View source for What Dianetics Can Do (500923)

'''Date:''' 23 September 1950

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

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I’m going to try to tell you what Dianetics can’t do, what it can do, tell you about a few case histories. Mr. Burton, would you give me those case history books, please. (Here I come on without my props.) You know, there is a school of thought running in the country today, a school of thought that says that Dianetics is such a miracle it can do anything. Now I heard two people, neither one of whom knew anything about Dianetics, one arguing for it, and the other one arguing against it. And the one arguing for it said, “Well, you know, Dianetics, being what Dianetics is, you could actually take a sharp ax or something like that and chop a mans spine in half, and if you picked up the engram immediately it would grow together once more.” (laughter) Thank you. Thank you. This is not true.

As a matter of fact, Dianetics—Dianetic processing—is a fairly precise art, but it is still an art. It is something that one does with a full knowledge of the principles and the practice of it.

You take a professional auditor, he can go into a case, usually, (if we certify him, he sure better)—go into a case rather rapidly and open it up, roll it, get places with it. Sometimes a person who has merely read the book is so afraid of hurting somebody or is practicing tacit consent to such a degree or is so slightly conversant with the principles—they were there on the page, but they just weren’t quite picked up—that I could imagine somebody running five or six hundred hours and accomplishing relatively little.

I have seen a man’s wife, for instance—this man is, incidentally, very close to the Foundation. I should blush about this. This one gentleman has a wife who is rather afraid of him and he has some engrams that tell him he—if he just lost it he would die. So, as a consequence he’s rather resistive. But he’ll lie down on the couch and she sits there and writes down everything he says. This—she’ll even tell him to go back down the time track. Of course what he is doing is staying in present time, running dub-in. When I found out how long they had been at this, I almost passed away. They have done it for five hundred hours. What a fantastic waste of time. So a professional auditor went into the case. Of course, it was sitting right on top of a big grief charge and a terror charge and three or four engrams that had to be resolved, but were quite painful And he picked this man up about four feet off the couch, knocked pieces of plaster off of the ceiling, used up—by the way, we measure grief charges in terms of Kleenexes: there’s the—there’s the four-Kleenex charge and the ten-Kleenex charge. And they got a full box off of him! And all of a sudden his tone started to rise and people could start living with him. But we run into these slight difficulties right there at the Foundation, Someone will sneak off and start this “patty-cake” auditing, I’m not responsible, really, for the terms in Dianetics, I tried to keep it so scholarly and so pure.

Once upon a time engrams were called “comanomes,” The phrase garbage isn’t used much more, but it meant “dub-in,” But there’s dub-in. These are very colloquial terms. You introduce a very fine term; it has several syllables; it rolls nicely on the tongue; one can look rather pompous when he says it. And the professional auditors will look at you and they’ll say, “Mm-hm, Mm-hm, Mm-hm,” And they’ll go off, and day after tomorrow you’ll find out that they call a chemical assist—they’re calling it “Guk,” Here is something new in the way of a language and it has its own— definitely has its own language that’s growing up around it. And the language is native to it and comes out of it spontaneously. It isn’t something somebody is thinking up. It’s just “There it is! What do we call it?” For instance, you take the word pianola case. Now, what would they use, for instance, to designate a case that was wide open, had sonic recall, visio recall, pain—no pain shut-offs, or anything—and you just said, “Go back to the earliest moment of pain or unconscious,” and the fellow went. And you say, “Go to the beginning of the engram,” and he goes. And you run it out. And it erases. Well, they’ve begun to call this the “pianola case” because it plays itself, I don’t seem to be able to keep these boys as sober as I should!

Now, the difference of auditing skill is enormous from person to person, I have seen people around who have just read the book who are darn good auditors. And the worst PA compares to them like light and darkness. It is very interesting, the amount of skill and hammer and practice. There’s an awful lot of technology, evidently, which grows up and gets into it completely outside the book. The book works; you can read the book and you can do the auditing in it, and—but there are degrees of how fast and how well I don’t mean to crush anybody here who is working with the book. Unless you are content just to sit there and write down what somebody says, you’ll get—you’ll get processing done. It’s how fast you get it done that counts.

Sometimes cases bog down and the book isn’t too adequate on starting up cases again. The first bulletin of the Foundation which released Standard Procedure does a little bit more for you, but there’s even more can be done on that. Dianetics is very hard to keep pace with. It can be chopped off any thirty days and it will [be] found to be very much in advance of what it was thirty days before. And each time one chops it off, one says, “Well, it can’t go much better than this. It can’t get any better than this. And we can just forget about it now and go on.” But then thirty days later it’s altered again.

We had to cut off the Research Department at Elizabeth from the School, because the curriculum couldn’t be set up accurately. And John would put together a curriculum, beautiful outline, he would give it to the Professional Auditor Instructors, and they would go in and start teaching the students very nicely. And, then somebody down in Research would nudge him and they’d say, “Say, you know, have you heard about this such and such, and you do so-and-so, you know, and it happens?” And you—for instance, you find out the meanest person in A’s life. And you keep finding out the time when this meanest person was the meanest possible to A. And he says, “You start running this out and the first thing you know, you find an ally. Somebody protecting A.” Ah, well this is very smart. And the next thing we know, it’s up in the School. And it isn’t in John’s outlines. So there sit the boys, and they wait patiently for something to be said about how you reach an ally with this new method. And then they tell the Instructor. But he’s been so busy he hasn’t had time to read about it.

So, the chaotic condition of instruction there was such that we had to put out of communication the School and the Research Department because they were completely upsetting each other continually. Somebody came along one day and started to run early lives on people. I say somebody, it was me. I—one Sunday morning I was very bored. I hadn’t done anything for several hours. And—it’s been very hectic back East, just as it’s been hectic in Los Angeles and—nevertheless this was a calm Sunday, and I had heard several times, people talk about early lives. So, a young chap there, the son of a rather famous author, who had been hanging around the Foundation for some time—I hadn’t found any use for him. So I decided I’d set him up as a guinea pig and I’d see if I could go back and find out a time when he lived before the time when he lived, just in straight reverie. So I sent him back to the time when he died last. I said, “Now the file clerk will give us the last time you died,” wondering what I would get. And I got a death. Oh my, here he is lying on a field of battle—it’s very touching—he’s lying on a field of battle and the horses step on him and the men at arms are screaming around him. And oh, he’s having an awful time. And he lies there on the floor, and he rolls and rolls. And I was—finally got wise to the fact that something was going on here that I had not wot of before. This seemed like a real engram.

So, I said, “The file clerk will now give us the death necessary to resolve the case,” And I got a death—I got a death at 35,000 B.C. when a saber-toothed tiger was chewing on him. Well, there’s something wrong with this because there weren’t saber-toothed tigers and men alive simultaneously according to some of my anthropologists, and so forth. And furthermore, the language in the engram reduced as English, I don’t think they were speaking English 35,000 years ago. And we ran to another engram and we ran that one, and it was supposed to have happened over in Ireland, But it reduced in English, too. So I said, “Now you will come forward to the time when this happened in your own life,” and bang! He was right square in a prenatal engram which always before he had been beautifully avoiding. But this time we’d taken the edge of it off. And so we ran out these engrams. They were valid engrams, but he’d put new salad dressing on them. And his imagination had so completely avoided his present life that he’d gone back into antiquity; you know, on the theory if you get far enough back it won’t hurt. And so, here was an early life technique, I don’t advise any of you, really, to use this because it’s very disruptive, I’m not giving it forth here as a valid technique or part of Standard Procedure, But it got into the School, And we found out that the dub-in (dub-in is caused by control circuitry)—and dub-in cases were very eager to run these early lives. And they would sit around and do nothing but run early lives, early lives, early lives, early lives. And one fellow spent about a week trying to run out the battle with the Persians, I think, at Thermopylae. And it was so disruptive that the Director of Training really came down on it, and everybody else came down on it very hard and we compartmented the two. But it means that the curriculum changes in some respect about every thirty days because new things keep being found, new data. Now there are many minds working on this, I get an idea and I try to work it out, and the first thing you know somebody whips it out of my hands and they’re processing it down in Tampa, Florida, And then the boys down in Tampa at the school, the university there, they’re writing in saying they have just found out that if you do so-and-so it resolves as such and such. And it’s a good technique. There are lots of minds thinking about this science now in lots of universities, in lots of places, and the data comes back to us rather fast. Usually in a university they start in by saying, “Well, Dianetics can’t possibly work. After all, look at the work of Lavetivor, or whoever it is, and it says clearly that man has a death wish. And how does this agree with Dianetics?” Well we’re not interested in how it agrees, we just want something that works, you see? And so, as one physicist from Columbia told me, a Doctor of Physics over there in the physics department, he says, “You know, the trouble with Dianetics, it’s so diabolically accurate. You predict these things and then they happen.” He says, “What are you doing to the field of psychology?” Well, I’m not doing anything to the field of psychology. I can’t help it if the mind operates that way. And he comes over and he tells me about this, and he goes back—maybe he learned some new technique—he goes back and the next thing you know, why, they’re in a huddle up in the department of psychology with the department of physics, and then I get a letter. They have just worked out that so-and-so and so-and-so are happening, and they’re off to the races.

Well now, trying to keep all these ideas together, trying to keep them coordinated, is one of the biggest jobs that the Foundation has at the present time. They come in, in an avalanche. And the more people that know how to do this, the more ideas you get, the more refinements you get. There are lots of minds working on this now, some of the finest minds in the United States. I heard—have heard, in the past week, from a series of names, talking about Dianetics and what it could do in the various fields and what they thought it could do, I wouldn’t dare release here today just because they are names which make news. There are some of these men say, “Yes, use my name all you please,” such as, Dr. Frederick Schuman, the authority on political science.

He wants to take a year off and orient Political Dianetics. And he has his application in for his sabbatical leave right now in order to start this study. He is being financed by an entirely different group than Dianetics. They are in on it too. And out of this is going to come, certainly, many refinements in Political Dianetics.

Well, Dianetics can do quite a bit. It can cure up psychosomatic illnesses, if the body has not reached the point of no return. It can pick up a person’s abilities quite markedly.

It is interesting to me that our first psychometric data coming out of the validation project on from a week to ten days of auditing, bad auditing, student auditing, on students—we picked up a series of eighty people—their IQs had jumped in that ten days from two to twenty-six points. This was not my conclusion nor my testing. These tests were made by Gordon Southon, a graduate psychometrist. They were supervised by Dr. Ibañez who studied with Freud and who is a graduate of the Sorbonne.

These people walked in on Dianetics and we were asking for validation and they decided they would give us heavy battery validation; the kind of validation which can’t be disputed.

In other words, somebody can come up to me and say, “Well now, how high will IQ go if you process a person on Dianetics?” And I can tell them, “Well, it goes pretty high. I’ve had it go up fifty, sixty points in people over a period of four or five months of processing.” And they say, “Well, where are the records?” Because it has to be done in such a way that nobody can dispute it. If somebody won’t believe my word about Dianetics they won’t believe my case histories. So let’s put it into the hands of people whose word can’t be disputed—people like Columbia University or people from the national Rorschach institute or medical doctors who have no connection with Dianetics, although many medical doctors now do have a connection with Dianetics. About 10 percent of our membership, now, is medical doctors and psychiatrists.

These people are indisputable. That is to say, if they say, “I made a test on such and such a date, and made another test at a later date at such and such a time on such and such a human being,” anybody saying, “No, you didn’t make this test,” would be challenging such an authority of, or the reputation of, Columbia University, for instance.

This is the type of validation, then, that we have been doing now for months. Our results on this have got to be thorough. They’ve got to be indisputable. There are many people who like to say, “Well, Dianetics won’t work. Everybody knows you can’t do anything with the human mind. So, the evidence has to be incontrovertible. And, we have been picking up that incontrovertible evidence as fast as possible, as a matter of fact, a little faster than was humanly possible a short time ago. The pressure that we have put on these research and validation projects is enormous. People are working on these things, it’s nothing to work fifteen, sixteen hours a day—hard work. And we have a series—little things keep tripping us up, too. We had twenty people that had been selected by a psychiatrist down in Los Angeles, and he hadn’t bothered to inquire what their addresses were. And their addresses were from anywhere from Cheyenne, Wyoming to Houston, Texas. And we managed to hold together ten of these twenty. The rest of them went through our hands after about ten days of processing. Geography came in and selected out about half of that one series. Well, we’ve still got the other ten. In other words, through this administrational blunder, we were deprived of most of the benefit, or half of the benefit of a research project which was costing us, by the way, about ten thousand dollars. It costs such a lot of money! And yet, we’re going forward now. We have a planned validation project which will carry forward several years and which will include three thousand cases. Now, we have lots of cases right today. I had asked Dr. Ibañez if she would be displeased, and I asked Gordon Southon, the psychometrist, if he would be displeased if I took the first samplings of some of their psychometry and just selected them, willy-nilly, out of a stack and had them put together.

Its too new; I mean there has—the cases haven’t had enough time. For instance, one week of processing in Dianetics is practically nothing. And one week of student processing, when everybody is doing everything else too, that is not good. It puts a bad strain on Dianetics. And in addition to this, these particular tests, the second one, which was the one to show the improvement, were given to a group of people on the day they were facing a certification board.4 And they were very badly disturbed people. So the way these things show up is a wonder to me. There’s a statement in here from Dr. Ibañez as to how they were taken.

We have here I don’t know how many cases. These are actual—the psychometric summations. The—this is a short test. With these, of course, went Rorschachs, TAT and the medical examinations and so forth. We didn’t get as many processed with this as we could have merely because we couldn’t put that heavy a strain on the National Rorschach Institute people that were working there. That takes them quite a while to give a Rorschach. It takes about half a day to give it and a day to evaluate it if it’s going to be a very good Rorschach. Rorschach is a very high order of intelligence test.  But so is this one.  This is UCLA.

UCLA test is the California Test of Mental Maturity. Now that doesn’t compare in any degree with the Rorschach, but it is one which shows up very swiftly what is happening. It is very carefully delivered. It’s pages of testing. And it was devised by Elizabeth T. Sullivan; I understand she’s UCLA, I’m not sure. And it gives the profiles here, of a number of people, just grabbed out of the stack. For instance, I open this up, I find here is—these people, by the way, of course, we can’t use their names. So these people came up before a notary public who certified—gave a certification that this was the person, and have signed and notarized each one of these tests, that this is a living person, this is the person that the test was administered to. You see how careful we’re being.

Now, I just open this one at random; it’s “Summary of Data.” It says non— this person is an optometrist. The red graph that’s on this test was administered on the twenty-fourth of August, and the blue, the second test, the after, was administered only a couple of weeks later on the eighth of September. During that time they’d had rather minimal processing. And yet, this goes up. This person was processed in Dianetics. And we find that nonlanguage factors rose from 89 to 103, that language factors rose from 147 to 155, and that the total mental factors rose from 124 to 136. That much jump!

Now, I’m not going to bore you with psychometry. There are people here, however, who are interested in psychometry. And although these are very far from conclusive, that is to say, here they are, this is not too long after the eighth of September. Here are people who are only processed for a short time—who are still being processed. There are follow-ups on all of these cases. There’s a three-months follow-up and a six-months follow-up, but I’m not going to make you wait three months or six months to look at a second series of tests.

Further, these are the compilation of the tests. That is to say, these are the certified tests given by Gordon Southon, psychometrist. He certifies them as of the twenty-first of September. This stuff is fresh, brand-new, and I am going to have these tests here at the lecture—the classes which are going to be held here at the Oakland Municipal Theater. They will be on display there from Tuesday night on, to anybody who wants to come in and inspect them closely. And tonight, a young lady will have these two books out there in the lobby. I would love to be able to put these up on a big bulletin board where you could all stand around and look at them, but frankly, I’m a little afraid that they might be hurt or injured in some way, and they’re the only copies we have of these tests. They’re quite valuable to us, now, because they’re the original summations.

The other test—this book of tests here—is the Johnson Temperament Analysis Profile. I’m no psychometrist; forgive me if I don’t talk quite as learnedly about these psychometric tests as possible. I am fascinated right now, as is the research and psychometric section of the Foundation (another organization, not anything to do with this one) back in the East, to discover better and newer tests that will show us where the engrams are and what we have to hit to resolve the case. That’s what I’m interested in. And we’re doing quite a bit of work on that.

We have two people there who are doing nothing but trying to refine Rorschach so that it will hit every time. As a matter of fact, Rorschach is a wonderful test. It will show up a paranoid, inevitably and invariably. You give a person—a paranoid—and we know the engram that causes paranoia. The engram is the “against me” engram. “They’re all against me.” It causes paranoia. And when we know from a Rorschach that a person is a paranoid, we can then go into the case immediately and look for that engram, “they’re all against me.” We’ll find it.

Now, perhaps there’s one for certain types of schizophrenia, certain—there may be a certain type that causes manic-depressives. In other words, there may be a whole catalog here of engram types. That’s the type of psychometry we’re trying to do. This Johnson Temperament Profile is a selection showing the processing . . . For instance, the red graph test was administered here, it says, on the first of September, and the blue was administered only on the eighth of September. These were only seven days apart. Well, because the first and second test occupied days, a day apiece, that leaves only six days of processing. And here we find these factors. This—probably can’t see these too well, but I’ll just explain it to you, and when you look at them out on the table, then you can see what I’m talking about—the test here, the way the psychometrists have figured this one out, the personality graph is supposed to fall in this black area. That’s optimum. If it falls into the gray—dark gray area, that’s not so good. If it falls into the light gray, that’s pretty bad, and if it falls anywhere in the white, that’s psychotic, that’s awful.

Well now, here’s a test of eight days of processing, and it shows that a couple of these points have pulled into the black, which were in the gray.

I haven’t looked these tests over. They were just put in my hands today.

Here is a test. Here’s one of them, here, that shows, at first, when the thing was first processed, here we had, one of its points was in white. In other words, this person was psychotic on this subject. This person was processed for a little bit longer this time—two and a half weeks. This person was psychotic here, and after processing, that point had pulled in almost into the black. In other words, this person was practically normal on that subject.

Here’s another one that’s very questionable, way out here in the gray, and after processing it pulled well into the black. In other words, the person became normal on that subject.

Here’s one that was white, psychotic, on this subject, and after processing, that point had pulled into the black. In other words, here was a person who was getting sane with great rapidity.

The psychometrist used these tests to demonstrate what happens in the mind. They are the tests used in the universities. And they are very ably administered and very thoroughly authenticated. These tests will be available to those who care to look at them in the lobby as you go out. Then they will be on display here at the Municipal Theater while I’m giving these classes.

Now, I want to tell you a little bit, a very little bit because I’m running short on time—I was going to tell you about several cases here. I’ll just take the last two on the list. Two of these cases were very interesting to me. One of them I heard from about a week ago—no, a little bit longer than that—about two weeks ago. And I received this scrawled note. This is just a testimonial. It has no value except a human interest value.

It says, “My Dear Doc, I was looking for to see you for a long time, but you never came back. Now maybe you don’t even remember me, but when I saw that article in Time magazine, I figured maybe I’d better write you and thank you for my leg. “You remember a day three years ago in Hell’s Kitchen when they were going to cut it off and you told them to go to hell? I still got my leg. I feel fine. Hoping you are the same.”—Blank.

His—there’s a lot of satisfaction in this work. Now, that’s personal satisfaction to me, that isn’t psychometry. It was one night at 11 o’clock in an ambulance clanging down in Hell’s Kitchen in New York. There’s been a lot of adventure along the line of this research.

Another one is a letter I just received today. I mention it, it suddenly comes in with a crush on me. A young girl that we will call “Dot” was back East. She was going to a university. She had a love affair and her lover beat her and hypnotized her and then beat her again, and then drugged her. This we found out after a lot of research—what had happened to her. A fantastic thing to happen to a human being! So we had an awfully hard time taking it apart.

This girl was thoroughly psychotic. All she would say was, “I’m a top dog. I’m the top dog around here. I’m in the saddle. Calm down.” And she would walk around in a circle of the room, and she would say this again. And then she would scream, and then she would go around in the room and she’d say this again. And she had done that week in and week out for a long, long time. Her husband was a certified public accountant, a very brilliant man. He had no idea what could have happened to her. He knew that she had had several psychotic breaks in the past, that she disassociated very easily. But suddenly, one night, she had come home in this state. He brought her up to the Foundation and I tried to work the case. I had very little time and I was only able to work the case for a few hours. And yet, I’d picked out enough out of it so it’d take the tension off the case so that she wasn’t walking around in circles; she would at least sit down and say, “I’m the top dog.” And it was very hard because she was inaccessible. I finally got her to a point where she would say, “Well, I’ll do it if you want me to.” And I’d say, “Well, all right, I want you to.” But she’d say, “But you didn’t tell me where you wanted me to.” “Well, I want you to there.” “That isn’t the right place.” She finally got out to a point where she would say these things in addition to her dramatization, which was some improvement, but not much.

He took her away from there because he, himself, was an auditor and he wanted to—he was a certified public accountant and an auditor in Dianetics—and he wanted to work her. And Commander Price, our psychiatrist in Washington, DC, at the Washington, DC department, Dick Price there, worked her for a while. She was at the George Washington University Hospital and she was quite noisy. And they put her under very heavy sedation. And that was a terrible thing to do to her, but they had to. And she became a bit worse. I thought this case was hopeless; I couldn’t understand what had happened to this case. It was the one big imponderable on the whole record. It was sort of the hold-out case, the one nobody could do anything for.

The husband took her down to the Virginia Medical Center and—across the river from Washington—and he asked them down there to give her some treatment; asked them to do Dianetics on her, if possible. And one of the young interns said, “What else do you think she will have here?” This was a great shock to him since we hadn’t heard that Virginia Medical was on the bandwagon. They took her in there and I hadn’t—I heard nothing more from her, I considered that was probably the lost case of Dianetics. And today I got a letter from her. And it says, “Dear Ron, I remember so well your standing there trying to help me, and I tried to tell you how much it would mean to me to be able to break through. But I couldn’t, I haven’t been able to for a long time. But I’m all right now, and I’ve been all right for a month, and they’re going to discharge me next week,” They broke the case with Dianetics down at Virginia Medical Institute. So that was a big load off my mind. She went home to two kids and a husband that loved her.

Another case, I’ll just mention in passing, the longest solid case history that is really a solid one, that was witnessed by doctors and psychiatrists and people all over the place. Got a report on her a few days ago; she had a nickname in the field, “Lady Lazarus,” The medical doctor there at the Foundation went in and picked up this case at Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, Prognosis: death in one month. Weight: 80 pounds from 115, Apathy, He worked her for two hours in Dianetics, He went back a week later and he worked her another two hours. He sprung the central engram. She walked out of the hospital weighing 85 pounds and ambulatory. Her weight came up to 90 pounds. She went into a slight slump. Her psychiatrist, Dr, Monroe, in New York City, was quite astounded by all this, and started to follow the case rather swiftly, and wondering, “What the devil could have happened to this girl?” because he knew nothing of Dianetics, And he called in consultation on her, and they went over her again, they restimulated her pretty badly and she went into a little—another little slump, out of which she came. She undulated along that line for about two months. She was well all this time, though. And she was doing well, and her outlook was good. Her case finally stabilized and that case is still very stable. She is coming up toward Clear now, being worked by her husband. That case is getting along just fine. But Presbyterian Hospital and Dr, Monroe have evidently been very close on the heels of this case because I keep getting letters from them every once in a while.

We have, throughout the country, many people on the bandwagon now that we did not have before, such as Dr, Douglas down in Beaumont, Texas, He’s running a hospital down there and he’s giving people a very bad time. When any doctor comes in to operate, he says, “Do you know your Dianetics?” And of course, half of these fellows say, “I— my—I’m a good dietitian.” And he gives them a course of indoctrination, very fast, in Dianetic surgery. And he won’t let anybody operate down there unless he is. All of his doctors are in process, and he himself is. And he says his mortality rate has dropped markedly since he instituted this. He didn’t give me what the figures are, I’ll have to write him and ask him. Dr. Douglas in a hospital—in charge of a hospital there in Beaumont, Texas. I don’t know what hospital it is. It may be the general hospital, or it may be a private hospital.

Now, what we’re trying to do right now, though, is carry Dianetics well forward of where it has been. A study of man’s activities requires more than one mind and one set of hands. Sometimes I feel rather despairing about all this, trying to find people who can run things, people who can do this, so that you can turn your back on something and go away. I had a trip scheduled to go to Asia Minor this fall. I was going to go over there for a vacation; I was supposed to leave on the first of October. And oh, I’m a long way from it. I—if I don’t get there next year, though, I’m going to be very disappointed. Well, our whole battle is to find good men, put them in good places, get processing done, make them better, and carry forward something which will make this international picture perhaps a little bit smoother. You may think this is even a little conceited on our parts, that we might be able to do something about it. Well, maybe we can’t and maybe we’ll fail, but we can at least try.

The problem, here, of answering questions is quite acute. I always have a little bit of trouble with this part of a program because there can be so confoundedly many questions, and some of them are not always of complete interest to everybody present but may be just specialized. Now, I will try to answer some of these questions which I have here. I will give you all a fair show. I’ll try to pick them out and look them through. So, if you’ll just bear with me. This looks like one of the old-time mind reading acts according to—and believe me, it’s a mind reading that will have to be done—now—on some of them, I’m sure.

He says, “In your book you say that psychotic cases can be treated by any auditor, but recently you have said that such cases should await physicians trained in Dianetics. Has new information made this warning necessary?” No, it’s not that a terrific warning is necessary. But perhaps at first I may have underestimated some of the slightness that would be given to the data in the book. More important, that is to say, so that it might be possible to make a psychotic worse. I just imagine this would be possible; I don’t know of any psychotics who have been made worse by this type of auditing, and I certainly would have been the first to hear about them. But there is this possibility. Another thing is a sort of a burying of the hatchet with psychiatry.

I at first—I kept a rather—quite an aplomb about psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and so on, I said that—and psychology—I said, “I don’t think these people are against me.” I didn’t have an engram to that effect. “And I think that they will welcome this as soon as they know about it.” And everyone says, “Oh, get yourself set for a terrible battle. This is going to be awful, they’re going to run you off the face of the earth. You’re flying in the teeth of authority, and so on.” I didn’t believe it. And I think I was justified in doing so, since those psychiatrists who have studied the techniques, and particularly those who have cared to apply them, have become very enthusiastic about Dianetics. We get wires quite regularly back there from some psychiatrist who has just used Dianetics.

There was one at Missouri State. They said that Missouri State Institution was very open minded about Dianetics. Robert Moore Williams, a writer, went in there, talked to the head of it, and the two of them got together on a schizophrenic, a young lady who had been insane for quite a while, and they worked her for several sessions. And then one day she lay down on the couch; she was insane, but when she got up off the couch she was sane. And he said this psychiatrist was no longer open minded about Dianetics. He knew that he had something new with which to treat his mental patients. And so they started to research on it further, and they started to work with it further. Now, I haven’t heard anything about that; that was two months ago.

About 10 percent of our membership in the Foundation is composed of medical doctors and psychiatrists, the preponderance being psychiatrists. These gentlemen want to heal people; they want people to be well.

Naturally, when some engineer and mathematician suddenly walks up to a man who has studied the human mind for twelve years and says, “I have the answer,” they don’t say, “Well, he studied it for fifteen.” They say, “This is impossible, because he’s not a specialist,” or something of the sort. And I get into an argument. But if these gentlemen test it, they go ahead. Therefore, I don’t try to sell Dianetics to any of these people, by the way. I don’t have to sell Diane tics. I wish I—sometimes, that I didn’t have quite as many people interested in it. But the information should be that it would be very good—it’s very good medical practice and very good psychiatric practice. When a person is severely ill, a psychiatrist or a doctor who is interested in this case, certainly, at all times, should be consulted about the case. An auditor shouldn’t go in just because he knows Dianetics and suddenly steal the case away and make a big show out of it. What this is, mainly, is trying to instill some good manners into the professions. “How does one resolve oneself to enter therapy even when the prospect of being Clear is greatly appealing, but when one commences therapy, either as an auditor or preclear, one is greatly afraid of all aspects of contacting even the simplest engram?” This problem isn’t just Dianetics. There is a certain survival value, apparent survival value, in the hypochondriac for instance. And there is the mental hypochondriac, the fellow who has, actually, a survival—I’m not using hard words now. I’m just trying to explain—there is a value, he feels, in being ill. He always has an excuse for his social errors. Now, this is the manifestation of it, but actually down at the bottom of the engram bank, somewhere, there’s an engram that says, “If I lose this I will die,” or it says, “I can’t go into it, it’s too painful,” or “I don’t dare change myself; he likes me as I am,” et cetera, et cetera.

There are all kinds of engramic computations that forbid an engram being touched or even forbid a case being opened. A skilled auditor can look at one of these cases, listen to the fellow for a few minutes and hit the engram—bang! After that, the case will roll. Sometimes it takes a lot more than a few minutes, by the way.

I get this one quite often. “If the reactive mind can be influenced so strongly while unconscious, why couldn’t a person be put under an anesthetic and told a lot of good things which would drive out all the bad engrams?” This mind doesn’t think. That’s the trouble with it. And you’re trying to make one engram reason with another engram, and neither one are reasonable. Experiments have actually been done along this line. Hypnosis really is that—hypnosis is some of that. It’s trying to put in a good engram to counteract bad engrams, and it doesn’t work. Anesthetic hypnosis is wonderful, but not other types. Anesthetic hypnosis can be picked up after the fact. “Are alcoholics especially difficult cases?” No, they are not. But they certainly are messy sometimes. You know I’m getting into a lot of trouble for that footnote in the book. No one thinks I drink. So I go to a party and everyone leaves me sitting there.

Here is another common error here: “Modern psychiatry has evidence that children exhibit neuroses before they reach an age where they know the meaning of language. How can you explain this when the child could not know the meaning of the words contained in its engrams?” I remind you that the only reason words become active in engrams is because the analytical mind knows what the words are. Engrams are bodies of perceptics. It is a strip of perceptics. The words have no meaning in the reactive bank. I tested rather—I thought afterwards it was rather mean of me, but anything for science—I tested a little baby three weeks of age that I knew had an engram containing a swear word. So I—I remembered this mother having received that engram and when the baby was born, at three weeks, I went over to the crib and I said this swear word to the baby. The baby flinched. And then I said several other words, just nonsense syllables, but said them in the same voice tone, and the baby did not flinch, and I said the swear word again and the baby flinched. Obviously the baby was reacting on this word. But he was just reacting on syllables. An engram is like a phonograph record. That’s all. It doesn’t think, and so—as a matter of fact, the dropping of a spoon, if contained in an engram, will reactivate the engram. It doesn’t matter what the word is. “What is the difference between reverie and light hypnotic trance?” There is rather a world of difference between the two, and I wish to caution you that we don’t any longer use counting in Elizabeth because we occasionally induce one of these light hypnotic trances. And they’re very bad and shouldn’t be played with. So therefore, we merely tell— reverie is very hard to induce, by the way, all you do is tell a person to close his eyes. And that is not a light hypnotic trance. But if you count to a person who has been hypnotized before by counting, he is liable to go into an hypnotic trance, so avoid it. And by the way, he says it’s reverie and light hypnotic trance, the difference between—if a person were completely analytically awake he would be in an optimum state of mind. I think you’ll agree to that. If he had his full analyzer he would be fully rational, that sort of thing. All right. In Dianetics, we are trying hard to wake people up, not put them to sleep, and that is the difference between hypnosis and Dianetics. They are 180 degrees different. One tries to put people to sleep and the other tries to wake people up. “Please describe an experiment which could be performed by any medical man to demonstrate the existence of reactive memory during anesthesia, without room for scientific doubt.” This is a very easy experiment. One puts a person under sodium pentothal or some sedation, inflicts some pain just to make sure that he has an anchor point there to go back to, like pressing hard on the person’s chest, reads some nonsense syllables to him, lets him wake up in the normal course of events, and then puts him in reverie some days later and goes back and picks up the nonsense syllables. He will get them. The best way to do it so as to prohibit such things as telepathy or whatever between the person who is doing it and somebody else is to let a couple of doctors install this engram and then let an auditor, who wasn’t even there, and who has no knowledge of it, pick it up later.

This experiment is very easily done, but I warn you that it is very dangerous. It can be done, but make sure it is done on a person who has full sonic recall. Otherwise you may have to process him for twenty or thirty hours before you can get that late on his time track in order to pick up the data. That’s an installed engram, you understand. And that engram, if it is installed, you have to be able to pick it up.

The last time I tried this experiment was in Elizabeth, and it was the last time I will do it. Two psychiatrists sent over to me a young man who had been so treated, and I was supposed to pick up the nonsense syllables. This was a long time ago, when Dianetics was very much in question, when validations were few and so on. It would have been all right—they read him the nonsense syllables all right, but the reading of his blood pressure, respiration, so forth, they mentioned these things. They talked around him, they—then one of them sat on his chest, and they read the nonsense syllables through and cuffed him in the face and then they said, “Well—he’s certainly unconscious, isn’t he?” “Yes. He is unconscious.” And then they said, “Well he won’t be able to remember any of this, anyway. I don’t know why we’re being so careful. He’ll forget it a long time before he’s in Elizabeth, even if he could remember it. And this fellow Hubbard won’t be able to do a thing with him!” Now, because this thing had a forgetter in it, the young man came over and sat in the Elizabeth railroad station for nine hours. I couldn’t find him. I knew he’d been sent to me, but there he was, sitting over in the corner, at last. It was 8 o’clock at night. He’d come over in the morning. I picked him up, I took him back to the house, and I worked on him for eighteen hours. He was a non-sonic case. I had to take grief off the case and bring the fellow up, actually, to some sort of a fair release before I could touch this thing. And I didn’t dare let him get out of the house before I’d picked it up for the good reason that he was in amnesia. So I picked it up and put it on a record, and I sent it back over to New York. I sent it back over with considerable disgust. And I won’t do it again. But with those provisos, that test can be made. Make sure it’s a sonic case and don’t say anything else but those nonsense syllables. And be sure and inflict a little pain, so it is easy to find. Anybody can do that experiment if he is very careful. “What are the requirements of being a Dianetics professional?” The requirements are to be bright and alert, to have a fair educational background. We would dearly love to have had educational backgrounds of psychologist, but we find out that they do not necessarily make the best Dianetic Auditors—do not necessarily. Many times their basic purpose is good, and so on. The best Dianetic Auditors to date have been writers. Only, there aren’t very many writers. There’s Robert Moore Williams, back there in Missouri, so on; there are other fellows around.

We have—a psychiatrist, Dr. Turner, of Huntington, Long Island is a very, very good auditor. He is magnificent. He’s got that cool, calm detachment so that—he was working a paranoid schiz and the paranoid schiz, that particular day, had brought a gun with him and the paranoid schiz rolled over and cocked the gun. And Dr. Turner took it out of his hand and put it over on the dresser and told him to go back to the engram. This man is the coolest hand with a psychotic I’ve ever seen. That’s his natural business, and with all of his vast knowledge and experience in psychiatry, that man is invaluable.

What makes a good Dianetic Auditor is, of course, his own alertness, his ability to think, and so on, rather than based on his educational background. There’s a sort of a natural aptitude for it.

Now, I’m not going to rattle on here all night with these questions, but “Will there be another course of lectures here? When?” Well, these special classes before lectures there are taking up Standard Procedure and the latest developments and demonstrations— that will be the course. The—as far as the Professional Course is concerned, that requires a month, and there is a professional school now operating down in Los Angeles. We had to keep it operating. I was going to shut it down after I’d delivered my lectures there, but the pressure of enrollment is such and the demand for professional auditors is still such that two schools, one in the East and one in the West, seem to be indicated. So a school is there in Los Angeles. “Is it advisable to practice therapy on your own children? If so, what age are they most receptive?” Well I’d hate to have to cover Child Diane tics here with you. But a child generally can’t be processed very much before he is eight, nine years of age. However, to take one exceptional case, little Joey, he’s a junior. He was a fairly easy case. At six years of age, why, they could run this little boy all the way back down the time track and do wonderful tricks with him. He was picking up in alertness and so forth. They got birth off the case and a chronic set of sniffles stopped and he worked pretty well. He was six. But that’s very unusual. Many, many people, many children wouldn’t be workable perhaps until they were twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.

You can however do—at any child at any age from three on—you could do Straightwire, a new technique of direct memory which occasionally keys out engrams. You can nearly always pick up some grief off a child; they’re seldom very badly shut down. You can go in for grief engrams and pick them up. You can certainly better a child. But when you stop and think of some of the things that are in the reactive mind in the engram bank, and you stop and think of taking some little girl of eight or nine years of age and sending her back down a time track to an engram bank which, if left alone, would make a psychotic out of her when she’s twenty, she gets into it, she can’t handle it. It’s just too much. She doesn’t understand it. It’s too much emotion, and so on, and therefore children should not be handled too young. If a person—if a child can handle himself ably in life, he can handle his engrams. “Once cleared, can a person record engrams and be influenced by them following future physical unconsciousness?” Undoubtedly. We ran a couple of experiments on this and we found out that a person could still receive engrams but they were sort of on the order of blowing one’s nose. I mean, snuff, and they were gone. The real aberrative engrams are those which are very early in the bank. And you try to put in later engrams and if they have nothing on which to hang, there isn’t anything to hold them down.

I’m not going to go in through this whole long list here. There’s an awful lot of questions here. I will try to answer them all in my next book. And thank you very much. You’ve been a very, very good audience.

Thank you.

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