Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health

by L. Ron Hubbard

  Anger goes into an engram as anger, apathy as apathy, shame as shame. Whatever people have felt emotionally around an “unconscious” person should be found in the engram which resulted from the incident. When the emotional tone of personnel in an engram is obviously angry or apathetic from the word content and yet the patient, recounting, does not feel it, there is something somewhere which has a valence wall between the patient and the emotional tone, and that valence wall is nearly always broken down by the discovery of an engram with a sorrow charge sometime earlier or later in a patient’s life.

  The only legitimate reason for entering later portions of a person’s life before the prenatal area has been well exhausted is search for sorrow discharges occasioned by the death, loss or denial by an ally. And by “denial,” we mean that the ally turned into an active enemy (real or imaginary) of the patient. The counterpart of the ally, the pseudo-ally, is a person whom the reactive mind has confused with the real ally. The death, loss or denial by a pseudo-ally can contain a sorrow charge.

  According to theory, the only thing which can lock up life units is this emotion of loss.

  If some method existed of doing nothing but freeing all life units, the physical pain could be neglected.

  A release is brought about, one way or another, by freeing as many life units as possible from periods of loss with minimal address to actual engrams.

  The loss of an ally or pseudo-ally need contain no other physical pain or

  “unconsciousness” than the loss itself occasions. This is serious enough. It makes an engram.

  Any person who is suddenly discovered to be occluded in a patient’s life can, with some reliability, be considered an ally or pseudo-ally. If, either while remembering or returning, large sections of a patient’s association with another person are missing, that person 159

  can be called an occluded person. It is a better guarantee of ally status if the occlusion surrounds the death of the person or a departure from or a denial by that person. It is possible for occlusion to take place, also, for punishment reasons; which is to say, the occluded person may also be an arch enemy: in such a case, however, any memory present will concern the death or defeat or illness of the occluded person. Occlusion of a person’s funeral in the memory of a patient would theoretically label that person an ally or pseudo-ally. Recollection of the funeral of a person but occlusion of pleasant association might tend to mean that the person was an enemy. Such rules are tentative. But it is certain that any occlusion means that a person had a vast and unrevealed significance in a patient’s life which should be explained.

  It may be remarked at this point that the recovery of the patient will depend in large measure on the life units freed from his reactive bank. This is a discharge of sorrow and may be quite violent. The usual practice is to “forget” such things and the “sooner forgotten, the sooner healed.” Unfortunately this does not work: it would be a happy thing if it did. Anything forgotten is a festering sore when it has despair connected with it. The auditor will find that every time he locates that arch denyer, “forget it,” he will get the engram it suppressed; when he can’t locate the engram and yet has found a somatic, a “forget it” or “don’t think about it” or

  “can’t remember it” or “don’t remember it” or some other denyer will be sitting there in the context of the engram. Forgetting is such unhealthy business that when a thing has been “put out of mind,” it has been put straight into the reactive engram bank and in there it can absorb life units.

  This “loopy” computation, that forgetting things makes them bearable, is incredible in view of the fact that the hypnotist, for instance, gets results with a positive suggestion when he puts one of these denyers on the end of it. That has been known now for a great many eons: it was one of the first things the author was taught when he studied Asiatic practices; from India it long ago filtered to Greece and Rome and it has come to us via Anton Mesmer: it is a fundamental principle in several mystic arts: its mechanics were known even to the Sioux medicine man. Yet people at large, hitherto unguided about it, and perhaps because they lacked any real remedy, believed that the thing to do with sorrow was to “forget it.”

  Even Hippocrates remarks that the whole of an operation is not finished until the patient has recounted the incident to all of his friends in turn, and while this is inadequate therapy, it has been, like the Confessional, a part of popular knowledge for lo, these many ages: yet people persist in suppressing sorrow.

  The auditor will many times in his activity be begged by a patient “not to talk to me about so-and-so’s death.” If he is foolish enough to heed this tearful plea when the patient is in reverie, then the auditor is actively blocking a release. That is the first incident he should get!

  Perhaps it would be bad, without dianetic technique, to approach such things; but with our art it is easy not only to enter the actual moment of the incident but to then recount it until the tears and wailings are but echoes in the case book. Treating that loss like an engram, recounting it until it is no longer painful emotionally, is to give back to the patient vitality he has not had since the incident took place. And if the incident does not ease on a dozen recountings, slide back down its sorrow track, just as you would with any other engram, and find earlier and earlier moments. A patient starting to discharge sorrow at the age of fifty may find himself, two hours later, down in the basic area recounting the primary moment of sorrow, at the moment when the lost ally first became an ally. If the auditor can get the whole chain on any one ally, exhausting sorrow from it from later to earlier, taking all the sorrow he can get from every incident and stripping the entire series of engrams of their charge, he may, in a few hours work, rid the case of enough emotional charge to then begin an orderly erasure.

  Please observe this difference: the Achilles heel of the ally computation can be considered late on the chain of incidents which concern that ally, which is to say that we have a funnel here, upright in time, which can be entered late and followed early: the Achilles heel of the contra-survival engram chain is in the earliest incidents, exactly the reverse of the emotionally painful engrams.

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  To regain out of the engram bank life units so that enough free emotion is available to release or clear a case, start with late ally or pseudo ally losses and work back earlier.

  To release the physical pain of the individual from the engram bank, start early (as close to conception as you can get) and work through to late. Physical pain in the contra-survival chain can suppress painful emotion in the pro-survival chain.

  Painful emotion in the pro-survival chain can suppress physical pain in the contra-survival engrams.

  If you were to draw a picture of the prenatal area of the reactive engram bank, it would appear somewhat as follows: a long line drawn horizontally, representing time, would have dark blots on it representing engrams; one end of the line would represent conception, the other end birth: above this line would lie a dark area, like a heavy mist, extending from one end of the line to the other and dropping down almost to it: above this dark mist would lie another horizontal line, the apparent time track along which the patient returns. The first long line is the actual time track; the mist is painful emotion; the uppermost dark line is what the patient mistakes and uses for his time track.

  The painful emotion is, of course, occasionally tapped in the prenatal area itself, and the opportunity of dispersing it by so discovering prenatal emotional charges should never be overlooked by the auditor: indeed, once much of the later life painful emotion is discharged, a great deal of painful emotion can be found amongst the early engrams. The better part of this mist, and the first part the auditor often contacts, is in late life: although it originates, as charge, in late life, it can be said to lie on this prenatal area.

  Moments of loss, the loss by death or departure of any of the patient’s allies, and the loss of an ally because he turns against the patient, trap these emotional charges and intervene
them between the patient and actuality. Although the moment of loss was post-birth, in infanthood, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, it was retroactive in suppressing early engrams.

  This aspect of painful emotion is a key-in of the early incidents by the moment of loss.

  In other words, a moment of great loss suppresses the individual on the tone scale to a point where he approximates the level of early engrams and these, keyed-in, hold the units of charge thereafter.

  Life units so seized are held and are the life of engrams. As in electricity, a positive charge glances away from a positive charge: like charges repel each other. The analyzer, operating, it can be said for analogy, on the same kind of charge as that contained in the engram, glances away from the engram, which remains thereby unknown and intact.

  As the individual returns into the area of the early engrams -- which are held keyed-in by virtue of the seized charges from late incidents -- he can quite comfortably pass by enormous quantities of aberrative material without even suspecting it is present. However, when the late moments of painful emotion are released, the auditor can go immediately into the early area and find engrams of physical pain which he had not hitherto been able to uncover.

  Actually the late moments and the early moments are both engrams: the news or observation of loss shuts down the analyzer and everything which then enters it is engramic and is filed in the reactive mind. Because of sight and a memory of activity which is connected to the present, all of which serves to keep an individual oriented, a person can often recall the moment of loss, whereas he cannot recall prenatal material, for he lacked in that area any connection with orienting factors which would impinge themselves on the analyzer. While the prenatal infant definitely, especially in the late stages, has an analyzer, experience and memory are not coordinated and the existence of engrams is not then suspected by the analytical mind.

  This is not true of the later periods of life, particularly those after speech has been learned and is being used. The fact of the matter is that this later-life ability to recall surrounding 161

  circumstances without feeling any extremity of pain also serves to hide here the existence of an actual engram: a person feels that he knows all about such a moment of loss analytically: actually he has no contact with the engram itself, which contains a moment of

  “unconsciousness” of a lesser depth than that, for instance, of the anesthetic variety. Childhood losses of allies, however, can be so entirely occluded that the allies themselves are not remembered.

  The auditor will find very late engrams easy to contact. And he will also discover something else. The patient may not be, as he is returning to such a moment of loss, occupying his own body. This “phenomenon” has been known for several thousand years and even the latest mention of it merely said that it was “interesting” without making any further effort to find out why a person, returned to an area in hypnotic regression, sometimes could be found within himself (which is to say, seeing things as though he were himself) and sometimes saw things there and himself included as part of the scenery (as though he had a detached view).

  Because we have discovered that a natural function of the mind is to return in an awake state to past incidents does not alter the fact that we encounter aspects hitherto known as mysterious

  “phenomena” of drug dreams and hypnotism. We are not by any means practicing hypnotism; so this means that hypnotism and dianetics use similar abilities of the mind -- it does not mean that such abilities belong in the field of hypnotism. And one of the various aspects of the return is that it occasionally -- or, in some patients, continually -- encounters areas where the patient is

  “outside” his body. These exteriorized views of self have two explanations. One of them is valence, whereby the patient has taken unto himself the identity of another person and sees the scene through that other person’s eyes; the other is exteriorization, in which painful emotion is present in such quantity that the patient cannot occupy himself. That painful emotion may stern from past or future incidents to the moment when the patient is witnessing a scene to which he has been dianetically returned. On several recountings of the scene, the patient will come nearer and nearer to an occupation of his body until at last he sees the scene from within his body. At times no emotional discharge (tears, etc.) takes place until the patient has gone over the incident several times and until he is within his own body. It is as though, returned, he had to scout the ground to find out if it was safe to occupy himself. If, after a few recountings, no discharge such as tears takes place, then the emotion is suspended elsewhere, earlier or later but usually much later. Exteriorization because of emotion is the same as exteriorization because of physical pain to all intents and purposes of the auditor. When he encounters a case which, all the way up and down the track, is continually exterior, he should address his skill to the release of moments of painful emotion.

  All patients seem to have the idea that time heals and that some incident of ten or twenty years ago no longer has any effect upon them. Time is a Great Charlatan, not a great healer, as has been remarked. Time by the processes of growth and decay alters, and environment introduces new faces and activities and thus alters the restimulators: a moment of painful emotion in the past has, like any other engram, its own restimulators and is, in addition, holding keyed-in all the early engrams which relate to it so that their restimulators also work: every restimulator has a set of restimulators which are associated to it by the analytical mind, which cannot see the real restimulator. All this makes a complex pattern but complex in therapy only if one does not know the source of aberration. If the auditor returns the patient to any moment of painful emotion in the past and runs it as an engram, he will discover that all its original charge is present and will discharge.

  He will usually find the patient shying away from any thought of going into the actual engram: the pre-clear may attempt to detail all manner of bric-a-brac, his own thoughts, the reasons why it no longer is painful to him, and so forth. These thoughts and data before the fact or after it are about as much use in running an engram as a dissertation about “childhood illusions” was to the problem of removing aberrations from the human mind. The auditor who will listen to these “reasons” and “I remembers” in lieu of running the engram itself will not get his patient well and will waste valuable hours of therapy. An auditor who will do this belongs to the hand-patting school of thought which believes sympathy has value. He does not belong in an auditor’s chair. It is wasted time, wasted valuable time, to listen to anything the patient thought or said or did or believed when the patient should be going into the engram and 162

  running it as an engram. Certainly there is a necessity to find out, from the patient’s talk, where that engram is, but once it is located, all else is dross.

  Take a moment when a child is notified of his parents’ deaths. The auditor learns that the parents died when the child was two years of age. He can then deduce, without further trouble or questions, that somebody must have told his patient about the death of the parents, that there was a precise moment when the patient, then an infant, learned about that death.

  Recounting the matter in present time -- without being returned, the patient is using all the intervening years as buffers against the painful emotion. The auditor returns the patient, without further preamble than the usual routine of putting the patient into reverie, to the moment when the patient learned of the death of the parents. The patient may do a little fumbling to orient himself in the past, but shortly he will have a contact with the instant somebody informed him. Be assured, if that child loved his parents at all, that an engram exists here. The engram starts at the first moment the child is informed, when the analyzer can be expected to have shut down. The end of the engram is a moment, an hour, a day or even a week later when the analyzer again turned on.

  Between the first moment of analytical attenuation and a regain of analytical power is the engram. The first minutes of it are the m
ost severe. Running an hour of it (an hour of incident, not of therapy) should be more than ample. Most auditors run only the first few minutes several times to get a test of whether or not there is going to be any emotional discharge. Run such a period of loss which must contain painful emotion exactly as you would run a period of physical pain and “unconsciousness” with another source. For the period of painful emotion is an “unconscious” period just as certainly as if the patient had been struck with a club. If the emotion in this period can be contacted with four or five recountings (each time starting at the beginning, making sure the patient is returned and in contact with all perceptics of the incident, and running it for what it is, an engram) then the engram should be recounted until the emotion in it is gone, until the patient is bored with it or even cheerful about it. If, after four or five recountings the patient is still well exteriorized, still has not contacted any emotion, then the charge is suspended elsewhere, either earlier or later, and tries should be made in terms of other losses, no matter how many years from the unyielding incident, to get a discharge.

  After a discharge is blown off elsewhere the incident first addressed, as in the case of the two-year-old who lost his parents, may discharge. It is certain that sooner or later such an incident will discharge and it is also certain that the case will not make much progress in getting any bulk of physically painful engrams until such a severe incident is well discharged.

  Discharges are contacted, often, in very unlikely places. Somewhere they contact the surface enough so that a touch by the returned patient will permit the units to free, permit engrams to key-out and come into view on the time track in their proper places.

  The engram bank becomes severely distorted by painful emotion and the areas of painful emotion become severely distorted by physical pain elsewhere. The filing system of the reactive mind is bad. The file clerk is able to recover and deliver to the auditor only so many painful emotion engrams or physical pain engrams at a time.