Astounding

by Alec Nevala-Lee

  Shortly afterward, Winter went home to Michigan for Thanksgiving. His son Joey—another junior case—was six years old, and after seeing a play that featured a ghost, he developed a fear of the dark, refusing to go upstairs by himself: “That’s where the ghosts are.”

  Winter decided to put his new skills to use. “Why should you be afraid of ghosts?”

  “They choke you,” Joey said. Winter told him to lie down, shut his eyes, and describe the ghost. “He has a long white apron, a little white cap on his head and a piece of white cloth on his mouth.”

  The boy began to squirm. When Winter asked for the ghost’s name, Joey answered, breathing hard, “Bill Short.” It was the name of the obstetrician who had delivered him. Winter told him to repeat the story a dozen times, and Joey relaxed. His fear of the dark never returned.

  After Winter came back to New Jersey, they prepared for publication. Winter submitted a paper informally to the Journal of the American Medical Association, which turned it down for lack of evidence, saying that it might be a better fit for a psychotherapy journal. It was dutifully revised for the American Journal of Psychiatry, which rejected it on similar grounds.

  Astounding was their last remaining option. Campbell evidently feared that printing it there would make it harder for readers to take it seriously—he cautioned a correspondent years later against publishing research in a science fiction magazine, which would stamp it with that label for decades. He decided against presenting himself as a coauthor, a decision that would have important consequences, and asked Hubbard to obtain a rebuttal that could run alongside the article.

  In response, Hubbard said that he couldn’t get any doctors to listen to him, so he and Winter composed a fake reply, “A Criticism of Dianetics,” credited to the nonexistent Dr. Irving R. Kutzman, M.D. Hubbard claimed that it consisted of comments from four psychiatrists he had consulted, which he had “played . . . back very carefully” using his own perfect memory. He also described setting up “a psychiatric demon” to write the article, which referred to the notion that a clear could deliberately create mental delusions for his own amusement.

  It was an unexpectedly straightforward piece—Hubbard said that “it is in no sense an effort to be funny and it is not funny”—that anticipated many objections that would later be raised against dianetics, including the charge that it merely repackaged existing concepts. “Kutzman” argued that Hubbard had just thirteen months of data—which was actually a generous estimate—and that there was no evidence that any improvements would be permanent.

  The article was never published, and no actual rebuttal ever materialized, which indicated the extent to which Hubbard had given up on collaborating with the establishment. Campbell had yet to abandon that hope, and he worked hard to find a reputable publisher. He finally succeeded with Art Ceppos of the medical publishing firm Hermitage House, and a contract was signed around Christmas. They hoped to release the book by April—Hubbard cranked out a draft in a month—but it was delayed by the addition of fifty thousand words of new material.

  Anticipation within fan circles was growing, stoked by Campbell’s announcements, and it seeped into the wider culture. On January 31, 1950, the columnist Walter Winchell wrote, “There is something new coming up in April called Dianetics. A new science which works with the invariability of physical science in the field of the human mind. From all indications it will prove to be as revolutionary for humanity as the first caveman’s discovery and utilization of fire.”

  On March 8, Sara—who later claimed that Hubbard had kicked her in the stomach in an attempt to induce an abortion—gave birth to a daughter named Alexis Valerie. Winter was the doctor at the delivery, which was conducted in silence, to avoid implanting any engrams. Hubbard proudly said that the world’s first dianetic baby was unusually alert, and Winter concurred, “There was a greatly accelerated rate of development. . . . This child had a much more even disposition and was less given to startle reactions and temper manifestations than the average child.”

  Hubbard had reason to be pleased, but Campbell was less happy. Without attribution, he had written an appendix to the book, “Advice to the Pre-Clear,” in which he laid out the challenges that the patient faced:

  Anyone attempting to stop an individual from entering therapy either has a use for the aberrations of that individual—on the “push-button” order—or has something to hide. . . . Wives with children may have a fear that therapy will eventually be applied to the children, in which case much information might come to light which the husband or society “should never know.”

  Campbell was speaking from experience. His wife still refused to support dianetics, and she had resisted auditing for herself and their children. In the terms that the Church of Scientology would later use to describe its enemies, Doña Campbell was the original Suppressive Person.

  “TERRA INCOGNITA: THE MIND,” WHICH MARKED THE INAUSPICIOUS DEBUT OF DIANETICS IN PRINT, appeared not in Astounding but in the Winter/Spring 1950 issue of The Explorers Journal, the official periodical of the Explorers Club. In a brief article, Hubbard provided the first public description of dianetics, including the claim that he had developed it as a way for expedition leaders to screen team members for mental problems, as well as a form of emergency medicine in the field.

  The piece testified to how malleable the principles of dianetics could be, depending on its intended audience, but it was also important to Hubbard that it appear there first. It was friendly territory, independent of Campbell, where he could frame his work in terms of how he liked to see himself—as an adventurer and man of action. It aroused no perceptible response, but it shed light on the readership that he was hoping to reach. Hubbard wanted to attract explorers and men of the world. Instead, he ended up with science fiction fans.

  But its most intriguing sentence offered a glimpse into the therapy’s origins: “While dianetics does not consider the brain as an electronic computing machine except for purposes of analogy, it is nevertheless a member of that class of sciences to which belong General Semantics and cybernetics and, as a matter of fact, forms a bridge between the two.” In reality, neither field had played any significant role in Hubbard’s work before his arrival in New Jersey, and their inclusion here betrayed how deeply his ideas had been shaped by Winter and, above all, by Campbell.

  The connection to General Semantics was natural enough. Hubbard later wrote, “Bob Heinlein sat down one time and talked for ten whole minutes on the subject of Korzybski to me and it was very clever. I know quite a bit about Korzybski’s works.” He had also encountered it in The World of Null-A, writing, “[Van Vogt] with his null-A is going to be an awful surprised young man!” Sara had read Science and Sanity in the late forties, and she recalled that her husband was excited by it: “He became a big follower of Korzybski.”

  Hubbard, like Campbell, was unable to finish any of Korzybski’s books, and he relied mostly on Winter and Sara for his knowledge of General Semantics, which anticipated dianetics in several ways. Korzybski had written that painful memories could be restimulated by events in the present, and that treatment might consist of reliving such incidents under therapy. Hubbard also alluded to what Korzybski had described as the confusion between a mental map and the underlying reality: “The analytical mind computes in differences. The reactive mind computes in identities.”

  Even more profound was the influence of cybernetics. As a discipline, it had arisen in the work of Norbert Wiener, Campbell’s old professor at MIT, who had designed antiaircraft guns during World War II. Wiener found that one prototype would swing wildly while locking on to its target, which one of his colleagues compared to “purpose tremor,” the involuntary trembling that can occur during fine motor activity. It led Wiener to look into the phenomenon of feedback, in which the difference between an intention and its result generates information that is fed back into the system—a concept that was first developed at Bell Labs.

  Wiener began to study servomechan
isms, or machines that used negative feedback to correct themselves, such as thermostats or naval steering systems. In 1948, he coined the term “cybernetics,” after the Greek word for navigation, and defined the field in the subtitle of his landmark Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Campbell was undoubtedly familiar with Wiener’s research—as well as in contact with Bell Labs—and he would have eagerly read the book soon after its publication. When Hubbard arrived in Elizabeth, a piece on cybernetics was already in the pipeline at the magazine.

  And its impact was felt at once. A fascinating detail about Excalibur was preserved in the “Affirmations”: “There was one error in that book and you have psychically willed it into nothing. It was the electronic theory of the workings of the human mind. Human, material minds do work this way and you were right. Your own mind does not work this way.” An “electronic theory” was evidently present at an early stage of Hubbard’s work, but it troubled him, and in its intermediate versions, it disappeared entirely. In a letter to Heinlein on March 31, 1949, Hubbard focused instead on what he called the tone scale, an elaborate hierarchy of human emotion, and he wrote proudly of its benefits, “I’m up to eight comes. In an evening, that is.”

  What he didn’t mention was any relationship between the brain and a computer. Four months later, when Campbell wrote to Heinlein, this analogy was suddenly at the forefront. After mentioning that he had attended a lecture by Warren McCulloch, one of Wiener’s collaborators, he stated, “Basically, the brain is a relay-computer of the type that the ENIAC is.” In a subsequent letter he repeated this point—“The human mind is a calculating machine, a binary digital computer, of immense complexity, and absolutely unrealized capability”—and only after discussing it at length did he write, “Now we take off on Ron’s work.”

  Campbell’s distinction strongly implied that the computer analogy was his own contribution, even if it was only a return to the “electronic theory” that had been previously discarded. In a letter to Winter, Hubbard named psychoanalysis, hypnosis, and Christian Science as his major influences, while Campbell provided an expanded list to Heinlein: “Christian Science, Catholic miracle shrines, voodoo practices, native witch doctor work, and the witch methods of European tradition, as well as modern psychology’s teachings.” Cybernetics was nowhere to be found.

  Less than a year later, it was all over the book. The term “dianetics” itself, which was coined in the fall of 1949, evoked cybernetics, while the word “clear” was an analogy to “clearing” an adding machine. Both theories drew parallels between the brain and a computer—Wiener pictured “anxiety neuroses” as circular processes that drained the mind of its capacity, while dianetics evoked the “demon circuit,” a parasitic memory that depleted the brain of its life force. Yet there is no indication that Hubbard had read Wiener before coming to New Jersey, if he ever read him at all. In “A Criticism of Dianetics,” he referred to him as “Dr. Werner.”

  Any cybernetic elements in dianetics emerged, in short, during the period in which Campbell was working with Hubbard to position it for his readers. His primary role was to add a layer of science over what was already there, as he had with so many other writers. He effectively edited the book Dianetics, and his impact on it was just as meaningful as it was on the fiction that he published. Sara later said of Campbell, “He was a marvelous editor.”

  If the cybernetic angle came primarily from Campbell, it was motivated largely by his sense of how the therapy could be presented. On May 30, 1950, he wrote to the managing editor of the journal Psychiatry about “a new, logical theory as to why there are two levels of mind in man,” but he didn’t mention Hubbard for nearly three pages. Instead, he summarized an article in Astounding that defined a perfect computer, moving from there to dianetics, which he described as a separate development from “the cybernetic suggestion” that led to “precisely similar conclusions.”

  In reality, the relationship was tenuous at best, which didn’t prevent him from claiming otherwise. He either willfully misunderstood cybernetic ideas or saw them as a rhetorical entry point to persuade skeptics, and he persisted in treating dianetics as a kind of practical cybernetics. Campbell even reached out to Wiener himself, writing that his former professor would “be greatly interested” in dianetics “as suggesting a new direction of development of the work from the cybernetics side,” and concluding, “Further study of dianetics will be of immense aid in your projects.”

  He also contacted his neighbor, the mathematician Claude Shannon, who had founded the field of information theory at Bell Labs. Shannon encouraged Warren McCulloch to meet Hubbard: “If you read science fiction as avidly as I do you’ll recognize him as one of the best writers in that field. . . . [He] has been doing some very interesting work lately in using a modified hypnotic technique for therapeutic purposes. . . . I am sure you’ll find Ron a very interesting person . . . whether or not his treatment contains anything of value.” McCulloch was traveling, so he was unable to arrange a meeting, but he wrote to Hubbard, who thanked Shannon for the introduction.

  Hubbard tolerated Campbell’s contributions, and he eventually appropriated them for himself. Writing to Heinlein on March 28, 1950, he referred to electronic demons: “They are parasitic and use up computer circuits.” Elsewhere, he said that dianetics was a return to “the electronic computer idea” that he had conceived in the thirties, but he also sounded a cautionary note: “The concept of the electronic brain was not vital but only useful to dianetics and it could be swept away as well—dianetics would still stand.” He was right. Cybernetics was less an integral part of the theory than a form of branding, and he would ultimately remove nearly all of it.

  Campbell’s hand was visible in the book in other ways. He was responsible for several key sections, including a long footnote in which he used a computer analogy to explain how the analytic mind could be free of error, and he wrote an appendix on the scientific method, signing it “John W. Campbell, Jr., Nuclear Physicist,” and thanking the engineers of Bell Labs. Campbell also composed the appendix “Advice to the Pre-Clear,” of which Hubbard said years later, “You can tear that out. . . . I didn’t write it in the first place. Written by John W. ‘Astounding’ Campbell, Jr., who the older he gets the more astonishing he is.”

  The editor even figured anonymously in at least two case studies. One was an account of his birth, while the other was a memory of his grandmother watching him while he was sick. It concluded:

  Now with this engram we have a patient with sinusitis and a predisposition to lung infections. It may be that he was luckless enough to marry a counterpart of his mother or his grandmother. . . . And even if the wife thinks that sinusitis and lung infection are repulsive enough to lead to divorce, the reactive mind keeps that engram keyed-in. The more hatred from the wife, the more that engram keys-in. You can kill a man that way.

  It was an unsettling glimpse into Campbell’s state of mind at the time. When this passage was written, his marriage was already over.

  THERE ARE TWO DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF HOW DOÑA FINALLY LEFT CAMPBELL. ACCORDING TO George O. Smith, he had arrived on the train for their weekly rendezvous when Doña told him that it was time to confront her husband. They headed for the house in Scotch Plains, where Campbell seemed surprised to see them. “Shouldn’t you be on your clandestine way to Philly?”

  “We should,” Doña said. “But this business has to come to some sort of finish sooner or later.”

  Campbell pretended to absorb this. “And what do you want me to do about it?”

  Doña wouldn’t be dissuaded. “John, I want a divorce. I want to marry George.”

  If she had wanted a scene, Campbell was unwilling to provide one. “And has George been asked about it?”

  “John, it’s only in those silly romantic novels of the Victorian period where the man throws himself on his knees, places one hand on his heart, and supplicates his lady love to give him her hand in holy matrimony.”


  Campbell glanced at Smith, who had remained silent. “Okay, if that’s what you want, but I don’t think it will work.”

  “John, if it doesn’t work, it will be our fault, and ours alone,” Doña said. “And outside interference isn’t going to help.”

  Her husband looked at his watch. “It’s too late to call Bruce”—the family lawyer—“this evening, but I’ll get in touch with him and see what can be worked out. Now, get along to Philly, and please, don’t stop in New Hope on your way. It makes me nervous when people drive after a couple of quick ones.”

  Campbell provided a very different account. On March 9, 1950, he wrote to Heinlein, “Doña sort of blew her top.” In his version, Doña had decided to leave him at the beginning of February, and he recalled her saying, “If I don’t get out of here, I’ll go mad, mad, mad.” On reading that statement in print, Doña dryly remarked, “This shows the word rate influence.”

  According to Campbell, Doña drove to Boston with Peedee and Leslyn on February 7. A few days later he went to see her, returning with the car and the girls, and when he told Peedee what had happened, he was afraid that she might have a nervous breakdown. Fortunately, Hubbard was available, and he audited her to remove the emotional charge, although she continued to walk around muttering, “That George!” When Leslyn figured it out, Campbell gave her the same treatment.

  In his mind, Doña’s refusal to be treated was inseparable from the end of their marriage, and he believed that she was afraid of what might be revealed if the girls were audited: “I’d like to know just what the living hell she did to Peeds and Leslyn that she feels must never, never, never come out.” Campbell warned Heinlein that if he wrote to Doña, “you’ll also get a long discussion of how I’m playing God, I put pressure on her, dianetics is untried, dangerous, deadly, and drives people crazy.” It was the first recorded attempt—but not the last—to cast doubt on a critic of dianetics, and the same letter included the chilling passage: