Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health

by L. Ron Hubbard

  “unconscious.” When he becomes “unconscious” he receives all the percepts and words in the area of the mother as engrams. Analytical power has nothing to do with engrams. If the child is “unanalytical,” this does not predispose him to engrams. If the child is “unconscious” or hurt it does.

  The presence or absence of “analytical power” has nothing to do with whether or not engrams are received.

  Morning sickness, coughing, all monologuing (mother talking to herself), street noises, household noises, etc., are all communicated to the “unconscious” child when he is injured.

  And the child is very easily injured. He is not protected by formed bones and he has no mobility. He is there: when something strikes him or presses him, his cells and organs are injured. A simple experiment to demonstrate how mobility influences this is to lie down in bed and place one’s head on a pillow. Then have somebody lean a hand on one’s forehead. As there is no mobility, the pressure of the hand is far stronger than it would be if a hand were laid on the forehead when one was standing. The tissue and the water around the child form very slight buffers. In an injury amniotic fluid, as an incompressible medium, presses him, for it cannot compress itself. The child’s situation is far from armored.

  Mother’s act of tying her shoes, in the later stages of pregnancy, even may be severe on the child. Mother’s strain when lifting heavy objects is particularly injurious. And mother’s collision with objects like a table edge might well crush a baby’s head. The repair facilities of the unborn child, as mentioned elsewhere, are far above anything ever before discovered. The child may have its head crushed but the blueprint is still there and the building materials and repair can be made. So it is not a case of the child being “all right” just because it can live through almost anything. It is a case of whether or not these injuries are going to have high aberrative value as engrams.

  Attempted abortion is very common. And remarkably lacking in success. The mother, every time she injures the child in such a fiendish fashion, is actually penalizing herself.

  Morning sickness is entirely engramic, so far as can be discovered, since clears have not so far experienced it during their own pregnancies. And the act of vomiting because of pregnancy is via contagion of aberration. Actual illness generally results only when mother has been interfering with the child either by douches or knitting needles or some such thing. Such interference causes the mother to become ill and, from an actual physical standpoint, is much harder on the mother than on the child. Morning sickness evidently gets into a society because of these interferences such as attempted abortion and, of course, injury.

  The cells know when pregnancy occurs. The reactive mind is acquainted with the fact before the analyzer by process of organic sensation, since the endocrine system is altered.

  Hence, the mother’s discovery of pregnancy has little to do with whether or not she was sick before the discovery.

  This entire field has been a subject of considerable research in dianetics. Much more research must be done. These conclusions are tentative. But the conclusion that the engram is 104

  received and that it is as violent as its content, rather than its actual pain, is a scientific fact and not in any way a theory. It is as real a discovery as gravity.

  Preventing these engrams is the first consideration. Preventing them from having any content is the second. Women who lead peasant lives, doing heavy labor, are subject to all manner of accident. Perhaps such accidents cannot be prevented because of the purpose these women serve in the society. But when it is known that any injury to the mother can create an engram in the unborn child, it should be the concern of all those present during such an injury, including the mother, to maintain a complete and utter silence. Any remark is aberrative in an engram. Even such a statement as “You can remember this when in dianetic therapy,” made toward an unborn child, installs an engram so that every word in this statement means a physical pain just where he received it at the time, and in the future “dianetic therapy” will be restimulative to him.

  The doctor, punching around to find out if mother is pregnant, may say, “Well, it’s hard to tell this early.” The patient in dianetic therapy years later will return into the vicinity of this incident only to draw a blank until the dianeticist suddenly guesses the content from how the patient describes his reactions. If the doctor is very tough and says, “You had better take good care of yourself, Mrs. Jones. If you don’t, you’ll be mighty sick!” the child,

  “unconscious” from the examination no matter how mild it is, will get a mild hypochondria when the engram keys-in and be very concerned over his health.

  If the husband uses language during coitus, every word of it is going to be engramic. If the mother is beaten by him, that beating and everything he says and that she says will become part of the engram.

  If she does not want the child and he does, the child will later react toward him as an ally and perhaps have a nervous breakdown when the father dies. If she wants the child and he doesn’t, the ally computation is reversed.

  This is true when abortion is threatened or attempted providing the threat is contained in an engram.

  Should the mother be injured and the father be highly solicitous, the engram has this for content and the child has a sympathy engram. The way to survive, then, is to be pathetic when injured, and even see to it that one is injured.

  A woman who is pregnant should be given every consideration by a society which has any feeling for its future generations. If she falls, she should be helped -- but silently. She must not be expected to carry heavy things. And she should not have coitus forced upon her.

  For every coital experience is an engram in the child during pregnancy.

  An astonishing number of pregnancies must take place which are never realized. The violence of coitus, the use of douches and jellies (used because the woman is still contracepting and does not know she is already pregnant), straining bowel movements, falls and accidents must account for a large number of miscarriages which come about sometime around the first period after conception. For the zygote and embryo forms of the child have a rather frail grip on existence and are very severely injured by things the mother would consider nothing. Once past the first missed period, the chances of miscarriage rapidly grow less and only when the child is a genetic monstrosity or when abortion attempts are made can a miscarriage be expected to take place. The monstrosities are so small a percentage that they are negligible as a possibility.

  The amniotic sac can be pierced many times and repeatedly and emptied of all water after the first missed period and the child can still survive. 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.

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  The child before birth does not depend upon the standard senses for its perceptions.

  Engrams are not memories but cellular level recordings. Therefore, the child needs no eardrums to record an engram. Cases are on hand where whatever hearing mechanism the unborn child had must have been temporarily destroyed by an abortion attempt. And the engram was still recorded. The cells rebuilt the apparatus which was to be the source of sound in the standard banks and stored their own data in the reactive bank.

  Release of such engrams means a restoration of rationality to the individual far above the current norm and a stability and well-being greater than Man ever thought Man possessed.

  These engrams have been confirmed by taking the data from a child, from the mother and the father, and all data checked. So we are dealing here with scientific facts which, no matter how startling, are nevertheless true.

  The mother, then, should be extremely gentle on herself during pregnancy and those around her should be entirely informed of the necessity for silence after any jar or injury. And in view of the fact that it is not possible to tell when a woman has become pregnant and in view also of the high potentiality of aberration in the zygote and embryo e
ngrams, it is obvious that society must better its ways toward women if the future health of the child is to be preserved.

  The woman has to some degree become considered less valuable in this society than in other societies and times. She is expected to be in competition with men. Such a thing is nonsense. A woman has as high a plane of activity as man. He cannot compete with her any more than she can compete with him in the fields of structure and vigorous activity. Much of the social maelstrom now in existence has as its hub the failure to recognize the important role of the woman as a woman and the separation of the fields of women and men.

  The changes which will come about in the next twenty years need no urging here. But with the recent discoveries in photosynthesis which should secure enough food to feed Man better and at less cost, the importance of birth control dwindles. The morality standards have already changed, no matter what moralists do to try to block the change. And woman, therefore, can be freed of many of her undesirable chains.

  In the custody of Man is the current world and its activity and structure. In the charge of woman is the care of the person of the human being and his children. Almost sole custodian of tomorrow’s generation, she is entitled to much more respect than her chattel-period of the past gave her.

  It is not, then, any wild Utopian thought that woman can be placed above the level hitherto occupied. And so she must be placed if the childhood of tomorrow’s generation is to reach any high standard, if homes are to be peaceful and unharassed and if society is to advance.

  Preventive Dianetics, in the sphere of the home, must place emphasis on the woman in order to safeguard the child.

  As any first step, a mother should be cleared, for any mother who attempts an abortion is blocked across the second dynamic and any block menaces her health as well as her happiness. An antipathy for children has been found to accompany sexual aberration.

  Preventive Dianetics, then, on the level of the individual, asks for cleared parents and then precaution against the aberrating of the child, and further precaution against the keying-in of any aberration the child might have received.

  To do this is very easy. Maintain silence in the presence of injury. Do what has to be done for the injure ill and do it in silence. Maintain silence in the presence of birth to save both the sanity of the mother and the child and safeguard the home to which they will go. And the maintaining of silence does not mean a volley of “Sh’s,” for those make stammerers.

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  In a wider field, the maintenance of silence around any “unconscious” or injured person is second in importance only to preventing the “unconsciousness” in the first place.

  Say nothing and make no sound around an “unconscious” or injured person. To speak, no matter what is said, is to threaten his sanity. Say nothing while a person is being operated upon. Say nothing when there is a street accident. Don’t talk!

  Say nothing around a sick child or an injured child. Smile, appear calm, but say nothing. Actions do not speak louder than words but actions are all that can be done around the sick and injured unless one has an active desire to drive them into neurosis or insanity or, at best, to give them a future illness.

  And above all, say nothing around a woman who has been struck or jarred in any way.

  Help her. If she speaks, don’t answer. Just help her. You have no idea of whether she is pregnant or not.

  And it is a remarkable fact, a scientific fact, that the healthiest children come from the happiest mothers. Birth, for one thing, in a cleared mother, is a very mild affair. Only birth engrams in the mother made it hard. A cleared mother needs no anaesthetic. And that is well because the anaesthetic makes a dazed child and the engram, when it reacts, makes him appear a dull child. A happy woman has very little trouble. And even a few engrams, which arrive despite all precautions, are nothing if the general tone of the mother is happy.

  Woman, you have a right and a reason to demand good treatment.

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  Book Three

  THERAPY

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  CHAPTER I

  The Mind’s Protection

  The mind is a self-protecting mechanism. Short of the use of drugs as in narcosynthesis, shock, hypnotism or surgery, no mistake can be made by an auditor* which cannot be remedied either by himself or by another auditor. Those things which are stressed, then, in this book, are ways to accomplish therapy as swiftly as possible with minimal errors; for errors take time. Auditors are going to make errors, that is inevitable. If they make the same error repeatedly, they had better get some one to guide them through therapy.

  There are probably thousands of ways to get into trouble with mental healing, but all these ways can be classed in these groups: (1) use of shock or surgery on the brain; (2) use of strong drugs; (3) use of hypnosis as such; and (4) trying to cross-breed dianetics with older forms of therapy.

  The mind will not permit itself to be seriously overloaded so long as it can retain partial awareness of itself; it can only be overloaded when its awareness is reduced to a point where it cannot evaluate anything: it can then be thoroughly upset. Dianetic reverie leaves a patient fully aware of everything which is taking place and with full recall of everything which has happened. Types of therapy which do not do this are possible and useful but they must be approached with the full knowledge that they are not foolproof. Dianetics, then, uses the reverie for the majority of its work and using the reverie an auditor cannot possibly get himself into any trouble from which he cannot extricate himself and the patient. He is working with an almost foolproof mechanism as long as the mind retains some awareness: a radio or a clock or an electric motor are far more susceptible to injury in the hands of a workman than the human mind. The mind was built to be as tough as possible. It will be found that it is difficult to get it into situations which make it uncomfortable and impossible, with the reverie, to embroil it enough to cause neurosis or insanity.

  In the U.S. infantry manual there is a line about decision: “Any plan, no matter how poorly conceived, if boldly executed is better than inaction.”

  In dianetics, any case, no matter how serious, no matter how unskilled the auditor, is better opened than left closed. It is better to start therapy if it is to be interrupted after two hours of work than not to start therapy at all. It is better to contact an engram than to leave an engram uncontacted even if the result is physical discomfort for the patient -- for that engram will not thereafter possess as much power and the discomfort will gradually abate.

  This is scientific fact. The mechanism dianetics uses is an ability of the brain which Man as a whole did not know he had. It is a process of thought which everyone possesses inherently and which was evidently meant to be used in the overall process of thinking but which, by some strange oversight, Man has never before discovered. Once a person has learned that he possesses just this one new faculty, he is better able to think than he was before, and he can learn this faculty in ten minutes.

  Further, when one approaches an engram with this faculty (which, when intensified, is the reverie) some of that engram’s sub-level connections are broken and the aberrative factors no longer have as much force either in the physical or mental spheres. Further, the knowledge that there is a solution to mental ills is a stabilizing factor.

  Approaching an engram with the reverie is very far from the same as restimulating the engram exteriorly as is done in life. The engram is a powerful and vicious character only so long as it is untapped. In place and active it can be restimulated to cause innumerable mental and physical ills. But approaching it with reverie is approaching it on a new circuit, one that disarms it. The power of the engram is partly the fear of the unknown -- knowing brings stability by itself.

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  Do not think that you will not make patients uncomfortable. That is not true. The auditor’s work, when it taps engrams which cannot be lifted, may cause the patient to have headaches, various aches and pains and even mild physical illness, even when the
work is carefully done. But life has been doing this to the patient on a much grander scale for years and no matter how badly the case is mauled around, no matter how many aberrations spring into view to plague the patient for a day or two, none are as serious as those which can be occasioned by the environment acting upon the untapped engram.

  The auditor can do everything backwards, upside down and utterly wrong and the patient will still be better, provided only that he does not try to use drugs before he has worked a few cases, that he does not use hypnotism as hypnotism and he does not try to cross dianetics with some older therapy. He can use drugs in dianetics if he knows his dianetics and if he has medical concurrence. He can use all the techniques of hypnotism so long as he is thoroughly experienced with dianetics.

  And once he has used dianetics, he will not fall back to mystic efforts to heal minds. In short, the point which is offered here is that so long as the auditor takes a relatively simple case at first to see how the mechanisms of the mind work and uses only the reverie he cannot get into trouble. There will be those, certainly, who believe they are so vastly experienced in tom-tom beating or gourd rattling that they won’t give dianetics a chance to work as dianetics but will sail in and begin to plague the patient about “penis-envy” or make him repent his sins, but the patient who starts to get this will be smart to simply change positions from the couch to the auditor’s chair and clear up some of the aberrations of the auditor before work proceeds.

  Anybody who has read this book once through and procured a patient with sonic recall for a trial effort will know more about the mind, in those actions, than he has ever known before, and he will be more skilled and able to treat the mind than anyone attempting to do so, regardless of reputation, a very short while ago. This does not mean that men who have had experience with mental patients will not, knowing dianetics (knowing dianetics) have an edge on those who do not realize some of the foibles of which Man in an aberrated state is capable.