Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (29 page)

The only thing which resists is the engram! When it is being restimulated it impinges against the patient’s analyzer, tends to reduce analytical power, and the patient exhibits a modified dramatization. Any auditor with two brain cells to click together will never be in any slightest danger of his person at the hands of the pre-release or pre-clear. If the auditor wants to use hypnotism and try to run late physically painful engrams such as operations when early ones are available, he may find himself targeted. But then he has done something very wrong.

If the auditor suddenly gets supermoral and lectures the patient, he may get involved, but again he has done something very wrong. If the auditor snarls and snaps at the patient, he may get targeted, but once more a fundamental error has been made.

The target is the engram bank. It is the auditor’s job to attack the pre-clear’s engram bank. It is the pre-clear’s job to attack that bank. To attack the pre-clear is to permit his engram bank to attack the pre-clear.

We know that there are five methods of handling an engram. Four of them are wrong.

To succumb to an engram is apathy, to neglect one is carelessness, but to avoid or flee from one is cowardice. Attack and only attack resolves the problem. It is the duty of the auditor to make very sure that the pre-clear keeps attacking engrams, not the auditor or the exterior world.

If the auditor attacks the pre-clear, that’s bad gunnery and very poor logic.

The engram bank is best attacked primarily by discharging its emotional charge anywhere it can be contacted. After that it is best attacked by finding out what the pre-clear, in reverie, thinks would happen to him if he got well, got better, found out, etc. And then it is most and always most important, in any way possible, to contact the primary moment of pain or unconsciousness in the patient’s life. This is basic-basic. Once an auditor has basic-basic, the case will swiftly resolve. If the preclear’s reactive mind is suppressing basic-basic, then the auditor should discharge more reactive emotion, discover the computation now in force, and try again. He will eventually get basic-basic. That’s important. And that is all that is important in a pre-clear.

In the pre-release (patient working toward release only) the task is to discharge emotion and as many early engrams as will present themselves easily. The reduction of locks may be included in pre-release; but only when they lead to basic-basic should locks be touched in a preclear.

There are three levels of healing. The first is getting the job done efficiently. Below that is making the patient comfortable. Below that is sympathy. In short, if you can do nothing for a man with a broken back, you can make him comfortable. If you can’t even make him comfortable, you can sympathize with him.

115

The second and third echelons above are entirely unwarranted in dianetics. The job can be done efficiently. Making the patient comfortable is a waste of time. Giving him sympathy may snarl up the entire case, for his worst engrams will be sympathy engrams and sympathy may restimulate them out of place. The auditor who indulges in “hand-patting,” no matter how much it seems to be indicated, is wasting time and slowing down the case. Undue roughness is not indicated. A friendly, cheerful, optimistic attitude will take care of everything. A pre-clear sometimes needs a grin. But he has already had more “hand-patting” than the analyzer has been able to compute. His chronic psycho-somatic illness contains sympathy in its engram.

The next thing the auditor should know and live is the AUDITOR’S CODE. This may sound like something from “When Knighthood Was in Flower” or the “Thirteen Rituals for Heavenly Bliss and Nirvana,” but unless it is employed by the auditor on his patients, the auditor will have some heavy slogging. This code is not for the comfort of the pre-clear; it is exclusively for the protection of the auditor. The AUDITOR’S CODE should never be violated. Practice in dianetics has demonstrated that violation of the AUDITOR’S CODE alone can interrupt cases.

The auditor should be courteous in his treatment of all pre-clears.

The auditor should be kind, not giving way to any indulgence of cruelty toward preclears, nor surrendering to any desire to punish.

The auditor should be quiet during therapy, not given to talk beyond the absolute essentials of dianetics during an actual session.

The auditor should be trustworthy, keeping his word when given, keeping his appointments in schedules and his commitments to work and never giving forth any commitment of any kind which he has any slightest reason to believe he cannot keep.

The auditor should be courageous, never giving ground or violating the fundamentals of therapy because a pre-clear thinks he should. The auditor should be patient in his working, never becoming restless or annoyed by the pre-clear, no matter what the pre-clear is doing or saying.

The auditor should be thorough, never permitting his plan of work to be swayed or a charge to be avoided.

The auditor should be persistent, never giving up until he has achieved results.

The auditor should be uncommunicative, never giving the patient any information whatsoever about his case, operates more or less automatically on this code. Dianetics is a parallel to thought, since it follows the natural laws of thought. What works in dianetics works as well in life.

Various conditions ensue when any of the above are violated. All violations slow therapy and cause the auditor more work. All violations come back to the detriment of the auditor.

For instance, in the last, it is not part of the auditor’s work to inform the pre-clear of anything. As soon as he starts doing so, the pre-clear promptly hooks the auditor into the circuit as the source of information and so avoids engrams.

The auditor will see in progress the most violent and disturbing human emotions. He may be moved to sympathy, but if he is, he has overlooked something and hindered therapy: whenever an emotion shows, it is an emotion which will shortly be history. Whatever gyrations the pre-clear may go through, however much he may move or wrestle around, the auditor must keep firmly in mind that every moan or gyration is one step closer to the goal. For 116

why be frightened or waste sympathy about something which, when it has been recounted a few times will leave a pre-clear happier?

If the auditor becomes frightened and pulls that error of all errors when a pre-clear begins to shake, “Come up to present time!” he can be sure that the pre-clear will have a couple of bad days and that the next time the auditor wants to enter that engram it will be blocked.

If an auditor assumes the state of mind that he can sit and whistle while Rome burns before him and be prepared to grin about it, then he will do an optimum job. The things at which he gazes, no matter how they look, no matter how they sound, are solid gains. It’s the quiet, orderly patient who is making few gains. This does not mean that the auditor is trying for nothing but violence, but it does mean that when he gets it he can be cheerful and content that one more engram has lost its charge.

The task of auditing is rather much a shepherd’s task, herding the little sheep, the engrams, into the pen for slaughter. The pre-clear isn’t under the auditor’s orders but the preclear, if the case runs well, will do whatever the auditor wants with these engrams because the analytical mind and the dynamics of the pre-clear want that job done. The mind knows how the mind operates.

117

One of the most important contributions of dianetics is the resolution of the problem of diagnosis in the field of aberration. Hitherto there have been almost unlimited classifications; further there has been no optimum standard. As one researches in the field of psychiatric texts, he finds wide disagreement in classification and continual complaint that classification is very complex and lacking in usefulness. Without an optimum goal of conduct or mental state and without knowledge of the cause of aberration, catalogues of descriptions alone were possible and these were so involved and contradictory that it was nearly impossible to sharply assign to a psychotic or neurotic any classification which will lead to an understanding of his case.**

The main disability in this classification system was that the classification did not lead to a cure, for there was no standard treatment and there was no optimum state to indicate when treatment was at end; and as there was no cure for aberration or psycho-somatic illness, there could be no classification which would indicate the direction which was to be taken or what could uniformly be expected of a case.

This is no criticism of past efforts surely, but it is a source of relief to know that the classification of aberration is unnecessary along such complicated lines as have been used and that the cataloguing of psycho-somatic ills, while necessary to the physician, is unimportant to the auditor. In the evolution of the science of dianetics there were several stages of classification until it finally became clear that the label on a pathological condition should only be whatever the auditor had to overcome to achieve cure. This system, as now evolved through practice, makes it possible for the auditor to “diagnose” without any more knowledge than is contained in this chapter and his own future experience.

The number of aberrations possible is the number of combinations of words possible in a language as contained in engrams. In other words, if a psychotic thinks he is God, he has an engram which says he is God. If he is worried about poison in his hash, he has an engram which tells him he may get poison in his hash. If he is certain he may be “fired” from his job any moment even though he is competent and well-liked, he has an engram which tells him he is about to be “fired.” If he thinks he is ugly, he has an engram about being ugly. If he is afraid of snakes or cats, he has engrams which tell him to fear snakes and cats. If he is sure he has to buy everything he sees, despite his income, he has an engram which tells him to buy everything he sees. And in view of the fact that anyone not released or cleared has upwards of two or three hundred engrams and as these engrams contain a most remarkable assortment of language and as he may choose one of five ways of handling any one of these engrams, the problem of aberration is of no importance to the auditor except where it slows therapy.

Most aberrated people talk in a large measure out of their engrams. Whatever the chronic patter of the individual may be, his rage patter, his apathy patter, his general attitude toward life, this patter is contained in engrams wherever it departs even in the slightest degree from complete rationality. The man who “cannot be sure,” who “does not know” and who is skeptical of everything, is talking out of engrams. The man who is certain “it cannot be true”

that “it isn’t possible,” that “Authority must be contacted” is talking out of engrams. The woman who is so certain she needs a divorce or that her husband is going to murder her some night is talking out of either her own or his engrams. The man who comes in and says he has a bad pain in his stomach that feels “just like a #12 gauge copper wire going straight through me”

has quite possibly had a #12 gauge copper wire through him in an attempted abortion or talk of such a thing while he was in pain. The man who says it “has to be cut out” is talking straight out of an engram either from some operation of his own or his mother’s or from an attempted abortion. The man who “has to get rid of it” is again possibly talking out of an attempted abortion engram. The man who “can’t get rid of it” may be talking from the same source but from another valence. People, in short, especially when talking about dianetics and engrams, give forth with engram talk in steady streams. They have no awareness, ordinarily, that the things they are saying are minor dramatizations of their engrams and suppose that they have 118

concluded these things themselves or think these things: the supposition and explanation is only justified thought -- the analyzer performing its duty in guaranteeing that the organism is right no matter how foolishly it is acting.

The auditor can be assured, particularly when he is talking about dianetics, that he is going to hear in return a lot of engram content; for discussion of the reactive mind generally takes place in language which it itself holds.

Recall that the reactive mind can think only on this equation -- A = A = A, when the three A’s may be respectively a horse, a swear-word and the verb “to spit.” Spitting is the same as horses is the same as God. The reactive mind is a very zealous Simple Simon, carefully stepping in each pie. Thus when a man is told he has to delete the content of the reactive bank, he may say that if he did, he is sure he would lose all his ambition. Be assured -- and how easily this proves up on therapy and how red-eared some pre-clears become -- that he has an engram which may run something like this:

(Blow or bump, prenatal)

FATHER: Damn it, Agnes, you’ve got to get rid of that God-Damned baby.

If you don’t, we’ll starve to death. I can’t afford it.

MOTHER: Oh, no, no, no, I can’t get rid of it, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t! Honest I will take care of it. I’ll work and slave and support it.

Please don’t make me get rid of it. If I did I’d just die. I’d lose my mind! I wouldn’t have anything to hope for. I’d lose all my interest in life. I’d lose my ambition. Please let me keep it!

What a common one that engram is: and how sincerely and “rationally” and earnestly an aberree can be in supporting his conclusion that he has just “thought up” the “computation” that if he “gets rid of it,” he’ll lose his mind and ambition, maybe even die!

As this work is written, most of the engrams that will be found in adults come from the first quarter of the 20th century. This was the period of “Aha, Jack Dalton, at last I have you in my possession!” It was the period of “Blood and Sand” and Theda Bara. It was the period of bootleg whiskey and woman suffrage. It covered the days of “flaming youth” and the “The Yanks are Coming,” and bits of such color will be demanding action in the engram banks.

Dianetic auditors have picked up whole passages of the Great Play “The Drunkard” out of prenatal engrams, not as a piece of funny “corn” but as Mama’s sincere and passionate effort to reform Papa. Super-drama, Mellerdrammer. And not only that but also tragedy. The hangover of the Gay Nineties, when the “business girl” had just begun to be “free” and Carrie Nation was saving the world at the expense of bartenders will be common fare in engrams found in today’s adults.