Word: hubbards
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...think, even though your description of the mechanics of Ron Hubbard's Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health [TIME, July 24] is fair and accurate enough, that as a whole your treatment is ... unduly derisive...
Modern man's analytical mind, says Hubbard, is a perfect computing machine, incapable of error except when it is supplied with wrong data. An example, typical of Hubbard's cases: a woman is struck by a man, and while she is unconscious he kicks and reviles her. A chair is overturned and a faucet has been left running. She does not "remember" these things because she is unconscious, but according to dianetics her reactive mind records them all in an engram. Later, the crash of an overturned chair and the sound of running water might make the engram...
...exorcise such a demon engram, the dianetics patient lolls on a couch or easy chair in a dimly lit room. The auditor says: "When I count from one to seven your eyes will close." He keeps counting to seven until the patient's eyes close. (The patient, says Hubbard, is still awake but in "reverie.") In a typical procedure, the auditor may next command: "Let us return to your fifth birthday." The patient's mind is then supposed to slip back along its "time track" to that birthday. Having "returned," he "relives" the experience...
...another, the patient eventually relives a variety of painful experiences. In so doing, he may reel from the relived pain of a blow on the head, double up with stomach cramps, sweat or shiver in terror. Once these painful engrams have been run through the waking analytical mind, says Hubbard, they lose their "charge"-their power of evil. The analytical mind puts them in a dead file like so many closed accounts. The final goal of dianetics-in its own jargon-is to make the patient a "clear," a person whose every engram has been resolved...
...Hubbard's most striking departure from older psychoanalytical schools is his insistence that protoplasm begins to record engrams immediately after conception. He sees the period of gestation as one of dire discomforts and great perils. The most important of all engrams, which he dubs "basic-basic," is the first one received after conception-perhaps during the mother's examination by her doctor, or in some mishap before her pregnancy is known...