Inside Scientology
Page 5
Hubbard, however—who in early editions of Dianetics made sure to acknowledge his influences,* including Freud and Breuer, as well as Count Alfred Korzybski, the creator of general semantics—maintained that his therapy "cures and cures without failure." Hundreds of people, Hubbard said, had already been cured using Dianetics techniques.
For audiences of 1950, this claim was appealing on many levels. After World War II, the American system of mental health care was stretched as at no prior time in its history, the result, at least in part, of the tremendous psychological damage caused by the war and the specter of the atom bomb. In 1946, Veterans Administration hospitals had some forty-four thousand patients with mental disorders. By 1950, half a million people were being treated in U.S. mental institutions, a number that would increase dramatically by the middle part of the decade, when psychiatric patients were said to account for more beds than any other type of patient in U.S. hospitals.
Though psychiatry was not a new discipline, there were still only about six thousand psychiatrists in the United States in 1950, most working at mental hospitals. Few options existed outside these facilities for those needing mental health care. Only six hundred or so psychoanalysts (practitioners of the most popular form of outpatient therapy at the time) were available; they practiced psychoanalysis, a technique based on Freud's theories, which usually required a commitment to years of therapy involving multiple sessions per week, at a cost of time and money that most people could not afford. It was also markedly impersonal: analysts, working on the principle that they were the blank slate onto which a patient would transfer anger or other emotions, tended to sit quietly in a chair, taking notes, while the patient spoke.
Hubbard proposed Dianetics as an alternative. Done with a partner who, Hubbard suggested, could be a family member or a friend, it was interactive. It was also efficient—only a few sessions, he said, could rid a person of an engram. It was noninvasive, unlike the groundbreaking new psychiatric treatment of the time, the lobotomy; some twenty thousand had been performed by 1950 in the United States. And Dianetics was affordable: all it cost to get started with Dianetics, at least initially, was the money required to buy L. Ron Hubbard's book.
By the summer of 1950, Dianetics was making its way up the bestseller lists. College students were interested in it, as were their professors. In suburban living rooms, people began holding "Dianetics parties," auditing one another playfully, as if the activity was the equivalent of a game of charades. In southern California, home of all things new and experimental, it became particularly popular with avant-garde members of the Malibu Colony and other artistic enclaves. Some Los Angeles booksellers, in fact, reportedly had so much trouble keeping Dianetics in stock that, fearing a run on the books, they began to sell Dianetics under the counter, offering it only to those who asked for it by name.
"A new cult is smoldering across the U.S. underbrush," declared Time magazine on July 24, 1950. By August of that year, more than fifty-five thousand copies of Dianetics had been sold and more than five hundred "Dianetics clubs" had sprung up across the nation. (It held, for many, the same excitement that The Secret would hold for audiences more than fifty years later.) By the end of 1950, more than half a million people had bought Dianetics. "The trail is blazed, the routes are sufficiently mapped for you to voyage into safety in your own mind and recover your full potential," Hubbard wrote. "You are beginning an adventure. Treat it as an adventure. And may you never be the same again."
Certainly, L. Ron Hubbard never was.
Few books of the past sixty years—at least few that were so successful—have been as widely derided as Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. Within weeks of its publication, a score of physicians and psychologists rushed to point out that there was very little science in it: citing a lack of "empirical evidence of the sort required for the establishment of scientific generalizations," the American Psychological Association denounced the practice of Dianetics as dangerous. Some of Hubbard's key premises, including one that held that embryos had "cellular memory," were deemed unprovable. And so, in many respects, was Hubbard's overall view of human behavior.
The book Dianetics depicts most people as victims of their own unfortunate prenatal experiences. Hubbard wrote voluminously of life in the womb, a noisy and rather chaotic place, as he described it. The baby was captive to everything that happened outside the womb, all of which could prove engramatic. The most crucial engrams seemed to be the result of domestic violence—there are abundant examples in Dianetics of women being thrown down the stairs, pushed, shoved, kicked, or yelled at by angry husbands. But even worse were those caused by attempted abortions, or "AAs," as Hubbard called them. In an era preceding the birth control pill and legalized abortion, Hubbard made the astounding claim that twenty to thirty attempted abortions occurred per woman, effected by knitting needles or other devices.*
Numerous scientists, including readers of Astounding, were skeptical if not roundly condemning. Newsweek, calling it the "poor man's psychoanalysis," denounced the entire concept of Dianetics as "unscientific and unworthy of discussion or review." Some of Hubbard's own colleagues found the book's premise preposterous and its prose almost unreadable. "To me, it looked like a lunatic revision of Freudian psychology," said the writer Jack Williamson. Isaac Asimov was less generous. "I considered it gibberish," he said.
In his review of Dianetics, published on September 3, 1950, in the New York Herald Tribune Book Review, the psychologist and social theorist Erich Fromm raised a crucial distinction between Dianetics theory, which was in some ways a reduction of Freud's early work, and what could only be referred to as the "Dianetic spirit." Freud's aim, wrote Fromm, "was to help the patient to understand the complexity of his mind." Dianetics, by contrast, "has no respect for and no understanding of the complexities of personality. Man is a machine, and rationality, value judgments, mental health, happiness are achieved by an engineering job." Hubbard believed that those who rejected his thesis either had ulterior motives or were being controlled by what Hubbard called a "denyer," which he defined as "any engram command which makes the patient believe that the engram does not exist."
Fromm saw these ideas as misguided, even dangerous. But many others found them comforting. Perhaps the greatest attraction of Dianetics was that it offered concrete answers. The vastly complex problems of the human condition could be solved not through prayer, or politics, or through the work of great philosophical teachers, but through the application of a set of basic scientific techniques. The foggy, fuzzy precepts of psychoanalysis could be replaced by straightforward, foolproof actions that could be practiced at home, by anyone. The result of successful Dianetics therapy, Hubbard promised, would be a person liberated from all aberrations, infinitely more powerful and free; according to his system, this person was known as a Clear.
"For a world frightened by atomic-bomb destruction, with limited faith in the afterworld, no more hypnotic slogan could have been used to entrance people and allay their fears," wrote Milton Sapirstein in an essay printed in August 1950 in The Nation. "The real and, to me, inexcusable danger in Dianetics lies in its conception of the amoral, detached, 100 per cent efficient mechanical man—superbly free-floating, unemotional, and unrelated to anything. This is the authoritarian dream, a population of zombies, free to be manipulated by the great brains of the founder, the leader of the inner manipulative clique."
For a man with no prior business experience, L. Ron Hubbard proved very adept at turning Dianetics into a phenomenon. Weeks before the book was published, Hubbard and Campbell had set up a training school, the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation, across the Hudson River from Manhattan, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. As the book's popularity grew, devotees made the trek to the so-called Elizabeth Foundation to be trained as licensed Dianeticists, or practitioners, for which they received a certificate. Soon Hubbard had opened similar Dianetic Research Foundations in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Honolulu, and Washington, D.C. Each ce
nter offered a similar package. A five-week course, priced at $500, including lectures and demonstrations (often delivered by Hubbard personally), would turn a starry-eyed fan into a "professional auditor," as Hubbard called those who, having completed the course, often hung a shingle and began seeing clients. A one-on-one session at one of the foundations with a Dianeticist cost $25. More aggressive therapy, offered in ten-day processes known as "intensives," could be had for between $600 and $1,000, depending on the experience level of the auditor.
For all the talk about a "poor man's psychoanalysis," Dianetics was turning into a pricey undertaking. One $25 session with a Dianeticist cost $10 more than many psychiatrists at the time charged for a consultation. The ten-day intensive cost more than thirty times that amount. But Hubbard's therapy promised a cure. And, according to John Campbell, Dianetics delivered. Gushing in a letter to Jack Williamson that just "fifteen minutes of Dianetics can get more results than five years of psychoanalysis," Campbell, a board member of the Elizabeth Foundation, claimed that Hubbard's technology had cured homosexuals, asthmatics, arthritics, and nymphomaniacs. "It produces the sort of stability and sanity men have dreamed about for centuries. And a sort of physical vitality men didn't know they could have!" he said.
Such claims were very hard to verify. Though Hubbard craved the approval of the medical and psychological establishment—and indeed, a stated purpose of the Dianetic Research Foundations was to stimulate further research—he rejected numerous pleas by Dr. Winter, now the Elizabeth Foundation's medical director, to submit his findings for peer review.
Instead, Hubbard hit the lecture circuit, adopting the dignified mien of a professor while simultaneously holding large demonstrations at concert halls or on university campuses. The Los Angeles Daily News described him as "a personality, a national celebrity and the proprietor of the fastest-growing 'movement' in the United States." Gracious to the press and imbued with a huckster's exuberance, he posed for pictures and entertained reporters with stories of his life as an engineer, explorer, and nuclear scientist.
At times, Hubbard would fail to produce a promised result in front of an audience of thousands. For example, on one occasion he presented the "World's First Clear"—a woman, Hubbard claimed, who would be able to demonstrate "full and perfect recall of every moment of her life." Yet, as witnessed by the crowd, she couldn't even remember the color of Hubbard's tie. Nonetheless, Hubbard continued to pull in sellout audiences. "I thought he was a great man who had made a great discovery, and whatever his shortcomings they must be discounted because he had the answer," said Richard De Mille, the adopted son of the film director Cecil B. De Mille. Then just out of college, De Mille was present at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on August 10, 1950, the night of the Clear disaster. He'd brought his girlfriend, who dismissed Hubbard as a fraud; De Mille, though, was unswayed. "He promised heaven," he explained. "It did not matter that his qualifications were suspect; he held the key. People present new ideas that they say are going to change the world and there are always a certain number of people who believe them. Lenin was the Hubbard of 1917. Hubbard was the Madame Blavatsky of 1950."
Another person who believed in Hubbard was Helen O'Brien. She was a young, recently married housewife living in Philadelphia when she read in the New York Times that the American Psychological Association had publicly condemned Dianetics. O'Brien didn't pay much attention to fads, and the word Dianetics was new to her. Nor did the article shed much light on the concept. What the article revealed was what she later called the "immoderate, almost panicky tone" that the psychological establishment took when discussing this new therapy. Intrigued, O'Brien bought the book and read it in one sitting.
Not long afterward, Dr. Joseph Winter came to Philadelphia to lecture on Dianetics at a local church. O'Brien had read Winter's glowing introduction to Hubbard's book, in which he stated that Dianetics was "the most advanced and most clearly presented method of psychotherapy and self-improvement ever discovered."
But now, during the lecture, Winter seemed far less enthusiastic. In the audience, O'Brien wasn't sure why. She guessed he was feeling pressure from the medical establishment. "You could practically see the AMA reaching for the back of his neck," she told her husband later that night. In fact, Winter's equivocation was attributable to his growing conviction that Dianetics should be in the hands of people with at least a minimal amount of medical training. Since the book's publication, he'd been bothered by the slapdash atmosphere at the foundations and was frustrated by Hubbard's sloppy research techniques. Two preclears he knew of had suffered nervous breakdowns as a result of auditing, a result that wasn't unusual. "People had breakdowns quite often," Perry Chapdelaine, a former student at the Elizabeth Foundation, told the biographer Russell Miller in 1986. "It was always hushed up before anyone found out about it. It happened to a guy on my course, a chemical engineer. They wanted to get him out of the school and I volunteered to stay with him in an adjoining building. He never slept or ate and was in a terrible state, no one could do anything with him, and in the end they took him off to an asylum."
And yet new auditors were being certified every day. Winter was also bothered by Hubbard's continued claim that he could produce Clears—he once maintained he could produce this state in as little as twenty hours of auditing. Winter felt sure that it was impossible. "I know of persons who have had 1,500 to 2,000 hours of therapy and do not approximate the state of 'clear' as defined," he later wrote. "I have not reached that state myself, nor have I been able to produce that state in any of my patients."
But O'Brien knew nothing about Winter's reservations, and not long after attending his lecture, she signed up to be audited by a man she had met there. "Looking back, it is hard to believe that I had no doubts or hesitation about entrusting myself to these unorthodox therapies," she wrote in her 1966 memoir, Dianetics in Limbo. "I became a Dianetic preclear by the simple actions of taking off my shoes and lying down on a cot."
Though she'd been raised a Christian, O'Brien had never been particularly devout. A generation later, she might have been called a "seeker," for she had studied Sanskrit and Chinese and was familiar with the I Ching, the Tao Te Ch'ing, and the Rig-Veda. Nothing she'd learned previously prepared her for Dianetics—in her very first auditing session, O'Brien felt she had returned to her mother's womb. On another occasion, she reexperienced her own birth. The event was so traumatic, she said, that she continued to experience it for a week between auditing sessions. "It nearly floored my auditor and it was a living nightmare to me," she said. "I can vividly recall how it felt to be smothered and helpless while being violently handled by the flesh, muscles, and bones of another human body."
Soon afterward, O'Brien was being audited when she found herself in another body. "I was a husky young woman wearing a rough-textured, full-skirted dress," she recalled. She was in Ireland, circa 1813. British soldiers had arrived in her barnyard, and a boy she recognized as her fourteen-year-old son lay on the ground, about to be bayoneted. "The violence of that sight was terrific. I literally shuddered with grief," she said. Moments later, O'Brien felt herself being thrown down onto a hillside, about to be raped by one of the soldiers. "I snapped into vivid awareness then, and spit into his face. His response was immediate. He picked up a loose cobblestone and crushed my skull." At that moment, O'Brien experienced her own earlier death.
The session lasted for three hours, with O'Brien continually reliving the violence and horror of the incident until its "charge," or emotional impact, was nullified. "By the end of it, I was luxuriously comfortable in every fiber, yawning and stretching and taking breaths in full, deep satisfaction that seemed to reach to the soles of my feet." When the sessions ended, she walked down the stairs into her living room, which was decorated with Christmas lights. O'Brien was dazzled. "I was freshly there from another age. For the first time in this lifetime, I knew I was beyond the laws of space and time," she said. "I never was the same again."
Hubbard's affi
rmations, it seemed, had paid off. No longer a struggling science fiction writer, he was flush with cash, and his Dianetic Research Foundations were thriving across the country. Sara Hubbard would later estimate that the foundations took in over $1 million in less than a year. The most successful branch stood in Los Angeles, housed in an elegant Spanish-style mansion once occupied by the governor of California. Known as the Casa, for its Mission architecture, the Los Angeles Foundation featured an auditorium big enough for five hundred people, and it was routinely full, according to the science fiction writer A. E. Van Vogt, whom Hubbard had enlisted to run the organization.
But the flourishing was brief. The revenues generated by the Los Angeles branch of the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation weren't enough to cover its expenses. Hubbard thought nothing of drawing cashier's checks against the proceeds of the foundation. "The organization spent $500,000 in nine months and went broke," Van Vogt later told the interviewer Charles Platt. By the spring of 1951, Van Vogt would have no choice but to fold the operation to avoid declaring bankruptcy.
Similar things were happening at Dianetic Research Foundations all over the country. One official of the Elizabeth Foundation later told Helen O'Brien that he'd resigned after watching the foundation take in $90,000 in a single month and account for only $20,000 of it. By the end of 1950, the income of the Elizabeth Foundation, as well as the Dianetic Research Foundations in Chicago, Miami, Washington, D.C., and virtually everywhere else, had dropped so significantly that they were unable to meet their payroll and other costs.