Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (34 page)

“Oh, Ralph isn’t so bad. I like him.” Mother: “You don’t know his pride. If Ralph found out about this, it would kill him. He would just die, I know.” Lover: “Don’t worry, Ralph’ll never hear.”

This little gem of an engram is more common than one would suppose before he begins to get an embryo-eye view of Mother. This won’t compute in the analyzer as data. Therefore it is a worry. (A worry is contradictory engram commands which cannot be computed.) Ralph, Junior, finds that he is very shy sexually. That is the aberrative pattern. Approaching it in therapy we find we have a sympathy computation with the lover. After all, he said Ralph wasn’t so bad, that he liked Ralph. Well, the only Ralph is, of course, to the reactive mind, Junior. This keeps our patient from approaching this engram because he thinks he will lose a friend if he touches it.

Further, on the aberrative side, Junior has always worried about people’s pride. As we contact this in therapy, he shies violently from it. After all, if he found out about it it would

“kill him dead right where he lies.” And there is another thing here, a sonic shut-off. It says right there that Ralph will never hear. This is survival stuff. That is what the cells believe.

Therefore Ralph never hears in recall. There will be more sonic shut-offs; Mother is promiscuous and that generally means blockage on the second dynamic. Blockage on the second dynamic often means she dislikes children. In short, this would be an attempted abortion case which stabbed Junior full of enough holes to supply a cheese factory for some time.

Junior, now a man, may have extended hearing because he is frightened in general of

“life.” But his sonic recall is zero. This engram, then, would have to be sorted out through the demon circuits as “impressions” which come to the mind. The auditor, taking what the patient says about this, may very soon guess its content and explode it by repeater technique.

Now take the case of the mother who, a soul of propriety if a little on the whiny side, discovers she is pregnant and goes to the doctor. Mother: “I think I’m pregnant. I’m afraid I am.” Doctor punches her around for a while, knocking the unborn child, who is our pre-clear thirty years later, into an “unconscious” state. Doctor: “I don’t think so.” Mother: “I’m really afraid I am. I’m sure I’m caught. I just know it.” Doctor (more punching): “Well, it’s hard to tell this early.”

It says right there that this man patient of ours is pregnant. If we look, we’ll see he has a paunch. That’s good survival, that is. And in therapy we find he is afraid he exists: I am afraid I am. And suddenly he isn’t moving on the time track. Why? He’s caught. That doesn’t mean he’s pregnant, that means he is caught. Further, he won’t be able to recount it. Why?

Because it is hard to tell this early. Consequently he doesn’t speak about it. We free him on the track with repeater technique.

Oh, this language of ours which says everything it doesn’t mean! Put into the hands of the moronic reactive mind, what havoc it wreaks! Literal interpretation of everything! Part of the aberrative pattern of the person who had the above engram was great cautiousness about advancing any opinion. After all, it was hard to tell, this early.

Now let us take an engram from a girl patient whose father was badly aberrated. He strikes Mother because he is afraid Mother is pregnant and Father is blocked on Dynamics One, Two, Three and Four. Father: “Get out! Get out! I know you haven’t been true to me! You 135

were no virgin when I married you. I should have killed you long ago! Now you’re pregnant.

Get out!”

The girl, some five weeks after conception, is knocked “unconscious” by the blow to Mother’s abdomen. She has a severe engram here because it has painful emotional value which she will never be able to dramatize satisfactorily. The aberrative pattern here demonstrates itself in hysterics whenever a man might accuse her of not being true. She was a virgin when she was married twenty-one years after this engram was received, but she was sure she was not.

She has had a “childhood delusion” that her father was likely to kill her. And she is always afraid of being pregnant because it says now she is pregnant, which means always, since time is a march of “nows.” In therapy we try to get near this engram. We return the patient to basic area and suddenly find her talking about something which happened when she was five years of age. We return her again and now she is talking about something which happened when she was ten years of age. The auditor, observing any such reaction as this, knows he is handling a bouncer. It says, “Get out!” and the patient gets out. The auditor recognizes what is wrong, uses repeater technique, and reduces or erases the engram.

Always and invariably, the analytical mind reacts to these engrams as though commanded. It performs on the track as these engrams state. And it computes about the case or about life as these engrams dictate. Healthy things to have around, engrams! Real, good survival! Survival good enough to lay any man in his grave.

The auditor is not much worried by the phrases which assist therapy. An engram received from Father beating Mother which says: “Take that! Take it, I tell you. You’ve got to take it!” means that our patient has possibly had tendencies as a kleptomaniac. (Such things are the whole source of the impulses of a thief, the test being that when an auditor erases all such engrams in a patient, the patient no longer steals.) The auditor will find it eagerly recounted because its content offers it to the analytical mind.

The whole species of engrams which say, “Come back here! Now stay here!” as Fathers are so fond of saying, account for a snap back to an engram when therapy is entered.

The patient goes straight back to it the moment it is exposed. When recounted the command is no longer effective. But while that engram existed, unentered, it was fully capable of sending people to an institution to lie in a foetal position. Anyone left in institutions who has not been given shocks or pre-frontal lobotomy and who suffers from this type of insanity can be released from such an engram and restored to present time simply by use of repeater technique.

It sometimes takes only half an hour.

Traveling on the track, then, and wandering through the computations the analyzer is compelled by these engrams to attempt is something like playing a child’s game which has a number of squares and along which one is supposed to move a “man.” A game could actually be composed on the basis of this time track and engram commands. It would be similar to parchesi. Move so many squares, land on one which says, “Get out!” which means one would go back to present time or toward it. Move so many squares and then lose a move because this square on which we now land says, “Stay here!” and the “man” would stay until the auditor let him out by technique (but because this is struck by therapy, it would have no power to hold long). Then move so many squares to one which said, “Go to sleep,” at which the “man”

would have to go to sleep. Move so many squares until one was hit which said, “Nobody must find out,” and so there would be no square. Move so many until one was reached which said,

“I’m afraid,” at which the “man” would be afraid. Move again to a square which said, “I must go away,” so the “man” would go away. Move once more to a square which says, “I’m not here,” and the square would be missing. And so forth and so forth.

The classes of commands which particularly trouble the auditor are only a few. Because the mind actually does some part of its thinking, especially when remembering, by return, even when the individual is not returning, all these commands also impede the thought processes of the mind. In therapy they are particularly irksome and are the constant target of attention of the auditor.

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First is the patient-ejector species of command. These are colloquially called

“bouncers.” They include such things as “Get out!” “Don’t ever come back,” “I’ve got to stay away,” etc. etc., including any combination of words which literally mean ejection.

Second is the patient-holder species of command. These include such things as “Stay here,” “Sit right there and think about it,” “Come back and sit down,” “I can’t go,” “I mustn’t leave,” etc.

Third is the engram-denyer species of command which, literally translated, means that the engram doesn’t exist: “I’m not here,” “This is getting nowhere,” “I must not talk about it,”

“I can’t remember,” etc.

Fourth is the engram-grouper species of command which, literally translated, means that all incidents are in one place on the time track: “I’m jammed up,” “Everything happens at once,” “Everything comes in on me at once,” “I’ll get even with you,” etc.

Fifth is the patient-misdirector which sends the pre-clear in the wrong direction, makes him go earlier when he should be going later, go later when he should go earlier, etc. “You can’t go back at this point,” “You’re turned around,” etc.

The bouncer sends the pre-clear soaring back toward present time. The holder keeps him right where he is. The denyer makes him feel that there is no incident present. The fourth, the grouper, foreshortens his time track so that there is no time track. The misdirector reverses the necessary direction of travel.

Contacting any engram causes the pre-clear to react “analytically.” Just as in the case of an engram being restimulated, the commands are impinged upon his analyzer, and although the analyzer may firmly believe it has just computed the reaction all of its own accord, it is actually speaking straight out of the content of an engram or engrams.

This is the method of repeater technique.

As he goes back along the track contacting engrams, the pre-clear runs into areas of

“unconsciousness” which are occluded by “unconsciousness” or emotion. In most early engrams the pre-clear can be expected to yawn and yawn. It is not the command “to sleep”

which is responsible for this: the “unconsciousness” is releasing (boiling off, the auditors call i t ) . A p r e - c l e a r m a y , f o r a s p a c e o f t w o h o u r s , f u m b l e a r o u n d , d r o p o f f i n t o

“unconsciousness,” appear doped, start to go to sleep, without any such command being present.

Part of the engram bundle of data is the analyzer shut-off. When he is returned and an engram is contacted, the pre-clear then experiences an analyzer attenuation, which means he is much less able to think in the area.

Boiling-off “unconsciousness” is a process very necessary to therapy, for this

“unconsciousness” could be restimulated in the everyday life of the individual and, when restimulated, make his wits shut off just a little or a very great deal, slowing down his thought processes.

The aspect of “unconsciousness,” then, reduces the pre-clear’s awareness whenever it is contacted. He has dreams, he mumbles foolish things, he flounders. His analyzer is penetrating the veil which kept him from the engram. But it is also highly susceptible, when in this state, to an engram command.

When urged by the auditor to go through the engram and recount it (although the auditor knows it may take minutes for this “unconsciousness” to boil off enough to let the patient through) the pre-clear may complain that “I can’t go back at this point.” The auditor promptly takes note of this. It is an engram command coming through. He does not apprise the 137

patient of this knowledge; the patient usually doesn’t know what he’s saying. If the patient then continues to have trouble, the auditor tells him, “Say, ‘I can’t go back at this point.’” The patient then repeats this, the auditor making him go over it and over it. Suddenly the somatic turns on and the engram is contacted.

In interviewing a patient, the auditor notes carefully without appearing to do so, what phrases the patient chooses and repeats about his ills or about dianetics. After he has placed the patient in reverie, if he discovers the patient, for instance, insists he “can’t go any place,” the auditor makes him repeat the phrase.

Repetition of such a phrase, over and over, sucks the patient back down the track and into contact with an engram which contains it. It may happen that this engram will not release --

having too many before it -- but it will not release only in case it has that same phrase in an earlier engram. So the repeater technique is continued with the auditor making the patient go earlier and earlier fur it. If all goes on schedule the patient will very often let out a chuckle or a laugh of relief. The phrase has been sprung. The engram has not been erased, but that much of it will not thereafter influence therapy.

Anything the patient does about engrams and any words he uses to describe the action are contained, usually, in those engrams. Repeater technique takes the charge off the phrases so that the engrams can be approached.

This technique, of course, can very occasionally land the patient in trouble, but the kind of trouble into which one can get in dianetics is not very severe. The engram, restimulated in everyday life, can be and is violent. Murders, rapes and arsons, attempted abortions, backwardness in school, -- any aberrated aspect of life -- stems from these engrams. But the act of approaching them in dianetic therapy goes on another channel, a channel closer to the source of the engram. Ordinarily, acting on an unsuspecting individual, the engram has enormous motor and speech power, ties up great numbers of circuits in the mind which should be used for rationality, and generally effects havoc: its contacts are “soldered-in” and cannot be thrown out by the analyzer. In therapy the patient is headed toward the engram: that act alone begins to disconnect some of its “permanent leads.” A patient can be gotten into an engram which, unless approached on the therapy route, might have made him curl up like a foetus and get shipped off to the nearest institution. On the therapy route, which is a return down the time track, the most powerful holder has its force limited: a patient can get into a holder which in normal life might be a psychosis: his only manifestation, perhaps, is that when he is told to

“Come up to present time,” he simply opens his eyes without actually traversing the interval up the track to present time. He does not suspect he is in a holder until the auditor, watchful for such a manifestation, feeds him repeater technique.