Lecture: Prerequisites to Auditing (1958)

I well remember lecturing before a number of St. Elizabeths psychiatrists many, many years ago. Some of you heard this story before. There were numerous stories came out of that particular incident. I lectured for a week and I gave the same lecture, which was the basic fundamentals of Dianetics and I told them about a time track. I told them … [garbled] and then I’d say to them, now in the other room are some practitioners and they will show you how to audit people. The psychiatrists never went in the other room. They sat and listened to these fundamentals. There were patients in the other room to be audited, but they never went in there. They listened about the time track, they listened to, about Dianetic reverie.

The fact that you could tell a person to go back in time, you see, you could tell these and they’d listen to this in theory, and one of them finally came to me at the end of the week, and he says, “Say, you got something there in Dianetics that we can really use.”   I said, “So-o-o, hah!”, and he said, “Yes, I had a patient who’s in terrible shape and I’ve been trying for years to get this patient to find something in his past that I could analyze” (laugh). He started ranting down the track, the time when he was two years old, he says, “Nobody can remember when they’re two, you know the myelin sheathing isn’t formed, and I got him back down there and there he was lying in a crib with his father cursing him for having dirty diapers. There it was–the father complex–right there.”

He says, “I started right in and I told him what it was, yes, of course the information rather dazed him, but you’ve really got some things in Dianetics that we can use”, and I said to myself, yes Mister, but we can’t use you as a practitioner (laugh).¹

Notes