Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(27)
COITUS CHAIN, FATHER. 1st incident zygote. 56 succeeding incidents. Two branches, father drunk and father sober.
COITUS CHAIN, LOVER. 1st incident embryo. 18 succeeding incidents. All painful because of enthusiasm of lover.
FIGHT CHAIN. 1st incident embryo. 38 succeeding incidents. Three falls, loud voices, no beating.
ATTEMPTED ABORTION, SURGICAL. 1st incident embryo. 21 succeeding incidents.
ATTEMPTED ABORTION, DOUCHE. 1st incident fetus. 2 incidents. 1 using paste, 1 using Lysol, very strong.
MASTURBATION CHAIN. 1st incident embryo. 80 succeeding incidents. Mother masturbating with fingers, jolting child and injuring child with orgasm.
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And so on, all leading up to:
BIRTH. Instrument. 29 hours labor.
Hubbard’s view of women as revealed in this and many other examples is not just contemptuous; it betrays a kind of horror. He goes on to make this amazing statement: “It is a scientific fact that abortion attempts are the most important factor in aberration. The child on whom the abortion is attempted is condemned to live with murderers whom he reactively knows to be murderers through all his weak and helpless youth!” In his opinion, it is very difficult to abort a child, which is why the process so often fails. “Twenty or thirty abortion attempts are not uncommon in the aberree and in every attempt the child could have been pierced through the body or brain,” Hubbard writes. “However many billions America spends yearly on institutions for the insane and jails for the criminals are spent primarily because of attempted abortions done by some sex-blocked mother to whom children are a curse, not a blessing of God.”
One of the charges that would be lobbed against Hubbard by his disaffected eldest son was that his father had attempted two abortions on his mother. “One I observed when I was around six or seven,” L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., later testified. He recalled seeing his father standing over his mother with a coat hanger in his hand. The other attempted abortion was upon himself. “I was born at six and a half months and weighed two pounds, two ounces. I mean, I wasn’t born: this is what came out as a result of their attempt to abort me.” Hubbard himself writes in his secret memoir that Polly was terrified of childbirth, “but conceived despite all precautions seven times in five years resulting in five abortions and two children.” While he was writing Dianetics, and Sara was pregnant with Alexis, she says, Hubbard kicked her in the stomach several times to attempt to cause a miscarriage. Later, Hubbard told one of his lovers that he himself had been born of an attempted abortion.
While Hubbard was still writing Dianetics, he contacted both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association, representing himself as a colleague who had made fundamental advances in the science. Patients placed in a trance state, he explained, could be guided to remember their own births. In sixteen of what he says were the twenty cases that he examined, psychosomatic illnesses had been caused by pre-birth or birth traumas. “Migraine headache, ulcers, asthma, sinusitis and arthritis were amongst those illnesses relieved,” he asserted. In a similar letter to the American Gerontological Society, he also claimed that sixteen of the twenty cases had been made measurably younger. His preliminary title for the work was “Certain Discoveries and Researches Leading to the Removal of Early Traumatic Experiences Including Attempted Abortion, Birth Shock and Infant Accidents and Illnesses with an Examination of Their Effects on the Adult Mind and an Account of Techniques Evolved and Employed.” When scientists tested some of Hubbard’s claims and found that his techniques produced no measurable improvement, he blamed them for failing to understand his system.
Hubbard’s rejection by the mental health establishment, even before Dianetics was published, was itself a kind of pre-birth trauma. After that, whenever Dianetics or Scientology was attacked in the press or by governments, Hubbard saw the hand of psychiatrists. “The psychiatrist and his front groups operate straight out of the terrorist textbooks,” he wrote bitterly years later. “The Mafia looks like a convention of Sunday school teachers compared to these terrorist groups.” Toward the end of his life he concluded that if psychiatrists “had the power to torture and kill everyone, they would do so.… Recognize them for what they are: psychotic criminals—and handle them accordingly.” Psychiatry was “the sole cause of decline in this universe.”
HUBBARD SET UP schools to train auditors in major cities, which, along with the book sales and his lecture fees, generated a cascade of revenue. “The money was just pouring in,” Sara marveled. Hubbard began carrying huge wads of cash around in his pocket. “I remember going past a Lincoln dealer and admiring one of those big Lincolns they had then,” Sara recalled. “He walked right in there and bought it for me, cash!”
The people who were drawn to Dianetics were young to middle-aged white-collar Protestants who had a pronounced interest in science fiction. Some were motivated by the prospect of employment in this booming new field. Others were truth seekers, often veterans of other movements and cults that were responding to the dislocations of the era. And then there were those who had heard the legend of the heroic Navy officer who had been blinded and crippled by the war, who had healed himself through Dianetic techniques. Like Hubbard, they sought a cure. Society and science had let them down. Through Dianetics, they hoped to be lifted up, enlightened, restored, and made whole.