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Among the many other incentives to turn Hubbard’s movement into a religion, there
is one that might be considered especially in light of the frequent charge that he was
insane. Religion is always an irrational enterprise, no matter how ennobling it may be
to the human spirit. In many cultures, people who might be considered mentally ill in
Western societies are thought of as religious healers, or shamans. Anthropologists have
called schizophrenia the “shaman sickness,” because part of a shaman’s traditional
journey requires suering an illness that cannot be cured except by spiritual means. The
shaman uses the powers and insights he gains from his experience to heal his
community. This is exactly the history that Hubbard paints as his own: a blind cripple in
the Navy hospital, given up for lost, who then heals himself through techniques he
renes into Dianetics. This is the gift he humbly oers as a means of healing humanity.
“The goal of Dianetics is a sane world—a world without insanity, without criminals and
without war,” he declares. “It can be stopped only by the insane.”
For both the shaman and the schizophrenic, the boundaries between reality and
illusion are soft, and consciousness slips easily from one to the other. Hubbard, with his
highly imaginative mind, certainly had immediate access to visionary worlds; his
science-ction stories are evidence of that. But it is a dierent matter to be able to cast
the nets of one’s imagination into the unconscious and pull out best-selling books. The
schizophrenic is rarely so productive in the material world.
Sometimes in Hubbard’s writings, however, he puts forward what appear to be
fantasies of a highly schizophrenic personality. In 1952, for instance, he began talking
about “injected entities,” which can paralyze portions of the anatomy or block
information from being audited. These entities can be located in the body, always in the
same places. For instance, one of the entities, the “crew chief,” is found on the right side
of the jaw down to the shoulder. “They are the ‘mysterious voices’ in the heads of some
preclears,” Hubbard said. “Paralysis, anxiety stomachs, arthritis and many ills and
aberrations have been relieved by auditing them. An E-Meter shows them up and makes
them confess their misdeeds. They are probably just compartments of the mind which,
cut off, begin to act as though they were persons.”
Hubbard says there are actually two separate genetic lines that, in the history of
evolution, rst came together in the mollusk, but have been contending for dominance
ever since, even in human beings. “In the bivalve state, one nds them at war with each
other in an eort to attain sole command of the entire bivalve,” Hubbard writes. This
primordial contest manifests itself in higher forms of life in such things as right- and lefthandedness.
“Your discussion of these incidents with the uninitiated in Scientology can
produce havoc,” Hubbard warns. “Should you describe the ‘Clam’ to someone, you may
restimulate him to the point of causing severe jaw hinge pain. One such victim, after
hearing about a clam death, could not use his jaws for three days.”
HUBBARD’S THIRD WIFE was smart and poised, a decorous partner for him. She was so slight
and weightless that it might be easy to overlook her, but her Southern manners and
Texas accent concealed a hard and determined nature. Unlike Sara or Polly, Mary Sue