DMSH 1950 Book 3 Chapter 9

← Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950)

Mechanisms and Aspects of Therapy (Part One)

THE CASE ENTRANCE

Every case presents a new problem of entrance. No two human beings are exactly alike and no two cases will follow the exact pattern. However, this presents no problem to dianetics since the mechanics are always the same.

There are three case classifications: the sonic-recall, the non-sonic recall and the imaginary recall (what auditors call a “dub-in” recall).

In the sonic recall case, the entrance is very easy. But in all cases the basic procedure is the same. Put the patient in reverie (and don’t worry too much if he doesn’t go into a very deep reverie because reverie only serves to fix his attention on himself and the auditor and you can at least accomplish that). Install a canceller. Return him to childhood to pick up a pleasant incident and then find a minor pain incident such as a slap in the face. Run him through this a few times just to let him get the idea. If he doesn’t respond well, put him into yesterday and let him ride to work and ask him about sounds and sights, then send him to childhood again.

The object of finding a minor incident such as a slapped face is to find out if the patient has a pain shutoff. A pain shut-off is not particularly difficult in dianetics. You can get back before the command which installed the anesthesia, but it is interesting to know about it because you want to look for it early in the case. See then if the patient has an emotional shut- off. This again is not particularly embarrassing but again is data you want to find eventually.

Test now to find out if the patient is within himself or if he is outside himself, watching himself. If he is exteriorized, you are working a case which has considerable walled up emotion in it which must be discharged.

Now make a try to basic-basic. You might surprise yourself and get it. And you might work fifty hours for it, releasing the case the while. Get whatever the file clerk will give you in the prenatal area and what you get, reduce.

Whether basic-basic is contacted or not, locate as many prenatals as will present themselves without much coaxing and reduce each one.

If you find no prenatals, bring the patient up to present time but remind him to keep his eyes closed. Now ask him a few questions about his family, his grandparents, his wife or, if the pre-clear is a woman, her husband. Ask about any former husbands or wives. Ask about children. And ask particularly about death. You are looking for a painful emotion engram, an instant of loss which will discharge.

Finding out about one, even if it is just the death of a favorite dog, return the pre-clear to it and run it from the first moment he hears the news of it and for the ensuing few minutes of it. Then start it again. Reduce the moment as an engram. You want an emotional discharge. Run it several times. If you don’t get a discharge, find some other moment of loss, some failure, something, anything which will discharge: but do it all quietly as if with sympathy. Lacking any success, start in repeater technique, never for a moment giving any intelligence that you are anything but calmly concerned for his welfare (even if some of his gyrations worry you). Try such phrases as “Poor little — “ using his or her childhood name.

When the pre-clear has repeated this several times (the auditor at the same time stating that somatic strip will return to any incident containing the phrase to assist the “suck down”), he may find himself in a high tension incident which will discharge. If nothing discharges yet,

keep calm (all this work will pay dividends in the next session or the next or next), keep searching, keep observing. There is emotional charge here somewhere which will discharge. Try other combinations of words such as those which would be said to a sick and worried child, make the pre-clear repeat them.

If you have had no success as yet, make another test, without saying it is a test, to see if the pre-clear is actually leaving present time. Don’t let him “try to remember” — you want him to return and that is another process, although it is just as natural to the brain. If he is stuck in present time, start him on repeater technique again, suggesting bouncers: “Get out and never come back!” “You can’t ever return!” etc., which would account for his being still in present time. If he is not returning after some of this, start in with holder phrases: “I’m stuck!” “Don’t move!” and so forth.

Stay calm, never appear anxious. If you get neither a discharge nor an engram with repeater technique in this first session and if you get no motion on the track, read this manual again and try your patient not later than three days after this first session. At that time some of the data you have asked for may be available.

Ordinarily, however, you will receive either a prenatal or a discharge and if you get a discharge, then ask the somatic strip to go back for the prenatal it was sitting on. Reduce everything you can find. If birth turns up and seems to be in full recall, try to reduce that but do so in the knowledge that it probably will not lift very far and in the knowledge that you had better run it over and over and over to de-intensity it all you can.

Sometimes the pre-clear will go into a deeper reverie than you wish. But do not try to wake him into a higher level. Work him where he is. But if he seems to be in something approaching hypnotic trance, be very careful of your language. Never tell him, for instance, to go back there and stay there until he finds something. That’s a holder. Don’t use holders and bouncers and groupers et al. on anyone in dianetics. “Will you please return to the prenatal area?” “Let’s see if the somatic strip can locate an early moment of pain or discomfort.” “Please pick up the somatic at the beginning and roll the engram.” “What do you hear, please?” “Continue” (when you want him to keep on going from the point of the engram where he is to the later end of the engram). “Recount that again, please.”

There’s nothing to be nervous about. If you get nervous, then he’ll get nervous.

Sometimes you run into a pain shut-off. This has a tendency to put the pain into the muscles and the muscles will jump and quiver and the patient may sense this and still feel nothing more. Once in a great while a patient will have such a thorough pain shut-off that he bounces about, all unconscious of the action, and almost falls from couch to floor. If you run into this, do not be alarmed: the pain is locked in somehow. Get early enough and you’ll locate a somatic he can feel, or go late and find an emotional charge.

Don’t be misled if he tells you, with regard to emotion, that he has worked it all out in psycho-analysis or some such thing. He may have walled in the death of his wife or sweetheart or child, but the whole engram is still there, crammed with captured units, ready to be run exactly as an engram.

If you run into a heavy emotional charge, simply let the patient weep, keep him at the business of running the engram in a soft, sympathetic voice, have it recounted until there is no charge left in any of it and then run him early into the prenatal area or early childhood to get a physical pain engram that must have been below that emotional charge and held it in place.

The extravagance of emotional discharge is nothing to be alarmed about. Bringing the patient out of it and to present time suddenly would cause him unhappiness about it. Running the painful emotion engram will discharge, in a few recountings, sorrow which society has believed could never be countered or relieved except by repression. Get the moment he first heard the news or observed the thing which made him feel so bad. Run it far enough from its

beginning to make sure that you have the initial shock — a few minutes of engram time will do — and then get him to recount it again. He may observe himself to be far outside himself when you start. The moment may not discharge until you have run it several times. Remember, he is returned to the incident, he is not running it as a memory, a thing which would do no good whatever.

Do not let him replay anything, ever. Repay is a bad habit some pre-clears have of playing over what they remember they said the last time instead of progressing through the engram freshly on each recounting and contacting what is contained in the engram itself. Tell the pre-clear there may be some more in it, ask him what color the bed in the room he is returned to is, keep his attention, by any quiet mechanism, upon the scene. And do not let him replay ever, not on any engram at any time: he could replay forever without therapeutic value, each time saying what he remembered he said the last time. There is a difference between this and the repeated re-experiencing of the engram to gather additional data and to get rid of the charge.

Discharge emotion, reduce incidents of physical pain as early prenatally as possible. If you can’t get into the prenatal area at first, it has many bouncers in it and repeater technique will take you there.

If the patient keeps saying such a thing as “I can’t remember,” be patient — always follow the code. Have him start running that phrase as repeater technique. If he gets a somatic but contacts nothing else, send him earlier. If he gets another and still can’t contact on “I can’t remember,” send him earlier, his whole engram bank must be strewn with them — poor fellow. Somebody really didn’t want him to know what had happened to him. Eventually you will get back to an engram which will release a phrase. When he has gone over the phrase a few more times, he will smile or chuckle or perhaps merely feel relieved. Now you can either run the engram in which you found the earliest phrase, which is best, or you can come back toward present time, lifting the phrase as it later appeared. Or you can start on something else which may block the case.

The goal and the whole goal is to place the standard bank in entire conscious reach of the individual by deleting (a) early and subsequently all physical pain engrams; (b) all demon circuits (which are merely contained in engrams and come up more or less automatically); and (c) all painful emotion engrams.

The process of work is to get as early as you can, preferably prenatal and very early in that, and try to find and reduce an engram, complete with all somatics (pain) and perceptics (words and other sensations). If you fail in this, you go late, any time from birth forward to present time, and find a moment of loss or threatened loss from which you can get an emotional charge. Then you go back early, early, early and find the engram on which it rested. You try always, until you are certain you have it, to get basic-basic, the earliest engram. You reduce as many early engrams as you can find, using the file clerk and repeater system, and when you seem to run out of material, you go later into life and try to find another emotional charge.

The physically painful engrams cover up later emotional charges. Emotional charges cover up physically painful engrams. Back and forth, back and forth. Run as much as you can get early: when it seems to be running out or getting too unemotional, get some later material.

This is the way you work a case. No matter what kind of a case it is, no matter what the state of its recall, no matter if the case is normal, psychotic or neurotic or what, this is the way.

These are the tools:

(1) Reverie or fixed attention if you cannot get reverie.

(2) Return.

(3)  Repeater technique.

(4)  A knowledge of bouncers, holders, groupers, misdirectors, denyers.

(5)  A knowledge of the painful emotion engram.

(6)  The reduction or the erasure.

(7)  The flash answer.

(8)  The valence shift.

This is all you need to do:

(1)  Keep the patient mobile, able to move on the track.

(2)  Reduce or erase everything you get your hands on.

(3)  Deduce from the remarks of the patient, in or out of therapy, what must be his bouncers, holders, groupers, misdirectors, denyers.

(4)  Keep it solidly in mind that the number one goal is basic-basic, the earliest moment of pain and “unconsciousness.”

(5)  Keep in mind that the patient may have “computations” which make his illness or his aberrated state “valuable” to him and discover whence those “computations” come by flash answer to your questions.

(6)  Keep the case progressing, gaining, work only for progress and gain, not for sudden, soaring results. Worry only when the case remains static and worry then in terms of finding the engram which is balking everything. Its content will be a close approximation to the way the patient says he feels about it and will contain the same or similar words.

(7)  Get the patient back to present time each time you work and feed him the canceller. Test him with an age flash, get his first reply to how old he is, find the holder at that age if he is not at present time.

(8)  Keep your temper no matter what the patient says.

(9)  Never try to tell him what his data means: he knows and he alone knows what it means.

(10)  Keep your nerve and run dianetics; like Farragut said, “Damn the torpedoes! Go ahead.”

(11)  Wife, son, whatever you may be to the pre-clear, you are the auditor when you are auditing. He cannot compute his own engrams to find them — if he could they would not be engrams. You can compute them. Do what you think a good auditor would do, never what the patient says save only when he accidentally concurs in his opinion that a good auditor would do that. Be the auditor, not a recording device. You and the file clerk in his mind are running the case: what his engrams and his analytical mind believe should have no force in any of your computations. You and his file clerk know. He, as “I” doesn’t know.

(12)  Be surprised at nothing. Audit.

These are the things you must not do:

1. (1)  Dilute dianetics with some practice or belief of yesteryear; you will only slow or sidetrack a case. Analyzing data received on any other basis than getting more engrams leads to delay and confusion for the pre-clear. It is a temptation to use this material for other reasons than getting engrams if one has been trained in another field than dianetics. Yielding to that temptation before one knows how dianetics works is a very unfair test of dianetics, completely aside from the way it snarls a case. The temptation is great because, with dianetics, you get such a wealth of data.
2. (2)  Do not bully the patient. If the case is not progressing, then the fault lies with the auditor. Do not surrender to an old practice of getting mad at a patient just because he doesn’t get well. You may be sure the engram you have just reduced out of his reactive engram bank is the reason he won’t take baths, but if he still refuses to bathe, be certain there is an earlier reason.
3. (3)  Don’t assume grandly that you have a “different” case just because it doesn’t resolve swiftly. They are all “different” cases.
4. (4)  Don’t run for help to somebody who does not know dianetics if your nerve fails you. The reason the case did not progress or became involved is right there — your nerve failed you. Only dianetics can work a problem in dianetics.
5. (5)  Do not listen to a patient’s complaints as complaints; use them as data to get engrams.
6. (6)  Do not suppose that just because you cannot reach prenatal engrams in a case that they are not there. There are scores and scores of them in every case. Remember that an engram isn’t a memory, it has to be developed to become within recall. There is no human being walking on earth today who does not have a plentitude of prenatals.
7. (7)  Do not allow the patient to use his mother or his memory of what he has been told as a by-pass of prenatals. Every time you find a patient talking in past tense instead of present tense he is not returned to an incident. Unless he is returned, the engram will not lift.
8. (8)  Do not suppose that because a patient does not feel bad today about a sorrow of yesterday that a despair charge is not located back on his track when he received the impact of that despair. Time may encyst, it does not heal.
9. (9)  Do not think in terms of “guilt complexes” or “shame” unless you think of them as engram content for there they will be found. Never suggest to a patient that he may be at fault in an engram.
10. (10)  Any departure from optimum behavior or conduct or rationality on the part of the patient is engramic: don’t make “allowances for human nature” any more than you, as a mathematician, would make allowances for an adding machine which brought up wrong answers.Sexual fears, repressions, defenses are not “natural” as they have been regarded in the past.
11. (11)  Don’t worry about the patient’s aberrations. Work to contact and reduce and erase engrams. You will find, in any patient, enough aberrations to fill a dictionary.
12. (12)  Don’t fret if your patient does not become a clear in an evening or a month. Just keep working. You’ll have him above normal so quickly you won’t realize when you passed it. Above that you are shooting for a very high goal.

STUCK IN PRESENT TIME

Cases, when they are entered, are found in various positions and situations on the time track; sometimes they are off the time track entirely and sometimes the time track is all snarled up in a ball. Now and then the time track is found to be in good condition and the engrams available, but this is not ordinary.

No case can be said to be more difficult than another except in the matter of recalls, “dub-ins” and shut-offs. But the case which seems to be “stuck in present time” and on whom no repeater phrase works is very often quite puzzling to an auditor. The pre-clear will not return to engrams. Ordinarily there may be pain and emotional shut-offs and the painful emotion cannot be quickly discharged. Sometimes somatics will turn on but no content can be gained. Sometimes there is no somatic but content. The situations are quite various.

There are several things an auditor can do. The first of them is to use his wits. The next is to indoctrinate the patient into returning. This indoctrination is quite simple. The auditor takes the patient back a few hours and has the patient tell what he sees. The sonic and visio may be occluded but the patient may have some idea of what is taking place. The auditor then takes him back a few days, then a few months and finally several years, each time getting the patient to describe his “surroundings” as best he can. The patient now has the idea of returning. He can travel at least along portions of his life which are not occluded by engrams.

When the patient is returned to some early moment in his life, begin to use repeater technique on him, aiming toward obvious things such as feeling shut-offs (going over the word “feel”) or forgetter mechanisms (such as “forget”). An engram may then be contacted and reduced.

If repeater technique still does not work and still does not get data, diagnose by his behavior in therapy and his statements what must be troubling him or occluding his recalls and again use these guesses as repeater. For instance he may have no recollection of some member of his family. Have him repeat the familiar name. Or have him repeat his own childhood nickname until an incident is contacted.

Should this still fail, then find some light locks, incidents which contain minimal pain, and run those. Such things as falls from a tricycle, getting sent from the table, getting spanked or scolded, being kept after school and so forth will serve. After he has reduced several locks, again try to find an engram.

The running of locks will not bring about any great recovery, and there are thousands and thousands of locks in any case, most of which will vanish without assistance from the auditor once the severe engrams are located. But locks may be used to indoctrinate the patient into returning and therapy in general and may even bring about an improved condition in him by demonstrating to him that he can face his past.

The foremost things to do in any case at the beginning are to (1) attempt to locate and erase basic-basic, and (2) discharge painful emotion. The sooner emotion can be released, the better, and there is always emotion on a case just as there are always a plenty of prenatal incidents.

But when a case is stuck in present time either when it is opened or during progress, it is highly charged with occluded emotion and it is obeying a restimulated engram to the effect that it must go all the way to now and stay there. The wording of this engram will generally be expressed by the patient himself in complaining of his trouble. Repeater technique is used with this clue. That failing, indoctrinate the patient by taking him back to what he can contact and when indoctrination is done, as above, start using repeater technique again.

There is one motto which applies to all therapy, “If you keep asking for it, you’ll get it.” Any and all engrams surrender on the basis of returning the patient to the area time and again, session after session. The engram bank may be balky but enough asking will bring forth any data in it sooner or later. Just keep asking, keep the routine of therapy running. Even a

“stuck in present time” case will eventually begin to return on the sole principle of repeater technique.

There are certain things that the auditor may be doing which are wrong. He may be trying to work the case on data taken from parents or relatives, which is usually fruitless in view of the fact that it undermines the preclear’s faith in his own data (all the data will check with the relatives; just don’t worry about checking it until the case is finished). Or he may be trying to work the case in the presence of other people. Or he may be violating the auditor’s code. A list of these deterrents to progress is to be found elsewhere in this volume.

BASIC-BASIC

The first goal of the auditor is basic-basic and after that always the earliest moment of pain or discomfort which he can reach. He may have to go late for emotional charges and these themselves may be physically painful. Emotion may bar the patient from basic-basic. But always that first turn-off of the analyzer is important and when it is gained, subsequent engrams are much more easily reduced.

Basic-basic is the vital target for two reasons: (1) It contains an analyzer shut-off which itself is restimulated every time a new engram is received. The common denominator of all engrams is analyzer shut-off. Turn it on the first time it was shut off and a vast improvement takes place in the case, for thereafter analyzer shut-off is not as deep. (2) An “erasure” (which is to say an apparent removal of the engram from the files of the engram bank and refiling in the standard bank as memory) of basic-basic widens the track beyond it markedly and brings many new engrams into view.

Basic-basic is occasionally found weeks before mother’s first missed period, which would place it much earlier than any examination for pregnancy or an attempted abortion. Sometimes in a non-sonic case sonic is discoverable in basic-basic but far from always.

Considerable material may be “erased” before basic-basic appears.

Sometimes basic-basic gets “erased” without either the auditor or the pre-clear knowing that it has been reached, basic-basic being merely another engram in the basic area. Sometimes much painful emotion must be discharged in the later life areas before basic-basic discloses itself.

Always, however, basic-basic is the target and until he has a good idea that he has reached it, the auditor, once every session, makes an effort to get it. Thereafter he tries to get the earliest moment of pain or discomfort he can reach every session. If he can reach nothing early, he seeks to discharge a late emotional engram — when it is completely discharged, “reduced” or “erased” as an engram — then he goes down into the earliest material the file clerk will give him.

Whatever comes up, the auditor seeks to take all the charge out of it, whether that charge is pain or emotion, before he proceeds on his way to new material. This is done merely by returning the patient back over the incident many times until it no longer affects him either painfully or emotionally, or until it seems to vanish.

THE REDUCTION AND THE ERASURE

These two terms are highly colloquial. Serious effort has been made to deter their use and substitute for them something sonorous and wonderfully Latin, but no progress has been made to date. Auditors insist on using colloquial terms such as “AA” for attempted abortion, “louse up” for engrams which seriously aberrate, “aberree” for a person not released or cleared, “zombie” for an electric shock or neuro-surgical case and so forth. It is feared that a

tendency exists in them to be disrespectful to the hallowed and sacred tomes of yesteryear, to the dignity of past Authorities which labeled much and did little. However this may be, “reduction” and “erasure” are in such common use that to change them is hardly necessary.

To reduce means to take all the charge or pain out of an incident. This means to have the pre-clear recount the incident from beginning to end (while returned to it in reverie) over and over again, picking up all the somatics and perceptions present just as though the incident were happening at that moment. To reduce means, technically, to render free of aberrative material as far as possible to make the case progress.

To “erase” an engram means to recount it until it has vanished entirely. There is a distinct difference between a reduction and an “erasure.” The difference depends more upon what the engram is going to do than upon what the auditor wants it to do. If the engram is early, if it has no material earlier which will suspend it, that engram will “erase.” The patient, trying to find it again for a second or sixth recounting, will suddenly find out he has no faintest idea what was in it. He may ask the auditor who, of course, will give him no information whatever. (The auditor who prompts is slowing down therapy by making himself the patient’s memory.) Going through it and trying to find it may cause the patient some amusement when he cannot. Or it may make him puzzled for here was something which had, on first contact, a painful somatic and a highly aberrative content which now no longer seems to exist. That is an “erasure.” Technically the engram is not erased. If the auditor cares to spend some time, solely for purposes of research, he will find that engram in the standard banks now, labeled “formerly aberrative: rather amusing: information which may be useful analytically.” Such a search is not germane to therapy. If the incident had a somatic, was recounted a few times and then, when its last new material was found, vanished, it is erased so far as the engram bank is concerned. It will no longer be “soldered” into the motor circuits, will no longer be dramatized, it no longer blocks a dynamic and is no longer an engram but a memory.

The “reduction” has some interesting aspects. Let us take a childhood incident (age of four, let us say) which had to do with a scalding. This is contacted while much data remains in the basic area. It has many things below it which will hold it in place. Nevertheless, it has emotional charge and therapy is slowed by that charge. The file clerk hands out the scalding. Now it will not erase, but it will reduce. Here is a job which will take more time than an erasure. And there may be several aspects to that job.

The somatic is contacted, the incident is begun as close to the beginning as the auditor can get, and is then recounted. This scalding, let us say, has apathy as its emotional tone (Tone 0.5). The pre-clear slogs through it apathetically, well exteriorized, watching himself be scalded. Then suddenly, perhaps, an emotional discharge may come off, but not necessarily. The pre-clear returns to the beginning and recounts (re-experiences) the whole thing once more. Then again and again. Soon he begins to get angry at the people involved in the incident for being so careless or so heartless. He has come up to anger (Tone 1.5). The auditor, although the patient would like to tell how vicious his parents are or how he thinks laws ought to be passed about scalding children, patiently puts the pre-clear through the incident again. Now the pre-clear ceases to be angry and finds that he is bored with the material. He has risen up to boredom on the tone scale (Tone 2.5). He may protest to the auditor that this is a waste of time. The auditor puts him back through the incident again. New data may show up. The somatic may or may not be still present at this period but the emotional tone is still low. The auditor puts the pre-clear through the incident again and the pre-clear may, but not always, begin to be sarcastic or facetious. The incident is again recounted. Suddenly the pre-clear may be amused about it (but not always) and the incident, when it obviously has reached a high tone, may be left. It will probably sag in a few days, but that is a matter of no great importance for it will be erased wholly on the return from basic-basic. In any case it will never be as aberrative as it was before the reduction.

A reduction will sometimes result in the whole engram’s apparently disappearing. But it is obvious when this will occur. Without much lifting in the tone scale, the incident, by repetition, simply goes out of sight. This is reducing to recession. In a few days that incident will be back in force again, almost as strong as ever. There is material before it and emotional charge after it which make it unwieldy.

Several things can happen, then, to an engram in the process of work. It can reduce, which is to say, discharge emotionally and somatically and be of no great aberrative power thereafter. It can reduce to recession, which is to say it merely goes out of sight after several recountings. It can erase, which is to say, vanish and cease to be thereafter so far as the engram bank is concerned.

A little experience will tell an auditor what engrams are going to do after he has contacted them. Erasure takes place, ordinarily, only after basic-basic has been reached or, for that matter, when the basic area is being worked. The reduction occurs with an emotional discharge. The reduction to recession happens when there is too much in the engram bank suppressing the incident.

Every now and then even the best auditor will get hold of an engram and decide to grind it out now that it has been contacted. It is a sorry job. Perhaps it is better to grind it out than to merely restimulate it and let the patient be irritated by it for a couple of days. Perhaps not. But in any case that engram which reduces only to recession was better not contacted in the first place.

New auditors are forever charging at birth as an obvious target. Everybody has a birth: in most patients it can be located rather easily. But it is a painful incident and until the basic area has been thoroughly worked and until late life painful emotion has been discharged and until the file clerk is ready to hand up birth, the incident is better left in place. It will usually reduce to recession and afterwards keep popping up to plague the auditor. The patient gets obscure headaches, gets sniffles, feels uncomfortable afterwards unless birth is taken on the return (from the basic area). The auditor is wasting time, of course, by trying to remove these headaches and sniffles because birth, with the whole prenatal life before it, will not properly reduce or erase but only recede. It is too often the case that birth, if prematurely contacted, will give the patient a headache and a cold. These discomforts are minor and of no great importance, but the work the auditor may have invested in working an incident which will only reduce to recession is lost work.

True, the file clerk occasionally hands out birth: if he does, there is an emotional charge on it which will discharge and the incident will reduce properly. The auditor by all means should take it. True, a case sometimes stalls down and the auditor runs birth anyway just to see if he can speed things up. But merely going back to birth to put one’s hands on an engram because he knows it is there will bring about discomfort and lost time. Go prenatal as far as you can and see what the file clerk will hand forth. Try repeater technique in the basic area.

You may get incidents which will erase. If there is nothing there, find out about a painful emotion engram in late life, the death of a friend, the loss of an ally, a failure of a business, something. Blow a charge from it and reduce it as an engram and then go back prenatally as early as possible and see what has turned up. If the file clerk thinks you need birth, he’ll give it out. But do not ask for birth just to have an engram to work, because it may prove to be a thoroughly uncomfortable and fruitless endeavor. Birth will come up when it will come up and the file clerk knows his business.

Charging into any late period of “unconsciousness” such as surgical anesthetic, where physical pain is present in large quantities, can bring about this needless restimulation. You can, of course, fare better with such things in reverie than in hypnosis or narco-synthesis where such a restimulation might bring about severe results. In reverie the effect is light.

HANDLING THE SOMATIC STRIP

There are two little men on each side of the brain, a set for each lobe, hanging by their heels. The outer one is the “motor strip,” the inner one, the “sensory strip.” If you wish to know more about the structure of these pairs dianetic research will have the answer in a few more years. Currently there is something known about them, a description. To an engineer who knows dianetics the current description which will be found in the library is not entirely reasonable. These are, possibly, switchboards of some sort. Readings can be taken in the vicinity of them — just aft of the temples — if you have a very sensitive galvanometer, a galvanometer more sensitive than any on the public market today. Those readings show emanations of a field of some sort. When we have established the precise type of energy flowing here, we can probably measure it with better precision. When we know exactly where the thinking is done in the body we will know more about these strips. All dianetic research has established to date is that, beneath a welter of labels, nothing is actually known which is worth recounting about these structures beyond the fact that they have something to do with coordination of various parts of the body. We do, however, refer to them for lack of something better, in the course of therapy. Now that we know something about function, further research certainly cannot help but yield precision answers about structure.

The auditor can turn somatics on and off in a patient like an engineer handles switches. More aptly, he can turn them on and off in the body like a conductor runs a street car along a track. Here we have the game referred to previously when we talked about the time track.

In a patient who is working well, the “somatic strip” can be commanded to go to any part of the time track. Day by day, hour by hour, in normal life the somatic strip ranges up and down this track as engrams are restimulated. The auditor, working a patient, may find his own somatic strip obeying his own commands and some of his own somatics turning on and off, a fact which is at worst mildly uncomfortable. The whole body, the cells, whatever it is that is moving we do not really know. But we can handle it and we can assume that it at least passes through the switchboard of the little men who hang by their heels.

“The somatic strip will now go to birth,” says the auditor.

The patient in reverie begins to feel the pressure of contractions thrusting him down the birth canal.

“The somatic strip will now go to the last time you injured yourself,” says the auditor.

The pre-clear feels a mild reproduction of the pain of, perhaps, a bumped knee. If he has sonic and visio recall, he will see where he is and suddenly realize that it was in the office: he will hear the clerks and typewriters and the car noises outside.

“The somatic strip will now go into the prenatal area,” says the auditor.

And the patient finds himself in the area, probably floating along, not uncomfortable.

“The somatic strip will now go to the first moment of pain or discomfort which can now be reached,” says the auditor.

The patient drifts around a moment and suddenly feels a pain in his chest. He begins to cough and feels depression all over him. Mama is coughing (often source of chronic coughs). “Roll the cough,” says the auditor.

The patient finds himself at the beginning of the engram and begins to run it. “Cough, cough, cough,” says the patient. He then yawns. “‘It hurts and I can’t stop,’” he quotes his mother. “Go to the beginning and roll it again,” says the auditor. “Cough, cough, cough,” begins the patient, but he is not coughing as badly now. He yawns more deeply. “‘Ouch. It hurts, it hurts, and I can’t seem to stop,’” quotes the pre-clear, listening directly if he has sonic, getting impressions of what’s said if he does not have. He has picked up words now that were suppressed in it by “unconsciousness.” “Unconsciousness” is beginning to come off

with the yawns. “Roll it again,” says the auditor. “‘I can’t stop,’” says the pre-clear, quoting all that he finds this time. The somatic is gone. He yawns again. The engram is erased.

“The somatic strip will now go to the next moment of pain or discomfort,” says the auditor.

The somatic does not turn on. The patient goes into a strange sleep. He mutters about a dream. Suddenly the somatic gets stronger. The patient begins to shiver. “What occurs?” says the auditor. “I hear water running,” says the pre-clear. “Somatic strip will go to the beginning of the incident,” says the auditor. “Roll it.” “I keep on hearing water,” says the pre-clear. (He must be stuck, the somatics did not move. This is a holder.) “Somatic strip will go to whatever it is that is holding,” says the auditor. “‘I’ll hold it in there awhile and see if it does some good,’” quotes the pre-clear. “Pick up the beginning of the incident now and roll it,” says the auditor. “I feel myself being jostled,” says the pre-clear. “Ouch, something bumped me.” “Pick up the beginning and roll it,” says the auditor. “‘I’m sure I must be pregnant,’” quotes the pre- clear. “‘I’ll hold it in there awhile and see if it does some good.’” “Is there anything earlier?” says the auditor. The pre-clear’s strip goes to the earlier moment where he feels pressure as she tries to get something into the cervix. Then he rolls the engram and it erases.

This is handling of the somatic strip. It can be sent anywhere. It will pick up the somatic first, usually, and then pick up the content. Using repeater technique, the somatic is “sucked down” to the incident and the somatics turn on. Then the incident is run. If it does not lift, find an earlier incident simply by telling the somatic strip to go to the earlier incident.

If the somatic strip does not move, which is to say, if somatics (physical sensations) do not turn on and off, then the patient is stuck somewhere on the track. He can be stuck in present time, which would mean he has a bouncer thrusting him all the way up the track. Use repeater technique or merely try to send the somatic strip back. If it won’t go, get various bouncer phrases like “Can’t go back,” “Run a mile,” etc. and with them suck the somatic strip down to the incident and run it.

The somatic strip may move through an incident with full sensation and yet, returning over the same ground several times will not bring out data. Time after time this can be done without result in some engrams: the somatics remain almost the same, undulating through the incident each time but with no other content. Then the auditor is “bucking” a denyer, a phrase such as “This is a secret,” “Don’t let him know,” “Forget it,” etc. In such a case he sends the somatic strip to the phrase which denies the data: “Go to the moment a phrase is uttered denying this data,” says the auditor. After a moment, “‘If he found out about this, it would kill him,’” quotes the pre-clear, either from sonic or from impressions. Then the auditor sends the somatic strip back to the start of the incident and it goes on through it, this time with other perceptic content. The somatics, unless the incident is very late prenatal with basic area full of material, undulate (fluctuate according to the action of the engram) and diminish to either reduction or erasure on consecutive recountings.

The auditor tells the somatic strip to go earlier, sometimes it goes later. This is a misdirector. “Can’t tell which way I am going,” “Going backwards,” “Do just the opposite,” these are the type of phrases of the misdirector. The auditor recognizes that he has one in the pre-clear, guesses it or discovers it from the pre-clear’s wording of the complaint about the action, and by repeater or direct command of the strip, picks up the phrase and the engram, reduces or erases it and continues.

If the somatic strip does not respond according to command, then a bouncer, a holder, a misdirector, or a grouper has been restimulated and should be discharged. The somatic strip will be where the command is which forbids it to function as desired.

There are good and bad conductors of this somatic strip. The good conductor works closely with the file clerk, using such broad orders as “The somatic strip will pick up the earliest moment of pain or discomfort which can be reached,” or “The somatic strip will go to

the highest intensity of the somatic you now have” (when a somatic is bothering the patient). The bad conductor picks out specific incidents which he thinks might be aberrative, bullies the somatic strip into them and somehow beats them down. There are moments when it is necessary to be quite persuasive with the strip and moments when it is necessary to pick out incidents of physical pain, but the auditor is the best judge of what should take place. As long as the strip will work smoothly, finding new incidents and running over them, he should not tamper with it beyond making sure that he reduces everything the strip contacts.

A very fine way to thoroughly wreck a case is to put the somatic strip into an incident, decide something else is more important and go rushing off to it, get that half lifted and go off to something else. By the time three or four incidents have been so touched but not reduced, the strip stalls down, the track starts to bunch up and the auditor has a snarl which may take him many hours of therapy or a week or two of rebalancing (letting the case settle) to bring back to a workable state.

The patient will sometimes want a somatic turned off. It has been bothering him. That means that the strip is somehow hung up in some incident which therapy or the patient’s environment has restimulated. Ordinarily it is not worth the time and trouble to locate the incident. It will settle out of its own accord in a day or two and it may be an incident which cannot be reduced because of the earlier engrams.

The somatic strip is handled in a late incident just as it is sent to an earlier one. Despair charges are contacted in the same way.

If you want a test to see if the strip is moving, or to test recall, send it back a few hours and find out what you get. While the prenatal area is easier to reach than yesterday in many cases, some idea will be gained of how the patient is working.

PRESENT TIME

The beginning is conception. Your patients sometimes have a feeling that they are sperms or ovums at the beginning of the track: in dianetics this is called the sperm dream. It is not of any great value so far as we know at this time. But it is very interesting. It does not have to be suggested to the pre-clear. All one has to do is send him to the beginning of the track and hear what he has to say. Sometimes he has an early engram mixed up with conception.

At the late end of the track is, of course, now. This is present time. It happens now and then that patients are not getting back to present time because they have struck holders en route. Repeater technique with holders will generally free the strip and get it to present time.

A patient may get a trifle groggy with all the things which have been happening to him in the course of a therapy session. And he may have reduced resistance to engrams as he comes back up the track and may thus trip a holder. The auditor should be very sure the patient is up in present time. Occasionally the patient will be so thoroughly stuck and the hour so advanced that the effort to bring him all the way up is not feasible at the time. A period of sleep will generally accomplish it.

There is a test whereby the auditor can tell if the pre-clear is up to present time. He snaps a question at the pre-clear, “How old are you?” The pre-clear gives him a “flash answer.” If it is the pre-clear’s right age, the pre-clear is in present time. If it is an earlier age, there is a holder there, and the patient is not in present time. There are other methods of determining this but it is not very important, by and large, if the patient does fail to make it.

Snapping questions at people, asking how old they are, elicits some surprising answers. Being stuck on the track is so common in “normal” people that a day or two or a week or two of failure to reach present time in a pre-clear is far from alarming.

Anyone who has a chronic psycho-somatic illness is definitely stuck somewhere on the time track. Snap questions about it get, “Three,” or “Ten years,” or some such answer quite ordinarily even when asked of people who suppose they are in good health. Reverie reveals to them where they are on the track. Sometimes, in the first session, a pre-clear shuts his eyes in reverie to find himself in a dentist’s chair at the age of three. He has been there for the last thirty years or so because the dentist and his mother both told him to “stay there” while he was shocky with pain and gas — so he did, and the chronic tooth trouble he had all his life is that somatic.

This doesn’t happen very often, but you can find someone you know, it is certain, who would flash answer “Ten years” and, being put in reverie, would find himself, as soon as the engram came to view, lying flat on his back in a ball park or some such situation, with somebody telling him not to move until the ambulance came: that’s his arthritis!

Try it on somebody.

THE FLASH ANSWER

A device in common use in therapy is the flash answer. This is done in two ways. The first mentioned here is the least used. “When I count to five,” says the auditor, “a phrase will flash into your mind to describe where you are on the track. One, two, three, four, five!” “Late prenatal,” says the pre-clear, or “yesterday” or whatever occurs to him.

The flash answer is the first thing which comes into a person’s head when a question is asked him. It will come from the engram bank, usually, and will be useful. It may be “demon talk” but it is generally right. The auditor merely asks a question, such as what is holding the patient, what denies him knowledge, etc., prefacing the question with the remark, “I want a flash answer to this.”

“I want a flash answer to this,” says the auditor. “What would happen if you became sane?” “Die,” says the patient. “What would happen if you die,” says the auditor. “I’d get well,” says the patient. And with this data they then make an estimate of the current computation on allies or some such thing. In this case, the ally said to the pre-clear when he was ill, “I’d die, just die if you didn’t get well. If you’re sick much longer I’ll go insane.” And a former engram said the pre-clear had to be sick. And this is, after all, just an engram. So repeater technique is used on the word “die” and an ally is uncovered that the pre-clear never knew existed and a charge is blown.

Much valuable data can be recovered by clever use of the flash answer. If there is no answer at all, it means that the answer is occluded and that is almost as good a reply as actual data since it means some kind of a cover-up.

DREAMS

Dreams have been used considerably by various schools of mental healing. Their “symbology” is a mystic foible forwarded to explain something which the mystics did not know anything about. Dreams are crazy house mirrors by which the analyzer looks down into the engram bank.

Dreams are puns on words and situations in the engram bank.

Dreams are not much help, being puns.

Dreams are not much used in dianetics.

You will hear dreams from patients. Patients are hard to shut off when they start telling dreams. If you want to waste your time, you will listen.

VALENCE SHIFT

A mechanism used in dianetics is the valence shift.

We know the way a patient gets into valences when he dramatizes his engrams in life. He becomes a winning valence and he says and does rather much what the person in the winning valence did in that engram.

The theory behind it is this: returned to a time the patient may consider too painful to enter, he can be shifted into a valence which felt no pain. A dull way to persuade him is to tell him he does not have to feel the pain or the emotion and let him go through it. This is very bad dianetics because it is a positive suggestion and every safeguard must be taken to keep from giving suggestions to the patient, for he may be very suggestible even when he pretends not to be. But there is the valence shift and this permits the patient to escape the pain and still remain in the engram until he can recount it.

Example, father beating mother, unborn child knocked “unconscious.” The data is available in the father valence with no pain, in the mother valence with her pain, in the child’s valence with his pain.

The way to handle this, if the patient positively refuses to enter it although he has somatics, is to shift him in valence. The auditor says, “Go into your father’s valence and be your father for the moment.” After some persuasion the patient does so. “Bawl your mother out,” says the auditor. “Give her a fine talking to.” The patient is now on that circuit which contains no “unconsciousness” and approximates the emotion and the words his father used to his mother. The auditor lets him do this a couple or three times until the charge is somewhat off the engram. Then he turns the patient’s valence into the mother: “Be your mother for the moment now and talk back to your father,” says the auditor. The patient shifts valence and is his mother and repeats his mother’s phrases. “Now be yourself,” says the auditor, “and recount the entire incident with all somatics and emotion please.” The patient is able to re- experience the incident as himself.

This works very well when one is trying to get at an ally. “Shift valence,” says the auditor to the returned patient, “and plead with your mother not to kill the baby.” “Now be a nurse,” says the auditor, with the pre-clear returned to some incident he seems very fearful about entering, “and plead with a little boy to get well.” The patient will correct the auditor’s concept of the script and usually will proceed.

The patient will often refuse to go into a valence because he hates it. This means there must be considerable charge in the person he refuses to be.

This mechanism is rarely used but is handy when a case is stalling. The father did not obey the holders or commands, he uttered them. The nurse would not obey her own commands. And so forth. Thus many holders and denyers can be flushed to view. It is useful in the beginning of a case.

Valence shift is seldom used except where an engram is suspected which will not otherwise be approached by the patient. He will often approach the engram with valence shift when he will not approach it as himself. Valence shift is somewhat undesirable when employed on a suggestible subject since it violates the dianetic rule that no positive suggestion be used beyond those absolutely necessary in returning and recounting and uncovering data. Therefore valence shift is seldom employed and rarely on a suggestible person.

TYPE OF CHAINS

Engrams, particularly in the prenatal area, are in chains. That is to say there is a series of incidents of similar types. This is useful classification because it leads to some solutions. The chains one can most easily contact in a pre-clear are the least charged. The most aberrative chains will usually be the hardest to reach because they contain the most active data. Remember the rule that what the auditor finds hard to reach, the analyzer of the patient found hard to reach.

Here is a list of chains — not all the possible chains by any means — found in one case which had passed for “normal” for thirty-six years of his life.

COITUS CHAIN, FATHER. 1st incident zygote. 56 succeeding incidents. Two branches, father drunk and father sober.

COITUS CHAIN, LOVER. 1st incident embryo. 18 succeeding incidents. All painful because of enthusiasm of lover.

CONSTIPATION CHAIN. 1st incident zygote. 51 succeeding incidents. Each incident building high pressure on child.

DOUCHE CHAIN. 1st incident embryo. 21 succeeding incidents. One each day to missed period, all into cervix.

SICKNESS CHAIN. 1st incident embryo. 5 succeeding incidents. 3 colds. 1 case grippe. One vomiting spell — hangover.

MORNING SICKNESS CHAIN. 1st incident embryo. 32 succeeding incidents.

CONTRACEPTIVE CHAIN. 1st incident zygote. 1 incident. Some paste substance into cervix. entirely and completely unable to confront and attack an engram which the auditor is certain is present: and this is rare.

FIGHT CHAIN. 1st incident embryo. 38 succeeding incidents. Three falls, loud voices, no beating.

ATTEMPTED ABORTION, SURGICAL. 1st incident embryo. 21 succeeding incidents.

ATTEMPTED ABORTION, DOUCHE. 1st incident foetus. 2 incidents. 1 using paste, 1 using lysol, very strong.

ATTEMPTED ABORTION, PRESSURE. 1st incident foetus. 3 incidents. 1 father sitting on mother. Two mother jumping off boxes.

HICCOUGH CHAIN. 1st incident foetus. 5 incidents.

ACCIDENT CHAIN. 1st incident embryo. 18 incidents. Various falls and collisions.

MASTURBATION CHAIN. 1st incident embryo. 80 succeeding incidents. Mother masturbating with fingers, jolting child and injuring child with orgasm.

DOCTOR CHAIN. 1st incident, 1st missed period. 18 visits. Doctor examination painful but doctor an ally, discovering mother attempting an abortion and scolding her thoroughly.

PREMATURE LABOR PAINS. 3 days before actual birth.

BIRTH. Instrument. 29 hours labor.

In that mother was a sub-vocal talker this made a sizable quantity of material to be erased for the remainder of the patient’s life was in addition to this. This was a 500-hour case, non-sonic, imaginary recalls which had to be cancelled out by discovering lie factories before the above data could be obtained.

There are other chains possible but this case was picked because it contains the usual ones found.Mother’s lover is not very unusual, unfortunately, for he puts secrecy into a case to such an extent that when the case seems very, very secret, then a lover or two will seem indictated. But don’t suggest them to a pre-clear. He may use them for an avoid.

end.

DIANETIC DON’TS

Don’t give any patient a positive suggestion as therapy in itself or to assist therapy.

Don’t fail to give a canceller at every session’s beginning and use it at every session’s

Don’t ever tell a patient he can “remember this in present time” because the somatic will come to present time and that is very uncomfortable.

Don’t ever, ever, ever, ever tell a patient that he can remember everything that ever happened to him in present time because that groups everything in present time if the patient has slid into a deep trance. And that makes it necessary to unsnarl a whole case. Want to waste two hundred hours?

Don’t ever retaliate in any way when a patient in reverie gets angry at you. Follow the auditor’s code. If you get angry with him you may throw him into an apathy which will take you many hours to undo.

Don’t evaluate data or tell a patient what is wrong with him.

Don’t crow. If the pre-clear is your wife, or husband, or child, don’t rub it in that the favorite argument phrase was out of an engram. Of course it was!

Don’t question the validity of data. Keep your reservations to yourself. Audit the information for your own guidance. If the patient doesn’t know what you think, the engrams will never get a chance to evade.

Don’t ever snap a patient to present time just because he begs for it. If he is in the middle of an engram, the only way out of it is through it. The power of the engram is slight when the patient is returned to it. It turns on hard when the patient comes to present time. The patient will have a nervous shock if he is snapped to present.

Don’t ever get frightened, no matter what kind of squirming or squalling a patient may do. It isn’t serious, any of it, although it is sometimes dramatic.

Don’t ever promise to clear a case: promise only to release it. You may have to go away or work on something more urgent. And a broken promise to a pre-clear will be taken very hard.

Don’t interfere with the private life of a pre-clear or give him guidance. Tell him to make up his own mind about what he should do.

Don’t break the auditor’s code. It is there to protect you, not just the pre-clear. Therapy can’t hurt him if you do but half a job on it and do half of that wrong; breaking the code can make you very uncomfortable because it will make you a target of the pre-clear and cost you considerable extra work.

Don’t leave engrams half-reduced when you are given them by the file clerk.

Don’t get inventive about dianetics until you have worked at least one case out. And don’t get too inventive until you have worked a case which has sonic, a case which has shut- off sonic, and a case which has imaginary sonic. Clear these and you will know. And you will have met enough engrams to get some ideas that can be of great benefit to dianetics. If you don’t get ideas after that and after you yourself are in therapy and cleared, there’s something wrong. Dianetics is an expanding science; but don’t expand it until you know which way it travels.

Don’t mix gasoline and alcohol, or dianetics and other therapy except purely medical, dispensed by a professional medical doctor.

Don’t get a case snarled up and then take it to a psychiatrist who knows no dianetics. Only dianetics can unsnarl dianetics and yesterday’s methods won’t help your patient one slightest bit when all he needs is another run through the one you snapped him out of too fast. Take a cinch on your nerve and send him back through the incident again. In dianetics today’s obvious nervous breakdown is tomorrow’s most cheerful being.

Don’t quit, don’t balk. Just keep running engrams.

And one day you’ll have a release. And another day you’ll have a clear.

TYPES OF SOMATICS

There are two kinds of somatics, those which properly belong to the patient and those which belong to his mother or some other person. The first actually happened, so did the second. But the patient should not have his mother’s somatics. If he does, if he is found complaining of headaches whenever his mother has a headache, there is an engram, very early, which says he must have whatever she has: “The baby is part of me,” “I want him to suffer as I suffer,” etc. Or the phrase may be some entirely misunderstood thing literally taken. However, all this “comes out in the wash” and should be no great concern of the auditor’s.

“UNCONSCIOUSNESS”

While “unconsciousness” has been covered elsewhere in various ways, in therapy it has two special manifestations. The yawn and the “boil-off.”

The engram of physical pain contains deep “unconsciousness” and if it is going to lift, particularly in the basic area, it comes off in yawns. After a first or second recounting, the patient starts to yawn. These yawns are turning on his analyzer.

In a very extreme engram — a prenatal electric shock which mother received — five hours of “unconsciousness” “boil-off” have taken place during therapy. The shock lasted for less than a minute but so close did it bring the individual to death that when the incident was first contacted in therapy, he swam and floundered and had strange dreams, muttered and mumbled for five hours. That is a record. Forty-five minutes of this “boil-off” is rare. Five or ten minutes of it are not uncommon.

The auditor will take a patient into an area. No somatic turns on. But the patient begins to drowse into a strange kind of sleep. He rouses from this from time to time, mutters something, usually idiotic, rouses again with a dream and generally makes no progress to all appearances. But progress is being made. A period when he was almost dead is coming up to the surface. Soon a somatic will turn on and the patient will run an engram a few times on command, will yawn a little and then brighten up. Such a quantity of “unconsciousness” was, of course, sufficient to keep his analyzer about nine-tenths shut off when he was awake for, if it was near basic, it was part of every other engram. Such an engram, with such deep “unconsciousness,” when released, produces a marked improvement in a case, as much as a painful emotion engram at times.

It is up to the auditor to sit it through no matter how long it takes. It may make an uncleared auditor very sleepy to watch all this but it should be done. He will rarely strike one that lasts an hour but every case has such a period lasting from ten minutes to a half hour.

He should stir the patient up once in a while and try to make him go through the engram. There is a very special way to stir a patient into life: don’t touch his body for it may be highly restimulative and make him very upset. Touch only the bottoms of his feet with your hand or your own feet and touch them just enough to jog him into attention for a moment. That keeps the “boil-off” in progress and does not permit the patient to sag into ordinary sleep.

The “boil-off” can be confused, by an inexperienced auditor, with an engram command to sleep. However, if the auditor will observe the patient closely, he will find that in the “boil- off” the patient gives every appearance of being drugged while in a sleep command, he simply goes to sleep and does it very smoothly. The “boil-off” is a trifle restless, full of mutterings and flounderings and dreams. The sleep is smooth.

An engramic command to go to sleep, acting on the returned pre-clear, is broken by sending the somatic strip to the moment when the sleep command is given. If the pre-clear contacts it and goes over it, he will quickly awaken on the track and continue with therapy.

The “boil-off” may be full of yawns, mutterings or grunts. Sleep is usually quiet and gentle.

Just why this is called a “boil-off” and just why auditors are fond of the term is obscure. It was originally and sedately named “comatic reduction” but such erudition has been outvoted by the fact that it has never been used.

If you are fond of listening to dreams, you will find them in plenty in the “boil-off.” As images on the desert are distorted by the glass snakes of heat waves, so are the engramic commands distorted to the analyzer through the veil of “unconsciousness.”

LOCKS

It is one of the blessings of nature that the lock is something which needs minor attention. A lock is an incident which, with or without charge, is in conscious recall and which seems to be the reason the aberree is aberrated. Perhaps this was another way the bank protected itself. A lock is a moment of mental discomfort containing no physical pain and no great loss. A scolding, a social disgrace: such things are locks. Any case has thousands and thousands of locks. The auditor will discover them in plenty if he cares to waste time looking for them. The treatment of these locks was the main goal of an old art known as “hypno- analysis.” Most of them can be reduced.

The key-in of an engram takes place at some future date from the time the engram was actually received. The key-in moment contains analytical reduction from weariness or slight illness. A situation similar to the engram, which contained “unconsciousness,” came about and keyed-in the engram. This is a primary lock. Breaking it, if it can be found, produces the effect of keying out the engram. But it can be considered a waste of time even if it has some therapeutic value and was used, without understanding, by some past schools.

If an auditor wants to know how the case was reacting to life, he can find some of these thousands and thousands of locks and look them over. But that is probably all the interest he has in them, for locks discharge. They discharge automatically the moment the engram holding them is erased. A whole life rebalances itself when the engrams are gone and the locks need no

treatment. Neither does the pre-clear now cleared need education as to how to think: like the blowing of locks, this is an automatic process.

These locks lie down amongst the engrams sometimes. The pre-clear may be deep in the prenatal area and suddenly think about a time when he was twenty or, as is common in therapy, think about an engram he heard from somebody else. This is a good clue. Pay no further heed to the lock: find the engram to which it attached itself, for there is an engram immediately with it. In dreams these locks in distorted form, come swimming up out of the bank, complicating the dream.

THE JUNIOR CASE

Do not take on a Junior for your first case if you can avoid it. If father was named George and the patient is called George, beware of trouble. The engram bank takes George to mean George and that is identity thought de luxe.

Mother says, “I hate George!” “That means Junior,” says the engram though mother meant father. “George is thoughtless.” “George must not know.” “Oh, George, I wish you had some sex appeal, but you haven’t.” And so go the engrams. A Junior case is seldom easy.

It is customary to shudder, in dianetics, at the thought of taking on a Junior case. An auditor can be expected to slave his hardest when he has a case with non-sonic, which is off the time track, and which is named after father or mother. Such cases resolve, of course, but if parents knew what they did to children by giving them any name which might appear in the engram bank, such as that of parents or grandparents or friends, it is certain the custom would vanish instanter.

RESTIMULATING THE ENGRAM

“Ask often enough and you will receive,” is always true when working the engram bank. Simply by returning into an area enough times engrams will appear. If it is not there today, it will be there tomorrow. But if it is not there tomorrow, it will be there the day after and so forth. Emotional discharges are most certainly located by asking for them time after time, returning the patient over the part of the track where the charge is expected to lie. What repeater technique will fail to do can be done by returning the patient, session after session, to a portion of his life. Sooner or later it will come into view.

OCCLUDED LIFE PERIODS AND PEOPLE

Whole areas of the time track will be found occluded. These contain suppressors by way of engram command, ally computations and painful emotion. Persons can vanish utterly from sight for these reasons. They come to view after a few engrams have been lifted in basic or the area has been developed as above.

ANIMOSITY TOWARD PARENTS

It always happens, when one clears a child or adult, that the pre-clear goes through stages of improvement which bring him up the tone scale and cause him, of course, to pass through the second zone, anger. A pre-clear may become furious with his parents and other offenders in the engram bank. Such a situation is to be expected. It is a natural by-product of therapy and it cannot be avoided.

As the case progresses the tone scale, of course, rises and places the pre-clear in a state of boredom toward the villains who have wronged him. At last he reaches Tone 4, which is the

tone of the clear. At this time he is very cheerful and willing to be friends with people whether they have wronged him or not: of course he has the data about what to expect of them, but he nurses no animosity.

If a parent feels that the child, knowing all, would turn against him, then the parent is mistaken. The child has already, as an aberree, turned very thoroughly against the parent whether his analyzer knows all or not and the most uncertain and unlovely conduct may result from further hiding of the evidence.

It is a matter of continual observation that the good release and the clear feel no animosity whatever toward their parents or others who had caused their aberrations and indeed stop negating, defending and fighting so irrationally. The clear will fight, certainly, for a good cause and he will be the most dangerous opponent possible, but he does not fight for irrational reasons like an animal and his understanding of people is very much enlarged and his affection can at last be deep. If a parent wishes love and cooperation from a child, no matter what he has done to that child, permit therapy and achieve that love and cooperation with the child self- determined and no longer secretly in apathy or rage. After all, the clear has learned the source of his parents’ aberrations as well as his own; he recognizes that they had engram banks before he did.

PROPITIATION

In the process of work a stage will be passed, in the upper range of apathy, of propitiation. This conciliation is an effort to feed or sacrifice to an all destructive force. It is a state wherein the patient, in deep fear of another, offers expensive presents and soft words, turns the other cheek, offers himself as a doormat and generally makes a fool out of himself.

Many, many marriages, for instance, are marriages not of love but of that shabby substitute, propitiation. People have a habit of marrying people who have similar reactive minds. This is unfortunate for such marriages are destructive to both partners. She has a certain set of aberrations: they match his. She is pseudo-mother, he is pseudo-father. She had to marry him because father tried to murder her before she was born. He had to marry her because mother beat him when he was a child. Incredible as it may seem, these marriages are very common: one or the other partner becomes mentally ill, or both may deteriorate. He is unhappy, his enthusiasms crushed; she is miserable. Either with another partner might be a happy person yet, out of fear, they cannot break apart. They must propitiate each other.

The auditor who finds a marriage in this condition and attempts to treat one of the partners, had better treat both simultaneously. Or such partners had better treat each other and soon. Tolerance and understanding are almost always fostered by mutual help.

Propitiation is mentioned here because it has a diagnostic value. People who start bringing the auditor expensive gifts are propitiating him, and it probably means that they have a computation which tells them, engramically, that they will die or go crazy if they become sane. The auditor may enjoy the gifts, but he had better start looking for a sympathy engram not yet suspected or tapped.

Love.

LOVE

Probably no single subject in the concerns of Man has received as much attention as

It is not untrue that where one finds the greatest controversy, there he will also find the least comprehension. And where the facts are least precise there one can also find the greatest arguments. And so it is with Love.

Without doubt Love has ruined more lives than war and made more happiness than all the dreams of Paradise.

Entangled with a thousand songs a year and submerged beneath a solid tonnage of poor literature, Love should have a proper chance to be defined.

It has been discovered that there are three kinds of Love between woman and man: the first is covered under the law of affinity and is the affection with which Mankind holds Mankind; the second is sexual selection and is a true magnetism between partners; the third is compulsive “Love” dictated by nothing more reasonable than aberration.

Perhaps in the hero and heroine legends there have been cases of the second kind, and surely as one looks about him in this society he can discover numbers of happy partnerships based on a natural and strongly affectionate admiration. The third kind we find in plenty: tabloid literature is devoted to it and its travails; it crams the courts with urgent pleas for divorce, with criminal acts and civil suits; it sends children weeping into the corner away from quarrels and it launches from its broken homes broken young women and men.

Dianetics classifies this third kind of love as “reactive mind partnership.” Here is a meeting of minds — but the minds are on the lowest computational level possessed by man. Driven together by compulsion, men and women mate who will find in that mating nothing but sorrow and reduction of their hopes.

He is pseudo-brother who beat her regularly or he is pseudo-father whom she had to mind. Maybe he is even pseudo-mother who screamed ceaselessly at her but whom she had to placate, and he might be the doctor who hurt her so savagely. She may be his pseudo-mother, his pseudo-grandmother whom he had to love despite the way she undermined his decision; she may be a pseudo-nurse in some operation long gone or the pseudo-teacher who kept him after school to whet her sadism upon him.

Before the marriage takes place they only know there is a compulsion that they must be together, a feeling that each must be extremely nice to the other. And then the marriage takes place and more and more restimulation of ancient pain is felt until at last each is ill and life, complicated now perhaps by unhappy children, is an unhappy ruin.

The mechanism of propitiation carries with it covert hostility. Gifts given without cause and beyond the ability to expend, self-sacrifices which seem so noble at the time compose propitiation. Propitiation is an apathy effort to hold away a dangerous “source” of pain. Mistaken identity is one of the minor errors of the reactive mind. To buy off, to nullify the possible anger of a person perhaps long since dead but living now again in the partner, is the hope of propitiation. But a man is dead who will not sometimes fight. The hostility may be masked, it may be entirely “unknown” to the individual who indulges it. Certainly it is always justified in the mind of the person who exerts it and is supposed to be a natural consequence of some entirely obvious offense.

The wife who makes inadvertent blunders before the guests and by them accidently gives away the truth of her husband’s favorite myth, the wife who forgets the little favors he has asked, the wife who suddenly stabs him with a “logical” pin in the region of his hopes: these are wives who live with partners whom they must, out of some wrong done years before the courtship and by some other man, propitiate, and these are wives who, propitiating, numb the hopes and misunderstand the sorrows of their mates.

The husband who sleeps with another woman and “accidentally” leaves the lipstick on his tie, the husband who finds her excellent cooking bad and idleness in her days, the husband who forgets her letters he must mail, the husband who finds her opinions silly, these are husbands who live with partners whom they must propitiate.

A soaring, roller-coaster curve of peace and war in the home, failures to understand, mutual curtailment of liberty and self-determinism, unhappy lives, unhappy children and divorce are caused by reactive mind marriages. Compelled by an unknown threat to marry, repelled by fear of pain from trust, this “meeting of minds” is the primary cause of all marital disaster.

The law lacked definition and so invoked great difficulty in the path of those involved in such marriages. The track of it is the dwindling spiral of misery which accompanies all chronic restimulation and leads only down to failure and to death. Someday there will, perhaps, exist a much more sentient law that only the unaberrated can marry and bear children. The present law only provides that marriages must be at best most difficult to part. Such a law is like a prison sentence for the husband, the wife and the children — all and every one.

A marriage can be saved by clearing its partners of their aberrations. An optimum solution would include this in any case since it is most difficult for a wife or a husband to rise, even when divorced, to any future plane of happiness: and where there are children, if clearing is not effected, a great injustice has been done.

It is usually discovered that when both partners in a reactive mind marriage are cleared of aberration, life becomes considerably more than tolerable; for human beings often have a natural liking even when no sexual selection has been present. The restoration of a marriage by clearing the partners may not bring about one of the great loves that poets strummed about but it will at least bring a high level of respect and cooperation toward the common goal of making life worthwhile. And in many marriages so cleared it was discovered that the partners, beneath the dirty cloth of aberration, loved each other well.

A major gain to such a clearing is for the children’s sake. Nearly all marital discontent has as its major factor aberration on the second dynamic, sex. And any such aberration includes a nervous disposition toward children.

Where there are children, divorce does not answer, clearing does. And with clearing comes a fresh new page of life on which happiness can be written.

In the case of the reactive mind marriage, turn-about clearing is often complicated by the concealed hostilities which lie below the propitiative mechanism. It is wise for the partners to look outside the home, each interesting a friend in a therapy turn-about. If such mutual clearing is begun, with the partners working on each other, much restraint of anger and exertion of patience must be practiced, and the auditor’s code must be most severely followed. It requires a saintly detachment to bear the Tone One of the partner who, returned to a quarrel, seasons the recountings with further recrimination. If it must be done, it can be done but, when many quarrels and travails have beset a couple, it is easier if they each look without the home for a therapy partner.

Additionally, there is a kind of “rapport” established between any auditor and pre-clear and after the therapy session is done, a strengthening of the natural affinity is such that a small deed or word may be taken as a savage attack with the result of a quarrel and the inhibition of therapy.

Men can be considered to be best audited by men and women by women. This condition is changed when one deals with a woman who has such severe aberrations about women that she is in fear around them or when one is auditing a man who has deep fear of men.

The dynamics of men and women are somehow different and a wife, particularly if there have ever been quarrels of any magnitude, sometimes finds it difficult at times to be sufficiently insistent to audit her husband. The husband may audit, in the usual case, without great difficulty but when in therapy himself, his feeling that he must rise superior to the situation forces him to attempt auto-control, a thing which is impossible.

THE ERASURE

Sooner or later — if you keep trying — you will get basic-basic, the earliest moment of “unconsciousness” and physical pain. You will know when you have it, perhaps, only because things start to erase rather than reduce. If the patient still has a sonic shut-off, you can still erase: sooner or later that sonic will turn on, perhaps not even until the case is almost finished. You will reach basic-basic sooner or later.

The erasure, then, is more or less the same procedure as the entrance. You erase all the early engrams, always the earliest you can find, and you keep discharging painful emotion engrams either in the basic area or in the later periods after birth and later in life. You erase as much as you can find in the early part of the case, then you release all the emotion you can find later in the case (erase everything in each engram you touch) and then you come back and find early material.

The reactive engram bank is a hurrah’s nest. The file clerk must have a great deal of trouble with it. For things are keyed-in early and late, sometimes all he can get is material under certain topics, sometimes all he can get is material under certain somatics (all teeth, for instance), sometimes he can go in an orderly parade forward in time and give consecutive incidents: this last is the most important proceeding.

Not until you have worked out every moment of physical pain and discharged all the moments of painful emotion will the case be cleared. There will be times when you are sure that you are almost to the goal only to discover, going into the prenatal area again, a new series of material uncovered by the later life painful emotion you have released.

One day you will find a case which will not have any occlusions anywhere on the track, which will no longer be interested in engrams (apathy cases aren’t interested at the start; clears, at the top level, are not interested either, making a cycle, though the clear is a long way from apathetic), which will have all recalls, which will compute accurately and make no errors (within the limitations of the data available) and which, in short, has an exhausted engram bank. But do not be too optimistic, ever. Keep looking until you are sure. Observe the case to make certain no aberrations are displayed about anything, that dynamics are high in it and that life is good. If this person now feels he can solve all the problems of life, lick the world with one hand tied behind him and feel a friend to all men, you have a clear.

The only way you can go wrong is to compute with the idea that human beings are full of error and evil and sin and that if you have made a person less unhappy and above normal he is to bejudged a clear. This is a release.

In gold panning, it is true that every tenderfoot mistakes iron pyrites — fool’s gold — for gold. The tenderfoot will crow with delight over a bright bit of something in his pan which, actually, is worth a few dollars a ton. And then he sees real gold! The moment he sees real gold in that pan, he knows what gold really looks like. It cannot be mistaken.

Aside from the fact that psychometry would show a clear phenomenally intelligent, would show his aptitude and versatility wide, there is another quality, the human quality of a freed man. You take a release through psychometry and show him to be above normal, too. But a clear is a clear and when you see it you will know it with no further mistake.

That a clear is no longer interested in his extinct engrams does not mean he is not interested in the troubles of others. That a person is not interested in his own engrams does not necessarily argue a clear but may well be another mechanism, the apathy of neglect. To have engrams and neglect them is a common aberration with the reactive mind on a tone scale of apathy. To have no engrams and neglect them is another thing. Every apathy case, neglecting his engrams as an answer to his woe, insisting he is happy, insisting, as he racks himself to pieces, that there is nothing wrong with him, will, in work, particularly after basic-basic is lifted, become interested in his engrams and more interested in life. It is easy to tell the apathy

case from the clear for the two are at opposite ends of the spectrum of life: the clear has soared up toward victory and triumph, the apathy case knows victory and triumph are not for him and explains they are not worth it.

What the life span of a clear is cannot be answered now; ask in a hundred years.

How can you tell a clear? How close does the man measure to optimum for Man? Can he adjust to his environment smoothly? And far more important, can he adjust that environment to him?

Sixty days and again six months after a clear has apparently been effected, the auditor should again make a search for any neglected material. He should question the possible clear carefully as to the events of the past interval. In such a way he can learn of any worries, concerns or illnesses which may have taken place and attempt to trace these to engrams. If he cannot then find engrams, the clear is definitely and without question, cleared. And he will stay that way.

If a case merely stalls, however, and while aberration seems to be present, engrams cannot be found, the cause probably lies with thoroughly masked despair charges — painful emotional engrams. These are not necessarily postnatal, they can be within the prenatal period and involve circumstances which are very secret — or so the engrams announce. Also, some cases have stalled and proven “impenetrable” because of a current or immediately past circumstance the patient has not revealed.

There are two reasons which can delay a case:

(a)  the person may be so aberratedly ashamed of his past or so certain of retribution if he reveals it that he does nothing but avoid;

and

(b)  the person may be in fear because of some existing circumstance or threat.

The auditor is not interested in what the patient does. Or in what the patient has done.

Dianetics treats of what has been done to the person exclusively in therapy. What has been done by a patient is of no concern. The auditor who would make it any concern is practicing something other than dianetics. However, a patient, because of his engrams, may become obsessed with the idea that he must hide something in his life from the auditor. general classes above cover the general conditions.

These active reasons, as under (a), may be such a thing as a prison sentence, a murder hitherto unknown (although many people think they have done murder who have not even threatened it to anyone), abnormal sexual practices, or some such circumstance. The auditor should promise not to reveal any confidential matter, purely as a matter of routine and explain the principle of “done to. not done by.” And no auditor would taunt or revile a patient for having been victimized by his engrams. As under (b) there may exist some person, even the wife or husband, who has cowed the patient into secrecy. One case is at hand where no advance was made although there were many incidents contacted: the incidents would not reduce or erase no matter where they were. It was discovered that this case, a woman, had been beaten savagely and often by her husband and that she had been threatened with death if she told the auditor a word of these acts; and yet these acts contained the whole despair charges of the case and had to be released. Seeing this, finally suspecting, the auditor was able to gain her confidence and locate the despair charges. Even if he had not gained her confidence, by constant restimulation of late life areas he would have provoked her tears. In another case, that of a small child, “dub-in” recall was so obvious and lie factories were so busy that the auditor at last realized that he was attempting to penetrate not just the secrecy on an engram but the secrecy imposed upon a child by some one at hand. The mother, in this case, out of the idea that she would be apprehended, had furiously threatened the child to say nothing about his

treatment at home. There was more than this behind the case, there were eighty-one attempted abortions, an incredible number.

Anything is the business of an auditor if it has become an engram. If society has jailed a man, if all is not well in the home, these are things done to a person. What the person did to “deserve” this treatment is of no concern.

THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE CASE

Now and again an auditor will encounter a strange sort of hold-up in a case. He will be unable to get anything to clear or make sense in the prenatal area and sometimes in childhood as well as the prenatal area. He may be encountering a “foreign language case.” Occasionally the child did not know he was born to other parents (who may have spoken a foreign tongue) than those he has known as his parents. This is a special sort of mix-up of its own which is rather easily resolved simply by running engrams. It is always possible for the patient to forget that his parents spoke some other tongue in the home. Another tongue than the one the patient is using or other than that of the country in which the patient resides is, in one way, an asset: it gives a prenatal area which is very difficult to restimulate although it may still be acting upon the patient’s mind. But it is no asset to the auditor, who must now deal with a patient who does not know the language, who may not have sonic recall and yet has an engram bank full of data which once had meaning and really is his basic language.

The best remedy for such a case is to get an auditor who knows both the language used in the prenatal area and the present tongue. Another remedy is to take a dictionary to the case and figure out the bouncers et al. from the dictionary. Another way is to regress the patient often enough into the infant period that he begins to pick up the language again (making the file drawer of it come forth) and then ask the patient for phrases which, in the foreign tongue, would mean this or that. Gradually he may recover the language and so exhaust the bank. This is an extremely difficult case only when there was no childhood use of the other tongue. Given childhood use of that tongue, the auditor simply keeps returning the patient to childhood when he knew the tongue and then returning him into the prenatal area: the patient can translate what is happening. The cliches of other tongues than that the auditor speaks are often quite productive of other literal meanings than comparable cliches in the auditor’s tongue. This difference of cliche is a very responsible agent in the social aberrations of one nation as they differ from those of another. “I have hot,” says the Spaniard. “I am hot,” says the Englishman. Engramically, they mean different things, even if they mean the same to the analyzer.