A Book-Auditor Looks Back: A 'Sort of History' of Dianetics, Part IV


A Book-Auditor Looks Back

A 'Sort of History' of Dianetics

PART IV

by Bob Arentz

ED. NOTE -— Dianetics is still a baby, years wise, yet in less than a decade, it has stirred up a lot of contention, picked up many followers, and at the same time, wade many foes, some of whom were "stars" in the early days of the movement. Why? this series of articles is one auditor's opinion of what happened to Dianetics, sostly before it becase Scientology, but if anyone wishes to add their own views on the subject, they are invited to do so. All we ask is: Try to keep it as historical and "factual" as human aberration will permit.

ONE OF EARLY Dianetic's respected figures has written an impelling challenge to my thesis that Hubbard was right and the first book was a factual account of what drives people crazy and makes them sick. My correspondent said, in effect: "How do you account for the failure of 'successful' auditing cures to last? The despair of psychoanalysis and psychiatry is the individual who seems to respond to treatment, and then after a couple of years, drops right back into the same old hectic, destructive dramatizations that are killing him -- and Dianetics encountered the same failures."

This statement is a thumbnail digest of the reasons this man, and many other Dianetic auditors of 1950, have now turned their backs on Ron Hubbard and his book, "The Modern Science of Mental Health", which once gave them hope and inspiration. The question deserves an answer.

I, too, have seen the "miraculous" remission and subsequent return of chronic ailments, of all kinds. A classic case in Idaho that comes to mind was overnight recovery from a long-standing case of migraine headache, where the pre-clear had already spent much money on conventional treatments without avail. One day this person was a semi-invalid, the next day O.K. Two 'ears later, it came back as rapidly as it had gone away.

Both auditorandpre-clear are known to this writer. The "case" is a solid 1.5, with a full emotion shut-off. The engram ran was a simple lock incident without pain but heavy emotion at time of pick-up --and clearly remembered. The pre-clear had tried to dodge the session, and was violently ill thruout. Then slept soundly, to wake up "cured".

It came back after failure to control an aggravating sittation and suppression of that old "urge to kill".

What happened? Nothing mysterious to anyone familiar with the meat of the first book. The session described was no cure at all--not even an engrain "run"-- but, rather, was only what Hubbard calls the key-out of an engram in restimulation. Merely the first steps had been taken. But that was the end of the auditing. Both auditor and preclear went around waving banners and the real villain just kept on laying low. The cause had not been touched. More important, the emotional reasons for the use of such a sympathy exciter were unresolved. The lock session had brought nearly to the surface the emotional need to be ill. Fifty hours of the heaviest kind of going might have sufficed thereafter tp break into this occluded emotional bank, and gotten at the real cause involved. A hidden ally was about to be exposed, and to protect the ally computation, the psychosomatic illness was released-- temporarily. They quit there.

But the basic losses were intact, and bound in with repressed emotion or, as Hubbard described it --the glue that sticks engrams together. Hubbard says that when you get the first break, then doubled efforts are needed to get at the real WHY. But nobody ever does this; everyone is too busy sitting around crowing about the half-way point, or spinning in a hectic whirl of effort bordering on panic because Good Old Reliable has disappeared overnight and the world must be faced without it.

Now, IF— and this is the big "if" of Dianetics--the auditor and pre-clear had used this first stage as a starting point to attack the congealed and in:acted emotion, routing out along the way the loss of the ally, and aheadof that the formulation of the ally computation, exactly as charted on Hubbard's detailed map of the engram bank, there'd have been some real results, and some fantastic fireworks along the way--explosions all over the place, auditor with a black eye, preclear with some busted teeth and other concomitants of a good old knock-down-and- drag-out; but the hidden ally would have surfaced, the emotional need to be sick would have released with the pent-up emotion, and the so-called"cure"would have been permanent.

How you get a person to blow this emotional charge without a fight, I don't know; but you can't knock an ally out of the bank with any patty-caking auditing techniques, or the psychiatrist's pet stunt of bapping the victim with electric shock the first time a patient goes wild