Inside Scientology by Janet Reitman Read Free Book Online Page B

who described Dianetics as "the greatest advance in mental therapy since man began to probe into his mental makeup."
    On May 9, 1950, Hermitage House published Hubbard's book
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.
Weighing in at a hefty 452 pages, it opened with a dramatic statement: "The creation of Dianetics is a milestone for Man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his inventions of the wheel and the arch."

    Dianetics,
which Scientologists often refer to today as simply "
Book One,
" portrays the mind not as the mysterious, complex labyrinth that many scientists made it out to be, but as a simple mechanism that works very much like a computer. Its main processor, called the
analytical mind,
is like Freud's conception of the conscious mind, in charge of daily events and decisions and the management of information: taking it in, sorting it, and filing it in the appropriate places. The mind also has a subprocessor, which Hubbard called the
reactive mind.
This tends to undermine the work of the analytical mind by promulgating system glitches, or "aberrations," which manifest as fear, inhibition, intense love and hate, and also various psychosomatic ills. Like the Freudian subconscious, the reactive mind is not capable of independent thought and in fact lies dormant until awakened by a jarring event: a moment of pain, unconsciousness, or trauma, the most significant of which is the moment of birth.
    Painful or traumatic moments are recorded in the reactive mind as lasting scars, which Hubbard called "engrams." * These, Hubbard asserted, are the source of many present physical and psychological problems. To get rid of them he advocated a new therapeutic process called "auditing." In an auditing session, a patient was led through a series of commands intended to call up the minute details of an engramatic incident. The first questions might deal with a recent problem—an illness or injury, perhaps. But with each request for "the next incident needed to resolve this case," the patient, lying on a couch, eyes closed, would become aware of incidents farther and farther back in the past, all the way to what Hubbard called the "basic-basic," or prenatal incident. Once that had been identified, the subject would be asked to "run," or reexperience, the incident numerous times until its impact was neutralized.
    This form of therapy was not new. In the late nineteenth century, Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalyst Josef Breuer had used similar techniques in their early treatment of hysteria, often hypnotizing patients to uncover buried memories and lead them to relive traumatic incidents, a process known as "abreaction" therapy. Freud ultimately abandoned it in favor of free association and, later, standard psychoanalysis. Carl Jung, another champion of abreaction, or what he called "trauma theory," also lost interest in the process, finding that most neuroses were not caused by trauma. "Many traumata were so unimportant, even so normal, that they could be regarded at most as a pretext for the neurosis," he'd later write. "But what especially aroused my criticism was the fact that not a few traumata were simply inventions of fantasy and had never happened at all."
    Hubbard, however—who in early editions of
Dianetics
made sure to acknowledge his influences, * including Freud and Breuer, as well as Count Alfred Korzybski, the creator of general semantics—maintained that his therapy "cures and cures without failure."Hundreds of people, Hubbard said, had already been cured using Dianetics techniques.
    For audiences of 1950, this claim was appealing on many levels. After World War II, the American system of mental health care was stretched as at no prior time in its history, the result, at least in part, of the tremendous psychological damage caused by the war and the specter of the atom bomb. In 1946, Veterans Administration hospitals had some forty-four thousand patients with mental disorders. By 1950,