Magazine article: Child Scientology (1953)

Let us be very blunt–we are not interested in the problems of the child’s mind. In Scientology, we are no longer concerned with the inopportune and conceited short-circuit between epistemology and the human brain which has resulted in the “science” of psychotherapy. The Scientologist practicing with groups of children should disabuse anyone in authority of any lingering thought that the Scientologist might be using psychotherapy. The concern of psychotherapy is with the thinking processes of the human brain. The concern of the Scientologist is purely with the beingness of the child, which is to say his spirit, his potentialities, and his happiness. A Scientologist working with children, who permits himself to be led into arguments concerning psychotherapy is permitting to exist and be part of the argument the erroneous concept that gains in learning and behavior are attainable through a rearrangement, by direct address, of the physical habits or fears of the child.

It is possible to reform a child’s attitude toward existence by working with his mind. The best results in the field of psychotherapy were obtained by Dianetics, but even prior to Dianetics, many child psychotherapists had obtained considerably improved attitudes and behavior on the part of children by directly addressing the individual child and forming with the child a personal friendship which opened the child’s interest sufficiently to permit an awareness of the existing conditions of present time. This was possible because the child’s awareness of present time could be suppressed by incidents which, having force and stress contained in them, sought to represent in themselves that they were present time. But this does not say that the optimum results are obtainable by this process of addressing the past in order to heal the present. Psychotherapy could be said to be a series of processes by which the past is addressed to remedy the present or by which physical matter, such as the human brain, is rearranged (as in a prefrontal lobotomy) in order to inhibit odious conduct in present time. The 500 or 600 percent gains obtainable by the application of Child Scientology to groups of children are not obtainable by addressing the past to remedy the present.

Scientology increases the beingness and potentialities of beingness of the child in present time in order to secure the capabilities of the child in the future. It does this by exercising the capabilities of beingness of the child, and is about as closely related to psychotherapy as penmanship might be, or, for that matter, any other subject in the school curriculum. Thus, no one can reasonably object, on the grounds that psychotherapy is being practiced, to the education of the child in present time so as to fit him for his future.

It will be very difficult for the Scientologist to keep himself from being led into this snare, because tests in child psychology on those in his group will indicate that their reading ages leap under this process, that children who have never been able to master even rudimentary subjects begin to learn, and that behavior which, in the past, has been highly lacking in good order and discipline turns markedly for the better. These and many other advantages to be gained in the application of Child Scientology to groups of children cannot be classified as psychotherapy simply because they attain the goals of psychotherapy. Because a thing obtains the goals   another thing hoped to obtain, is no reason to assume that the two are identical. This obtaining of goals was never accomplished in terms of groups by psychotherapy, and, indeed, psychotherapy never attained these goals–even on individual children. But that person who immediately proclaims that we now have child psychotherapy simply because we have Child Scientology is making an extremely bad error in thinking and in semantics.¹

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