Lecture: Handling the PTS (1965)

Remember, we’ve already seen a psychotherapy go by the boards. I’ve gotten results with that psychotherapy; it’s called psychoanalysis. Why didn’t it ever take the world? I think they were so busy trying to handle PTSes and SPs on an individual-practitioner basis, with absolutely no rundown, that they could never complete their research. Now, they might have found some of our sub-zero material, if they’d continued to research. But psychoanalysis had a certain degree of workability. We shouldn’t snarl at Papa Freud, because he is a very bright man. But it was the world that kicked Papa Freud’s head in, and Papa Freud was not quite strong enough or able enough to take it.

But he, nevertheless, got across to the world the idea that psychosomatic illness could stem from the mind. He got across several other points, all of which are very interesting. His technology is sufficiently workable that I wrecked a Navy project, which wouldn’t have amounted to anything at all, by sitting under a tree and psychoanalyzing their research patients. See, I wanted their data for myself. And they weren’t going to do anything with their data anyhow, except file it, so I threw the book.

You say, how’d you do this? Well, I was sitting up in the middle of Oak Knoll Naval Hospital. I didn’t have anything to do. And they had a project running by which they were testing people with endocrine hormones and so forth. And they kept book on it, of course, and I was a very good friend of the doctor who was running this project. And they would take these people one after the other and they’d run them through this lineup. And the doctor would tell me enough about this–we’d sit around and chin-chin–and he’d tell me enough about this that I finally got interested. And I started studying up on what he was studying up, and studied up on a few things off my own kick and found out what his project was all about–and had been interested in it before that anyhow. And I thought, “What a beautiful tailor-made experimental line.”

So I merely looked at those patients that he wasn’t getting any result on to see if I could change it by a mental shift. And boy, I sure fixed it up! I didn’t put his–I didn’t put his project out of action because I told him–after a while. But I found out a datum which is absolutely invaluable to us: That the mind has dominance over structure. Structure does not dominate the mind. And that differentiates us from the medico.

The medico believes that structure monitors the mind. And it doesn’t. It’s the mind that monitors structure. Because the endocrine, which is the midway point, you might say–the switchboard of regulation and so forth–won’t monitor structure as long as the mind is unaffected. That is to say, if the mind is left alone, in a large number of cases the endocrine treatment will not monitor structure, including the glands or anything else. There it is.

But when you remove a few psychic blocks–traumas if you please–Freudian style, all of a sudden, zingo, it bites and monitors structure. Now, you could change the man’s diet; you could change his exercise; you could do anything you pleased with him; you could change his operating environment; and you did not change the environmental factor enough to make the endocrine dosages work.

In other words, with the changed mind conditions, why, hormones would work; but with changed physical like conditions, the aspect of the hormones did not change. That was a very, very fundamental thing, because it laid in my lap something very interesting.

Well, it was Freudian analysis did that, because I didn’t use anything on these boys. Sitting under a tree out in the hospital grounds: “Oh, I think your name is Jones, isn’t it? Hiya, hiya, Jones. Understand you’re part of that project up there. Hmm? That so? What are they doing up there? Mm–hm. Have much to do with what you used to think about life and so forth? You ever been worried about yourself? You ever thought about this sort of thing? Oh, is that so? Well, that’s very interesting. What sort of a childhood did you have? Did you ever have any unfortunate sexual experiences in your childhood? Oh, is that so?” You know, light Straightwire.

All of a sudden he’d say, “You know, I’d never remembered that, you know?” You’d get this bug-eyed-blowdown type of look. Mark it down in your little book. “Jones. November 1945, 5th.” Next time you’re in seeing the doctor, and so forth, a week or so later, and so forth; let’s look at Jones’s weight and physical record. “Same, same, same, same, same. November 5th–haaa!” And I’d say, “Thank you very much.”

This doctor, by the way, he was–he was a young fellow. And he didn’t take–he didn’t take mental treatment seriously. He didn’t think it worked. He’d never been educated in it in any way. But he was a nice young bloke, and he didn’t blow his stack very much. He was very pleased after a while to find out what had been going on. It didn’t draw any conclusion from him and he didn’t owe anybody the record but the medical department in the navy, so the devil with it.

But he had wondered why these sudden shifts and changes, don’t you see? Well, those sudden shifts and changes on that dozen or so patients and so forth was strictly and entirely doing–to what we would call, today, Straightwire, and–but it was run on entirely Freudian basis. So you see, there was some workability to that technology.¹

Notes