Inside Scientology (6 page)

Over the past several years, Hubbard had become a skilled hypnotist, though he never explained where he learned the technique. In Los Angeles, he had demonstrated his skills to science fiction colleagues, often wearing a turban while putting people under. His new technology had many of the classic elements of hypnosis: Campbell lay on his couch, closed his eyes, and counted to seven. Then, with Hubbard guiding him, he tried to recall his earliest childhood experiences in as much detail as possible: What were the sights, sounds, smells, and other feelings associated with each event? Had something similar occurred at a previous time? Campbell found himself not just remembering but sensing that he was actually returning to long-ago times and places to again experience particular incidents; after a few sessions, he'd traveled far enough back on the "time track" of his life to reexperience his own birth. Afterward, to his great surprise he found that his sinus condition, a chronic annoyance, was much improved.

Convinced that Hubbard had made a truly groundbreaking discovery, Campbell eagerly began promoting Hubbard's work, alerting friends and colleagues in the science fiction world to an upcoming article on "the most important subject imaginable." "This is not a hoax article," Campbell wrote in his editor's letter in the December 1949 issue of
Astounding
Science Fiction.
"It is an article on the science of the human mind, of human thought ... Its power is almost unbelievable."

This was the first public mention of Dianetics, which Hubbard later explained was a combination of the Greek terms
dia
(through) and
nous
(the mind). Within a month, Walter Winchell, the powerful syndicated columnist of the New York
Daily Mirror,
had heard the rumors. "There is something new coming up in April called Dianetics," he wrote in his column on January 31, 1950. "From all indications it will prove to be as revolutionary for humanity as the first caveman's discovery and utilization of fire."

Hubbard had by now a small circle of disciples. The "Bayhead Circle," as they would be known, was led by Campbell and included Dr. Joseph Winter, a Michigan physician and sometime contributor to
Astounding
who'd taken an interest in Dianetics after Campbell had told him that Hubbard had cured more than a thousand people with his techniques. "My response to this information was one of polite incredulity,"
said Winter. But he was sufficiently intrigued to visit Hubbard in New Jersey and also to submit himself to Dianetics therapy. Hubbard was then enlisting a number of his colleagues to give it a try, and, as Winter recalled, "the experience was intriguing." People went into a Dianetics session tense, depressed, and irritable; they'd come out cheerful and relaxed. Sometimes, while observing Hubbard use his techniques on another subject, Dr. Winter found himself experiencing sympathetic pain, exhaustion, or agitation. Winter also found that his memory greatly improved after Dianetics therapy. He was further impressed when his young son appeared cured of his crippling fear of the dark after a few sessions.

The Bayhead Circle also included Art Ceppos, the head of Hermitage House, a publisher of medical and psychiatric textbooks; Campbell had enlisted him to publish Hubbard's new book. The group spent the next several months refining Dianetics theory and coming up with much of its scientific-sounding terminology. By the end of December, Hubbard had extracted a sixteen-thousand-word manifesto from his larger manuscript. Entitled "Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science," it ran in the May 1950 issue of
Astounding Science Fiction.
It bore an introduction by Dr. Winter, 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, half a million people were being treated in U.S. mental institutions, a number that would increase dramatically by the middle part of the decade, when psychiatric patients were said to account for more beds than any other type of patient in U.S. hospitals.

Though psychiatry was not a new discipline, there were still only about six thousand psychiatrists in the United States in 1950,
most working at mental hospitals. Few options existed outside these facilities for those needing mental health care. Only six hundred or so psychoanalysts (practitioners of the most popular form of outpatient therapy at the time) were available;
they practiced psychoanalysis, a technique based on Freud's theories, which usually required a commitment to years of therapy involving multiple sessions per week, at a cost of time and money that most people could not afford. It was also markedly impersonal: analysts, working on the principle that they were the blank slate onto which a patient would transfer anger or other emotions, tended to sit quietly in a chair, taking notes, while the patient spoke.

Hubbard proposed Dianetics as an alternative. Done with a partner who, Hubbard suggested, could be a family member or a friend, it was interactive. It was also efficient—only a few sessions, he said, could rid a person of an engram. It was noninvasive, unlike the groundbreaking new psychiatric treatment of the time, the lobotomy; some twenty thousand had been performed by 1950 in the United States. And Dianetics was affordable: all it cost to get started with Dianetics, at least initially, was the money required to buy L. Ron Hubbard's book.

By the summer of 1950,
Dianetics
was making its way up the bestseller lists. College students were interested in it, as were their professors. In suburban living rooms, people began holding "Dianetics parties," auditing one another playfully, as if the activity was the equivalent of a game of charades. In southern California, home of all things new and experimental, it became particularly popular with avant-garde members of the Malibu Colony and other artistic enclaves. Some Los Angeles booksellers, in fact, reportedly had so much trouble keeping
Dianetics
in stock that, fearing a run on the books, they began to sell
Dianetics
under the counter, offering it only to those who asked for it by name.

"A new cult is smoldering across the U.S. underbrush," declared
Time
magazine on July 24, 1950. By August of that year, more than fifty-five thousand copies of
Dianetics
had been sold and more than five hundred "Dianetics clubs" had sprung up across the nation. (It held, for many, the same excitement that
The Secret
would hold for audiences more than fifty years later.) By the end of 1950, more than half a million people had bought
Dianetics.
"The trail is blazed, the routes are sufficiently mapped for you to voyage into safety in your own mind and recover your full potential," Hubbard wrote.
"You are beginning an adventure. Treat it as an adventure. And may you never be the same again."

Certainly, L. Ron Hubbard never was.

Few books of the past sixty years—at least few that were so successful—have been as widely derided as
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.
Within weeks of its publication, a score of physicians and psychologists rushed to point out that there was very little science in it: citing a lack of "empirical evidence of the sort required for the establishment of scientific generalizations,"
the American Psychological Association denounced the practice of Dianetics as dangerous. Some of Hubbard's key premises, including one that held that embryos had "cellular memory," were deemed unprovable. And so, in many respects, was Hubbard's overall view of human behavior.

The book
Dianetics
depicts most people as victims of their own unfortunate prenatal experiences. Hubbard wrote voluminously of life in the womb, a noisy and rather chaotic place, as he described it. The baby was captive to everything that happened outside the womb, all of which could prove engramatic. The most crucial engrams seemed to be the result of domestic violence—there are abundant examples in
Dianetics
of women being thrown down the stairs, pushed, shoved, kicked, or yelled at by angry husbands. But even worse were those caused by attempted abortions, or "AAs," as Hubbard called them. In an era preceding the birth control pill and legalized abortion, Hubbard made the astounding claim that twenty to thirty
attempted abortions occurred
per woman,
effected by knitting needles or other devices.
^*

Numerous scientists, including readers of
Astounding,
were skeptical if not roundly condemning.
Newsweek,
calling it the "poor man's psychoanalysis,"
denounced the entire concept of Dianetics as "unscientific and unworthy of discussion or review." Some of Hubbard's own colleagues found the book's premise preposterous and its prose almost unreadable. "To me, it looked like a lunatic revision of Freudian psychology,"
said the writer Jack Williamson. Isaac Asimov was less generous. "I considered it gibberish,"
he said.

In his review of
Dianetics,
published on September 3, 1950, in the
New York Herald Tribune
Book Review,
the psychologist and social theorist Erich Fromm raised a crucial distinction between Dianetics theory, which was in some ways a reduction of Freud's early work, and what could only be referred to as the "Dianetic spirit." Freud's aim, wrote Fromm, "was to help the patient to understand the complexity of his mind." Dianetics, by contrast, "has no respect for and no understanding of the complexities of personality. Man is a machine, and rationality, value judgments, mental health, happiness are achieved by an engineering job." Hubbard believed that those who rejected his thesis either had ulterior motives or were being controlled by what Hubbard called a "denyer," which he defined as "any engram command which makes the patient believe that the engram does not exist."

Fromm saw these ideas as misguided, even dangerous. But many others found them comforting. Perhaps the greatest attraction of Dianetics was that it offered concrete answers. The vastly complex problems of the human condition could be solved not through prayer, or politics, or through the work of great philosophical teachers, but through the application of a set of basic scientific techniques. The foggy, fuzzy precepts of psychoanalysis could be replaced by straightforward, foolproof actions that could be practiced at home, by anyone. The result of successful Dianetics therapy, Hubbard promised, would be a person liberated from all aberrations, infinitely more powerful and free; according to his system, this person was known as a Clear.