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
Copyright (c) 1990 by Jeff Jacobsen. For permission to
reprint this article, contact:
Jeff Jacobsen
P.O. Box 3541
Scottsdale, AZ 85271
1quoted in L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman?, by Bent
Corydon and L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. (Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart,
1987) p. 262.
2L. 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.)
3ibid. p.400.
4ibid. p. ix.
5ibid. p.122.
6Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah (N.Y.: Henry Holt & Co.,
1987), pp.230-231.
7L. Ron Hubbard, cassette tape, "Introduction to Dianetics,"
Dianetics Lecture Series 1. 1950. Bridge Publications,
Inc.
8Stewart Lamont, Religion, Inc.: The Church of Scientology
(London: Harrap, 1986) p.21.
9"The History of Dianetics and Scientology" cassette tape.
10Dianetics, p.130.
11Dr. J. Sadger, "Preliminary Study of the Psychic Life of
the Fetus and the Primary Germ." Psychoanalytic Review
July 1941 28:3. p.333
12ibid. pp.343-4.
13Dianetics, p.294.
14Sadger, p.336.
15Dianetics, p. 156.
16Dianetics, p.158.
17Sadger, p.352.
18Dianetics, p.158.
19Dianetics, p.130.
20Grace 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.
21ibid. p.307.
22Dianetics, p.91.
23Nathaniel Thornton, D.Sc., "What is the Therapeutic Value
of Abreaction?" Psychoanalytic Review 1949 36:411-415.
p.411.
24ibid.
25ibid. p.412.
26ibid. p.413.
27Dianetics, p.206.
28Dianetics, p.62.
29Corydon and Hubbard, Jr., pp. 266-269.
30Albert I. Berger, "Towards a Science of the Nuclear Mind:
Science-fiction Origins of Dianetics", Science Fiction
Studies, 1989, vol. 16:123-141. p.135.
31Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or Control and Communication
in the Animal and the Machine (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New
York, 1948).
32Dianetics, p.43.
33Wiener, p.150.
34Dianetics, p.323ff.
35Dianetics, p.ix.
36Dianetics, p.93.
37Dianetics, p.92.
38Dianetics, pp. 90, 193.
39Dianetics, p.170.
40Dianetics, p.417.
41L. Ron Hubbard, cassette tape, "What Dianetics Can Do,"
Dianetics Lecture Series 2. 1950. Bridge Publications,
Inc.
42ibid.
43Dianetics, p.168.
44Dianetics, p.253.
45Dianetics, p.278.
46Dianetics, p.179.
47Dianetics, pp.154, 155.
48Dianetics, p.212.
49Jack Fox, Alvin E. Davis, and B. Lebovits, "An Experimental
Investigation of Hubbard's Engram Hypothesis (Dianetics),"
Psychological Newsletter 1959, 10, 131-134.
50S.I. Hayakawa, "From Science-fiction to Fiction-science",
Etc.: A Review of General Semantics, 1951 Vol. 8 (4) 280-
293. p. 293.
Jim Lippard Lipp...@RVAX.CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU
Dept. of Philosophy Lipp...@ARIZRVAX.BITNET
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721
