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Article: Letters from the Birth of Dianetics (n.d.)

Those familiar with the life of L. Ron Hubbard as recounted in issues of the Ron Series will recall repeated references to the LRH trail of research through the latter 1940s. Generally touched upon are his 1945 endocrinological studies at an Oak Knoll naval hospital near San Francisco, his 1946 examination of narcosynthesis at a California Veterans Administration, his 1947 work with neurotics from the Hollywood film community and his 1948 treatment of the criminally insane in a Savannah, Georgia institution. Also routinely mentioned is Ron’s first formal description of results in a widely circulated “Original Thesis,” his presentation of discoveries to an American medical and psychiatric establishment, his rebuff from that establishment and, finally, his authoring of a broadly accessible Dianetics handbook in a beachfront rental in New Jersey. Never previously offered, however, is what appears here: the actual correspondence from which we draw so much of the color and detail found in the Ron Series.For example: from the literal road of discovery LRH traveled through these years, comes his most revealing letter to Russell Hays. An author, inventor and gentleman farmer, Hays had counted himself among Ron’s closest friends for more than two decades. Both shared an abiding fascination with primitive cultures, aeronautics and that terra incognita of the human mind — the subject of Ron’s letter here.

Next, and quite in addition to above-mentioned LRH letters to the American Medical and Psychiatric Associations, we offer Ron’s summary description of Dianetics to the Gerontological Society in Baltimore, Maryland. Of particular interest — and found nowhere else — is Ron’s reference to that Oak Knoll experimentation wherein former prisoners of war responded to hormonal therapy only after “the removal of early traumas” through Dianetic procedures.

Although much has been previously said regarding author-editor John W. Campbell’s publication of Ron’s “Evolution of a Science” in Astounding Science-Fiction, here is what Campbell himself had to say on the matter. Here, too, is J. W. Campbell on the forthcoming Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health and what he rightly foresaw as the backlash from a deeply flawed psychiatric community.

Finally, and for a rare LRH description of the actual Dianetics birthplace, comes a second telling note to Russell Hays from the “wilds” of Bay Head, New Jersey.1

Notes

  1. Letters from the Birth of Dianetics. (n.d.). traditionalhubbard.org. Retrieved 28 April 2010 from http://www.traditionalhubbard.org/page06.htm ↩

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Video: Scientology v. Psychiatry by Dr. Stephen Wiseman

sKepptiksowat – April 16, 2010 – Dr. Stephen Wiseman is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, and Consultant Psychiatrist at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, BC. For a number of years he has been researching Scientology, its inventor L. Ron Hubbard, and the organization’s anti-psychiatry arm, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights This is his first public talk about Scientology’s war on Psychiatry, given at Vancouver’s annual “Skepticamp” at UBC on March 20, 2010, and is of monumental significance in this long conflict.

Hubbard started a campaign against psychiatry 60 years ago that is supported by every Scientologist with either money or time. 24 years after Hubbard’s death, this campaign has reached a fanatical level of hostility with multi-million dollar attack-media offensives and legal and extralegal programs to harm or destroy the profession and subject of psychiatry generally and psychiatrists’ careers individually. Scientology’s war on psychiatry under current Scientology head David Miscavige has not attained its goal, but it has negatively impacted public understanding and threatens to drive an extremely vulnerable set of citizens away from the option, science, hope and help that psychiatrists can be for them.

Dr. Wiseman describes what he and two colleagues have undertaken as a push back against Scientology in the name of his profession. This is the first such effort, certainly in the English-speaking world, and is long overdue. In the past, several individual psychiatrists speaking for themselves have stood up to Scientology and faced its organized and heavily-funded hostility. For this, Drs. Jolly West and Jack Clark remain respected figures to this day. Until now, however, no group of psychiatrists or professional organization such as the American Psychiatric Association has confronted or pushed back against the distortions and falsehoods of Scientology, and this has emboldened Miscavige’s organization considerably over the years. With the work of Dr. Wiseman and his colleagues, these days are now over.

The Skeptics and related reason-promoting groups and individuals have been speaking out against Scientology’s deceptions and anti-science for many years. Dr. Wiseman’s talk and Q & A period are short because of the SkeptiCamp format, but he imparts considerable new information and many insights. It is obvious he has educated himself about Scientology and its war, and he says that the research he and his colleagues have done is at a level now where publication and further presentation options are under consideration. He has taken their endeavor this far while working full time in his medical specialty at a major metropolitan hospital. He is clearly articulate, well-informed, human, and reasonable, and for these reasons represents a formidable force against the shrill, destructive rage of Scientology.

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Transcript: The Scientology Wars (Dr. Jolyon West) (1992)

In his life, Ron Hubbard privately expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler more than once. Thus it is not surprising to see how many of Hitler’s tactics he adopted.

Other parallels also suggest themselves. The book Dianetics was Hubbard’s Mein Kampf. Like Hitler, Hubbard was scornful of established religions but made temporary connections with them for purposes of political advantage. Hitler’s alliances with religious leaders exploited common prejudices against Jews. Hubbard’s against psychiatrists. Hitler invoked fears of a common enemy. He called it communism. Hubbard, likewise, the IRS, and many respectable religions who are worried about their tax status. At the same time Hitler promoted fanaticism among his own followers and a mystique that owed more to Norse mythology than to Christianity. Just as Hubbard’s mystique owed more to science fiction cliches than to any established religion. In fact both men were athiests, and enemies of genuine religion.

Hubbard and Hitler were both intelligent, charismatic, energetic and equally capable of ruthlessness and charm. Both were intense, arrogant and profoundly narcissistic, capable of the boldness and decisiveness that often accompany great intensity of purpose and total lack of conscience. Their ability to exploit others was boundless.

For them the end always justified the means. And the end was self-aggrandizement and the intoxication of power. Both exhibited paranoid symptoms at times, but were not clinically psychotic most of the time. Far from it. And the clearcut diagnosis I believe in both cases was psychopathic personality.

Hubbard’s hostile obsession with psychs, that is psychologists and psychiatrists, matched Hitler’s hatred and persecution of the Jews. Like Hitler, Hubbard often accused his enemies of the very criminal practices and warlike preparations in which he himself was engaged.

Neither man could tolerate dissent or deviation from the party line. Both were past masters in the use of the big lie. And both had no compunction about inflicting suffering on others, with no mercy at all for deserters.1, 2, 3, 4

Notes

  1. Wikipedia: Louis Jolyon West ↩
  2. Source videos of this speech not available. Originally retrieved from xenutv.com ↩
  3. Audio files in rm format linked from this page. ↩
  4. Transcript of Dr. West’s speech at the CAN Conference, 1992. ↩

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Lecture: Esto’s Instant Hat (1972)

In 1950 I was looking for group auditing because I was well aware of the fact that groups could get an engram, mutual. And group auditing has been experimented with and worked with from time to time, even on a continental level, in an effort to do something about this. And what do you know, we finally have found what it is. It’s a wrong why that causes a group engram. And to de-engramize a group, all you have to do is do a complete, competent evaluation and find the right why and handle it correctly, and the group will dis-emote. This is quite remarkable. In other words, data analysis is third dynamic de-aberration and is as remarkable a technology as running engrams on the individual case. Interesting. The right why, the right why.1 So therefore, the aberrations of the planet are simply built on the wrong whys of yesteryear.

I’ll give you the most flagrant example of this in modern times that has any relationship to our field or activity. Psychiatry operates on a wrong why, and it gets itself into miserable trouble, and has miserable programs which are terribly unpopular. It thinks there’s a thing called mental disease and that that disease is a physiological thing. And Kreplin’s chart, the largest chart, I have a copy of it here, gives all the diseases. It’s only on a little section of the last page that they say that something might be caused by purely environmental stresses. The rest of it is all physiological, insanity is physiological, schizophrenia is physiological, paranoia is physiological. It’s because the guy hasn’t eaten the right brand of beans or something of the sort, and they dabble around with this. Freud’s breakthrough was that it might have something to do with mental, but psychiatry at large has never really admitted to itself that this is the case. So they have this thing called mental health. What the hell is this thing? Szaz, Dr. Thomas Szaz, exposes this in a very scholarly way in a terrifically well annotated, and cross-indexed and so on, set of books. He’s a marvel, he’s a psychiatrist, he does not believe in institutional psychiatry. And this is actually what it is.

And so therefore, they let the medical doctor into the mental field. And how did he get there? He got there about four and a half hundred years ago by saying that witches were actually possessed or not, whether it was physical or produced by demonic possession or spells.

And the medical doctor, from that period to this, has been the hidden factor back of psychiatry. Four and a half hundred years ago they called in the MD to find out whether or not the guy was physically ill or whether or not he was obsessed by demons. And if the medical doctor said he is physically ill, they treated him; and if he said he wasn’t really physically ill, they tortured the guy on the rack and burned him at the stake. And that’s been going on for four and a half hundred years and hasn’t stopped yet, and that’s basic psychiatric law.

”The Manufacture of Madness”, a whole book devoted by Szaz to this subject, and at first you believe this is just a gag, but no, the references are total. They were operating on a wrong why. There is no such thing as physical mental disease, and yet in every university the Psychology Department teaches people that they think with their brains. I was busy running this out the other day as a long series of locks, and you never saw anything so funny in your life. You keep blaming the prefrontal lobes and it makes them kind of hurt. All they are is just some meat. People have been told this so often that they become suspicious of this area of the body. Now, it is true in paresis, which is syphilis in its advanced stages, why, people get some weird states; they do, they get very weird states; but then perhaps it would just be the hiddeness of a disease and the cut off of any future procreation that would produce a mental response such as you get with that. There is no evidence of any kind whatsoever that there is anything called a mental disease. So therefore, the whole of psychiatry is based on a wrong why, and the whole of civilization for four and a half hundred years has been tossed into dungeons, and tortured and burned at the stake, and electric shocked and pre-frontal lobotomied and put in ice packs and everything else. Wrong why.

Now, we come along and we find the right why, we find the right why, we find the remedies of this sort of thing. The fact that somebody might actually get cured and that they might be wrong is really what drove psychiatry down the spout, it wasn’t really our publicity. They were so fixated on the fact that if we got loose with this idea, and they knew very well that we produced results and they didn’t, they knew that well. The only thing for which one can’t quite forgive them, they knew Scientology worked, they knew, they knew Dianetics worked, so that made their whole theory wrong and it drove them around the bend. We had another theory, it worked. They were operating with this other theory, it didn’t work. So, they ceased to be able to broadcast with sincerity from their top echelon because somebody could catch them out, somebody had missed the withhold. They knew psychiatry didn’t work. Somebody missed the withhold2. That’s what’s taken them down the drain.3

Notes

  1. Define: Why ↩
  2. Definition missed withhold ↩
  3. Hubbard, L. R. (1972, 1 March). Esto’s Instant Hat. Establishment Officer Series,   (ESTO-02). Lecture conducted from TSMY Apollo. ↩

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HCOB: Dianetic Assists (1969)

There is a conflict between Dianetics and political practices such as psychiatry since electric shock, brain operations and general degradation of the person may prevent the patient’s recovery by Dianetics.

As answers exist now for insanity there is no reason to continue Medieval or Fascist solutions to the problem of the psychosomatically ill or the insane and we are doing everything in our power against fantastic opposition to end the torture and killing of the insane regardless of the politically “desirable” ends envisioned by some groups. Dianetics, like any other true treatment, like aspirin or penicillin, was originally designed to handle the apparent basic cause of psychosomatic illness. The first research was intended to help allied prisoners of war degraded by the Japanese and Chinese prison camps and who after VJ day were transferred to Oak Knoll Naval Hospital. Later, in 1954, in a much more advanced state of development, Dianetics was successfully employed to eradicate the results of allied prisoners of the Korean war who had been subjected to Russian brainwashing. The subject has been improved, made easier to teach and apply and its results bettered continually over a total period of 29 years. It has in 1969 been fully updated as Standard Dianetics. It is very successful and is in very broad use over the world. 1

Notes

  1. Hubbard, L. R. (1969, 2 April). Dianetic Assists. (Hubbard Communications Office Bulletin). The Technical Bulletins of Dianetics and Scientology (1991 ed., Vol. VIII, pp. 342-345). Los Angeles: Bridge Publications, Inc. ↩

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Lecture: Releases and Clears (2) (1966)

Now your next level of Release that was acceptable to the world at large–that man is a spiritual being. Now that is in decay. That has been known and has been suppressed, and has been suppressed since 1879, Professor Wundt, Leipzig, Germany. I always like to remember the man’s name. Man was an animal and he was nothing but an animal and therefore it was all right to kill him, maim him, shoot him, do anything you possibly could to him because he was “Nyaa, no good,” see? Now this is something like some of the Christian philosophy that was advanced in the second or third century A.D., that man was conceived in evil and was evil so it was perfectly all right to kill him, maim him, harm him, do anything you wanted to. Do you see these things as justifications? Justifications for overts, no more than that.

So you have the entire, what is laughingly called “field of philosophy”–it is a field too, out there in the rain, man. You have what is laughingly called a field of philosophy embracing now uniformly, the idea that they’re dealing with rats or something. Well, they’re not going to make very much progress and they could get themselves into one awful bloody revolution. I’m not using that as a swear word, I mean a bleeding revolution. They could, they could be cut down in the streets, man. Because the Christian has not yet found out that the psychologist is an atheist. And there is atheism being taught right in the colleges and there’s a bunch of bigoted Christians going to find out about that someday and they’re going to get mad. Fortunately for psych–for psychology it is such an inarticulate subject that it hasn’t made itself sufficiently plain to be understood that it’s an atheistic subject.

But if your psychologist were ever to succeed he would have to come closer to the truth than the brain is all that is there, and a man is dead forever. Because it’s very unpopular, very unpopular. But suppressives would like it, and so psychology, psychiatry and things like that tend to be supported by governments rather than by the populace. The populace think anything is better. They think psychology is silly. But governments employ it. So you see suppressives employ these nontruthful subjects or subjects which prevent philosophic advances, or subjects which prevent releasing.

So your actual–you’d be surprised how far you could go just doing this–you actually could move in to the whole subject on the subject convincing somebody that man was a spiritual being. See, he’s already halfway agreed with it. “Well, you’re a Christian, aren’t you?”

“Oh yes, yes, yes.” You know he knows better than to say he’s not a Christian. He gets an c.

Well, you find even in Christianity–you know the whole subject of reincarnation was barred very recently by the Roman Catholic Church–very recently. Only in the last few hundred years. They carried reincarnation right along with them, pockety – pock. They said the guy who hadn’t been good enough had to come back and live it all over again. And somehow or another they dropped that, they had an edict of Scrantes?[sic]   Or something, I don’t know, some stupid edict by which they abolished wisdom.

Now, therefore that man is a spiritual being and not an animal–you could become very involved with as an argument–but if somebody bought the idea, if somebody bought the idea that he was a spiritual being rather than an animal, you have then got a state of Release. He’s released from an untruth that could trap him. Now very possibly–very possibly, this is where you could use exteriorization, but I do not advise it. What’s useful at this point is Dianetics. Because a person goes rapidly back, but it’s a little bit ahead of itself; don’t you see? There isn’t a perfect answer to this.

Ah, a guy goes back and only runs so many engrams and there he is sitting on the parapets of the castle, you know, watching the enemy march across the plain. And he says, what am I doing here, this is obviously me. And he makes it up out of his own head that he must be an immortal being because he has lived before quite obviously. Dianetics will bring people up to that point. But, this is a release from this lifetime. A person is released from the very narrow span of just one lifetime. And that is a terrific release because the death of–the terrible consequences of death fall away, he stands around and laughs as the funerals go by, you know.

I mean, I remember a long time ago I was–I had to pull off the road–I had to pull off the road down in Arizona to let a funeral go by. And boy, people’s eyes were streaming so that it looked like rain falling out behind that funeral. And boy, everybody was real sad. And I sat there and watched this, you know. And I just got through gauging on some researches into the immortal nature of man, you know. But it suddenly looked so silly to me that I sat there and laughed like a fool for about ten minutes. I couldn’t get the car going again, I didn’t dare drive. It just suddenly seemed so funny. All of this action with regard to this one thing, you see, such a production. And of course it was a very big funeral and a very sad one for a banker. Of course they–I knew he’d never get to heaven. I know he would be back there stirring it up again.

Anyhow, you, in that fashion would take people out of the one–lifetime idea. And that is your–a tremendous breakthrough that is available to you because it’s a release from the idea of one lifetime. There is a breakthrough for concentration which is quite acceptable to the society in which we exist.1

Notes

  1. Hubbard, L. R. (1966, 16 August). Releases and Clears. Saint Hill Special Briefing Course,   (SHSBC-438). Lecture conducted from East Grinstead, Sussex. ↩