams can be contacted and run in this person to the advantage of increasing his level of sanity. That is accessibility, not whether you can ask him for a cigarette and get one.

The “I can’t believe anything,” no-reality case can be classified as almost inaccessible. You will have to do something to create an accessibility in this person. He may be able to talk to you about the stock market or the dog races; he will be able to walk around and hold down a job; sometimes a very good job, too. But his sense of reality is practically zero.

Engrams that say “I can’t believe” are accessories to the crime, but you can’t hit those engrams before you do something else to this case. You will just have to talk to this person for a little while, not to try to convince him with anything in particular but to pick up his sense of reality. If he has got an “I can’t believe it” attitude about life you will see that attitude very strongly reflected when you start to work on him. People who do not believe in Dianetics, by the way, are neither crazy nor real “I can’t believe it” cases; they are just indifferent when looking over evidence. It is very easy to explain this and that to them. They say, “Yeah, sure”—normal skepticism.

I am talking instead about the case who says, “Well, I don’t believe I’ve got any engrams. I don’t believe this will do me any good,” and so on. He might not even be using the words I don’t believe. This man can’t believe himself; he doesn’t believe he is there.

One boy ran up to me one time after a talk and said, “I looked over Dianetics, read the book about three times, and I just can’t believe any part of it. Somebody has tried to run me and didn’t reach anything; I don’t believe there are any engrams.” I said, “How do you feel about medicine?” He said, “Well, medicine can’t do you any good.” “How do you feel about psychiatry, psychoanalysis?” “That’s—can’t do you any good.” “How do you feel about education?” “Well, that’s . . .” I said, “Well, are you there at all?” He thought about it, looked at me blankly and said, “Well, I never thought about that before. I don’t know.” Putting this person in reverie, you will get some very interesting results. You can even take him back down the track someplace and by good fortune get him enough into contact with reality to go through a very aberrative engram. You reduce this engram and run it out and he still doesn’t believe that anything has happened to him. That is a decreased sense of reality, not a “can’t believe” engram at work.

Sometimes an auditor will take a case and start in desperation to grope for “I can’t believes,” when that is no more what is wrong with the case than a lot of “I can’t hears” is what’s wrong with a nonsonic case. A nonsonic case normally does have a lot of “I can’t hears,” but you pay no attention to these. You do not turn on sonic by running these things out. We are dealing with the same problem now, exactly.

The person who says  “I don’t trust you” is a relatively inaccessible case, because you can’t start affinity with him. Here are all three points of the affinity, reality, communication triangle. The person who doesn’t believe any of the words that come through to him or any other thing that he perceives, the person who can’t believe that there is anything happening or that there is anything to it, and the person who is unable to establish anything like affinity with you, these are inaccessible cases at first.

Almost the entire effort of psychiatry is leveled at accessibility. It is so interesting to the psychiatrists after it has been achieved that they will normally say this person is a remission. That’s right. They have achieved accessibility on the case. This is no blast on psychiatry, this is their modus operandi. They get the case so the person will associate and talk to you and associate with himself, and call it remission.

What they have accomplished is accessibility—the person goes into communication with life. Insanity could be called being out of communication with life or with the rational world. Right along with out of communication, of course, go no affinity and no reality. That is our triangle.

Starting at the toughest level of accessibility there are two types of psychotics: computing and dramatizing. The computing psychotic is an animated demon circuit. In all the personality there is only one thing in operation, a demon circuit; you are talking to a demon circuit. The dramatizing psychotic is one who lives or dramatizes an engram. He sometimes runs it verbally and sometimes dramatizes it physically. For example, a dramatizing psychotic will be walking around dramatizing an engram, “Everybody’s against me, everybody hates me, I’m going to go away and leave them all, I just can’t stand it anymore.” Of course you can’t get it run out because it is probably the eighteenth engram on the chain, and he is only running one valence of it.

A catatonic schizophrenic is dramatizing an engram or is very low on communication, affinity and reality. The paranoiac would be a computing psychotic; he has a circuit. The circuit may say, “You know everybody is against you. You’ve got to do something about it. Now, think it over and you’d better change, you better reform,” and so on. This person goes out and suddenly says, “The US government has gone into league with the Western Union and they have just run through magic wires into my head so they can tell what I’m thinking down in Washington.” He is computing on the engram. The analyzer is cut off by the demon circuit and he is running on just that section of analyzer. He is the circuit.

You will understand the stupidity of insanity if you find a demon circuit in a preclear sometime and talk to it. You will very often find the chronic circuit. (I warn you that if you start talking to a demon circuit you will strengthen it a little.) These circuits are ordinarily gruff and unmannerly. Sometimes they are apparently quite bright, but you run just so far and then they get stupid. The auditor who can’t figure how to get around demon circuits is bad off, because they are so very dumb. Talk to a demon circuit for a little while and you will get a good idea of how a computing psychotic will talk. There is a terrific variety of manifestations and psychoses but you can break it down into those two parts—computing and dramatizing.

It is interesting that very few of the people who are insane are in institutions. The kind of people in the institutions are those who, if they were allowed to be loose, would harm themselves or others, or would be a great deal of trouble to others. That is a very specialized type of psychotic. There are all kinds of psychotics who won’t harm anybody physically (that is, not today—maybe tomorrow) and who won’t harm themselves, except of course by way of making themselves fail utterly and completely in life, ruining their own and everybody else’s marriages, or beating up the children—little things like that.

Many kinds of psychotics are not accessible at all. Talk to such people and you actually talk to a demon circuit.

Don’t define a psychotic as somebody in an institution, then. That would be an error. Very few people realize that there are open psychotics doing a days work in this world. It is whether or not they are harmful or troublesome that makes society take notice; but they can be very psychotic and not be harmful or troublesome.

By the way, the next research project is to speed up accessibility and make it very rapid so we can empty these institutions.

Now, most of you are going to be out in society, not working in the institutions, and it will be common for a man to come to you and say, I’d like to have you work on my wife. I don’t know why, but she keeps telling me that I’m no good. I just can’t live with her anymore, and I don’t want to get a divorce because, after all, I’ve got twelve kids. . . .” You will meet this girl, she belongs to a bridge club and she does this and that. You are just talking to a big demon computation right there, blocked up securely on the second, third and fourth dynamics. She acts with such a high level of irrationality that if anyone with the least bit of rationality takes a look, her actions will look very peculiar. Sometimes the mores of the society seem to support her in what she is doing. You are working then with an inaccessible.

Now, trying to say to this lady, “Would you please sit down on the couch and close your eyes,” would be very, very difficult to do. She would probably start telling you something or other but you wouldn’t be able to track very easily along what she was saying. She might sound rational (like a TV show!) but somehow it just would not all connect up logically on anything. Were you to sit down and try to argue this person into something—and this is why I am bringing this up—you would not be able to argue her into anything.

How easy is it for you to make a person change his dramatization unless you just push his buttons? I’m talking about the ordinary run of life. Did you ever see anyone change his convictions just by being talked to? Did you ever see a Mohammedan converted to Buddhism in half an hour’s conversation on the level of logic? No, you never have, and you are never going to change a person from inaccessible to accessible by talking to them logically.

A way to get them into engrams is to push their buttons so hard and turn on so many somatics that they slide into the engrams. And then they want to be run, madly, as the only way out. This is a very clumsy method. Another way is to pick up somebody in their vicinity who is suffering from something very specific and demonstrate something on the second party, such as on a child. That is not the optimum method, but it does pick up their sense of reality: You took something in their environment and altered it to the better. They were interested in this so you picked up their affinity. Now you can talk to them a bit better, but you had best not talk to them on anything except Straightwire, because they will do the lightest, easiest things first.

Don’t just say, “Well, that’s all there is to it. Your husband said that you had to be treated. Now, shut your eyes and let’s go back down the track.” The instant she finds out her husband said so (he might have told her so anyway just to help you out), you are going to be in trouble. She is probably running on an engram that says she can’t do anything her husband says and he has said, “You’ve got to go into Dianetics.” Will she work with you? No, indeed.

The inaccessibility of a person is measured by the accessibility of basic personality. Basic personality is usually the one who forces the person through.

Once in a while an engram stupidly teams up with basic personality and gives you an assist. Don’t leave that engram in place; rather, knock it out if it comes up. An example of this is I’ve got to get rid of it. I’ve got to get it out. If I don’t get it out I’ll just go mad. I’ve got to get rid of it now. Please do something for me, please help me.” This is actually a dramatization, it isn’t talking about Dianetics. The person’s mother had something in her, a baby; the engram doesn’t specify “baby,” so Dianetics is a subject which can work just as well. But when you get started, the preclear shifts over to the other part of the engram that says,  “Oh dear, go away. You’re hurting me.” You will drive yourself daffy with this case if you don’t know what you are looking at. You put him into reverie, he goes down the track, up off the couch, won’t cooperate, out of reverie—and in two or three days he comes around and says how much you have got to help him. That is inaccessibility.

How do you work on that case? Should you talk him out of that engram? No, that engram is probably way up the track where you would not get it anyhow; it is not that obvious. Instead you pick up the person’s sense of reality. The world is not real to this person. You have got a dramatizing psychotic on your hands.

This word “psychotic” can be very useful. Nobody, however, put in between “neurotic” and “psychotic” any kind of a step as there should be. There are a lot of phrases, such as “free psychotic,” “incipient psychotic” and so on, but no good ones to describe the step in there. The psychotic is usually the person who will harm himself or harm others and is institutionalizable. The next echelon up is people who are just as crazy but who are walking around in the society. What are you going to call those people if you don’t call them psychotics? The next category up is “neurotic.” Now, it is a normal thing in the society at the present time to be neurotic (there is even a book on the stands called Be Glad You re Neurotic), so you can’t call these people neurotic.

From all-the-way mad up the line to all-the-way sane is a series of very small steps. You can mark places on this scale. The one place which isn’t marked is from neurotic down to psychotic. Many varieties of people who are in the band between neurotic and psychotic are often classified up in the normal band. So we will put together a scale, and we will call each level just so many degrees of sanity. You would have, for instance, 0, 1 sane (“insane” has no meaning anyway). One-tenth of one percent below optimum would mean not sane. Classified in such a way, these cases will be made easier for you to work.

You have to find out things which make your course easier for you; therefore it is important for you to take a look at your preclear to determine whether he is actually a person who is normal or above, or whether you are dealing with a dramatizing psychotic or what. Some of these cases will be utterly frantic to be treated but then they can’t believe anything you say. These various combinations are very hard on you. You try to establish communication with them or you try to give them a little more reality than they have or you try to establish an affinity with them. There is the way you start with anybody, really.

You do a great deal toward entering the case with just your inventory—not a formal diagnosis, but just the inventory of incidents which might be of interest to you or things you are looking for in potential engrams. By starting this inventory and going down the line, you will do more than just discover information for yourself. You go into communication with this person, take an interest in him and take him through his own past, making him remember; therefore affinity is being established. If he starts answering any of these questions, affinity will start to strengthen even though he swears he doesn’t know the answer.

You want to know the answers, certainly. You would be in a bad way if you started running foreign language cases by repeater technique with English in the basic area, I did that once and had a bad time.

You should know whether or not a person has been hypnotized or been given shock therapy. These are very interesting points to you because you may have to tackle the case right there, at those strata.

Find out whether or not this person has ever been institutionalized for any psychosis. Sometimes you sit down and talk with this preclear and the family has never told you anything of the sort, but he says, “Oh, yes, that was last year when I was in Atlanta,” “Were you visiting friends?” “No, I was in a sanitarium for the mentally ill, I didn’t destroy myself, but I used to get depressed, I certainly used to get depressed,” “You tried to commit suicide?” “Oh yes, I think I’ve tried a hundred or two hundred times, cutting my wrist.” About this time you start to get pale because you realize that if you don’t handle this case right he is liable to . . .   So what do you do?

It’s not illegal in the society to cause a person to commit suicide, but it is in Dianetics. I can absolutely guarantee I’ll suspend such an auditor’s certificate.

The only person I know who tried anything desperate was one who got that way because nobody would work on him with Dianetics. Working on them is evidently better than nothing, but what do you work for? Start in and establish an affinity, communication and reality. Do it by Straightwire. Start picking up the attention units of this case and bolster the person’s morale. Go back and knock out some more charge. Handle this case with kid gloves, but also demonstrate to him that something good is going to happen.

When you pick up morale and tone you are working with Straightwire. Starting the case with inventory is Straightwire. You ask this fellow if he has ever been hypnotized. He thinks for a moment, he remembers somebody told him that he had been hypnotized, then he remembers all of a sudden that he has been hypnotized. And just that much charge goes out of that hypnotism.

Inventory is a very nice start, because it seems that he is not yet being worked on—although indeed he is! Many people who would resent and resist being worked on in any way, shape or form will go through an inventory readily. You could probably carry one on for as much as fifty or sixty hours. When you get a smile or a chuckle off one of these questions, you know that you have blown some charge off a lock.

Straightwire has a lot of bonuses: the establishing of communication, the picking up of reality by remembering the past in terms of the present, and the establishing of affinity by your being interested enough to sit there and ask him some questions.

There is a motto: “Always make them do something they don’t want to do.” Well, this applied to children doesn’t happen to work, but applied to preclears it is perfect. That’s right, never let them do what they want to do; always make them do what they don’t want to do and I believe you will be about 85 or 90 percent correct. I have never had a preclear ask me to do the right thing yet.

The preclear saying, “Tell you what to do,” is the sign that you have not got the computation on his case. The instant you find the computation on his case he will start slugging without worrying you anymore. When you make him compute his own case you waste a lot of time.

To sum up, the number of times it is necessary to depart from Standard Procedure is exactly zero.

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[[Category:Lectures 1950]]