Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health

by L. Ron Hubbard

“unconscious.” Grandma berates Mama: “Any daughter of mine who would do such a horrible thing should be punished by the vengeance of God (the principle of, don’t do as I do, do as I say, for who gave Mama this dramatization in the first place?) and driven through the streets.

  Your baby has a perfect right to live: if you don’t think you can take care of him, I certainly will. Now you go right on through with your pregnancy, Eloisia, and when that baby is born, if you don’t want him, you bring him to me! The idea of trying to hurt that poor thing!” And so, when our bleeding ulcer case gets born, there is Grandma and there is security and safety.

  Grandma is here the ally (and she can become an ally in a thousand different ways, any of them based on the principle that she talks sympathetically to baby when he is out like a flounder, and fights Mama in his favor when he is “unconscious”), and when he grows to boyhood he can be found placing a large dependency on Grandma, much to the parental wonder (for they never did anything to little Roger, not they). And Roger will, when Grandma is dead, develop bleeding ulcers to get her back.

  Whoever is a friend is to be clasped to the bosom with bonds of steel, says this great genius, the reactive mind, even though it kills the organism.

  The ally computation is a little more than the mere idiot calculation that anyone who is a friend can be kept a friend only by approximating the conditions wherein the friendship was realized. It is a computation on the basis that one can only be safe in the vicinity of certain people and that one can only be in the vicinity of certain people by being sick or crazy or poor and generally disabled.

  Show an auditor a child who was easily frightened by punishment, who was not at ease around home and who had allies who seemed more important to him than the parents (grandparents, aunts, boarders, doctors, nurses, etc.) and who was sickly, and the auditor can usually spring into view an attempted abortion background because, more often than not, it is there. Show an auditor a child who showed enormous attachment for one parent and detestation for the other and the auditor can bring out a background wherein one person wanted to get rid of or hurt the child and the other parent did not.

  The ally computation, then, is important. And it is also very secret. Trying to get the real allies in a case is often a great struggle. It may be that a patient had eight or ten of these allies in some cases and tried desperately to hold to them, and when he could not, searched and found mates and friends who were approximations of his allies. A wife, around whom A is continually ill but whom he will not leave under any circumstances, is usually a pseudo-ally, which is to say she approximates some mannerism of the actual ally, has a similar voice or even a similar first name. B, who will not leave a job and yet who is working far below his ability level in life, may be there because his boss is a pseudo-ally; further, he may be working at this job because an ally had a similar station in life and he is being the ally.

  Anything which can so far corrupt a person’s life is naturally going to be difficult to some degree in therapy, for when he is asked to get rid of his ally computation, it is as likely that he will give any clue to it as it is that he would have spit in his ally’s face.

  These pro-survival engrams containing the ally computation can be described as those which contain personnel who defended the patient’s existence in moments when the patient conceived that his existence was under attack. This need not be an actual, rational defense: it may only be that the content of the engram seems to indictate it; but it can safely be assumed that the worst ally computations are those when the life of the patient was defended against attackers by the ally. Most ally computations have their genesis in the prenatal area.

  The ally computation is sought as the first action in any case and new ally computations are sought throughout a case.

  These sympathy pro-survival engrams, which make up the ally computations, vary only in intensity from the standard pro-survival engram. A standard pro-survival engram is bad only because someone has expressed friendship for the patient or another person when he was

  “unconscious”: it is difficult to discover and clear even when it actually has been entirely 155

  misread -- which is to say that the pro-survival content was intended for another person than the patient but is only misconstrued by the patient. If the patient is “unconscious” and somebody says “he is a good guy,” actually meaning another person entirely, the egocentric reactive mind takes the phrase to have been meant for oneself.

  In the sympathy pro-survival engram (the ally computation is composed only of these) there is an actual defense of the person from danger by some ally: this can vary from a dramatic scene wherein somebody has been bent on killing the patient and the ally has arrived, like the cavalry, in the nick of time, to the incident wherein the patient was simply saved (or assumed he was being saved) from destruction such as drowning, being run over, etc. And the sympathy pro-survival engram is only as good as its content in words, for it does not rationalize the action. Engrams have been discovered where the patient was actually being murdered but the content was such that he was convinced he was being saved: such a case would include what auditors call a “mutual AA” -- a father and mother together attempting an abortion, AA meaning “attempted abortion” -- wherein Mama was in utter agreement and disposed herself for the operation but became frightened and began to scream about “her precious baby” in an effort to save herself from being injured: patients with this sort of sympathy pro-survival engram can get pretty confused about mother.

  The insidious aspects of the sympathy pro-survival engrams are several. (1) They are aligned with the fundamental dynamic of survival in the most literal sense and are therefore aligned with the purpose of the individual; (2) they are like cysts round which contra-survival engrams serve as the outer shell; (3) they most sharply affect the health of the individual and are always the basic factor beneath the psycho-somatic illness which the individual displays; (4) they cause the reactive mind (but not the analytical mind) to resist therapy; and (5) they are the largest drain upon the life force units.

  In (3) above, the pro-survival sympathy engram does more than just carry forward the injury which becomes the psycho-somatic illness. Any engram is a bundle of data which includes not only all perceptics and speech present but also metering for emotion and state of physical being.

  The last, the state of physical being, would be serious enough. This metering says that structure was so and such at the moment this sympathy pro-survival engram was received: in the case of an embryo engram, then, the reactive mind, in forcing the engram back into action, may also force the structural pattern back upon the body: this occasionally results in retarded development, embryo-like skin, embryo-type back curvature, and so forth.

  The glands themselves, being physical organs, are also sometimes so suppressed in the reactive mind’s effort to approximate all conditions. The underdeveloped gonads, the sub-level thyroid, the wasted limb, all these things often come from sympathy pro-survival engrams.

  This is so observably the case that when an individual is being cleared, growth process begins to bring the body up to genetic blueprint even before the case is completed: the change which takes place in the physical being of the patient is sometimes so remarkable and so marked that it is far more startling than the mere disappearance of a catalogue of psycho-somatic ills such as coronary, ulcers, arthritis, allergies, and so on.

  It would be supposed that anything powerful enough to twist the physical blueprint and keep the body from developing or make it keep on growing where it should have stopped would resist any therapy. This is true only in a most limited sense. Once one is aware of what suppresses a case, one can go about vanquishing the suppressors because a pro-survival engram, unlike a contra-survival engram, has an Achilles heel.

  The most workable answer now known to dianetics lies in the principle of life force units and a technique for throwing them back into circulation. The pro-survival engram collects and holds such units, according to t
his theory, and collapses when its power to hold units is broken.

  Entering a case, then, where one has a chronic psycho-somatic illness (and what case doesn’t have, even though it is as slight as an occasional fit of sneezing or hiccoughs), the auditor first scouts it, going through a returning routine to find out how early he can get for 156

  material, how the state of the sonic recall is, how occluded is the youth of the person, and so forth. When he has made this survey, he begins to make his computation on the case: first, was the child happy with both father and mother, and if not, where was the child happiest (there will be where the allies live). Was either parent an unreasonably powerful factor in shaping the thinking powers of the child: here again may be an ally, even if a poor one. Did the patient have grandparents or other relatives; how did he feel toward them? All this data will be more or less occluded and warped by demon circuits and is about as reliable as the data this patient will inevitably try to get from “loopy” parents or relatives, who not only do not know what happened to him but might be most anxious not to have anything discovered.

  What really did happen? Don’t let patients ask relatives or parents anything if you can help it, for these are restimulators in the extreme and never have any data you can use; the patient is just trying to use them as by-pass circuits to avoid the pain of recalling things himself. When the case is finished he will no longer want to hound these people and if you want a check for research reasons, get one of the relatives and put him through therapy.

  The auditor now has some slight idea of who the allies may be. And here comes the Achilles heel of the ally computation:

  Any ally computation may have included the loss of the ally. And the loss of the ally may be the trigger which will start chain fission. For what we are going to try to do is blow off or discharge as many life force units as possible from the reactive engram bank and weaken it.

  Every charge we get from the bank will reinforce the ability of the patient to carry on in existence and will aid his analytical mind to get into the engram bank. Hence, discharging these frozen units is a vital and important part of therapy and the condition of the case will improve in direct ratio to the number of these units so discharged.

  Consider these life units as free life energy: an engram capturing them can set itself up, for all intent, as a life force. It is then an entity and only then. The demon circuits, the valence walls (which compartment the analyzer, so to speak, and bring about multi-valence), the force and power of the engram itself are all dependent, according to theory and as observed in practice, upon usurped life units.

  To free these units is the primary task of therapy: to relieve pain from the engrams is the secondary task; to make the patient comfortable during therapy does not even rank, though there is no need he should be uncomfortable. The dual character of therapy, then, is actually two sections of the same thing: relieving engrams. There is this dual nature in engrams, however, that they have painful emotion (where that means usurped life force) and physical pain (where that means pain of injury, illness, etc.).

  To get as early as possible as fast as possible and find basic-basic is the direction and intent of therapy in its first stages: to accomplish this (when it cannot be done immediately merely by returning and finding basic-basic which can and always should be tried) one relieves the case and robs the engram bank by releasing life units (painful emotion captured them) from the ally computations.

  In brief, the entire intent and act of therapy is to find the earliest engram and erase it and then proceed to erase all other engrams as engrams so they can no longer be discovered (they refile in the standard bank but it takes a genius to find them there and a search of hours and hours: hence, to the auditor they can be said to have “erased” for they are no longer engrams and are now experience). The first, last and only job of the auditor is to find the earliest engrams available and erase them. That cannot be said too often or too strongly.

  The various ways to accomplish this are the techniques and arts of therapy. Anything which brings about this erasure of engrams in place and their refiling as experience is useful and legitimate whatever it includes. An engineer intends to remove a mountain which is in the way of a river: his intent and all his effort is directed toward moving that mountain; the ways 157

  and means employed by him to move that mountain, by steam shovel, hydraulic rams or dynamite are the art and techniques applied to do the job.

  There are three degrees of knowledge in our task: (1) In dianetics we know the goal: we know the results which come about when that goal is attained; (2) We know the character of the obstructions between us and the goal but of the exact character of the obstruction we can never learn too much; (3) The art and technique of removing the obstruction between us and the goal are legitimate only by the test of whether or not they remove the obstruction.

  The method of attack on the problem can always be improved by learning more about the character of the factors in the problem, and by learning new arts and techniques which can be applied to the problem, and by studying to improve our skill in practicing existing arts and techniques. The currently existing art and technique is not to be considered optimum merely because it does the job. The time and ease of work could be shortened by new techniques or advancing skills for old techniques.

  All this is interjected so that dianetics, unlike Aristotelian logic and natural history, will be recognized as an advancing, changing science. It is interjected at this place because no auditor should just sit back with this routine and never try to improve the routine.

  Very well: this is the routine: it works but it can never be made to work too quickly or too well:

  (1)

  Place the patient in reverie and scout into the prenatal area to see if engrams are available for lifting without further work. If they are there and can be found, take the charge out of them and erase them if possible. Do not try to erase anything as remote from basic-basic as birth unless the file clerk insists on presenting birth. In other words, get the subject into the prenatal area and look for the earliest engrams. Do not ask for specific instances, particularly for something like birth, just take whatever is presented. If you can’t get back early, take step two.

  (2)

  Scout the patient’s life, while he is in reverie (do this in any event sooner or later if the case slows down but only if it slows down to a point where early engrams are either not reducing or are without any emotion). Establish in this scout whomever may have been depended upon by the patient and be suspicious always that he has not told you the really important allies, but do not tell him you are suspicious.

  (3)

  Find out when the patient lost any ally through death or departure. Approach this moment and one way or another, by getting earlier material and this incident or getting just this incident, discharge the sorrow of loss out of the incidents. Treat any incident in which the ally departs or the patient is separated from the ally as an engram and erase it accordingly or run it until it has no “charge” of sorrow on it. If the “charge” holds, suspect an early moment of sorrow about this ally and find that and treat it as an engram.

  (4)

  First, last and always, the job is to get basic-basic and then ever afterwards the currently existing earliest moment of pain or sorrow, and to erase every incident as it is advanced by the file clerk or found by repeater technique.

  (5)

  Any incident that hangs fire always has a similar incident earlier, and the patient should be taken earlier for the prior incident when an engram will not “reduce” on recounting.

  (6)

  At any time the engrams start to become emotionless in tone, even though they reduce, suspect another ally computation and, early or late in the patient’s life, get it and reduce it at least until the emotional discharge is gone. Do not get everything in a case restimulated by changing from an unreduced incident to something which looks more fruitful, but reduce everything in view before you go loo
king for a new sorrow charge.

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  (7)

  It is better to reduce an emotionless early engram than it is to upset the case by hounding him for an ally computation when a cunning search fails to reveal none in sight. Erasing early emotionless engrams will eventually bring a new ally computation into sight if you occasionally look for it.

  (8)

  Consider that any hold-up on a case, any unwillingness to cooperate, stems from ally computation.

  (9)

  Treat all demon circuits as things held in place by life force units absorbed into the bank and address the problem of demon circuits by releasing charges of sorrow.

  (10)

  Consider that loss by death or departure of an ally is identical with a death of some part of the patient and that the reduction of a death or departure of an ally will restore that much life back to the patient. And remember that great sorrow charges are not always death or departure but merely may be a sudden reversal of stand by the ally.

  Always keep in mind that that person who most nearly identifies himself with the person of the patient, such as a sympathetic mother or father or grandparent or relative or friend, is considered by the reactive mind to be a part of the person himself and that anything happening to this sympathetic character can be considered to have happened to the patient. In such a case, where an ally has been found to have died of cancer, you may occasionally find the patient to have a sore or scaly place where he supposed the ally’s cancer to have been.

  The reactive mind thinks in identities only. The sympathetic pro-survival engram identifies the patient with another individual. The death or loss (by departure or denial) of the other individual is therefore a reactive mind conviction that the patient has suffered some portion of death.

  Emotional charges may be contained in any engram: the emotion communicates, in the same tone level, from the personnel around the “unconscious” person into his reactive mind.