Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health

by L. Ron Hubbard

  They may be disordered in their positions on the track, which is to say, the auditor may contact an early physically painful engram (always his most important job) then contact one in mid-prenatal, then one post-birth, and thereafter no other engrams of the physical pain variety seem to be present (engrams of the physical variety which contain knock-outs by accidents, illnesses, surgery or injury). This does not mean that the case is stalemated or that the patient is cleared. It more likely means that there are incidents of the other engram variety (painful emotion, stemming from loss by death, departure or reversal of allies) which can now be contacted.

  The auditor then looks for and exhausts the emotional discharge from the loss engrams, usually later in life.

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  These, with the units freed back in circulation, allow earlier physical pain engrams to appear and the auditor reduces each one of these he can contact. As soon as he can no longer find physically painful engrams, he goes back to a search for painful emotion engrams and so forth alternately as necessary. The mind, being a self-protecting mechanism, will sooner or later block the patient from physical pain engrams if painful emotion engrams are ready; and it will block him from painful emotion engrams as soon as physical pain engrams are ready.

  Start late to get painful emotion and work back early.

  Start early to get physical pain engrams and work toward late. And whenever any engram is contacted, run it until it is no longer troublesome in any way to the patient or is entirely gone (refiled, but gone for all the auditor and patient will be able to tell at the moment).

  If an incident, after many recountings, shows no signs of lightening (somatic decreasing or emotion either not expressed or not decreasing), only then should the auditor seek another incident. In a painful emotion engram the charge is often later, in a physical pain engram the suspension is invariably caused by the existence of the same phrase in an earlier physical pain engram which can be contacted, and in such case the auditor should go back over the phrases which brought him to the somatic until he finds a contact and a lift of the engram.

  It should be extremely clear by this time that rationalization about action or conduct or conditions does not advance therapy and is of no use beyond occasional aid in locating engrams. It should be equally clear that no amount of explanation or hand-patting or evaluation by the auditor is going to advance the erasure of the engrams themselves. It should be plain that what a person thought at the time of the incident was not aberrative. It should be clear that painful emotion puts the compartments and demon-circuits into the mind and that the physical engrams hold the aberration and physical pain in the body.

  This entire operation is mechanical. It has nothing to do with justified thought or shame or reasons. It has only to do with exhausting the engram bank. When the bulk of painful emotion is gone, the person is released; when the engram bank is exhausted of content, the person is cleared.

  The mind is like a fine piece of equipment: as itself and as a mechanism it is almost impossible to destroy except by removing some of its parts: engrams do not remove parts of the mind, they add unnecessary things to it. Envision a beautiful, stream-lined machine, operating perfectly -- that would be the mind without the additions of pain and painful emotion.

  Now envision this beautiful machine in the hands of a crew of moronic mechanics: they start to work around it and do not know that what they do affects the machine at all. Now they see that something is wrong with the machine and are all unwitting that they have placed various assorted monkey-wrenches, hatpins, old cigar butts and yesterday’s garbage into it and around it. Their first thought is to put something new on or in the machine to correct its operation and they add arbitrary gadgets to it in order to patch up the machine’s operation. Some of these gadgets appear to help the machine (sympathy engrams) and can be used, in the presence of the remaining bric-a-brac, by the machine itself to help its stability. The morons interrupt the fuel supply (painful emotional engrams) or, like the Japanese captain who beat the car with a switch when it would not go, try to goad the machine (punishment drive) and so add more trouble. At last this machine appears to be a hopeless wreck, being almost hidden beneath everything added to it and thrust into it, and the moron mechanics shake their heads and say, “Let’s put something else on it or it will stop!” They do and the machine appears to stop (goes insane).

  In dianetics, a workmanlike job of clearing away the debris in and around the machine is performed. It is not done by adding any more debris. The moron mechanics (the content of the reactive mind) seem dismayed at this action, but the machine itself, suddenly aware that something is being done for it which will actually bring it into good running operation again, begins to help. The more debris which is cleared, the better it runs and the less force the moron mechanics have. The course of improvement should be and is rapid. We can stop when the machine is running at least as well as the “normal” machine (a release) or we can stop when we have all the debris out of the machine (a clear). When we have effected a clear, we behold 164

  something which has never been beheld before because it never before existed in a debris-free state: a perfect machine, stream-lined, powerful, shining, able to adjust and care for all its own operations without further therapeutic assistance of any kind.

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  CHAPTER VIII

  Some Types of Engrams

  Two examples of each kind of engram are given, so that the auditor can clearly understand their differences:

  CONTRA-SURVIVAL ENGRAM

  This is any kind of engram which lies across the dynamics and has no alignment with purpose: Fight between mother and father shortly after conception. Father strikes mother in stomach. She screams (first percepts are pain, pressure, sound of blow and scream) and he says, “God damn you, I hate you! You are no good. I’m going to kill you!” Mother says,

  “Please don’t hit me again. Please don’t. I’m hurt. I’m hurt. I’m frantic with pain!” Father says, “Lie there and rot, damn you! Good-bye!”

  In this engram we have a severe aberrative situation, first, because it is early; second, because its content says the person who has it is hurt and frantic; third, because it has a holder and is therefore apt to become chronic (“Lie there”); fourth, because it can produce disease (“and rot”); fifth, because it has religious connotation about God and being damned; sixth, because it gives the individual a feeling other people are no good (“you” applies to other people, ordinarily); seventh, because it has an emotional tone, by content, of hostility (“I hate you”) and eighth, because the individual, post-birth, has to live with these restimulative persons, his father and mother. It has other additional effects, giving, like all engrams, two additional and unnecessary valences to the individual, one of which, the mother’s, is a coward valence and the other, the father’s, a bully valence. The individual may dramatize this in several ways: if he does not dramatize it, he feels the pain (as he would then be in his own valence) whenever it is restimulated; if he dramatizes the mother, he will feel the pain she received, which is a blow in the stomach (whereas his own was on his head and heart); if he dramatizes the father, he will be in trouble with society, to say nothing of his own wife and children.

  There is no winning with any engram of any kind but so long as a person has engrams, some kinds, the sympathy engram particularly, serve to hold away antagonistic engrams.

  The second contra-survival example is a morning sickness engram where the mother is vomiting so violently that the compression on the child is severe and renders it “unconscious.”

  The mother is vomiting and gasping and saying to herself between spasms, “Oh, why was I ever born! I knew I shouldn’t have let him come in me. I knew it, I knew it. It was wrong but he had to do it anyway. Ugh, how nasty. Sex is nasty. It’s horrible. I hate sex. I hate men. I hate them. Oh, ugh, it won’t come up, it won’t come up. I am so sick at my stomach and it won’t come up.”

  In this engram we have something a wom
an might dramatize if she were pregnant but which a man could never dramatize as pregnancy but only by being sick at his stomach. Much morning sickness seems to be an aberration stemming from engrams: somewhere back in time some mother may have vomited from food poisoning and started the whole thing -- perhaps in the days when Man was still in trees. Now note that the mother is throwing up, that the content of her stomach is being regurgitated: the engram, however, says that it won’t come up: when this is dramatized with the individual in his own valence, he experiences pressure on him and

  “unconsciousness” and thus such a dramatization is impossible; when this is dramatized it must be dramatized as the mother but the action is not dramatized so much as the command and we get a condition where the individual with such an engram, when he is sick, cannot vomit. The command of the engram is more important than the action people take in it. On a reactive level there is no rationality. If this were on a conscious level, where it would not be aberrative, of course, the action could be mimicked and then would contain actual vomiting, the action on the conscious level being more important than the word content.

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  In therapy, when we encounter this engram, we may have difficulty entering it because it says that “I shouldn’t have let him come in me,” which is a denyer. We also find, with the “It won’t come up,” a holder. The engram will most certainly lift the moment these words and the somatic lift, and these words could not interrupt the engram. If the engram does not lift, it is because there is a previous engram with much the same content (the aberree has a pattern of dramatization which he repeats over and over and over, giving people around him many incidents which are more or less alike except in their point in time). This could be restimulated in the environment (but not in therapy) to a point where it would cause madness, for “it” may also refer to the child, who identifying himself with the word “it,” then cannot rise to present time. In therapy the engram is somewhat drained of power just by being touched with the returned analytical mind; further, the auditor discovers the patient is not moving on the track and a scout of the situation soon discovers the holder, for the patient will sooner or later say he

  “can’t come up” even if the auditor has not guessed it.

  In the aberrative sphere, this engram would probably put a heavy block across the second dynamic and we would find the person in whose reactive mind it was being frigid, prudish and sharp with children (all of which go together in various combinations). Further, we would find an apprehension that “he” was going to have to do something when he found out it was wrong.

  In the psycho-somatic sphere it might cause headaches during or because of coitus or a tendency to nausea whenever coitus was performed. Any of the phrases of this engram, like any other phrases in any other engram, would tend to give him both the somatic and the aberration, providing, of course, the individual was in a state of low analytical power as found in weariness or slight illness. Thus, this one is waiting until somebody says during a future

  “unconsciousness” period, preferably in a voice like the mother’s would sound through the walls of the abdomen and womb, “Ugh, how nasty!” or some other phrase to key it in.

  “Nastier,” by the way, would not key it in: “ugly” despite a similar syllable to “Ugh” would not key it in. The sound of vomiting itself probably would key it in.

  PRO-SURVIVAL ENGRAM

  This could be any engram which, by content only, not by any real aid to the individual containing it, pretended to assist survival. Let us take a coitus engram: mother and father are engaged in intercourse which, by pressure, is painful to the unborn child and which renders him “unconscious” (common occurrence, like morning sickness, usually present in any engram bank). Mother is saying, “Oh, I can’t live without it. It’s wonderful. It’s wonderful. Oh, how nice. Oh, do it again!” and father is saying, “Come! Come! Oh, you’re so good. You’re so wonderful! Ahhh!” Mother’s orgasm puts the finishing touch on the “unconsciousness” in the child. Mother says, “It’s beautiful.” Father, finished now, says, “Get up,” meaning she should take a douche (they do not know she is pregnant) and then begins to snore.

  Obviously this is a valuable incident because one “cannot live without it.” Furthermore,

  “it’s beautiful,” also, “it’s wonderful.” But it is also extremely painful.

  It cannot be followed because it has first something which beckons part of the mind back, “Come!” and then, later, tells it to “Get up.” Things that are “beautiful” and “wonderful”

  can cause our patient, not in therapy, to have an orgasm when she looks at beautiful and wonderful things, providing they have been so labeled.

  Dramatization of this can be in either the father valence or the mother valence: to dramatize it in the personal valence would mean physical pain. Thus, the individual holding this, will be found, varied only by his other coitus engrams, to be, as father, disgusted after the act and telling his partner to “Get up.” The emotion is contained in how the words, “Get up,”

  were spoken: this is a telegraphed emotion out of voice tones, not word content: engrams always contain both.

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  In therapy, we find the reactive mind very chary of letting this one come to view because, after all, one “cannot live without it.” There are whole classes of these favorable evaluation phrases in engrams and wherever he comes upon one the auditor will find the preclear’s reactive mind holding out on him. “I don’t want to lose you,” “Hold on to this,” “I can’t let go of this, I’d fall,” and so forth. But this is, after all, just another engram and “pleasant” or not is aberrative.

  Masochistic and sadistic impulses often stem from coital engrams which contain those specific things, so the auditor is not to infer that merely because this coitus is painful to the child, it will make the child a masochist or a sadist. If masochism or sadism is present in the patient it is caused by engrams which contain rapes, beating for sexual gratification, enjoyment of pain, etc., and engrams which homonymically seem to state that sex and pain are alike such as a “normal” coitus which says, “It hurts so good! Hurt me again, Bill. Hurt me again! Oh, shove it in me, way up! Make it hurt so I can come.” Dramatized by a boy, this might very well bring about sodomy because the engram is not an observed action but a series of commands, literally taken.

  Thus our pro-survival coitus engram, as the first example of one here, is relatively innocent in a person’s aberrative pattern. But by an accident of words, it could be very different in its aberrative effect.

  The second pro-survival example concerns another prenatal engram. (One auditor commented, while he was being cleared, that he “had thought of my life B.D. -- before dianetics -- as a graph of years, in which the time from conception to birth occupied one-fiftieth of the linear distance between conception and present time, but now think of the prenatal period as occupying two-thirds of the distance between the beginning and now.” The prenatal area, cleared, at last went back to being one-fiftieth.)

  The mother, subject to high blood pressure, continually brought about a condition of great pain in the unborn infant, particularly when she was agitated. (This is a prime source of migraine headache.) Whatever it was which agitated her into high blood pressure at the moment this engram was received was unknown -- and much of the “plot” of prenatal life may remain unknown for the explanatory data may come before the pain and the engram and a complete recording only happens after the instant of pain when some degree of “unconsciousness”

  comes about. The mother, at the beginning of the engram, when pressure began to build up and stiffen out the unborn child, was weeping. She was by herself. “Oh, how am I ever going to get out of it. Everything looks so drab and colorless to me. Oh, why did I ever start it; I can’t possibly go through with it. But I have to, I have to.

  I would be sick if I didn’t. Oh,

  Lord, everything comes in on me at once. I am utterly trapped. But there, I will go thr
ough with it, I’ll feel better. I’ll be brave and do it. I’ve got to be brave. I am brave. I am the bravest person in the world. I have to be and I am.” The pressure receded.

  Exactly what this was about will remain a mystery to the auditor who reduced it, the patient who had it, the auditor and the reader: such is often the case with an engram. They are conceived in misunderstanding and they aren’t to be understood, save mechanically, and only deleted from the engram bank.

  This is a particularly dangerous engram to have for it contains a manic in the words,

  “bravest person in the world.” “I,” of course, is ordinarily used by the unborn child to be himself, when the engram is at last able to affect an analyzer in which there is speech. Before that moment, of course, there is just a recording without word meaning, although even before the words are given meaning, the engram can be aberrative. This is further dangerous because it says, “I’m trapped,” and because it says, “Everything comes in on me at once.” “Trapped” is our enemy, the holder. But “everything comes in on me at once” is a grouper. Further, the remainder of the content, as an engram, will not compute in the analyzer. It says one “must go through with it,” but that one “cannot go through with it,” that one “would get sick if I didn’t go through with it” but that “it is impossible.” Everything being equal to everything, as our 168

  moronic enemy, the reactive mind computes, this engram both repels and attracts therapy: it brings about a condition of indecision in the analytical mind which is insufferable.

  The individual holding this engram might find himself -- as it acted as aberration -- first in the manic portion of being the bravest person in the world and then, regressed a trifle by a slight change of restimulators such as his migraine headache getting bad, find himself utterly undecided about any course of action and with the telegraphed emotion, contained in the tears, of being very depressed. But this is pro-survival because it apparently dictates a way out of a situation. As an additional factor, it brings, with its phrase about “everything being drab and colorless” color blindness at least in recall so that the recalled images of the past are “seen” in the mind as having no color. It can bring about, if added to by enough subsequent dramatizations, actual perceptic color blindness. The whole engram is very likely, when combined with other factors, to place the individual in an institution with all of his somatic turned on (migraine) and, because of the grouper, all other pain he felt in his life turned on as well. This grouper bunches the track of the engram bank all into one place and then puts the individual squarely in that place.