Groovy Bytes: Behind the Moon/groovybytes.iso/GROOVY/PPE/DIGITALU/DIG_SC01.ZIP/DIANETIC.TXT

Text File | 1994-08-27 | 24.5 KB | 493 lines

The following is the stuff I have about where Hubbard obtained his
"discoveries".

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Article 1046 of alt.religion.scientology:
From: [e-mail] (James J. Lippard)
Subject: Origin of Dianetics
Date: 6 Jan 92 04:04:00 GMT

Reprinted with permission from The Arizona Skeptic, vol. 5
no. 2 (September/October 1991), pp. 1-5.  (Sorry about the poor paragraph
formatting.)

Dianetics: From Out of the Blue?

By Jeff Jacobsen

L. Ron Hubbard, author of the book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental
Health and founder of the Church of Scientology, was a science-fiction writer
before penning the book that would launch his fame.  Dianetics is a self-help
book published in 1950 which claimed to include new and unique theories on how
the mind works.  Hubbard claimed that this work was totally unprecedented;
"Man had no inkling whatever of Dianetics.  None.  This was a bolt from the
blue."1   So there would be no doubt as to the originality of his ideas,
Hubbard wrote that "dianetics borrowed nothing but was first discovered and
organized; only after the organization was completed and a technique evolved
was it compared to existing information."2  According to Hubbard, some
philosophers of the past helped provide the foundation of Dianetics, but the
remaining research had been done "what the navigator calls, 'off the chart.'"3

Dianetics became a New York Times bestseller in 1950, and has since sold many
millions of copies.

Was this a totally unique theory of the mind wrought from Hubbard's "many
years of exact research and careful testing,"4 or was it a loose composite of
already existing theories mixed with novel, unproven ideas?  This paper
proposes to show that, despite Hubbard's claims of originality, many of the
ideas in Dianetics were already existing and even in vogue before Dianetics
appeared.  Either Hubbard really studied other works before he wrote
Dianetics, or he wasted years of his time re-inventing the wheel.

Although there are no reference notes in Dianetics to see what are Hubbard's
ideas and what are borrowed, we can quickly eliminate the idea that Dianetics
appeared "from the blue" by Hubbard's own statements.  In Dianetics itself is
the statement that "many schools of mental healing from the Aesculapian to the
modern hypnotist were studied after the basic philosophy of dianetics had been
postulated."5  Alfred Korzybski, Emil Kraepelin, Franz Mesmer, Ivan Pavlov,
Herbert Spencer, and others are mentioned as resources in Dianetics, so we
must assume Hubbard was crediting these people to some degree.  He must
certainly have known, then, of at least some of the research from his time
which will be mentioned in this article.  Hubbard in other settings
acknowledged Sigmund Freud (especially through Commander "Snake" Thompson),6
Count Alfred Korzybski,7 and Aleister Crowley8 as contributors to his ideas on
the human mind.  In a speech in 1950, Hubbard stated that he had spent much
time in the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital medical library in 1945 during a stay for
ulcers, where "I was able to get in a year's study."9

In fact, most of the theories and ideas in Dianetics can be found in
scientific literature previous to the first publishing of Hubbard's theories.
Parts of Dianetics, for example, have striking resemblance to two articles
found in Volume 28 (1941) of the Psychoanalytic Review.

Dianetics theory posits the existence of engrams.  These are memories of
events that occur around us when our analytical mind is unconscious, and they
are recorded in a separate area of the mind called the reactive mind.  A
seemingly unique theory in Dianetics is that these memories begin being stored
"in the cells of the zygote--which is to say, with conception."10  These
engrams can cause problems for the person throughout life unless handled
through Dianetics auditing.

Dr. J. Sadger, nine years before the introduction of Dianetics in 1950, wrote
that several of his patients were not cured of their psychological problems
until he had taken them back to their existence as sperm or ovum.  He declared
that "there exists certainly a memory, although an unconscious one, of
embryonic days, which persists throughout life and may continuously determine
an action."11  Sadger spends much time explaining how his patients' memories
of the time when they were zygotes or even sperm or ovum had affected their
adult behaviors, noting that "an unconscious lasting memory must have remained
from these embryonic days."12   There were "unmistakable dreams" of being a
sperm in the father's testicle.

Engrams, those unconscious memories of Dianetics, are said by Hubbard to be
stored in the cells of the body and passed on to their clone cells and finally
on to the adult being.  Hubbard claimed to discover that "patients sometimes
have a feeling that they are sperms or ovums... this is called the sperm
dream."13  It was impossible, he claimed, to deny to a pre-clear that he could
remember being a sperm.  But Sadger wrote about this first, and Hubbard could
well have read this in his "year's study" at Oak Knoll Hospital.

Another coincidental discovery of Hubbard and Sadger was that mothers often
attempt to abort their child.  Sadger states that "so many a fall or other
accident of a pregnant woman is nothing else than an attempt at abortion on
the part of the unconscious, not to mention those cases where the mother seeks
to free herself more or less forcibly from the unwanted child."14   Hubbard
concurs; "Attempted abortion is very common,"15 and in fact "twenty or thirty
abortion attempts are not uncommon in the aberee."16  Again, not an idea "from
the blue."

Life in the womb was not very kind, according to one of Sadger's patients:
"Perhaps when father performed coitus with mother in her pregnancy I was much
shaken and rocked.  Shall that have been one reason that I so easily became
dizzy and that all my life I have had an aversion even as a child from swings
and carousels?"17  Hubbard, in a similar vein, insists that the mother "should
not have coitus forced upon her.  For every coital experience is an engram in
the child during pregnancy."18  "Papa becomes passionate and baby has the
sensation of being put into a running washing machine."19 There are at least
three other similarities like the "sperm dreams", commonality of abortion
attempts, and fetus discomfort during parental sex.  This seems quite a
coincidence, but it is not known whether Hubbard read Sadger's article.
Suffice it to say that these are major ideas in Dianetics, but they are not
new ideas.

The second article under discussion from Psychoanalytic Review deals with the
unbearable conditions during birth and the affects of these in later life.
Grace W. Pailthorpe, M.D., argued in this 1941 article that patients should be
psychoanalyzed more deeply into the period of infancy, or at least to the
'trauma of birth'.  Otherwise no lasting therapeutic effect could be expected.
Birth has traumatized all of us, she declares, and these unconscious memories
drive us in our adulthood.  "It is only when deep analysis has finally exposed
the unconscious deviations of our vital force"20 that we can recover and enjoy
life.

In Dianetics, the reader is left with the impression that the ideas of birth
and pre-birth memories and traumas, multiple abortion attempts, and fetal
discomfort in the womb are new discoveries.  As can be seen, this is not the
case.  And there are many other impressions of "new" and "unique" that are
incorrect as well.

With Pailthorpe's article, for example, we can also note the dramatic
similarities of Dianetics with simple Freudian psychoanalysis.  There is in
both the return to past times in the patient's life to search for the source
of his or her current problems.  Once these problematic memories are
discovered and treated the problems vanish.  In Pailthorpe's article we have a
man who was hopelessly traumatized by the events at his birth.  He was cruelly
kicked out of his "home" in the womb, and his resistance to this was assumed
to be the cause of the immediate traumas of the nurse's and mother's
attentions (which were "painful to the child's sensitive body"21).  These
traumas caused headaches and social disorders in adult life.  Psychoanalysis
discovered the causes (birth trauma) and when these were brought to the
conscious level with their meaning explained, the headaches and social
dysfunctions were alleviated.

Dianetics follows this line of reasoning to a great degree.  According to
Hubbard, engrams (past traumas) are discovered in the pre-clear's past, and
bringing these engrams into consciousness (from the reactive to the analytic
mind) alleviates the disorder.  Hubbard claims that after auditing people (he
had the pre-clear lie on a couch in Freudian imitation), "psycho-somatic
illness...by dianetic technique...has been eradicated entirely in every
case."22 A theory in psychoanalysis known as abreaction is so similar to
Dianetics (and preceding it by many years) that it must be mentioned in more
detail here.  A 1949 article by Nathaniel Thornton, D.Sc., gives a brief
overview of abreaction and his views on its value.  Abreaction began with
Freud and was considered early on to be "one of the very cornerstones of
analytic therapy."23  This is a method of freeing a patient "from the
deleterious results of certain pathogenic affects by bringing these affects
back into the conscious mind and re-experiencing them in all their original
force and intensity."24  A patient of one of Freud's colleagues, under
hypnosis and "with a free expression of emotion"25 was freed of all her
psycho-somatic symptoms using abreactive therapy.  Pierre Janet is credited in
the article with utilizing abreactive therapy to restore painful memories to
consciousness and thus relieving a patient's symptoms.  A patient being
treated with this method must continually work through such painful memories
until the patient "could accept the fact that the original experience no
longer loomed up as a threat to him."26

Thornton concludes that abreaction is a useful tool simply because "confession
is good for the soul", and that talking to someone about one's problems is
almost always therapeutic.  "Auditing" in Dianetics is a virtual clone of
abreactive therapy.  Auditing basically is searching through a person's past
until an engram is discovered, then continually reexperiencing the event when
the engram (painful memory) was instilled "until the pre-clear is no longer
affected" by the memory.27  Hubbard takes abreaction to an extreme and
declares that once a person has removed all his engrams, then Dianetics has
done its job and an almost god-like human results.  Once again, the similarity
of an already existing theory on the mind is presented as a great discovery in
Dianetics.

Alfred Korzybski, mentioned in passing in Dianetics,28 owes a debt to Hubbard
for making his theories well-known, according to some former followers of
Dianetics.  Bent Corydon, a former Mission holder of Hubbard's Church of
Scientology, has made a convincing comparison of Dianetics and Korzbyski's
writings, demonstrating that there is in essence little difference between
many aspects of the two.29 In support of this comparison, it should be noted
that there was a "Korzybski fad"30 sweeping through the science-fiction
community in the 1940's, of which Hubbard was a member, and that Hubbard, as
mentioned above, had stated the contribution Korzbyski made in his research.

Corydon also mentions the book The Mneme published in 1923 by Richard Simon,
wherein not only the idea of engrams, but the very word itself is used.  The
word "engram" is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary as deriving from
Simon's book.  Cybernetics, published in 1948,31 compares the human mind to
the newly developing technology of computers.  Dianetics also tells us to
"consider the analytical mind as a computing machine."32  Cybernetics speaks
of "affective tone" scales,33 as does Dianetics in a remarkably similar
vein.34 Cybernetics was a very popular work at the time Hubbard was writing
Dianetics.

We have seen that many of the ideas in Dianetics which were claimed to be
unique were in fact current in the study of the mind at the time of, or just
before, the introduction of Dianetics.  It is difficult to see whether Hubbard
had studied some of these works during his "many years of exact research,"35
but as mentioned previously he does acknowledge other researchers.  At any
rate, no book is written in a vacuum, so we may conclude from the evidence
that Hubbard was aware of at least some of this research previous to writing
his work.  Barring acknowledgment somewhere by Hubbard, or a list of articles
and works he had read, we can only guess as to the others.

It seems safe to conclude that the theories presented in Dianetics did not
arrive "out of the blue" as claimed, but were instead a synthesis of previous,
uncredited works.  In that case, is there any reason to discount the ideas in
Dianetics?  There certainly is.  There are outlandish, unsubstantiated claims
made by Hubbard, including the possibility that cancer may be cured by
Dianetic processing,36 that colds and accidents can be eradicated,37 IQ
improved,38 life extended,39 and total recall enjoyed.40 None of this is
proven in any way other than constant mention of previous research.  The
problem with this research is that there is no tangible evidence of its
existence.  Hubbard in a lecture stated that "my records are in little
notebooks, scribbles, in pencil most of them.  Names and addresses are lost...
there was a chaotic picture...."41  A certain Ms.  Benton asked Hubbard for
his notes to validate his research, but when she saw them, "she finally threw
up her hands in horror and started in on the project [validation of research]
clean."42  He was putting this into the hands of valid researchers "whose word
can't be disputed" so Dianetics could be legitimized by the scientific
professions.

Unfortunately, none of Hubbard's claimed research, nor those of his valid
researchers can be found today, if they ever really existed.  And if the
methods and statistical results of the supposed research are not available,
they cannot be checked and duplicated as the scientific method calls for.
Anyone can make as many outlandish claims as he wants, but the research must
be accessible and reproducible to support those claims if he brandishes
scientific validity.  Dianetics is designed as a how-to manual for
psychoanalysis.  Anyone who reads the book should be able to perform Dianetics
auditing and help his fellow man become "clear".  "Dianetics is not being
released to a profession...  it is insufficiently complicated to warrant years
of study in some university."43  It is better to audit someone, said Hubbard,
regardless of how well, than to not audit at all.  But this seems a bit
reckless.  Auditing can produce "tears and wailings,"44 and "a
patient...that...bounces about, all unconscious of the action."45  Regardless
of the auditor's abilities, and regardless of how traumatic a session becomes
for the pre-clear, "If an auditor...can sit and whistle while Rome burns
before him and be prepared to grin about it, then he will do an optimum
job."46  This sounds more like quackery than therapy.

Children often have engrams that are restimulated by their parents.  Hubbard
states that it may be necessary to remove the children from their parents if
this is the case, until the engrams are processed.47  Here again we have
Hubbard making an outlandish proposal of splitting families in order to
produce healthier people.

The cells of the zygote, according to Dianetics theory, record sounds during a
period of pain (Hubbard often uses a husband beating his pregnant wife as an
example), such as "'Take that!  Take it, I tell you.  You've got to take
it!'"48  From this engram we are to believe that the child grows up to be a
thief.  Cellular recordings of sounds by the cells can even be in another
language unknown to the adult or child and still cause similar problems.  All
of this, again, has no evidence accompanying it, and without such evidence it
may as well be classified as mere science-fiction.

We have in Dianetics a work by a science-fiction writer who claims to have
created a totally new and foolproof handbook of the mind with no documentation
to prove his claimed research.  This book has been actively sold by Hubbard's
Church of Scientology for many years, and yet it is simply a synthesis of
already published ideas with bizarre, unsubstantiated claims thrown in.  The
theories in this book, other than those found in previous works by others,
have never been scientifically validated, and in fact, one attempt came up
dry.49  There is little scholastic or societal benefit to be derived from this
work.  S.I. Hayakawa put it well in his review of Dianetics:  "The appalling
thing revealed by dianetics about our culture is that it takes a 452-page book
full of balderdash to get some people to sit down and seriously listen to each
other!"50

1  quoted in L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman?, by Bent Corydon and L. Ron
Hubbard, Jr. (Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1987) p. 262.

2  L. Ron Hubbard, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (Los
Angeles: American Saint Hill Organization, 1950), 12th printing, paperback,
August 1975, p. 340.  (Henceforth Dianetics.)

3  ibid. p.400.

4  ibid. p. ix.

5  ibid. p.122.

6  Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah (N.Y.: Henry Holt & Co., 1987),
pp.230-231.

7  L. Ron Hubbard, cassette tape, "Introduction to Dianetics," Dianetics
Lecture Series 1.  1950.  Bridge Publications, Inc.

8  Stewart Lamont, Religion, Inc.: The Church of Scientology (London: Harrap,
1986) p.21.

9  "The History of Dianetics and Scientology" cassette tape.

10 Dianetics, p.130.

11 Dr. J. Sadger, "Preliminary Study of the Psychic Life of the Fetus and the
Primary Germ."  Psychoanalytic Review July 1941  28:3. p.333

12 ibid. pp.343-4.

13 Dianetics, p.294.

14 Sadger, p.336.

15 Dianetics, p. 156.

16 Dianetics, p.158.

17 Sadger, p.352.

18 Dianetics, p.158.

19 Dianetics, p.130.

20 Grace W. Pailthorpe, M.D., "Deflection of Energy, as a Result of Birth
Trauma, and It's Bearing Upon Character Formation."  Psychoanalytic Review
July 1941 28:3  pp.  305-326, p.326.

21 ibid. p.307.

22 Dianetics, p.91.

23 Nathaniel Thornton, D.Sc., "What is the  Therapeutic Value of Abreaction?"
Psychoanalytic Review 1949 36:411-415.  p.411.

24 ibid.

25 ibid. p.412.

26 ibid. p.413.

27 Dianetics, p.206.

28 Dianetics, p.62.

29 Corydon and Hubbard, Jr., pp. 266-269.

30 Albert I. Berger, "Towards a Science of the Nuclear Mind: Science-fiction
Origins of Dianetics", Science Fiction Studies, 1989, vol. 16:123-141. p.135.

31 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or Control and Communication in the Animal and
the Machine (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1948).

32 Dianetics, p.43.

33 Wiener, p.150.

34 Dianetics, p.323ff.

35 Dianetics, p.ix.

36 Dianetics, p.93.

37 Dianetics, p.92.

38 Dianetics, pp. 90, 193.

39 Dianetics, p.170.

40 Dianetics, p.417.

41 L. Ron Hubbard, cassette tape, "What Dianetics Can Do," Dianetics Lecture
Series 2.  1950.  Bridge Publications, Inc.

42 ibid.

43 Dianetics, p.168.

44 Dianetics, p.253.

45 Dianetics, p.278.

46 Dianetics, p.179.

47 Dianetics, pp.154, 155.

48 Dianetics, p.212.

49 Jack Fox, Alvin E. Davis, and B. Lebovits, "An Experimental Investigation
of Hubbard's Engram Hypothesis (Dianetics)," Psychological Newsletter 1959,
10, 131-134.

50 S.I. Hayakawa, "From Science-fiction to Fiction-science", Etc.: A Review of
General Semantics, 1951 Vol. 8 (4) 280- 293.  p. 293.

Jim Lippard              [e-mail]
Dept. of Philosophy      [e-mail]
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721
----
Article 16757 of sci.skeptic:
From: [e-mail] (Mark Robert Thorson)
Subject: Karl Lashley and L. Ron Hubbard
Date: 20 Oct 91 00:33:40 GMT

I recently was reading a book describing the work of Karl Lashley and his
students at the University of Chicago, and was struck by the similarity of his
work and the "technology" of Dianetics.

I already knew that Lashley coined the term "engram".  In fact, Lashley is
famous in the field of neurobiology for his decades- long search for the
engram (i.e. memory trace).  Most of these experiments took the form of
teaching a rat or a pigeon some sort of stimulus-response relationship, then
performing brain surgery (like removing or slicing up some small part of the
brain), allowing a period of recovery, then testing for the continued
existence of the learned response.  Despite spending virtually his whole
career looking for the seat of memory, he never found it.  His work is
considered to be strong evidence against the existence of any sort of "memory
organ" in the brain.

In his book _Studies_in_the_Dynamics_of_Behavior_ (University of Chicago
Press, 1932), Lashley and his students Stone, Darrow, Landis, and Heath report
on their early work.  What caught my attention is how intensively they used
one particular analytical tool, namely galvanic skin response (GSR).

They looked at many different aspects of GSR, including magnitude of response,
recovery time, baseline shifts, spontaneous responses, initial resistance
before stimulus, and minimum resistance achieved during examination.  This
data was correlated (using factor analysis) against questionnaires designed to
measure specific personality traits.

Here are some of the questions they used.  Note the similarity to questions on
the famous "personality test" which is often a person's first contact with
Scientology.

Do you often feel self-conscious about your personal
appearance?
Do you think you are regarded as critical of other people?
Do you have the habit of contradicting people?
Have your friends ever turned against you?
Are you frightened by lightning?
Do you often experience periods of loneliness?
Does it bother you to have people watch you at work?
Do you get tired of people quickly?
Were you your parents' favorite child?
Do you consider yourself a rather nervous person?
Are you frequently troubled with nightmares?
Do people think you are selfish?
Does it make you uneasy to go into a tunnel or subway?
Can you stand the sight of blood?
Are you bothered much by blushing?
Do things often go wrong for you by no fault of your own?
Do you think you know yourself well from having observed
your own mind?
As a child did you like to play alone?
Are you troubled by thoughts of death?
At night are you frequently troubled by the idea that
somebody is following you?
--MORE--(93%)

Is there anyone you want to get even with?
Do you think most people are self-seeking or malicious?
Do you have a great fear of fire?
Do you usually sleep well?
Do you lose your temper quickly?
Do you dread the sight of a snake?
Do you feel life is a great burden?
Do you feel that you are not satisfactorily adjusted to life?
Have you found books more interesting than people?
Are you troubled with shyness?
Do you frequently talk to yourself?
Do you have difficulty in making friends?
Do you frequently talk to yourself?
Do you usually sleep well?
Are your feeling easily hurt?
Are you often in a state of excitement?
Were you considered a bad boy (or girl)?
Do ideas often run through your head so that you cannot sleep?

It seems to me that Hubbard borrowed extensively from Lashley's work, which is
reasonable considering that it may have seemed the most advanced scientific
work in psychology at that time.  But today, Hubbard's Dianetics is an
anachronism, like a time capsule from a university psychology department of 60
years ago.

Of course, Hubbard added much of his own stuff, like the auditing procedure
and the theory of "negative engrams".  He turned GSR, a tenative scientific
tool, into the E-meter, a tool for his own brand of mass psychiatry.

Can anyone tell me if Hubbard ever acknowledged the contribution of Lashley's
work to Dianetics?  And did Lashley ever comment on Scientology?  (Lashley
lived to be quite old -- I believe he died around 1975.)

[As I understand it, Dianetics and E-meter are trademarks of the Church of
Scientology, referring to their brand of mental therapy and galvanic skin
response meter, respectively.]