Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(26)
One of the most painful reviews of Dianetics, no doubt, was by Korzybski’s most notable intellectual heir (and later, US senator from California), S. I. Hayakawa. He not only dismissed the book, he also criticized what he saw as the spurious craft of writing science fiction. “The art consists in concealing from the reader, for novelistic purposes, the distinctions between established scientific facts, almost-established scientific hypotheses, scientific conjectures, and imaginative extrapolations far beyond what has even been conjectured,” he wrote. The writer who produces “too much of it too fast and too glibly” runs the risk of believing in his own creations. “It appears to me inevitable that anyone writing several million words of fantasy and science-fiction should ultimately begin to internalize the assumptions underlying the verbiage.” Dianetics, Hayakawa noted, was neither science nor fiction, but something else: “fictional science.”
Not all scientists rejected Hubbard’s approach. One of his early supporters was Campbell’s brother-in-law Dr. Joseph Winter, a physician who had also written for Astounding Science-Fiction. Searching for a more holistic approach to medicine, Winter traveled to New Jersey to experience Hubbard’s method firsthand. “While listening to Hubbard ‘running’ one of his patients, or while being ‘run’ myself, I would find myself developing unaccountable pains in various portions of my anatomy, or becoming extremely fatigued and somnolent,” he reported. “I had nightmares of being choked, of having my genitalia cut off, and I was convinced that dianetics as a method could produce effects.”
Hubbard’s method involved placing the patient in a state of “reverie,” achieved by giving the command “When I count from one to seven your eyes will close.” A tremble of the lashes as the eyelids flutter shut signals that the subject has fallen into a receptive condition. “This is not hypnotism,” Hubbard insists. Although a person in a Dianetic reverie may appear to be in a trance, the opposite is the case, he says: “The purpose of therapy is to awaken a person in every period of his life when he has been forced into ‘unconsciousness.’ Dianetics wakes people up.”
Sara watched the effect that Ron was having on his patients. “He would hold hands with them and try to talk them into these phony memories,” she recalled. “He would concentrate on them and they loved it. They were so excited about someone who would just pay this much attention to them.”
Dr. Winter tried out Hubbard’s techniques on his six-year-old son, who was afraid of the dark because he was terrified of being choked by ghosts. Winter asked him to remember the first time he saw a ghost. “He has on a long white apron, a little white cap on his head and a piece of white cloth on his mouth,” the boy said. He even had a name for the ghost—it happened to be the same as that of the obstetrician who delivered him. Winter then asked his son to look at the “ghost” in his mind repeatedly, until the boy began to calm down. “When the maximum relaxation had apparently been obtained after ten or twelve recountings, I told him to open his eyes,” Winter reported. “It has been over a year since that short session with my son, and he has not had a recurrence of his fear of the dark in all that time.”
The idea that early memories—even prenatal ones—could be recaptured was central to Hubbard’s theory. Every engram rooted in the reactive mind has its predecessors; the object of Dianetics therapy is to hunt down the original insult, the “basic-basic,” which produced the engram in the first place. Freud had also postulated that childhood traumas would be played out in later life through symptoms of hysteria or neurosis. In his famous Wolf Man case, for instance, Freud traced a childhood neurosis in his patient to the sight of his parents copulating when he was a year and a half old. “Everything goes back to the reproduction of scenes,” Freud thought at the time. He recognized that in many cases such childhood memories were clearly invented, but from an analytical perspective, they were still useful, because the emotions and associations attached to the confabulations opened a window onto the patient’s subconscious. False childhood memories were often as deeply believed in as real ones, but what made them stand apart from actual memories was that they were almost always the same, unvarying from patient to patient; they must be somehow universal. Freud’s protégé Carl Jung would seize on this fact to construct his theory of the Collective Unconscious. Freud himself came to believe that what was a false memory in a present-day patient’s mind had been a reality at some point in prehistory. “It seems to me quite possible that all the things that are told to us to-day in analysis as phantasy—the seduction of children, the inflaming of sexual excitement by observing parental intercourse, the threat of castration…—were once real occurrences in the primaeval times of the human family, and that children in their phantasies are simply filling in the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth.” And yet Freud continued to be troubled by the fact that many of these supposed memories were formed at a suspiciously early age. “The extreme achievement on these lines is a phantasy of observing parental intercourse while one is still an unborn baby in the womb,” he noted wryly. That absurdity was one of the reasons he eventually cast aside the seduction theory.
For Hubbard, however, early or even prenatal traumas were literally true. He believed that the fetus not only recorded details of his parents copulating during his pregnancy, but also every word spoken during the act. Such recordings can be restimulated in adult life by hearing similar language, which would then awaken the anxiety that the fetus experienced—during a violent sexual episode, for instance. That could lead to “aberration,” which for Hubbard includes all psychoses, neuroses, compulsions and any other deviation from rational behavior. Engrams form chains of similar incidents, Hubbard suggests. He gives the example of seventeen prenatal engrams found in a single individual, who “had passed for ‘normal’ for thirty-six years of his life.” Among them: