Lecture: Mechanics of the Mind (1953)

[Based on R&D transcripts. This was checked against an old reel for LGC-3, but the reel only contains the second half of this lecture. The start of the reel is marked below. We did not find any omissions.]

This is the third lecture today: In this lecture we’re going to talk something about the mechanics of the mind. Now, you must realize that there’s quite a bit of work and technology underlies this material in Dianetics and Scientology. The amount – the amount of data which has been sorted really would stagger one if he summed it all up and put it in one place.

Perhaps a word about the source of this data would not be amiss. This data might be said to be a combination and a reevaluation of Eastern and Western culture. And as much as anything else, that marriage, which hitherto has been a misalliance, is responsible for Dianetics and Scientology, making it a little more compatible.

I was very young when I first went out to the East, extremely impressionable as a child would be. I struggled along in north China, India and was back in the States and then back out there again.

And while in the States on a very early visit, a stay, I met Commander Thompson of the United States Navy who was just returned from having studied with Sigmund Freud in Vienna, Commander Thompson was a very sound man, a very solid friend of mine. He had no boy of his own and was quite interested in me, mostly as a personality.

It’s very odd to realize, as I did one day, that in subsequent years I have approximated to a very remarkable degree the career of Commander Thompson – to show you what an impressed – impressionable boy can have handed to him suddenly.

I have followed that, however, fragmentarily. It just sort of dubs in to the career that I have been following to this degree that – I didn’t realize this until one day I looked at a map, and in the field of expeditions, explorations, I always favored certain quarters of the world, always went there and, when there, did certain things. It fits Commander Thompson’s record. Amusing.

[R&D Note: Commander Thompson: Joseph Thompson (1874-1943), a commander in the US Navy Medical Corps who studied with Sigmund Freud in Vienna and was a friend of L. Ron Hubbard when Ron was a boy.]

It just suddenly struck me one day, I hadn’t ever realized it. Nothing would do at a certain place I went but what I would dig up one of the old, ancient tribal burial grounds. Never realized the significance of this until one day – I hadn’t known this, you see – I was standing in the Bishop Museum in Hawaii and saw there the exhibit of Commander Thompson on some of the men he had dug up in a tribal burying grounds. All right. He directed my attention toward many things and perhaps imparted to me, fragmentarily or otherwise, the basic tenets of Sigmund Freud and also imparted to me the fact that Freud didn’t think he’d solved it.

That’s an interesting datum we append right on to there; it should be more than appended.

Freud wasn’t at war with those other lines of thought to amount to anything: He was trying to find out, 1920 or something like that. He even wrote a paper and said he hadn’t, It’s called “Psychoanalysis, Terminable and Interminable.” And it’s rather heart broken sort of a paper.

[R&D Note: “Psychoanalysis, Terminable and Interminable”: reference to Volume V of the collected papers of Sigmund Freud, entitled Analysis, Terminable and Interminable.]

Right at that time when he was writing that, I was taking a look at Hindu snake charmers, wondering why the audience believed there was a snake there. Well now, it would be handing myself bouquets (which one should never do) to say that one would pick up where somebody else left off, but one was going forward there. There are many things in Dianetics and Scientology which are directly Sigmund Freud’s – directly. They’re reevaluated. They’ve been fitted in at the right places for Dianetics and Scientology and have been evaluated against workability. For instance, association. There aren’t as many things as you would think, by the way, but there’s the whole business of associative thought, all kinds of things here and there.

In the first place, he put his stamp on this culture. He put his stamp on there with a great big stamp. And you don’t realize to what degree you have been influenced by Sigmund Freud. You would have to read the literature of 1880 and then the literature of 1950 sequitur (one right after the other) to realize that something happened: the evaluation and characterization of story characters in 1880 and 1950 – quite different.

The whole literary world bought psychoanalysis, and they use it as their modus operandi for plotting. And as a result, the whole society has been salted with this as a background. It’s interesting, isn’t it?

And today, we find this man who began on his course of investigation into the teeth of the medical profession, was practically thrown out of everything, was hammered at and beaten at and thrown away and chewed up in general. We find that his work opened a door, and it opened a door in this fashion. It said, “Something can be done about the human mind.” That doesn’t sound very startling to you, but believe me, that was a startling statement to make when he was first working.

In 1894, when he released his libido theory after his work with Breuer, he was basing it on results he had had. Unfortunately, to a large extent, Freud was the sort of an auditor – let’s get that straight – I said Freud was a sort of an auditor who added in a lot of extra personality factors. And every time he added one of these things into a session, he didn’t know what he was doing, he never said what he was doing, he never knew what he was doing and he left all kinds of xs all over – unknowns, unknowns, unknowns, unknowns.

How can one auditor take Book One and produce miracles and another auditor not? That’s because there are unknowns in the personal address of the auditor to the preclear.

Just as in Group Auditing – and this becomes very pertinent to you – in Group Auditing there are unknowns from auditor to auditor before the children. They will be unknown to the Group Auditor; they are not unknown to the professional auditor. He’d know how to get rid of these unknowns. But one is confronting the group with a personality. And the tone of voice and the general personality and the stage presence of the Group Auditor will make Group Auditing different in its results from one group to the next, one Group Auditor to the next.¹

Notes