The Hubbard is Bare

by Jeff Jacobsen PO Box 3541 Scottsdale, AZ 85271

copyright 1992 by Jeff Jacobsen may be reprinted so long as it is kept in its entirety and not edited.

INTRODUCTION

In June of 1989 I was in Chicago at a large used book sale, one of the largest in the country. I stumbled upon Physical Control of the Mind, by Jose Delgado. Delgado had experimented with various animals by placing electrodes in certain parts of the brain, then passing an electrical signal to those electrodes. By this process he could induce behavior in the animal. Delgado became a notorious figure to me when I had read some of his experiments while researching mind control for a college paper. In discussing the brain's development, Delgado made the following statement about the writings of psychoanalyst Robert Sadger;

Sadger reported that when he could not relate some patients' neuroses to their embryonic periods, he induced them to recall what happened to their original spermatazoa and ova, or even to remember possible parental attitudes which could have produced a trauma in their delicate germinal cells before conception. Sadger maintained that these cells have a psychic life of their own with the capacity to learn and to remember.1

This sounded strikingly like some theories I had read in Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health, by L. Ron Hubbard. I had been reading and studying Hubbard's works, and had even written a tract critical of his Church of Scientology after studying the church's doctrine and history. Dianetics seemed to be full of new and unique theories and ideas, but Delgado's statement caused me to wonder whether perhaps Hubbard had not actually ripped off some of his ideas instead of discovering them. Sure enough, the reference date on Sadger's article was 1941 - eight years before Dianetics was published! That was the beginning of the booklet you are about to read. I had studied Hubbard's works since 1986, and had taken an introductory course in about 1983 (which included some "Book one" auditing). By the time of the Chicago book sale, Hubbard's writing style, wacky theories and smugness were wearing on me, and I hoped to begin a study on electrical brain stimulation - hence the interest in Delgado. But since the revelation hit that Hubbard borrowed rather than invented his theories, it seemed to be a ripe and exciting subject to pursue. The reason I thought this was an exciting topic was Hubbard's insistence that he came up with his ideas by himself and that they were as monumental a breakthrough from what came before as was the discovery of fire to the cavemen. If it could be shown that dianetics was simply a synthesis of previous ideas, then Hubbard would be exposed as a huckster and fraud. And I don't like hucksters and frauds. Generally speaking, it is my contention that Hubbard did no credible research of his own. Instead he distilled ideas from books he had read, the few college courses he took, his own experiences, and his very fertile and disturbed mind, and came up with a mish-mash of bizarre theories which he wrote down in scientific-sounding phrases and words. The ideas Hubbard borrowed were generally bizarre ideas to begin with, and his fertile, twisted mind altered and embelished them to produce an even worse hodge-podge. It is a mammoth task to try to piece where Hubbard took ideas, since there is no definitive list of works he had read. He did in the early years of dianetics credit some people such as Korzybski, Freud, and some others, but Sadger, for example, never shows up in any credit by Hubbard. Thus, one has to pick an idea (from dianetics or some writing) and practice a little detective work to see whether the idea originated elsewhere. Of course, this bares me to criticism that I am simply reading dianetics back into some work that just happens to sound like dianetics, but in fact what I am trying to show is that almost none of the ideas in Dianetics is new or unique, as Hubbard claims. My goal is not so much to trace back to the definite source where Hubbard took ideas, but to demonstrate that his "new" and "unique" ideas are neither. But I think it is possible to show that Hubbard absolutely stole ideas from some definite sources, such as Sadger and some others without ever crediting their works. The examples I have been able to uncover I am convinced are just the tip of the iceberg. There are ideas, for example, from William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (which coincidentally was first published in 1950) that I find markedly reflected in the organization of Scientology. Were it possible to get a list of what Hubbard read, I am certain that a very large volume could be written comparing what he read to what he wrote. It is most certainly clear that Hubbard was first and foremost a synthesizer of ideas, not a creator.

Some of the sections in this booklet are the culmination and conclusion of about 5 years' part-time research into Hubbard's teachings. I wanted to put down what I had learned in order to move on to other topics. Towards the completion of this work, I was reading the Australian "Report of the Board of Inquiry Into Scientology" from 1965, and was amazed to see that some of my research was a repetition of that work. The advantages to the Australian report are that they were able to call many actual experts to give their opinion of Hubbard's theories. They also had representatives of Scientology at hand who were allowed to present evidence as well, although they apparently did not produce anything that negates anything in my writings. This is a wonderful document despite its age, and I highly recommend it to anyone wishing to delve deeper into the subjects I have written about in this work. Actually, there should be no need to write about Hubbard's ideas at all, since most of them are so absurd and indefensible. Hubbard's writing style is grandiose, difficult, exasperating, and just plain wacky. But despite all this, there are still around 70,000 Scientologists today who consider Hubbard a genius and live their lives according to his dictates. Scientology still actively advertises and recruits the unwary, and so long as this is happening, those of us who know better must speak out and expose the lies and deceits. The way scoundrels win is by having no opposition. One of Hitler's first official acts when he became chancellor was to silence his critics. If we as critics remain silent, Scientology can go a long way, and Hubbard knew this - hence the constant attacks by Scientology on its perceived enemies.

1 Jose M.R. Delgado, M.D. PHYSICAL CONTROL OF THE MIND (Harper Colophon Books, New York, 1969) P.47-8.

REVIEW OF HUBBARD'S THEORIES

First I must tell you that there is NO SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE for most of Hubbard's theories, despite his claim that they are "scientific facts". Secondly, Hubbard had no academic background

to come up with theories of the mind, despite his false grandiose claims of world travel and incredible education. Finally, the actual scientific community and in fact the real world all dispute with credible evidence almost all of Hubbard's theories. Despite this, Hubbard still has a following. And since he and the Church of Scientology have placed his teachings into the marketplace of ideas, it is useful to all interested parties to have these ideas critiqued. But first, a brief overview of those ideas. If you already understand dianetics and Scientology doctrine, you may wish to skip this chapter as it is a general overview of these. Most of this booklet deals with the teachings from the book Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health and the basic ideas that sprang from this work. If you are not clear on dianetics, you should read this section in order to follow large portions of this booklet. I will be brief yet concise enough for the reader to follow the deeper discussions. Words underlined are Hubbard's terms that you should familiarize yourself with. It is of course helpful to read the book Dianetics before continuing. 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; "...Dianetics was the bolt from the blue."1 Mankind was destroying himself by various means "without any idea of what caused Man to behave as he did or what made him sick or well. THE answer was, and still is, Dianetics."2 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."3 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'."4 Dianetics became a New York Times Best seller in 1950, and has since sold many millions of copies. Dianetics is a "science of mental health" as the full title of Hubbard's 1950 book declares. The main theory of dianetics is that the human has two minds, the Analytical mind and the Reactive mind. The Analytical mind is a perfectly working device, and life would be wonderful were it not for the Reactive mind lousing up the workings of the Analytical mind. The Reactive mind stores memories of events in our life when we were unconscious and in pain. These memories are perfect recordings of the events, but the problem occurs because they are not stored in the Analytical mind. These memories can be triggered or restimulated by events in our environment that the Reactive mind interprets as similar to one of its memories. When the Reactive mind spots such a similarity, it attempts to take over from the Analytical mind. This is a problem because the Reactive mind is "moronic" and screws things up horribly and disrupts the proper activities of the Analytical mind. The goal of dianetics is to re-file these memories, called Engrams, into the Analytical mind, where they can be properly indexed and utilized. The Reactive mind is an evolutionary throwback to how animals think, and is therefore a weaker area of the mind in the human. An example of an Engram in the book Dianetics is of a child whose father beat his mother while the child was still in the womb (Engrams can be recorded from conception on in dianetics). The child was knocked unconscious from the beating and was in pain when the father yelled "Take that! Take it, I tell you! You've got to take it!"5 When the child grew up and something (perhaps the sound of the father yelling) occurred within the child's surroundings that was similar to the recordings in the Engram, this keyed in or triggered the Engram, and the Reactive mind would take over, effectively shutting down the Analytical mind to a degree and controlling actions based instead on the moronic interpretation of statements made in the Engram. Thus this child, because of the "Take it!" statements in the Engram, becomes a kleptomaniac. The goal of dianetics is to remove all Engrams from the Reactive mind and clear them out, transferring these memories into the Analytical mind where they can be properly utilized and processed. When the Reactive mind is emptied, or cleared, of all Engrams, the person is declared a CLEAR, and from then on the person is able to utilize his or her mind to the utmost, operating on a heretofore unknown level of abilities. Engrams are found through auditing, where one person asks another questions about his past until an event with potential for an Engram is encountered. If an Engram seems to exist, the event is then gone over several times until the auditor is satisfied that the Engram memory has now left the Reactive mind and has been filed in the Analytical mind (see the section on Clear for more details). Auditors are the practitioners that take you throught the dianetics process. They search your past by asking you questions, looking for engrams to eradicate. Auditors do not have to be trained much at all, according to the book Dianetics.6 So long as a person is reasonably intelligent and communicative, he can audit after reading Dianetics. After Dianetics was written, Volney Mattheison introduced Hubbard to a galvanic skin response meter. Hubbard decided to use this device as a tool to find Engrams. This device, which appeared in 1941 as a "new fun-provoking stunt for parties,"7 simply registers the differing conduction of a weak electrical flow through the body which can differ by how hard a person squeezes the cans held in each hand or how much the person is sweating. Hubbard called this device an E-meter. In any event, the goal was still to re-file all memories in the Reactive mind to the Analytical mind. The goal of dianetics is to Clear the Planet, i.e. to process everyone on earth to the state of Clear. This, however, is not the end of it. While your mind may now be running at an optimal level, your soul, known in Scientology as a Thetan, is still troubled. Dianetics has supposedly fixed the problems of our mind, but now the religion of Scientology must enter to cure the problems of our soul. Every person is not just a person with a mental problem, but is also a reincarnated spiritual being who has lived at least millions of years. Each of us has experienced an identical horrible event whereby other Thetans were fused on to our own Thetan, and these interfere with the optimum activities of the main Thetan (our own soul). Scientology processing teaches the Thetan how to rid itself of these Body Thetans that are attached to us somewhat like leeches, and also how to operate on a more efficient level. L. Ron Hubbard claims to have been the first person to discover the truths of both dianetics and Scientology. Without his Tech, or methods to eradicate these hitherto undiscovered impediments to life, there is no hope for mankind.

All the above has been deciphered from about 16 books by Hubbard, over 45 hours of taped lectures, countless articles on and by the Church of Scientology, and discussions with several current and ex-members. Hubbard is often times repetitive and undecipherable, so understanding some of his ideas is difficult. Take this sample of his writing;

In other words, Life, faced with a non-understanding thing, would feel itself balked, for Life, being Understanding, could not then become non-understanding without assuming the role of being incomprehensible. Thus it is that the seeker after secrets is trapped into being a secret himself.8

It is this sort of stuff that makes Hubbard exasperating to try to follow.

The above is a brief review of a complex subject. There are many more points to this teaching, but I will attempt to point out the intricacies when needed for the reader to follow my arguments.

1 L. Ron Hubbard, DIANETICS: THE ORIGINAL THESIS (Los Angeles; Church of Scientology of California Publications Organization, 1951) outside back jacket 2 Ibid. 3 L. Ron Hubbard, DIANETICS, THE MODERN SCIENCE OF MENTAL HEALTH (Los Angeles; Bridge Publications, 1987) p.340 4 DIANETICS, p.400. 5 DIANETICS, p.281 6 DIANETICS, P.225 7 Giant Home Workshop Manual, 1941. See The Survivor, volume 8, p.1 P.O. Box 95, Alpena, AR 72611 8 L. Ron Hubbard, DIANETICS 55! (Los Angeles; Bridge Publications, Inc., 1955) p.41

THE MURKY STATE OF CLEAR

It would seem that the first person to reach the state of Clear should stick out in history like a sore thumb. After all, a Clear -

* never has colds or accidents, * has a soaring IQ, * total recall of his entire life from conception on, * has cancer (possibly) and other physical deficiencies repaired,1 * can compute in seconds what the average person needs 30 or more minutes for ,2 and * is the first case of a truly rational person.3

As Hubbard states, "We are dealing here with an entirely new and hitherto nonexistent object of inspection, the Clear.".4 A Clear would be an immense boost to many social areas, such as law enforcement, where a Clear could recall events when he was a fetus or unconscious and thus help solve crimes he may have "witnessed" while in an unconscious state. Biology would make giant leaps if you could really recall what you were thinking when you were a sperm or ovum (Planned Parenthood might be helped by having a person recall their life as an ovum; "could you have stopped the sperm from impregnating you?"). Clears would be the most sought after people in many sciences, in law enforcement, medicine, and other fields. Clears, being the most rational and intelligent of society, should naturally rise to positions of power and authority in academics and politics, making the world a better place to live. This allegedly superhuman condition is the end result of dianetics and the launching point toward the upper levels of Scientology training. Any person not yet Clear is an aberrated person and not capable of full human potential. It should be obvious to all, considering the incredible abilities and states of being involved, who the first Clear was. Just as we know who was the first man to walk on the moon, we should all be taught who the first person in history to reach the state of Clear was. L. Ron Hubbard himself should surely have known who this person was, since he claimed discovery of the condition. Or was it Hubbard himself? Imagine, says Hubbard, an engineer who builds a bridge up to a high plateau that had never been visited by man. After finishing the bridge, "He himself crosses and he inspects the plateau carefully."5 Others cross after the engineer. This analogy is obvious. The engineer is Hubbard, and the plateau is the state of Clear. So Hubbard was the first Clear, and to support this further is the "Scientology Catechism", which asks if Hubbard was Clear, and answers "Yes- in order to map the route for others he had to make it himself."6 Yet, in a speech in 1958, Hubbard said that the first Clears were people he was treating in Los Angeles while he was disguised as a swami.7 The first of these became Clear "by 1947"; "these were the first Clears."8 "There were people who were run on the old techniques who were Cleared years ago," Hubbard stated on June 12, 1950.9 On August 10, 1950, Hubbard gave a talk at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles where he introduced Sonya Bianca (aka Ann Singer) as the world's first Clear.10 After she miserably failed recall tests on stage, she was never again referred to as the first Clear. This declaration, however, seems to contradict the notion that Hubbard was the first, or even that the "swami's" patients were. Hubbard declared Sara, his first wife, as the first Clear until she divorced him.11 "He stood up on stage in Los Angeles and announced that I was the first 'Clear.' I was so embarrassed..."12 Within Dianetics itself several Clears are mentioned, who would thus have to have been Clear before 1950. A woman with twelve difficult prenatal engrams finally "progressed to Clear."13 A husband and wife team Cleared each other.14 A pianist who was halted by his engrams became "one of the best-paid concert pianists in Hollywood".15 Others are indirectly mentioned.16 These pre-Dianetics Clears seem logically to be necessary, otherwise how would Hubbard have been able to describe what a Clear was like? For example, how did Hubbard know that a Clear has "an increase in longevity which is at least a hundred to one for every hour of therapy"?17 Wouldn't at least one Cleared person have had to have lived for quite some time before Hubbard, with his reported penchant for scientific accuracy, could write this? Also, how did he know that about 500 hours of auditing is the average amount needed to produce a Clear,18 and that it otherwise takes from 30 to 1200 hours?19 This indicates that there must have been several Clears at the time Hubbard wrote Dianetics. And last but not least, John Mcmaster was checked and double checked, and the Church of Scientology officially declared him the first Clear on March 9, 1966.20 Will the real first Clear please stand up?

Since it seems impossible to understand the state of Clear by observing the first example, let us come at it from what Hubbard wrote from his observations of Clears in Dianetics. "If this person now feels he can solve all the problems of life, lick the world with one hand tied behind him and feel a friend to all men, you have a Clear."21 Hubbard is helpful here, although it could be argued that he is also describing a drunk. Of course, Hubbard has more scientific sounding definitions: "the Clear is an unaberrated person... [who] has no engrams which can be restimulated..."22 This sounds more helpful, but how can you tell when there are no more engrams? Engrams, those memories stored in the reactive mind, have to be found, and gone over and over until the auditor perceives that the pre-Clear has come up through apathy, anger, boredom, and finally laughter.23 Once the pre-Clear is having a good time reliving his father's attack on his mother or his mother attempting to abort him (to use Hubbard's examples), then the engram is said to have moved out of the reactive mind and into the analytical mind, and the auditor moves on to search for another engram. Simply put, then, an auditor has a pre-Clear relive an experience (which has pain and unconsciousness in the experience) stored in the reactive mind over and over until the auditor is satisfied that the engram no longer affects the pre-Clear. At this point the engram is considered erased [note: there seems to be a contradiction here in that the auditor is not to evaluate for the pre-clear, although here the auditor decides when an engram is gone]. Although Hubbard declared that anyone can audit (Dianetics is, after all, a how-to-audit manual) there are many pitfalls an auditor must watch out for while searching for engrams. He may encounter a "lie factory" engram that makes the pre-Clear "remember" things that never really occurred. Hubbard offers no help in differentiating between actual engrams and "lie factory" memories, and in fact says you will wind up in a "tangled hash."24 The "denyer" engram may hide itself by denying its own existence. Phrases in an engram like "I'm not here" and "forget about it" will hide its existence from the auditor because the pre-Clear, in his aberrated state, takes language phrases in an engram literally. The method used to find these is to GUESS at a phrase that may be in the engram. In one example, Hubbard tells of an auditor who tried 200 phrases before he got one that seemed to fit the bill.25 This would seem by the auditing methods used then to probably have taken days of the auditor telling the pre-Clear to "Repeat this phrase, 'you won't find me' (pre-Clear repeats many times. No apparent evidence of an engram, so...) Now repeat 'I can't be found'..." Doesn't this seem to be a way to drive someone insane rather than therapy? And Hubbard says there are thousands of denyer phrases!!!26 The "bouncer" engram is another deceptive type, with phrases like "get out," which kicks the pre-Clear out of the engram.27 Again, the solution is to GUESS at a phrase since this is the best way to find engrams.28 Consequently a lot of guessing goes on in this precise "scientific" process of auditing. The "holder", "misdirector", "grouper", and "derailer" all offer similar problems to the auditor. And all the above are simply blocks to FINDING an engram. There are also problems in eradicating the engram. You may think an engram has been erased, yet you may only have reduced its effect on the pre-Clear. There is even the possibility that the pre-Clear has engrams in another language that he doesn't know about!29 How these can be declared eradicated when there is no proof of their existence in the first place strains the imagination to the utmost. The above (incomplete) examples of problems in auditing are brought up to show that finding someone who has no engrams is a difficult task, since engrams according to Hubbard's own words are often hard to detect. And if just one engram escapes detection, you do not have a Clear. Let us consider a theoretical example of a person who knows Dianetics but is not a Clear. This person, during auditing, kicks in a "lie factory" engram, and since this person understands the auditing process he is skillfully able to create fake engrams, and even can fake its eradication. His mother lived with her Greek parents until the fifth month of pregnancy, and engrams in the Greek language were instilled in the fetus. The auditor found prenatals in auditing (after the fifth month), and it was assumed that all were eradicated, since the person became much more assertive, happier, and the like after many hours of auditing. This person could be declared Clear because the "lie factory" engrams were skilled at hiding by understanding the auditing game, and the foreign language engrams were never restimulated or found because auditing was done in English. This is a perfectly conceivable case under Hubbard's theories. But a worse case might be when an auditor continually searches for weeks trying to find engrams that don't even exist, in other words, auditing a Clear. It should be obvious from the above that the entire process of auditing is subjective. An engram is declared gone because the auditor perceives that the person has gotten better. A Clear is declared because the auditor decides he is now free of "aberration" and "psychosomatic illness."30 Hubbard even states that "The subjective reality, not the objective reality, is the important question to the auditor."31 This massive amount of subjectivity puts a strain on Hubbard's claims of scientific accuracy. The auditor is continually required to make subjective decisions and yet is taught that the entire process is a mechanistic, scientifically precise exercise. The auditor is never allowed to consider that a hindrance to auditing is from anything other than engrams. If a person is skeptical of engrams, the auditor is assured that an engram is causing the skepticism32 and certainly not a healthy amount of research on the part of the skeptic. When someone "resists" auditing, that is caused by an engram rather than the person's conclusion that dianetics is stupid.33 Boredom is never from genuine boredom, according to Hubbard, but from an engram. Consequently, anything other than full acceptance and submission to dianetics auditing must be caused by engrams. This entire process of finding and eradicating engrams is totally subjective. Although Hubbard tries valiantly to make auditing seem a mere mechanical process34 with his engineering and scientific talk, the mind is not a mechanical object. It is the most complex device nature ever made, and has to this day baffled those who have tried to figure out how it works. Personality, culture, upbringing, and more, influence individual actions, not just a finite set of past events incorrectly stored in the reactive mind.

In the real world, the state of Clear is basically a rank within the Church of Scientology. In the real world, the superhuman qualities of Clear have not been perceived by independent investigators, nor have these superhumans been able to take over or at least greatly effect society in any fashion. In other words, although thousands of people have obtained the rank of Clear, there is no proof that any of them fit Hubbard's grandiose claims for them in Dianetics. Nor have they been able to accomplish what Hubbard claimed they could.

PROBLEMS WITH THE ENGRAM THEORY

1. CONDITIONING Conditioning is an alternative explanation of people's behavior to Hubbard's engram theory. I wondered why Hubbard argued that there was no such thing as conditioning35 until I realized that if conditioning exists, then many activities attributed to engrams could more rationally be attributed to conditioning, and thus, people could receive help elsewhere than from dianetics. Hubbard even unwittingly provides a good example of conditioning himself. A small fish in shallow, stale waters is bumped and hurt by a larger fish trying to eat him. The small fish got an engram from this occurrence (pain and momentary unconsciousness being present). The small fish is attacked again later in a quite similar manner, and the first engram is "keyed in", thus reinforcing the first engram. From then on, whenever the fish enters stale, shallow waters, he panics and heads elsewhere, even when there is no danger present.36 This is very similar to Pavlov's experiments with dogs who drooled at the sound of a bell that normally rang only when food was provided. Yet Hubbard claims that Pavlov's dogs "might be trained to do this or that. But it was not conditioning. The dogs went mad because they were given engrams."37 From Hubbard's own example of the fish, we can see that some things described as engrams can in fact be better attributed to conditioning. The fish story could work just as well without pain and unconsciousness even being present, thus negating engrams. Were we to continue following the fish around, he may at a later time figure out that stale, shallow waters do not always include dangers, and thus may return to those areas to feed. Conditioning can thus be unlearned, whereas engrams remain until audited out. This is much more than a game of semantics. Conditioning is a learned pattern of responsive behavior acquired from repetitive stimulation of a certain type. Pavlov's dogs learned that whenever they heard a bell that food became accessible to them. They became accustomed to anticipating food at the sound of the bell, so naturally they salivated at the sound of the bell after a time, even when food did not always thereafter accompany the sound (this works with humans, also). Hubbard's engram theory applied to this case cannot account for such behavior, since there was no pain or unconsciousness present during these experiences, and thus no engrams were created. Conditioning is a danger to Hubbard's engram theory because it is an alternative explanation for certain behaviors. The fish in Hubbard's above example need not have been knocked unconscious or even been in pain to learn to avoid certain areas where it regularly came in contact with an enemy. Pavlov's dogs did not have engrams that made them salivate. Where engrams don't exist, there is no need for dianetics. Habits are also caused by engrams, according to Hubbard. Habits "can only be changed by those things which change engrams."38 Habits may be considered a simple form of conditioning where a person unconsciously trains him or herself to perform a certain activity at certain times. A girl, for example, may twirl her hair when she gets nervous. A grownup might bite his nails when he is under stress. If habits are engramic, as Hubbard states, then the only way to stop a habit would be through dianetic auditing. But certainly common sense and life experience teach that this is not the case at all. The girl generally outgrows her hair twirling, and the man can train himself not to bite his nails. There is no need for the engram theory to explain habits, and in fact the engram theory is weakened by the constant experience of people stopping habits without dianetic auditing.

2. THE INTELLIGENT MORON

The reactive mind, says Hubbard, is moronic. It considers everything in an engram to be identical to everything else in the engram. "Recall that the reactive mind can think only on this equation - A=A=A, where the three A's may be respectively a horse, a swear word, and the verb to spit. Spitting is the same as horses is the same as God."39 Remember this example, where the reactive mind cannot differentiate between a verb, an animal, the deity, and an expletive. Remember also that the reason engrams cause problems is that they replay past memories where someone is stating something, and then the reactive mind literally interprets the statement and causes the person to act on that statement. I have previously mentioned the example of a child whose engram stated "You've got to take it." This child grew up to be a kleptomaniac because the reactive mind literally interpreted this statement in the engram, although it was actually the father yelling at the mother while raping her. But there is a contradiction here. On the one hand, Hubbard states that the reactive mind thinks in identities, A=A=A. On the other hand, the reactive mind understands a most complex concept unique to man, language. In order to understand language, you must be able to differentiate between sounds, such as "ch" and "th". You must be able to differentiate between verbs and nouns. As anyone who has learned a second language can attest, understanding a language is an enormous analytical challenge, yet this is what is required of the moronic reactive mind in Hubbard's theory. Hubbard does not grasp this contradiction at all. He skirts the issue to some degree, stating for example that you should never name your son a junior (George, Jr. etc.) since any engrams with"George" in them will be interpreted by the reactive mind to apply to the junior when he grows up (although, surprisingly, Hubbard named his son L. Ron Hubbard, Jr.). "I hate George", for example, is incorrectly interpreted and applied to the junior, "though Mother meant Father".40 But one can see in this case that the reactive mind could not tell one George from another, although it could differentiate between the "I" sound and the "G" sound, and also understood which sound was the noun, which the verb, and which the pronoun. It could not only differentiate the sounds into the three words, it could comprehend that "I" meant the mother, "hate" meant dislike intensely, and "George" meant the junior. Now, let us remember the previous statement of Hubbard where a horse equals a swear word equals a deity. Consider also this other example, where "The reactive mind says 'NO!' Arthritis is a baby is a pig grunt is a prayer to God."41 In this case a pig grunt cannot be differentiated between a prayer, nor an animate object, for that matter. According to Hubbard's theories there is a great gulf between the analytical mind and the reactive mind. They are in fact in different areas of the body, where the analytical mind is in the brain and the reactive mind is "cellular". The analytical mind is said to be a perfect computer, making no mistakes and able to compute difficult items in split seconds. The reactive mind is moronic and thinks that everything equals everything else. If it could be shown that there was really little difference between the two or that they were so thoroughly connected that there was essentially no differentiation between the two, then dianetics theory collapses because its two major competitive components are revealed as in fact one. And this in fact is the case:

* As has been shown already, the reactive mind understands language, which is perhaps the shining triumph of analytical thinking. * The reactive mind also makes decisions. It must decide one of five types of reaction to an engram that it will command the body to perform.42 * It distinguishes in an engram between the ally and the enemy, if there are two or more people present.43 * It chooses which valence, or which role, to dramatize from the engram.44 * It decides which engram to restimulate if there is more than one engram with the same sensual recording being restimulated.

For Hubbard to call the reactive mind moronic, and yet declare that it can perform all these functions, seems to be contradictory. Since Hubbard did not seem to perceive this contradiction, he of course offered no explanation, so I offer two possible ones that could be presented to try to save the theory. 1) The reactive mind connects with the analytical mind and utilizes some of its abilities. 2) The reactive mind is actually a part of the analytical mind. Either of these solutions is, however, actually a death blow to dianetics. The whole point of dianetics is that these two minds cannot communicate and are completely separate. Dianetic auditing, where one spends hundreds of hours searching out memories in the reactive mind, is touted as the only way that memories in the reactive mind can be transferred to the analytical mind and erased from the reactive mind. If #1 or #2 above were true, then this roundabout trip into the reactive mind would not be necessary, since the two minds are already on speaking terms. I understand that this point is perhaps hard to follow, but I have elaborated on it because I believe that if I am right, then the dianetic theory collapses right at the beginning of its explanation of how the mind works. If there is no gulf between the reactive and analytical mind (if this dichotomy even exists in reality), as dianetics posits, then there is no reason for dianetics to exist, as there would be no need for auditing.

1 DIANETICS, p. 24 2 DIANETICS, p. 228 3 DIANETICS, p. 24 4 DIANETICS, p. 18 5 DIANETICS, p. 543 6 L. Ron Hubbard and staff, WHAT IS SCIENTOLOGY? (Los Angeles; Church of of California, 1978), p.202 7 L. Ron Hubbard, "The Story of Dianetics and Scientology" cassette tape, 1958. tape #581OC18 8 ibid. 9 L. Ron Hubbard, RESEARCH AND DISCOVERY SERIES (Copenhagen, Denmark; Scientology Publications Organization ApS, 1980) vol. 1, p.84 10 Russell Miller, BARE FACED MESSIAH (New York; Henry Holt and Co., 1987), p.165 11 Stewart Lamont, RELIGION, INC. (London; Harrap, Ltd., 1986) p.24 12 Bent Corydon and L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., L. RON HUBBARD, MESSIAH OR MADMAN? (Secaucus, NJ; Lyle Stuart, Inc., 1987) p.288 13 DIANETICS, p. 365 14 DIANETICS, p. 502-3 15 DIANETICS, p. 316 16 DIANETICS, pp. 211,228,311,552 17 DIANETICS, 1975 edition, p.417. This is not in the newer version. 18 DIANETICS, p.258 19 DIANETICS, p.519 20 RELIGION, INC., pp.53-4 21 DIANETICS, p.414 22 DIANETICS, p.565 23 DIANETICS, p.429 24 DIANETICS, p.256 25 DIANETICS, p.295 26 DIANETICS, p.440 27 DIANETICS, p.282-3 28 DIANETICS, p.369 29 DIANETICS, pp.418-419 30 DIANETICS, p.227 31 DIANETICS, p.522 32 DIANETICS, p.246-7 33 DIANETICS, p.479 34 DIANETICS, p.522 35 DIANETICS, p.193 36 DIANETICS, pp. 88-9 37 DIANETICS, p.193 38 DIANETICS, p.56 39 DIANETICS, p.243 40 DIANETICS, p.405 41 DIANETICS, p.323 42 DIANETICS, p.197-200 43 DIANETICS, p.463 44 DIANETICS, p.155

SCIENCE AND DIANETICS

L. Ron Hubbard constantly makes the claim that dianetics is a "scientific fact." In fact, he makes that claim 35 times in Dianetics. For example, "All our facts are functional and these facts are scientific facts, supported wholly and completely by laboratory evidence."1 Hubbard shows that he regards correct scientific experimentation to a high degree by carefully hedging his approval of another scientific experiment done by someone else. This test was conducted in a hospital to see whether unattended children became sick more often than attended children. "The test... seems to have been conducted with proper controls,"2 he cautiously states, not having apparently seen the entire written report. In The Phoenix Lectures Hubbard is also critical of the early psychiatric work of Wundt in the latter 1800's; "Scientific methodology was actually not, there and then, immediately classified... what they did was unregulated, uncontrolled, wildcat experiments, fuddling around collecting enormous quantities of data..."3 And in a lecture in 1954, Hubbard complained loudly and long about how poorly psychologists and psychoanalysts conducted research and how they neglected to maintain proper records.4 I am similarly cautious about Hubbard's experiments, especially since there seems to be no record of how they were done, what exactly the results were, what kind of control group was used, whether the experiments were double blind, how many subjects there were in each experiment, and other pertinent data. I have asked ranking scientologists for this data, and have fervently searched for it myself, and have yet to see it. This brings up the question about whether Hubbard can call his original research science. And, in keeping with the need to understand each word we use, it brings up the question of just what science is. What does it take for someone to legitimately make the claim that his ideas are scientifically proven? When can something be called a scientific fact?

As with many subjects in life, the deeper one looks into science, the more complex it gets. There is not even one single agreed upon definition for science in the scientific community. Those people who seek to establish a unifying definition are dealing in what is called the philosophy of science. One of the most respected and most influential of these is Karl Popper. Popper claims that no theory can be called scientific unless it can be demonstrated that deliberate attempts to prove a theory wrong are unsuccessful. Thus, a theory must open itself up to criticism from the scientific community to see whether it can withstand critical scrutiny. Popper's formulation for scientific validation is;

(1) It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory - if we look for confirmations. (2) Confirmations should count only if they are the result of RISKY PREDICTIONS; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory - an event which would have refuted the theory. (3) Every 'good' scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is. (4) A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice. (5) Every genuine TEST of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testability: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks. (6) Confirming evidence should not count EXCEPT WHEN IT IS THE RESULT OF A GENUINE TEST OF THE THEORY; and this means that it can be presented as a serious but unsuccessful attempt to falsify the theory (I now speak in such cases of 'corroborating evidence'.) (7) Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still upheld by their admirers - for example by introducing AD HOC some auxiliary assumption, or by re-interpreting the theory AD HOC in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status.5

The falsifiability approach is a good one, because no theory can be proven unless every case possible is individually examined to see that it applies to every possible case, which is normally impossible to do. For instance, a popular example of a "fact" in science classrooms of the 19th century was that "all swans are white." This was, however, shown to be untrue when a variety of swan in South America was discovered to be black. This "fact" was proven wrong by a previously unknown exception to the rule, and this example points out that it is never entirely possible to prove a theory in the positive without examining every possible case of that theory. (It is, of course, not possible to completely falsify many theories also, but for the sake of brevity I would refer the reader to Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery for further arguments on this subject.) Let us go now momentarily to one of Hubbard's scientific claims:

Its [the reactive mind's] identity can now be certified by any technician in any clinic or in any group of men. Two hundred and seventy-three individuals have been examined and treated, representing all the various types of inorganic mental illness and the many varieties of psychosomatic ills. In each one this reactive mind was found operating, its principles unvaried.6

After the brief previous discussion of science, we can begin to question Hubbard's claim to scientific validity. Exactly who were these 273 people? Were they believers in Hubbard's theories or a representative sample of the public at large? Exactly how was the experiment conducted that proved the existence of the reactive mind? This needs to be known so others can try it to test for variables that Hubbard may have overlooked, to see if his experiment produced a statistical fluke, and to help in conducting experiments to try to disprove the theory. The more times an experiment is conducted, the more likely it is shown to be true, keeping in mind of course that no matter how many times an expedition went looking for white swans, it would find them, so long as they didn't go to South America. Was Hubbard seeking confirmation in his experiments or was he attempting to refute his theory, as Popper suggests a true man of science would do? Designing a test that will provide confirmation of a thesis is not difficult. Below is such a test.

A REAL EXPERIMENT COMES UP DRY

Hubbard does mention an experiment to perform that can prove the existence of engrams:

If you care to make the experiment you can take a man, render him "unconscious," hurt him and give him information. By Dianetic technique, no matter what information you gave him, it can be recovered. This experiment should not be carelessly conducted because YOU MIGHT RENDER HIM INSANE.7 {emphasis in original}

Three researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, decided in 1950 to give this experiment a try.8

If an individual should be placed, by some means of [sic] other, into an unconscious state, then, according to traditional psychology, no retention of the events occurring about him should take place and consequently, no reports of such events can be elicited from the individual, no matter what methods of elicitation are employed (hypothesis I). According to dianetics, retention should take place with high fidelity and, therefore an account of the events can be elicited by means of dianetic auditing (hypothesis II).9

The Dianetic Research Foundation of Los Angeles cooperated with the experimenters by providing a subject and several qualified auditors. The subject was a 30 year old male who worked for the foundation and was considered a good candidate for the experiment by the foundation since he had "sonic" recall and had been audited. The experiment was carefully laid out according to dianetic theory and was at all times done under the cooperation and suggestions of the Foundation. The subject was knocked unconscious with .75 grams of sodium pentathol by Dr. A. Davis, MD, who is one of the authors of the experiment. When the subject was found to be unconscious, Mr. Lebovits was left alone with the subject while two recording devices recorded the session. Mr. Lebovits read a 35-word section of a physics book to the subject, administering pain during the reading of the last 18 words. He then left the room, and the patient was allowed to rest for another hour, at which time he was awakened. Two days later, the professional auditors from the Dianetic Research Foundation began to audit the subject, trying to elicit the engram, or recording of the spoken text that according to dianetic theory resided in the subject's reactive mind. The auditors did elicit several possible passages from the subject and supplied these to the experimenters. The results were that "comparison with the selected passage shows that none of the above-quoted phrases, nor any other phrases quoted in the report, bear any relationship at all to the selected passage. Since the reception of the first interim report, in November 1950, the experimenter tried frequently and repeatedly to obtain further reports, but so far without success."10

The experimenters concluded by stating that while their test case was only one subject, they felt that the experiment was well done and strongly suggested that the engram hypothesis was not validated. I know of no other scientifically valid experiment besides this one by non-dianeticists which attempted to prove Hubbard's engram theory. Here was an experiment designed to confirm the engram hypothesis which, according to Hubbard, was a "scientific fact." Apparently (or, perhaps, IF) Hubbard did this test he got positive results. But this is a good example for showing that even one type of experiment should be conducted several times in order to be sure of its outcome. Perhaps some neutral party today could be persuaded to attempt it again. There is one point I consider the most damning to Hubbard's attempt to cloak dianetics in scientific validity. While he seems to be inviting others to conduct their own investigations (and thus seems to be open to attempts to refute his claims), he never explains his own experimental methods, thus closing the door to the scientific community's ability to attempt to verify his claims. In order to evaluate Hubbard's claims, the scientific community would seek to replicate his experiments to see if the same results were obtained and to check for possible influences on the experiment Hubbard may have overlooked. They would also, as Popper suggests, try to shoot holes in the theory, either on a logical basis or by conducting refutational experiments. If Hubbard really respected science, he would have welcomed and helped the scientific community in its attempts to both support and attempt to refute his theories. But he and his successors in dianetics and Scientology refuse to join in scientific debate over the merits of Hubbard's ideas, maintaining a dogmatic rather than scientific stance. My attempts to get the experiments from the Church of Scientology have been in vain. I have never heard of anyone who has seen them, nor even anyone who claimed to know how they were conducted. It is mainly for this reason, I believe, that dianetics cannot claim scientific validity. Until Hubbard's supposed original experiments are released to the public, dianetics can only be called science fiction. As a footnote, the only references I found to Hubbard's actual notes on any original experiments were on taped lectures by Hubbard in 1950 and 1958. He stated in 1950 that "my records are in little notebooks, scribbles, in pencil most of them. Names and addresses are lost... there was a chaotic picture..." 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] clean."11 In another lecture in 1958 he explained "the first broad test"12 of dianetics, wherein he would audit some patients of Dr. Yankeewitz at the Oak Knoll Hospital without the knowledge of the doctor. Hubbard called these shoddily done tests "significant", but added that they are "unfortunately not totally available to us".13 If this is the type of material Hubbard was basing his "scientific facts" on, then there is probably no need to even see them to be able to reject them with good conscience.

1 DIANETICS, (1987 edition) p. 96 2 DIANETICS, p.143 3 L. Ron Hubbard, THE PHOENIX LECTURES, (Los Angeles; Bridge Publications, 1982) p.203 4 L. Ron Hubbard, "Lecture:Universes", 1954, from the "Universes and the War Between Theta and Mest" collection, cassette tape #5404C06 5 Karl Popper, CONJECTURES AND REFUTATIONS: THE GROWTH OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE (NY; Harper Torch Books, 1963) pp. 36,37 6 DIANETICS, p.70-71 7 Dianetics, p.76 8 Psychological Newsletter (Dept. of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY) 1959, 10:131-134 "An Experimental Investigation of Hubbard's Engram Hypothesis (Dianetics)", by Fox, Davis, and Lebovits 9 ibid. p.132 10 ibid. p.133 11 L. Ron Hubbard, "What Dianetics Can Do", lecture series 2, 1950, cassette tape #5009M23 12 "The Story of Dianetics and Scientology" 13 ibid.

HUBBARD'S SOURCES

Advance comes from asking free-minded questions of nature, not from quoting the works and thinking the thoughts of by-gone years.1

There is certainly no book in existence quite like Dianetics, with its wild scientific claims and unsubstantiated arguments. The claim is that dianetics was a totally unique theory of the mind wrought from Hubbard's "many years of exact research and careful testing."2 But was it rather a loose composite of already existing theories mixed with novel, unproven ideas? 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 (uncredited) 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".3 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),4 Count Alfred Korzybski,5 and Aleister Crowley,6 as contributors to his ideas on the human mind. In a speech in 1958, 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."7 In fact, many of the theories and ideas in Dianetics can be found in scientific and philosophical 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."8 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."9 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."10 There were "unmistakable dreams" of being a sperm in the father's testicle. Engrams, those unconscious memories in 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."11 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."12 Hubbard concurs; "Attempted abortion is very common,"13 and in fact "twenty or thirty abortion attempts are not uncommon in the aberee".14 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?"15 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."16 "Papa becomes passionate and baby has the sensation of being put into a running washing machine."17 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"18 that we can recover and enjoy life. "It was no obscure theory," wrote Hubbard, "which brought about the discovery of the exact role prenatal experience and birth play in aberration and psychosomatic ills." He coincidentally concurs with Pailthorpe's obscure theory, however. With Pailthorpe's article, for example, w them, "she finally threw up her hands in horror and started in on the project [validation] clean."11 In another lecture in 1958 he explained "the first broad test"12 of dianetics, wherein he would audit some patients of Dr. Yankeewitz at the Oak Knoll Hospital