Scientology A New Slant on Life 1965 Chapter 24

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The Vocabularies of Science

In all scientific systems you have a number of code words which operate as communication carriers, and when a person does not know these words well, he is having difficulty with the science itself. I have seen a senior in science falling down in his comprehension of a later part of the science because he had never gotten the nomenclature of the science straight to begin with. He did not know exactly what a British Thermal Unit was, or something like that—therefore, later on, when he’s solving some vast and involved problem, there’s a datum rambling around in his head and it’s not stable at all—it’s getting confused —it’s mixed up with all other data. And that is only because he didn’t understand what the term was in the first place.

So just as you learn semaphore signals, just as you learn Morse Code, just as you learn baby talk, so, when you become conversant with any particular specialized subject, you must become conversant with its terminology. Your understanding of it then increases. Otherwise, understanding is impeded by these words rattling around and not joining themselves to anything. If you know vaguely that such and such a word exists and yet have no definite understanding of what it means, it does not align. Thus, a misunderstanding of a word can cause a misalignment of a subject, and this really is the basis of the primary confusion in Man’s understanding of the mind.

There have been so many words assigned to various parts of the mind that one would be staggered if he merely catalogued all of these things. Take, for instance, the tremendous background and technology of psychoanalysis. Overpoweringly complicated material, most of it is merely descriptive; some of it, action terminology, such as the censor, the id, the ego, the alter-ego, and what not. Most of these things lined up, each one meaning a specific thing. But the practitioners who began to study this science did not have a good founding in the exact sciences—in other words, they didn’t have a model of the exact sciences. And in the humanities, they could be as careless as they liked with their words, because the humanities were not expected to be precise or exact—not a criticism of them—it just means that you could have a lesser command of the language.

When they got into the study of Freud, they got into this interesting thing—to one person an id was one thing and to another person it was something else. And alter-ego was this and it was that. The confusion of terms there, practically all by itself, became the totality of confusion of psychoanalysis.

Actually, psychoanalysis is as easy to understand, certainly, as Japanese. Japanese is a baby talk—very, very hard to read, very, very easy to talk. If you can imagine a language which tells you which is the subject, which is the verb, which is the object, every time it speaks, you can imagine this baby-talk kind of a language. One that doesn’t have various classes or conjugations of verbs. A very faint kind of a language. Nevertheless, it merely consists, in order to communicate with a Japanese, of knowing the meanings of certain words; and if you know the meanings of those words precisely, then when a Japanese comes up to you and says, “Do you want a cup of tea?”, you don’t immediately get up because you thought he said, “Wet Paint”. You have a communication possibility.

Well, similarly, with the language of psychoanalysis, the great difficulties inherent in understanding such a thing as psychoanalysis became much less difficult when one viewed psychoanalysis as a code system to relay certain meanings. It did not, then, become a problem of whether or not these phenomena existed or didn’t exist. It simply became a problem of words meaning a certain precise thing. And if they meant that thing to everybody, then everybody was talking psychoanalysis, and if it didn’t mean this thing to everybody, then people weren’t talking psychoanalysis. Who knows what they were talking? The next thing you know, they were talking Jungianism—the next thing you know, they were talking Adlerianism—and the amount of difference between these various items is minute, to say the least. But the language difficulties, then, made many practitioners in that field at odds with the theory, which they did not, at any rate, understand.

I remember one time learning Igoroti, an Eastern primitive language, in a single night. I sat up by kerosene lantern and took a list of words that had been made by an old missionary in the hills in Luzon—the Igorot had a very simple language. This missionary had phoneticized their language and he had made a list of their main words and their usage and grammar. And I remember sitting up under a mosquito net with the mosquitoes hungrily chomping their beaks just outside the net, and learning this language—three hundred words—just memorizing these words and what they meant. And the next day I started to get them in line and align them with people, and was speaking Igoroti in a very short time.

The point here is that it is not difficult to learn a language, if you understand that you are learning a language.