Volume 9, Issue 10, page 5
DIANETI CS -- A Study in Abortion By ROBERT M. CHURCHILL
IOC (tA#tSei,/gil
N 1950, a book appeared which made
comprehensible for the first time the
bewildering problems of human motivation and behavior. With one basic concept and several simple corollaries,
the seemingly contradictory and unsolvable problems of human aberration
began to assume intelligible and manageable proportions. "Dianetics: the
Modern Science of Mental Health", by
L. Ron Hubbard, became an immediate bestseller.
The book was not a literary masterpiece; it
outraged the orthodoxy of psychology and psychiatry, yet between its covers was contained
an understandable version of human ills and a
method for their alleviation. The tens of
thousands of ordinary human beings to whom it
was primarily addressed bought the book in
quantities, and took a new lease on life.
This article is not intended to be a critical-review, nearly 12 years later, of the merits or demerits of Dianetics, but is concerned
with the question -- argued and fought over by
many people -- what happened to the Dianetic
revolution? Why did it fail?
I am not concerned with the present system
and techniques of Mr. Hubbard, called Scientology, and claimed by him to embrace the primitive data of Dianetics; I am concerned with
the observed failures of a movement which
promised so much. which struck a responsive
note in tens of thousands of people, and which
in less than three years, after demonstrating
in many cases the validity and workability of
the concepts and techniques, was finished, with
its founder in flight from the last of the Dianetic Foundations and Ms supporters unnerved
and confused -- most of than unable to understand the dissolution and chaos that prevailed.
That some were able to follow Mr. Hubbard into
Scientology is not the concern of this article;
the concern is with why the original effort
failed, and why the majority who took up the
theory and practice of Dianetics were never
able to realize, even to a small degree, all
the benefits which "Book One" claimed were
available to everyone who could read.
Space does not permit a recapitulation except very briefly of the basic tenets of Dianetics, as advanced in "Book One". The concept
of the "engrain", a recording on a cellular
level of moments of pain and/or unconsciousness, is the old "trauma" theory of Freud,
extended past the point of the first breath --
where Freud's view stopped -- to the crucial
area of conception, pre-natal, and birth. The
pre-natal engrain becomes activated, keyed-in,
after birth, and is then "replayed" wholly or
in part by an individual who is totally unaware of the origin or content of this dramatization. Many things happen in the uterus which
are painful, fear- inducing, and which profoundly distort the psycho-physiological
"fields" of the developing organism. Such moments of stress, pain, and distortion then
constitute the original "engram ", a complete
recording; and the sum total of these makes up
the "reactive mind", a product of what we call
"conditioning", and the predisposition for
later patterns of aberrating behavior and psychosomatic illness. When the engram is keyed
in, the thoughts, spoken words, and phrases --
complete with emotion and pain -- act as posthypnotic suggestions and commands, and ride
over conscious efforts at control.
With this over-simplified account of the
engram as postulated by Dianetics, let me describe a class of pre-natal events, named ir
Dianetic shorthand "AA's" (attempted abortions), and termed by Mr. Hubbard as the most
aberrative and the most productive of destructive consequences of all pre-natal experiences
to which the zygote-embryo-foetus is subjected.
AA's have three common denominators -- One,
there is the compulsion on the part of the
Mother (and sometimes the Father and other assorted persons) to erase the unwanted pregnancy; Two, the wish and the attempt or attempts happen early, in terms of the embryo'e
existence -- mostly within the first three
months, the period during which the developing
life form is totally vulnerable on all levels;
and Three, the attempted abortion is a murderous attack aimed at destroying life and is
usually attended by the heaviest emotions:
fear, resentment, shame, hate, guilt, remorse.
With the above goes the voiced or unvoiced
phrase -- a compulsive, irrational, fear- and
hate-driven command "Get rid of it!" "It", the
unwanted life, is a threat to survival as
"computed" by Mother, and/or Father, Grandmother, etc., and must be eliminated.
One other Dianetic concept is necessary to
fill out the picture: that of "valence", the
compulsive identification with (assuming of)
another personality. The "valences" of Mother
and Father are the most important . With valences, one assumes, for example, Mother's likes
and dislikes, hates, fears, guilts, etc. A person in the valence of an aborting Mother will
feel compelled to rid himself or herself of
any number of things "computed" to be undesirable to his or her survival.
We are now in a position to answer the
question: "What happened to Baby Dianetics?",
and to begin to see the ever-widening circle
of things included in the indefinite pronoun,
"it", which has no ascertainable referrent in
most engrammatic phrases, e.g., "Get rid of
it!"
In a future paper, I will present some statistics regarding the incidence of AA's; but
for the moment, assume that these events are
far more common than anyone cares to admit.
And assume that if only one in 10 is an AA
victim, that person has a fear- and hate-driven
compulsion to "get rid of" various things felt
to be inimical to his survival -- such as posMARCH, 1963 The ABERREE 5