Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (12 page)

The profession of
psychiatry, meantime, had entered a period of brutal experimentation, characterized by the widespread practice of lobotomies and
electroshock therapy. The prospect of consulting a psychiatrist was accompanied by a justified sense of dread. That may have played a role in Hubbard’s decision not to follow up on his own request for psychiatric treatment. The appearance of a do-it-yourself manual that claimed to demystify the secrets of the human mind and produce guaranteed results—for free—was bound to attract an audience. “It was sweepingly
, catastrophically successful,” Hubbard marveled.

The scientific community, stupefied by the book’s popularity, reacted with hostility and ridicule. It seemed to them little more than psychological folk art. “This volume probably
contains more promises and less evidence per page than has any publication since the invention of printing,” the Nobel physicist
Isidor Isaac Rabi wrote in his review of
Dianetics
for
Scientific American.
“The huge sale of the book to date is distressing evidence of the frustrated ambitions, hopes, ideals, anxieties and worries of the many persons who through it have sought succor.”
Erich Fromm, one of the predominant thinkers of the psychoanalytic movement, denounced the book as being “expressive of a spirit
that is exactly the opposite of Freud’s teachings.” Hubbard’s method, he complains, “has no respect for and no understanding of the complexities of personality.” He derisively quotes Hubbard: “In an engineering science like Dianetics we can work on a push-button basis.” But, of course, that was part of the theory’s immense appeal.

One of the most painful reviews of
Dianetics
, no doubt, was by
Korzybski’s most notable intellectual heir (and later, US senator from California),
S. I. Hayakawa. He not only dismissed the book, he also criticized what he saw as the spurious craft of writing
science fiction. “The art consists
in concealing
from the reader
, for novelistic purposes, the distinctions between established scientific facts, almost-established scientific hypotheses, scientific conjectures, and imaginative extrapolations far beyond what has even been conjectured,” he wrote. The writer who produces “too much of it too fast and too glibly” runs the
risk of believing in his own creations. “It appears to me inevitable that anyone writing several million words of fantasy and science-fiction should ultimately begin to internalize the assumptions underlying the verbiage.”
Dianetics
, Hayakawa noted, was neither science nor fiction, but something else: “fictional science.”

Not all scientists rejected Hubbard’s approach. One of his early supporters was Campbell’s brother-in-law Dr.
Joseph Winter, a physician who had also written for
Astounding Science-Fiction
. Searching for a more holistic approach to medicine, Winter traveled to New Jersey to experience Hubbard’s method firsthand. “While listening to Hubbard
‘running’ one of his patients, or while being ‘run’ myself, I would find myself developing unaccountable pains in various portions of my anatomy, or becoming extremely fatigued and somnolent,” he reported. “I had nightmares of being choked, of having my genitalia cut off, and I was convinced that dianetics as a method could produce effects.”

Hubbard’s method involved placing the patient in a state of “
reverie,” achieved by giving the command “When I count
from one to seven your eyes will close.” A tremble of the lashes as the eyelids flutter shut signals that the subject has fallen into a receptive condition. “
This is not hypnotism
,” Hubbard insists. Although a person in a Dianetic reverie may appear to be in a trance, the opposite is the case, he says: “The purpose of therapy is to awaken a person in every period of his life when he has been forced into ‘unconsciousness.’ Dianetics wakes people up.”

Sara watched the effect that Ron was having on his patients. “He would hold hands
with them and try to talk them into these phony memories,” she recalled. “He would concentrate on them and they
loved
it. They were so excited about someone who would just pay this much attention to them.”

Dr. Winter tried out Hubbard’s techniques on his six-year-old son, who was afraid of the dark because he was terrified of being choked by ghosts. Winter asked him to remember the first time he saw a ghost. “He has on a long
white apron, a little white cap on his head and a piece of white cloth on his mouth,” the boy said. He even had a name for the ghost—it happened to be the same as that of the obstetrician who delivered him. Winter then asked his son to look at the “ghost” in his mind repeatedly, until the boy began to calm down. “When the maximum relaxation had apparently been obtained after ten or twelve
recountings, I told him to open his eyes,” Winter reported. “It has been over a year since that short session with my son, and he has not had a recurrence of his fear of the dark in all that time.”

The idea that early memories—even
prenatal ones—could be recaptured was central to Hubbard’s theory. Every
engram rooted in the
reactive mind has its predecessors; the object of Dianetics therapy is to hunt down the original insult, the
“basic-basic,” which produced the engram in the first place.
Freud had also postulated that childhood traumas would be played out in later life through symptoms of
hysteria or neurosis. In his famous
Wolf Man case, for instance, Freud traced a childhood neurosis in his patient to the sight of his parents copulating when he was a year and a half old. “Everything goes back
to the reproduction of scenes,” Freud thought at the time. He recognized that in many cases such childhood memories were clearly invented, but from an analytical perspective, they were still useful, because the emotions and associations attached to the confabulations opened a window onto the patient’s subconscious.
False childhood memories were often as deeply believed in as real ones, but what made them stand apart from actual memories was that they were almost always the same, unvarying from patient to patient; they must be somehow universal. Freud’s protégé
Carl Jung would seize on this fact to construct his theory of the
Collective Unconscious. Freud himself came to believe that what was a false
memory in a present-day patient’s mind had been a reality at some point in prehistory. “It seems to me
quite possible that all the things that are told to us to-day in analysis as phantasy—the seduction of children, the inflaming of sexual excitement by observing parental intercourse, the threat of castration…—were once real occurrences in the primaeval times of the human family, and that children in their phantasies are simply filling in the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth.” And yet Freud continued to be troubled by the fact that many of these supposed memories were formed at a suspiciously early age. “The extreme achievement on these lines
is a phantasy of observing parental intercourse while one is still an unborn baby in the womb,” he noted wryly. That absurdity was one of the reasons he eventually cast aside the seduction theory.

For Hubbard, however, early or even prenatal traumas were literally true. He believed that the fetus not only recorded details of his parents copulating during his pregnancy, but also every word spoken during the act. Such recordings can be restimulated in adult life by
hearing similar language, which would then awaken the anxiety that the fetus experienced—during a violent sexual episode, for instance. That could lead to “aberration,” which for Hubbard includes all psychoses, neuroses, compulsions and any other deviation from rational behavior. Engrams form chains of similar incidents, Hubbard suggests. He gives the example of seventeen prenatal engrams found in a single individual, who “had passed for ‘normal’
for thirty-six years of his life.” Among them:

And so on, all leading up to:

Hubbard’s view of
women as revealed in this and many other examples is not just contemptuous; it betrays a kind of horror. He goes on to make this amazing statement: “It is a scientific
fact that abortion attempts are the most important factor in aberration. The child on whom the abortion is attempted is condemned to live with
murderers
whom he reactively knows to be murderers through all his weak and helpless youth!” In his opinion, it is very difficult to abort a child, which is why the process so often fails. “Twenty or thirty abortion attempts
are not uncommon in the aberree and in every attempt the child could have been pierced through the body or brain,” Hubbard writes. “However many billions
America spends yearly on institutions for the insane and jails for the criminals are spent primarily because of
attempted abortions done by some sex-blocked mother to whom children are a curse, not a blessing of God.”

One of the charges that would be lobbed against
Hubbard by his disaffected eldest son was that his father had attempted two abortions on his mother. “One I observed when
I was around six or seven,” L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., later testified. He recalled seeing his father standing over his mother with a coat hanger in his hand. The other attempted abortion was upon himself. “I was born at six
and a half months and weighed two pounds, two ounces. I mean, I wasn’t born: this is what came out as a result of their attempt to abort me.” Hubbard himself writes in his
secret memoir that Polly was terrified of childbirth, “but conceived despite all precautions
seven times in five years resulting in five abortions and two children.” While he was writing
Dianetics,
and
Sara was pregnant with Alexis, she says, Hubbard kicked her
in the stomach several times to attempt to cause a miscarriage. Later, Hubbard told one of his lovers
that he himself had been born of an attempted abortion.

While Hubbard was still writing
Dianetics
, he contacted both the
American
Psychiatric Association and the
American Psychological Association, representing himself as a colleague who had made fundamental advances in the science. Patients placed in a trance state, he explained, could be guided to remember their own births. In sixteen of what he says were the twenty cases that he examined, psychosomatic illnesses had been caused by pre-birth or birth traumas. “Migraine headache
, ulcers, asthma, sinusitis and arthritis were amongst those illnesses relieved,” he asserted. In a similar letter
to the
American Gerontological Society, he also claimed that sixteen of the twenty cases had been made measurably younger. His preliminary title for the work was “Certain Discoveries and Researches Leading to the Removal of Early Traumatic Experiences Including Attempted Abortion, Birth Shock and Infant Accidents and Illnesses with an Examination of Their Effects on the Adult Mind and an Account of Techniques Evolved and Employed.” When scientists tested
some of Hubbard’s claims and found that his techniques produced no measurable improvement, he blamed them for failing to understand his system.

Hubbard’s rejection by the
mental health establishment, even before
Dianetics
was published, was itself a kind of pre-birth trauma. After that, whenever Dianetics or
Scientology was attacked in the press or by governments, Hubbard saw the hand of psychiatrists. “The
psychiatrist and his front groups
operate straight out of the terrorist textbooks,” he wrote bitterly years later. “The Mafia looks like a convention of Sunday school teachers compared to these terrorist groups.” Toward the end of his life he concluded that if psychiatrists “had the power to torture
and kill everyone, they would do so.… Recognize them for what they are: psychotic criminals—and handle them accordingly.” Psychiatry was “the sole cause of decline
in this universe.”

HUBBARD SET UP
schools to train
auditors in major cities, which, along with the book sales and his lecture fees, generated a cascade of revenue. “The money was just
pouring in,” Sara marveled. Hubbard began carrying huge wads of cash around in his pocket. “I remember going past a Lincoln dealer and admiring one of those big Lincolns they had then,” Sara recalled. “He walked right in there and bought it for me, cash!”

The people who were drawn
to
Dianetics were young to middle-aged white-collar Protestants who had a pronounced interest in science fiction. Some were motivated by the prospect of employment in this booming new field. Others were truth seekers, often veterans of other movements and cults that were responding to the dislocations of the era. And then there were those who had heard the legend of the heroic Navy officer who had been blinded and crippled by the war, who had healed himself through Dianetic techniques. Like Hubbard, they sought a cure. Society and science had let them down. Through Dianetics, they hoped
to be lifted up, enlightened, restored, and made whole.

One of the contradictory features of
Dianetics
is the fact that Hubbard continually referred to the powers of Clears, but as yet he had not actually produced a single one for inspection. Among other powers, a Clear “has complete recall
of everything which has ever happened to him or anything he has ever studied. He does mental computations such as those of chess, for example, which a normal would do in half an hour, in ten or fifteen seconds.” Such claims presumed that there was already a sizable population of Dianetic graduates with exceptional abilities, and Hubbard’s readers naturally wondered where they were.