going-clear-scientology-hollywood-and-the-prison-of-belief-by-lawrence-wright-2

she is told she is no good, a faker, and that she is always changing her mind. Meantime,
a chair has been knocked over; a faucet is running in the kitchen; a car passes outside.
All of these perceptions are parts of the engram. The woman is not aware of it, but
whenever she hears running water or a car passing by, the engram is partly
restimulated. She feels discomfort if she hears them together. If a chair happens to fall
as well, she experiences a shock. She begins to feel like the person she was accused of
being while she was unconscious—a ckle, no-good faker. “This is not theory,” Hubbard
repeatedly asserts. It is an “exact science” that represents “an evolutionary step in the
development of Man.”
Hubbard proposed that the influence engrams have over one’s current behavior can be
eliminated by reciting the details of the original incident until it no longer possesses an
emotional charge. 4 “Dianetics deletes all the pain from a lifetime,” Hubbard writes.
“When this pain is erased in the engram bank and reled as memory and experience in
the memory banks, all aberrations and psychosomatic illnesses vanish.” The object of
Dianetics therapy is to drain the engrams of their painful, damaging qualities and
eliminate the reactive mind entirely, leaving a person “Clear.”
WRITTEN IN a blu, quirky style, and overrun with patronizing footnotes that do little to
substantiate its bold ndings, Dianetics nonetheless became a sensation, lodging itself
for twenty-eight weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and laying the groundwork
for the category of postwar self-help books that would seek to emulate its success.
Hundreds of Dianetics groups sprang up around the United States and in other countries
in order for its adherents to apply the therapeutic principles Hubbard prescribed. One
only needed a partner, called an auditor, who could guide the subject to locate his
engrams and bring them into consciousness, where they would be released and rendered
harmless. “You will nd many reasons why you ‘cannot get well,’ ” Hubbard warns, but
he promises, “Dianetics is no solemn adventure. For all that it has to do with suering
and loss, its end is always laughter, so foolish, so misinterpreted were the things which
caused the woe.”
The book arrived at a moment when the aftershocks of the world war were still being
felt. Behind the exhilaration of victory, there was immense trauma. Religious certainties
were shaken by the development of bombs so powerful that civilization, if not life itself,
became a wager in the Cold War contest. Loss, grief, and despair were cloaked by the
stoicism of the age, but patients being treated in mental hospitals were already on the
verge of outnumbering those being treated for any other cause. Psychoanalysis was
suspiciously viewed in much of America as a European—mainly Jewish—import, which
was time-consuming and fantastically expensive. Hubbard promised results “in less than
twenty hours of work” that would be “superior to any produced by several years of
psycho-analysis.”
The profession of psychiatry, meantime, had entered a period of brutal
experimentation, characterized by the widespread practice of lobotomies and
electroshock therapy. The prospect of consulting a psychiatrist was accompanied by a