Lecture: Dianetics: First Lecture of Saturday Course (7) (1950)

You will sometimes find some person who has been through the war and who has come home with a dishonorable discharge with a fancy tale to tell the folks about how he was “wounded in the head, right there; that’s all healed up now,” but for that reason they had to discharge him. He will tell the folks all about this. In therapy he is very reluctant, but finally says,”If I tell you something about this, it won’t get back to my wife, will it? See, I can’t audit with my wife because she doesn’t know about it.”

You say,”Well, what’s the matter? “ and he will tell you about this wound that he faked. Send him back down the time track and get it, because it is there. You will very often find that it is a simple computation in a sympathy engram, l and those are the most vicious ones to hold up the case, but those are the ones you want.

He doesn’t feel any pain there, he knows he’s lying, but he is dramatizing an injury he has. And you have got to get him prior to this period. Children’s lies and so forth are not necessarily all based on fact, but an enormous amount of truth is scattered through them together with odd engramic computations.

For instance, in my own case, when I was 5 years of age, I ran down the street one day and told the grocer that my mother never fed me, and that I was left home abandoned all alone and so on. And he gave me some bananas.

I never dramatized it again, but during therapy we stumbled across this incident. I was feeling very bad about it because of course I had lied. Then we discovered that exactly two years before that time, completely out of recall, an older boy of about 7 or 8 had taken a hockey stick which was cut down so he could roll hoops with it, and he had beaten me to a point it had cracked the skull and given me brain concussion.

I had then been laid out on a couch about three-quarters unconscious for about two weeks. The only thing left of it was just this odd dramatization later, but the earlier one was down the track completely closed. The first time we ticked it, it seemed like I had tripped the boy with the hoopstick and I was very sorry that I had hurt him (propitiation). But then we ran it a little further and found that my dear mother, in trying to amuse me, read me Oliver Twist from cover to cover during that period. So I accumulated it as an engram! And later when I was running down the street looking very, very pathetic, I was Oliver Twist running after carriages and so forth. Once we had the initial moment of concussion out of the thing and had gotten the rest of it into recall, the general words and maybe a page or so of the book, the rest of it erased easily. But it must have made the case very perplexing for a couple of weeks.¹

Notes