Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health

by L. Ron Hubbard

  In Class 1 (a) fall such ordinary things as constipation and such extraordinary things as arthritis. Arthritis is a complex mechanism with a simple cause and a relatively simple cure.

  Remember that there are two things present in an engram: physical pain and verbal command.

  In arthritis both must be present (as in the bulk of psycho-somatic ills). There must have been an accident to the joint or area affected, and there must have been a command during the “unconsciousness” which attended the injury which would make the engram susceptible to chronic restimulation. (Such commands as “It is always like this” or “It just goes right on hurting” or “I’m stuck” will produce similar results). Given this engram and given this engram keyed-in, there is a chronic pain in the area of the injury. It may be minor, but it is a pain just the same. (It can be a pain but not be felt if the engram contains a command which is anaesthetic such as “He’ll never feel this,” which produces a similar condition but makes one

  “unconscious” of the pain there.) This pain in the body probably tells the cells and the blood that this area is dangerous. It is therefore avoided.

  The command permits the mind to influence, let us say, the parathyroid, which contains the secret of the calcium content in the blood stream. A mineral deposit then begins to be laid down in the area. The mineral deposit is not necessarily the cause of the pain, but it is an organic restimulator so that the more mineral, the more pain, the more the engram keys-in.

  This is the dwindling spiral. And this is arthritis in action. Understand that the parathyroid and the blood avoidance are theoretical cause; the scientific fact is that when an engram is picked up and deleted about an area containing arthritis, that arthritis vanishes and does not return and this is X-ray plate evidence; it happens every time and does not happen because of any suggestion or medicine; it happens because an engram is picked up and refiled.

  As the engram goes away, so goes the pain, so vanishes the arthritis. This forms a whole class of ills, of which arthritis is only one.

  69

  The mechanisms involved vary slightly. All can be headed under “physical derangement caused by reduced body fluid flow.”

  Class 1 (b) of psycho-somatic ills, magnification of fluid flow, contains such things as high blood pressure, diarrhea, sinusitis, priapism (overactivity of the male sex glands), or any other physical condition resulting from a superabundance of fluid.

  Class 2 (a) can cause such things as a withered arm, a foreshortened nose, underdeveloped genital organs or any other underdevelopment of a gland having to do with size (which cross-classes this with 1 [a]), hairlessness (which also like the rest can be part of the gene pattern and therefore inherent), and in short reduction in size of any part of the body.

  Class 2 (b) causes such things as oversized hands, a lengthened nose, oversized ears, enlarged organs and other common physical malformations. (Cancer might possibly come under this heading as overhealing.)

  Class 3 would include tuberculosis (some cases), liver trouble, kidney trouble, rashes, common colds, etc. (cross-classing with others, as do all of these in one way or another).

  Class 4 would include those diseases which, arising without psycho-somatic influence, yet fix upon by accident a previously injured area and by restimulation, keep an engram keyed-in in that area so that a condition becomes chronic. Tuberculosis could be included here.

  Conjunctivitis, all running sores and any condition which refuses to heal, etc.

  This fourth class would also include all bizarre pains and sicknesses which cannot be found to have actual pathology.

  Class 5 includes an enormously wide catalogue of conditions, any one of which may cross-index to other classes or which arise solely out of engrams which dictate the presence or necessity of an illness. “You always have colds,” “I have sore feet,” etc. announce a psychosomatic illness and the mechanisms of the body can furnish one.

  Any disease whatever can be precipitated by engrams. The disease may be of germ origin; the individual possesses an engram to the effect that he may become sick and on this generalization, becomes sick with whatever is to hand. Further and even more general, the engram reduces the physical resistance of the body to disease, and when an engram goes into restimulation (perhaps because of a domestic quarrel, an accident or some such thing), the ability of the individual to resist sickness is automatically decreased.

  Children, as will be explained, have many more engrams than has been supposed.

  Almost all childhood illnesses are preceded by psychic disturbance and if psychic disturbance is present -- keeping an engram restimulated -- such illnesses can be far more violent than they should be. Measles, for instance, can be just measles or it can be measles in company with engramic restimulation, in which case it can be nearly or entirely fatal. A check of many subjects on this matter of childhood illness being predisposed by, precipitated by and perpetuated by engrams causes one to wonder just how violent the diseases themselves really are: they have never been observed in a cleared child and there is reason to investigate the possibility that childhood illnesses are in themselves extremely mild and are complicated only by psychic disturbance -- which is to say, the restimulation of engrams.

  In fact, one could ask this question of the entire field of pathology: what is the actual effect of disease minus the mental equation? How serious are bacteria?

  The field of bacteriology has been without dynamic principles until now; the dynamic, survival, is applicable to all life forms and “life forms” include germs. The purpose of the germ is to survive. Its problems are those of food, protection (offense and defense) and procreation.

  70

  To accomplish these things the germ survives at its optimum efficiency. It mutates, alters with natural selection and changes dynamically from survival necessity (the missing step of the evolution theory, that last) in order to accomplish the maximum survival possible. It makes errors by killing the hosts, but to have a purpose to survive does not mean that a form necessarily survives.

  In pathology, the germ, bent on its purpose, acts as a suppressor to the survival dynamic of the human species.

  How serious this suppressor is in the absence of engram suppression in the human has not been determined; enough data exists to indicate that a human individual with his potential in the fourth zone is not, apparently, very subject to disease: the common cold, for instance, if it is a virus or not, passes him by; chronic infections are absent. What antibodies have to do with this or what this factor is, is yet another question. But it remains that a clear is not easily made ill. In the aberree illness closely pursues mental depression (depression of the dynamic level).

  The aberration of mind and body by engrams leads, then, not only to psycho-somatic ills but also to actual pathology, which has hitherto been considered more or less independent of the mental state. As has been proven by clinical research, clearing of engrams does more than remove psycho-somatic illness, potential, acute or chronic; the clearing also tends to proof the individual against the receipt of pathology: to what extent it is not yet known, for such a wide and long term view is required to establish the actual statistics that the project will require thousands of cases and the observations of medical doctors over a long term.

  The amount of aberration which a person manifests, which is to say, the position he would occupy on a sanity scale, has little to do with psycho-somatic illness. Such illnesses require only one or two engrams of a specific nature to become manifest. These engrams may not be aberrative in any other way than to predispose the individual to illness. Having a psycho-somatic illness is not the same as being “crazy” or having hypochondriacal tendencies.

  The hypochondriac thinks he has illnesses, a special case of Class (5) above.

  Derangement falls sharply into two categories: the first is the mental derangement, any irrational condition, which in dianetics we call aberration in order to avoid constant cataloguing of the thousands, the millions of manif
estations irrationality can have. The other derangement of the individual is somatic: this applies entirely to his physical being and physical ability and health. Both these things are present in every engram: the aberration and the somatic. But the engram can manifest itself chronically as either a somatic (a noun has been made out of an adjective here and it is commonly employed in dianetics to avoid the use of the word pain, which is not embracive and which is restimulative) or as an aberration or as both together.

  An engram must contain physical pain. When an engram is restimulated in everyday life, that physical pain may appear or it may not. If it does not appear as pain but as aberration, then the individual is in another valence than his own (the “necessity to manifest his hostilities”). If he is sane enough to be in his own valence, the physical pain will be present. In dianetics we say the somatic has appeared. When any somatic appears, unless the individual is a pre-clear in therapy, some of the aberration is also appearing. In short, the aberration can appear by itself or the somatic plus some of the aberration can appear. When a person dramatizes another valence than his own, the aberration is present; when the dramatization, running off the engram phonograph-record-wise in one or another valence, is suppressed by some other factor such as the police or a stronger person or even the individual himself (this has been called repression -- the term is not used here because it is loaded with other meanings), the somatic most certainly will come into view.

  The individual is then apparently “better off,” as the cells meant him to be, to occupy the survival role in the engram, the winning valence, for he is, at least, not ill. But how many people have been killed, how many banks have been robbed and how many marital partners have been driven mad by these dramatizations?

  71

  So the health of the individual would be considered by society, in its effort to protect its members to be a secondary affair. In fact, “society” has not known about this mechanical aspect. The individual who dramatizes the survival valence in his engrams may do violent things to other people. The individual who will not permit himself such a dramatization or who is forced by society away from such dramatization will most certainly become psycho-somatically ill. “Heads I win, tails you lose.” The answer is in the alleviation or deletion of the engram. For there are many additional aspects to the problem: the man who dramatizes his engrams, society or no society, is not apt to survive, and if he dramatizes them, he is subject to whatever slurs were leveled at the valence he is in by another valence in that same engram.

  The combinations of the classes and aspects of psycho-somatic illness listed and described here lead to some highly complex situations. It is a scientific fact that no psychosomatic ill exists without an aberration. And it is true that no aberration exists without a potential or actual psycho-somatic ill. One of the psycho-somatic illnesses one would least expect to find as a psycho-somatic affair is the illness of sexual perversion.

  The sexual pervert (and by this term dianetics, to be brief, includes any and all forms of deviation in Dynamic II such as homosexuality, lesbianism, sexual sadism, etc. and all down the catalogue of Ellis and Krafft-Ebing) is actually quite ill physically. Perversion as an illness has so many manifestations that it must be spread through the entire gamut of classes from (1) to (5) above. Over-development of sexual organs, underdevelopment, seminal inhibition or magnification, etc. are found some in one pervert, some in another. And the sum of it is that the pervert is always a very ill person in one way or another, whether he is conscious of it or not. He is very far from culpable for his condition, but he is also so far from normal and so extremely dangerous to society that the tolerance of perversion is as thoroughly bad for society as punishment for it.

  Lacking proper means prior to this time, society has been caught between tolerance and punishment, and the problem of perversion has, of course, not been resolved. A bit off the subject here, but it can be remarked about perversion that the best previous explanation for it was something about girls becoming envious of Papa’s penis or boys becoming upset about that terrible thing, the vulva, which Mama was incautious enough to show one day. It takes a great deal more than this utter tripe to make a pervert.

  It is, rather, something on the order of kicking a baby’s head in, running over him with a steam roller, cutting him in half with a rusty knife, boiling him in lysol and all the while with crazy people screaming the most horrifying and unprintable things at him. The human being is a very tough character. He is so confoundedly tough that he has whipped the whole animal kingdom and he can shake the stars. And when it comes to throwing his second dynamic out of balance, what that takes is straight out of Dante and Sax Rohmer combined. Hence the pervert, containing hundreds and hundreds of vicious engrams, has had little choice between being dead and being a pervert. But with an effective science to handle the problem, a society which would continue to endure perversion and all its sad and sordid effects doesn’t deserve to survive.

  Perversion can have other aspects. In one society examined, these aberrations had multiplied so far that a principal mystic cult had sprung up which contended that all mental illness came from sex; this, of course, gave further impetus to aberrations on the second dynamic (sex), as such a cultic belief must have been originated by an individual who had severe aberrations across the second dynamic; this belief that sex was the only source of human aberration and travail, naturally attracted as its practitioners individuals who had similar aberrative patterns. And so the cult further enforced existing aberrative factors in the society, since all their activity was leveled at making sex something ogreish and dreadful by labeling it the society’s primary source of illness. The prophet of this god was Manichaeus, a Persian of the third century, who taught that all things about the body, especially sex, were evil; the cult of Manichaeus carried on well into the Dark Ages and then vanished, to trouble Man no more.

  72

  Any dynamic can be blocked, the personal dynamic, the sex dynamic, the group dynamic or the Mankind dynamic. Each one has been the target at some time of one cult or another seeking to cure all Man’s ills and save him. Dianetics is not interested in saving Man, but it can do much to prevent him from being “saved.” As an organized body of scientific knowledge dianetics can draw only the conclusion which it observes in the laboratory.

  It can be observed that the Church is entirely correct in doing all in its power to prevent blasphemy. Blasphemy can very often be uttered during the “unconsciousness” of a person who has been struck. This would enter sacred names and curses into engrams which, reacting within the individual, give him an unnatural terror and compulsion or repulsion toward God. It is not the religion which is at fault, it is the blaspheming of the religion. Such blasphemy makes the insane zealot and the murderous atheist, both of whom the Church would very gladly do without.

  In the realm of psycho-somatic illness any combination of the language is as damaging a factor in an engram as any other factor. The moronic reasoning of the reactive mind, which considers everything in an engram equal to everything in an engram, also considers that everything similar to the engram in the exterior world (the restimulators) is sufficient cause to place an engram in effect. Hence aberration and illness can come about.

  There is, however, a peculiarity in psycho-somatic illnesses which is chronic: the aberree’s reactive mind exercises a power of choice to the extent that only pro-survival engrams become chronic. It could be said, on a reactive level, that the aberree will not permit himself to suffer illness from his engrams unless that illness has a “survival” value. This is very important in therapy. The chronic psycho-somatic illnesses which a patient displays are those which have a sympathy (pro-survival) background.

  It is not possible to “spoil” a child with love and affection. Whoever postulated that it was possible was postulating out of bad data and no observation. A child needs all the love and affection it can possibly get. A test was run in one hospital which tended to show that babies, when left wi
thout attention, ran fevers. When given attention the fevers immediately abated.

  The test, while not observed personally by the author, seems to have been conducted with proper controls according to report. If this is true, it postulates a mechanism in the human being which uses illness for affection on a genetic basis. There is no reason why not; there have been enough years of engineering -- almost two billion -- to build anything into the blueprint. These babies, in several groups, were left in the hospital by their parents for the test; they uniformly became ill when not given affection. Here is the law of affinity at work, if these tests were accurately conducted, their purpose was not to help dianetics but to show that the leaving of a baby in the hospital after his birth because he has a slight illness invariably increases that illness.

  A series of severely controlled dianetic experiments over a much longer period demonstrated that the law of affinity, as applicable to psycho-somatic illness, was more powerful than fear and antagonism by a very wide margin. So great is this margin that it could be compared as the strength of a steel girder to a straw. It was found, as above, that chronic psycho-somatic ills existed only when they had a sympathy engram behind them. The law of affinity might be interpreted as the law of cohesion; “affinity” might be defined as “love” in both its meanings. Deprivation of or absence of affection could be considered as a violation of the law of affinity. Man must be in affinity with man to survive. The suicide ordinarily commits the act on the computation that the removal of self will some way benefit other selves

  -- this, on the reactive mind level is a very ordinary computation, deriving exclusively from engrams. The violent industrial chieftain with his merciless mien, when he suffers from a psycho-somatic ill, ordinarily derives it out of a sympathy engram.