Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (49 page)

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 192

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

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

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.

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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.

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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.