VICISSITUDES OF THE PRECLEAR

A lecture given on 6 July 1950

Parallels

In this lecture I will cover some of the vicissitudes of the preclear You are inevitably going to have a lot of problems with the people on whom you are working. You will find out very early in your auditing that that thing which is confronting the analytical mind as an engram computation also confronts Dianetics as such. The parallel is actually so obvious that you can do a large amount of diagnosis on the basis of: What is the reaction of the patient toward Dianetics?

This doesn’t include, of course, the reaction of the patient toward you personally since this may be based upon an ally computation, or an antagonist computation. If the patient is very antagonistic toward you, it sometimes works out that merely shifting him over to another auditor will bring about a cessation of hostilities.

However, it does include the proposition that we have paralleled the action of the human mind in its effort to achieve an optimum in operation for itself. The analytical mind is seeking to achieve this continually. The analytical mind works on the proposition that it is supposed to overcome knowable obstacles toward a known or not unknowable goal. The mind only falters when it confronts what it considers to be unknowable obstacles. As long as these obstacles are in the knowable classification, then the mind can surmount them and reach a goal.

You will find that a great many people will recover if you merely assign them a goal. They have been unable to assign themselves a goal, they don’t know what they are going to do in life. You don’t name one for them, but you place a number of leading questions to them and make them clarify their goal themselves. You don’t say, "What you have to do now is become a streetcar conductor," if you think this man’s ultimate goal in life is conducting a streetcar. You simply keep asking him questions, getting him to remember this and that until you finally unblock his own goal, no matter what it is. Then you find out who was against his achieving this goal, what computations were placed in his road and why the mind thinks that these computations are not knowable.

As long as an analytical mind can operate more or less freewheeling, it can confront, recognize and synthesize the various problems which are confronting it, and it can also achieve the goals which it has assigned to itself. That is self- determinism. It can achieve these things then at least to some limited degree and it will keep on overcoming obstacles toward that goal. It so happens that the exterior world, via engrams, when the analytical mind is shut down, becomes interior and unknown. Now, when the analytical mind starts forward toward a goal, it has numerous obstacles assigned by the engrams, such as, "I can’t do this," or "A man who would conduct streetcars is no good," and so on.

So the mind more and more directs its attention units down into this interior world, and in so doing finds at last that these problems are less and less solvable because it is being commanded, perhaps, on the one hand, and forced by pain, on the other, to sell Fuller brushes, for example. I actually found a manic on this exact subject. The Fuller brush man came to the door right after Mama had been attempting an AA. It was a manic. So, there was an interior goal. There is nothing wrong with selling Fuller brushes, but there is a great deal wrong with being forced to sell Fuller brushes by some unknown force. Maybe at the same time the mind is being told that the thing to be is a great writer. Let’s say there is no ability either to sell Fuller brushes or to be a great writer inherent genetically in the organism. These two things come up in separate manics and they fight each other and it is not the goal the mind is trying to achieve at all. What the person really wanted to be all this time was a good bookkeeper. So we get conflicts on the subject of goals and purpose in life.

Let’s take the smaller goal of what to eat. The person will sit down and look at a menu. What he himself wants to eat is very definitely modified by engrams concerning food, what he should eat and so on. You will find people who would become very upset indeed if you mentioned pickles and ice cream to them. "You can’t eat pickles and ice cream. It will make you sick." Actually pickles and ice cream mix, but there is a social aberration to the effect that they don’t. So he gets into a state of confusion. He has the goal of wanting to eat pickles and ice cream, but the engram says, "No, pickles and ice cream will make you sick," so he goes down the line and sees sauerbraten. Sauerbraten is one of those foreign foods, according to the engram in the bank, and "You shouldn’t eat this fancy foreign food stuff." He can get very confused on this whole line. He is trying to make a minor decision and his mind will go around, and finally rather unhappily he will say, "Bring me ham and eggs." He doesn’t want ham and eggs, but the engrams don’t forbid ham and eggs so he has got a compromise solution.

In the small sphere or the large sphere you get the same thing. When the analytical mind by its genetic abilities wants one thing and the engrams say it wants something else, the mind is reduced to the point in its computation where it can’t align enough decisive factors to acquire anything. You will very often find you put a little factor up in front of a person and suddenly it looks too great for him to overcome and he collapses at the thought of it.

You say to somebody, "Let’s go down to the beach and go swimming." He’s all enthused about going down to the beach and going swimming. Then suddenly somebody says, "Well, where’s the thermos jug?" They send him to look for the thermos jug and all of a sudden going to the beach and going swimming is just too much. So he changes his mind about the whole thing. The engram says, "I can’t look for things, I just go crazy when I try to look for things. And besides, it’s lost and I can never find it anyway." It’s very unspecific, but merely because somebody sent him to look for something, now he can’t go anyplace. There is the interrupted decision.

With a patient, the auditor is saying directly, "We are going to deintensify all the engrams we have to in order to bring about an alleviated or cleared condition." That is exactly what the analytical mind would like to do so that it can think on a clear channel straight through, with full recalls. That is what it has been trying to do for years. But an AA in the engram bank may be saying, "Oh, I couldn’t do this. This treatment won’t work, I just know it won’t work." Or it may be an operation and the doctor is saying, "Well, I don’t know whether it’s going to do her any good or not. Personally, I would advise against touching it. I’d just leave it alone." He is talking about a mole. But the baby at that moment after the examination is in pain and we have a computation there which says, "Don’t touch it," or, "Leave it alone."

Sometimes we have engrams which say, "Nobody can do anything for me anyway, I’m just hopeless," or, "Nobody can do anything for you, you’re just hopeless," or, "This is a situation that cannot be solved. We are at an impasse, we are up against a blank wall, there’s nothing we can do, nothing. We may as well give up." Well, that may be Papa and Mama discussing a lawsuit that has just been slapped on them and has nothing to do with reaching engrams, but Mama became very tearful and highly emotional and we got an engram implanted which results in a chronic engram, at least with a few attention units.

Now we say to this person, "Let’s return to the first moment of pain or unconsciousness. "

All of a sudden he says, "I just can’t do it, I might as well give up. It might work on somebody else but it couldn’t possibly work on me." If you as the auditor say to yourself at that moment, "This is probably right," or, "This is an analytical computation," you are letting the basic personality down.

Basic personality is the personality. People when they are more or less themselves and cheerful are running on basic personality. It isn’t something foreign or very esoteric. But it gets covered up by a lot of engram computations, valences, demon circuits and so on.

What he has to say about what you are trying to do to him is what his engrams are saying his analytical mind cannot do, as a definite parallel. So, if we size this up, we will see the overall computation of the case the moment we ask this person to go back or to do anything, or try to explain to him how this is going to work with him. You get the most aberrated reactions on a lot of patients. You get somebody saying, "Well, I just dare you to try anything on me." Go into the engram bank at that point and you find Papa saying, "I can’t afford this child, we ought to do something about it." There is no AA, but Mama is extremely pugnacious and says, "I dare you to do anything about it. You can’t take this away from me. I would go mad if you touched it. Now you can just get it out of your mind entirely, just forget about it, because I’m not going to have any part of it. Now, go away. Get out of here." (That was an actual engram.) The reaction of this person toward the auditor was very interesting because it was just that. But it was all about Dianetics, not about the child. "Oh, I just dare you to try to pick up some of these parts to my personality. I need them How would I get along if I got rid of all these neuroses?"

It was noticeable as he was talking that he would be stumbling over his uses and selections of the words which didn’t fit in the engram, because, of course, they had to be dubbed and that part of the engram had to be set aside, which made it very clumsy arguing. As he ran along, it was trying more and more to come out as a dramatization and he was becoming intellectually upset, with the result- that one walked head- on into a fullfledged dramatization.

It so happens that people in the past have gyrated toward the fields of mental healing. Most of the people in the field went in that direction not because they really believed anything could be done about it but because they hoped something might be done about it. Then someone came along and told them about a specific entity called an engram, and that caused an extremely aberrated reaction in a lot of these people.

If you as an auditor let it get you down to any degree you are very foolish, as you are talking to an engramic computation. If you just look it over for a moment you will see that it is so full of emotionalism and non sequitur arguments that no amount of persuasion on your part is going to get anywhere, because the other half of that engram he is dramatizing may be a persuasive engram. "Oh dear, why don’t you let me get rid of it. After all, you’d feel so much better. Here you are sick all the time with morning sickness and so forth. Just let me get rid of it for you."

If you as the auditor then say, "Well, I think you ought to let me get rid of these engrams for you. We have to go ahead and do something about this," the person, getting the full restimulation of the engrams, will fling it right back at you, fast.

You can change his valence, but if you argue with him bluntly and say, "You are wrong, you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re crazy," completely aside from the fact that that may have been Papa’s pitch, you are tending to break his dramatization, and when you break his dramatization you will make him sick so he is not going to permit you to do that. Of course you could push his buttons up to a point where it does break it. But it is a problem. You undoubtedly will have this problem, not only in the therapy room but out on the street someplace.

You can look right down the engram bank when you are trying to talk to somebody about Dianetics and he gets upset about it. The worst offenders on this subject are those who have a stake in it. Let’s take Mama who doesn’t want anything known, instinctively, desperately. In addition, she has all the engrams she put into this child about believing his elders and minding her. So all of a sudden she turns on him full blast while he is your patient, and starts telling him, "You know you can’t remember things like that. You know this whole thing is invalid. You know there’s no use going on with something like this, it is absolutely insane on your part. After all, in your profession you have to hold yourself up," or, "Stay in your own profession, don’t go in for anything else. And besides, you know you can’t remember."

She will get your patient into a very confused state. But here is the unfortunate thing: Arguing secondhand with somebody who has enough engrams in your patient to reinforce her arguments practically defeats you. One of the best ways to handle this is to give her therapy too, then you are no longer arguing secondhand. I have done this several times in the interests of somebody’s sanity.

The moment you reinforce the analytical mind in any way and give it more attention units with which it can then go through engrams, you reinforce basic personality. The ways to do this without attacking engrams are very important to you. Straight memory will help a lot. Another thing that helps is to get the patient, no matter what he is thinking about, into the key engram in his case quickly. Get some nice, solid explosive action. Get the engram deintensified and the person will be stronger and will work with you better after that on two angles. The forward circuits which have been terrifically impinged on by the engrams will themselves begin to commence to function on an educational level and say, "There is something here," and by knocking this out you have demonstrated that basic personality can get through, can contact engrams and give you flash answers and so on. The patient will start to get well at that point.

When you find somebody becoming despondent or very skeptical or doubtful, you have not closely enough paralleled what basic personality wants. You will find people will start coming to you to be treated with a whole sheaf of notes of what they thought of last night. They are sure that they must have engrams about this, about that, about something else, and they go around thinking about it all the time. That means specifically that the auditor has not entered the computation which must be entered to resolve the case.

The patient who is getting doubtful and skeptical is often undergoing this very interesting mechanism. Basic personality looks around and says, "How are we going to force this auditor?" So he will get a show- me attitude that he doesn’t feel at all. It’s an act. After all, you are dealing with a human being, and human beings are pretty wily. Basic personality is too. "Let’s force this auditor into working more on us," or "Let’s challenge him enough so that he really will tackle this case and work it out right." There are all sorts of odd combinations like this. But any time you get a combination of reactions which is, as far as you are concerned, utterly undesirable for the furtherance of therapy, know very well that you have not contacted the combination in the case which must be undone to start the case rolling. Know also that that combination is available. It tells you those things.

Then there is the person whom you meet on the street who says bluntly, "Dianetics, well, that’s no good. Anybody who practices it is a charlatan. I just hate the very idea. A science of mind would pervert the whole world anyway. You can’t do anything like this," and so on. It is always interesting to look at this man’s history. You will find him in and out of all kinds of scrapes, mental jams and confusions. He is the very person who needs it. He unfortunately is probably the last one that will get it when he ups and throws it to you that fast. But it also may be a challenge.

Once the analytical mind gets the idea it can be entered, it gets stronger and these things start resolving.

I don’t envy you some of the patients you will have. But keep this axiom there as an operating axiom and inspect it as you go. You will see it borne out time and time again. But I want you to see it borne out, and that is the fact that those things which are confronting the analytical mind in its efforts to operate at an optimum are those things which will face the auditor immediately, and seek to defeat him as well, since he is thereby a part of the analytical mind which is trying to defeat the strength of the engrams. The engrams start to fight him too, and it is only the engrams who fight.

The research department has data on gathering up the cooperation of basic personality. By talking straight through to basic personality, explaining to the patient what basic personality is, the possibility of the patient working better can probably be demonstrated. We are going to run a series on this, but it is a perfectly good tenet.

There are some things which don’t need a lot of testing. One looks back along the line to see whether it compares with what one has found before and whether it makes sense. If it makes sense, it is all right, and you can go on with perfect confidence and start knocking out cases left and right until you find some case that departs suddenly. Then you have to find out why that case departed. In the case of a dub- in, talking to basic personality may aid. But you may also be talking to a demon circuit, so you get the control mechanisms out of the case, and then talk to basic personality.

I found a person who had gone crazy at 7 months prenatal. It was very interesting. Every computation which had been entered into this case had been violated. Papa was an ally, but then Papa started a mutual M. Mama was an ally, but then Mama started Ms. So he had it rigged up at first that one was safe whenever Papa showed up; but then when Papa’s voice showed up all of a sudden things were very unsafe. Even on a reactive level the data was going backwards. Then he built up the fact that every time one of Mama’s lovers was around, why, things were safe. But the only thing about that was that Mama’s lover got very angry at her because she wouldn’t leave Papa and finally beat her up. So this of course invalidated that computation. Everything that was entered upon computationally was invalidated. So the reactive mind, which was about the only mind running, would say, "Well, A plus B equals C, okay, but now tomorrow it equals G." Furthermore A couldn’t be added to B anymore. And we had a nervous anxiety which had arisen so that everything spoken, just the sound of voices in the vicinity, finally, was enough to pick the child up into a high tension nervous anxiety. In working this patient we had a bit of luck. We got the patient back into the basic area rather rapidly and sonic turned on. I got the whole parade of the case all the way up with each erasure moment. As we would come to a new one the patient would flinch, so I would ask, "What’s the matter?"

"Papa said something."

"What did he say?"

"Give me a cup of coffee."

My conclusion on it was that the fetus, by cross- computations and destroyed decisions and so on, must have been insane. Actually the person as a child became very tough. The child walked sideways into Grandpa’s valence and was thereafter Grandpa. And as such he was a very, very tough character.

He managed to rescue his own sanity computationally on this order: If Mama and Papa tried to say anything to him, he would just take their heads off. They were scared of him. Everybody was scared of that kid. At about the age of 25 he had gotten into the war, and there had been a lot of top sergeants who thought they were tough, and a lot of officers who thought they were tough, and the War Department thought it was tough, and the Japanese prison camp he went into thought they were tough. By the time he got through he had been hammered, driven and pounded out of the valence in which he could operate. He had slid back into an approximation of his father and mother’s self valence combination and had gone as crazy as he must have been in the womb before Grandpa showed up on the scene. Grandpa’s first greeting in this case was "Damn, you’re a cute little son of a gun! " which came right on the end of birth.

Of course, a person sometimes in Dianetic therapy feels as if he is on a merry- go- round, with the valences just walking around and around. Somebody comes up to him and says, "Give me a match," and he pops into Mama’s valence and says, "Yes, here’s a match." Somebody else comes up to him and says, "What are you doing here?" And he turns around and says, "To hell with you"— right away he’s in Papa’s valence. It’s very unstable, but he does stabilize.

Another vicissitude regards psychosomatic illnesses. For instance, we know nothing about cancer, but indicators and a few minor observations seem to indicate that cancer is a psychosomatic illness.

It also works out that toothache as such is psychosomatic. I have been challenged with this rather lame claim that how could a person possibly get a toothache before he has any teeth? It is very simple. For one thing there is a technique of hooking the baby out of the birth canal with a hook in the mouth that is used occasionally which bruises the gums, and we take this patient afterwards and start back on him when he is 15, 20 years of age and we find that he is in a lot of trouble with his front teeth. Sometimes we try to pick up the somatic early in the case and we really have something on our hands because this thing will go into restimulation and the whole top row of teeth will ache for a while. Every time a drill is addressed to a tooth, you have a potential toothache. Every time an injury hits the mouth, you have a potential toothache. Every time you get an extraction, you have potential decay of the adjacent teeth. The tougher and more traumatic the experience, the worse the situation is, until a person gets total exodontistry in an effort to get rid of these aching teeth. But the teeth weren’t aching. So, with the total exodontistry we have now added 32 more aches. And we give the person false teeth and they have toothache.

I personally have got some swell cavities that are making exactly no progress. In fact, one tooth was practically ruined by some "plumber." It used to be that this cavity was right up almost against the gum. Now there is some tooth below the cavity. I used to wonder whether or not a tooth would grow, because it seemed to me it was a living organism. Well, this one is busy growing the cavity out of itself!