ABOUT PSYCHOTICS

A lecture given on 8 July 1950

Obtaining Accessibility

This lecture is about psychotics. No matter what psychiatrists do about psychotics, you are going to have to do something about them and you had better know them.

The process has a dual virtue in that it will knock out incipient psychosis before it begins. Once precipitated, a psychosis is like playing with chain lightning because the person’s accessibility drops way down.

So, as you enter the case of a psychotic— somebody who has consistent breaks— with good sense and thorough attention to what you are doing, he should get gradually better. If you don’t pay attention to what you are doing, you are likely to hand him another break.

It is a very bad thing when a psychotic has a break. "I" suddenly submerges. One tries to let his case settle out, but other restimulators come in, and something else happens to him. "I" is suddenly told in the most unmistakable terms that he is no longer persona grata in the society.

The psychotic’s "I" is very much there, very much aware of what is taking place, and recording. But the psychosis is very badly stirred up: Imagine sitting behind something that you couldn’t reach through and having people say about you, "Well, he’s no good, let’s put him in the local bastille and feed him some sedation," and pay no attention whatsoever to what you want and what you are trying to do.

One of the best ways to prevent this is to make a quick improvement of case. If you are working with a psychotic who is accessible, handle him with kid gloves, because you want to preserve that accessibility. You will find that psychotics become periodically accessible or inaccessible. For instance, at 2 o’clock in the afternoon they are accessible, but they are never accessible at 9 o’clock at night. Or, at 8 o’clock in the morning they are cheerful and accessible, but at 4 o’clock in the afternoon they have vomiting spells.

The mind runs on a time clock arrangement, and the engram which is in greatest restimulation has on it a time tab which is exactly the time tab of when the engram occurred. If the engram occurred at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, even though it is prenatal and the baby had no clocks to look at, at 2 o’clock in the afternoon you are going to get with the psychotic the most severe recurrence of the psychosis. This doesn’t always work. Some psychotics are psychotic all the way around the clock. But you will notice that there are periods of the day when people can be worked and times when they can’t.

One patient, who all morning, every morning, had to be kept in an institution in a wet pack, promptly at noon with a smile would jump out of bed, after having been in a fetal position all morning, very happily get dressed, go around and talk to everybody, as sane as anyone you wanted to meet. But the attendants would come around the next morning and there she would be curled up in a fetal position, so they would again put her in a wet pack until noon. This went on every day, and had been going on for five years— an interesting example of a time clock running on an engram.

Discovering a moment of accessibility in a psychotic and preserving that accessibility once it’s discovered is of very great importance to you, because you can’t talk to an engram. You need to be able to have a little bit of "I" there, at a moment when "I" can go up against the bank.

If you can’t find this moment of accessibility, you have to create one.

A psychotic is one who has had a history of breaks, although he may look quite sane to you. Actually this is an engram or a group of engrams which can suddenly walk in on a person and in effect he becomes the engram. These people are divisible into two classes: the engram psychotic and the demon circuit psychotic.

In order to have a demon circuit in operation there has got to be a holder in the engram. But, if a demon circuit is in this engram, you are going to have a psychotic playing it all off at a fast rate whereby he is saying all manner of computed things. They appear to be rational to him. He’s saying things like, "You know, the Western Union Telegraph Company has rigged up wires to this room and everything that is said here to me is taken down in Washington. Even the Secretary of State is against me." And he will explain this to you. You are talking to a demon circuit.

The other one is the person who is simply playing a record. If the engram went "I see the cat, the cat is black," he comes back to the beginning and says, "I see the cat, the cat is black," over and over again. Then he quietens down. He doesn’t talk for a while, and then somebody drops a pin in the room and he says, "I see the cat, the cat is black." He has various gyrations that go along with this and these are patterned very standardly.

What is deceptive about one of these psychotics is that "I see the cat, the cat is black" is a valence playing out of an engram, and is just one set of words in that engram. The number of engrams which are very severe which have only one person present is not particularly numerous unless you’re playing off an AA. But if he played this AA off and he was playing everything in it off, the thing would deintensify. So he is only playing off part of the dramatization.

The way you handle the former is to figure out what were the words that planted the demon. They are right there in the engram. And in the latter, you find all the valences in the engram and get them played out.

In handling psychotics, you have to coax and plead and humor and work with them in order to find the denyers, holders, call- backs, bouncers, and so on. The psychotic will be playing part of this thing off, but we have got to get the entire engram and shoot it full of holes.

The unfortunate part of it is that it may be the 15th engram up the line, it may not be No. 1. In the case where it is the 15th engram up the line, telling him to get the first time this was said sometimes produces results, but not invariably.

You have to just shoot holes in the holders and call- backs. Pick out of the person’s dramatization just one engram, then pick out the holders and call- backs and get him to say them again and again, and soon he will start laughing. He doesn’t know what he is laughing about, but that holder no longer appears in his conversation. It’s as though it suddenly dropped through the bottom. Now, get the call- back and that too will drop out.

You are trying to get this person back up into present time. If you can get him into present time, you can get a good run on him. He becomes much more accessible. Usually he doesn’t go straight back up into present time though, he goes into another engram, and you sometimes have to sort out several of these things before you finally get him back up where he belongs.

This is a cat and mouse game. He has got holders. and call- backs and bouncers and one does anything one can to get them.

Psychotics in institutions are usually very heavily sedated. Everything said to such a person is going to be a bad lock. And lots of things have been said to him which are bad locks.

Electric shocks, of course, are nothing but engrams, with the added physiological "benefit" of producing cerebral hemorrhages. If the person has had 150- 250 electric shocks, people have just added 150- 250 engrams to him. A person will eventually quit if you punish him enough.

For a short while I wondered if little light shocks might not do something to the engram bank that would help you gain accessibility. However, I have found that they do not make a psychotic more accessible, they merely beat him down. After a while he is quiet. In order to cure a psychotic you have got to make him noisy.

Recently there was a psychotic who was a screamer, and she was noisy! The whole effort on the part of people around her was to make her be quiet, which is the one thing you couldn’t have done if you wanted her to get well. When psychotics start turning up the volume, the last thing in the world you want to do is to make them quiet. You break the run on the engram, and once that is done that engram is less accessible.

The idea of institutions, the idea of sedation, the idea of electric shocks and prefrontal lobotomy has only one purpose and that is to make the patient quiet, tractable and adjusted. Don’t ever delude yourself or let anybody delude you otherwise. I have gone over the field thoroughly. Their definition of adjustment is not applicable, because he doesn’t get adjusted to the environment, he is merely less trouble, and that has been most of the effort.

So when the psychotic begins to turn on a screaming dramatization and start on through one of these valences, they immediately have to get him quiet. However, he is just screaming, he isn’t going to do anything. Supposing this poor psychotic is caught in birth dramatizing Mama. You will get the contractions on a minute per minute basis. Mama’s screams will be played out one scream after another. And as you watch this thing, you can time the contractions. The first ones are 15 minutes apart, the next ones are 14 and 13 minutes apart, and finally we get down to where he is screaming every 30 seconds. When you run one of these engrams, he will make comments on these screams perhaps which will be the conversation of the doctor and the nurse. It is unmistakable. Although he thinks he is making the comments himself, he is merely playing off the other valences as his own comments.

That is the setup you are facing when you are playing off one of these one- line psychotics where they are playing out the text. Shoot it full of holes, knock out the holders, bouncers, call- backs. Don’t sit there and try to make him quiet, and don’t at any time get panicky. He may be under heavy sedation, and you are having to work him anyway. If you say, "Lie back and be quiet," you have installed an engram. The one thing you don’t want this person to do is to lie back and be quiet. You want the interest. It makes a big difference .

Treating a demon circuit psychotic you will have to probably discover the source of the demon circuit. These demon circuits are "Everybody’s against me" control circuits, "You don’t dare tell him the truth" circuits, and so on, but this person will move to some slight degree on the track. You may have to push him a bit and much to your dismay find out that you have restimulated 4 to 5 engrams, and he flares up and says, "You are trying to kill me, I know, you’re against me too." You have restimulated several engrams on him, and he doesn’t like it. They settle out in 8 to 10 days, but don’t let anybody give him electric shock during the time you are waiting for an engram to settle out.

The fear which is generally felt toward the psychotic is not peculiar to this society. The awe and terror that insanity has produced in men down through the ages is very standard. Insanity has been incomprehensible and as a result they have been afraid of it. Suddenly somebody’s loved one, back in the cave days, turns up screaming, "I am a chipmunk, bark, bark, chatter, chatter." What do we do with him? Well, we can say he has been invaded by spirits and is a holy man, and let him wander around, as long as he doesn’t destroy any property or hurt anybody. Some choose their witch doctors from amongst their psychotics. Then there is the shamanistic call where some psychotic suddenly goes into a slight spin and walks out in the woods thinking the ghost of some shaman has called him.

That may be peculiar to North Borneo, but anything that one human being will do, others will. Some psychotic will probably have a shamanistic call on the subject of Dianetics, and will go around saying that he has been chosen to be the carrier of the great torch of truth, Dianetics. He is now second only to God himself and is the wonder of the ages, and he is the only one who is qualified to know anything. That will be the shamanistic call at work.

It is a very interesting mechanism. The person has been trying all his life to become important. He has a manic on the subject. He has to become important, he has to tell somebody something. He has a message for somebody. And all of a sudden he grabs hold of Dianetics— there’s the message. Of course he has been psychotic all his life; however, earlier it was the message that this or that or something else.

People are going to say Dianetics is dangerous because of this. If anybody mentions that to you, point also to the Holy Bible, and if they will check back against the past they will find there have been people who were not quite sound, who had some feelings that the word ought to be spread. This occurs with almost any subject. This does not invalidate religion, nor does it invalidate Dianetics. This is the shamanistic call.

You may walk into an institution and find four or five people in there with the shamanistic call all of a sudden for Dianetics: You may find a couple more that have been driven insane by somebody who knew what he was doing with Dianetics too. This is an aberrated society.

There will be somebody who, for instance, has one of these shamanistic calls, who is going around and telling everybody, "Now, the thing for you to do is to bow down to the Great God Motaw." Or, "I am the chosen one. In a vision last night I saw the Great God Motaw, and I have this great message for the world."

If you start working him on the basis that there is an engram at work underneath it on the subject of the great message, you are not going to get anything because you are facing a demon circuit. Although the wording of the demon circuit makes it possible for this sort of a computation to come in, you are actually working a manic case. That manic may only be Grandma saying, "You mustn’t abort the baby because he will be a great man someday and he may do something wonderful in the world," and so on.

The insidious part of demon circuits is that they seem so reasonable at times. A person working on one of these demon circuits may seem quite rational to you, but when you have had a little experience with psychotics, you will notice that the division line between sanity and insanity in the lower stages is so sharp that you will never be very confused about it. You can tell a man who is a psychotic. Don’t think for a moment that on this shamanistic call basis it isn’t based upon a perfectly good analytical computation. Somebody sees something good or something that has to be done in the world. Some priest goes out into the backwoods where sacrificial altars are the order of business and he finds that they sacrifice little babies on sacrificial stones, and that some of the customs there are very remarkable. He starts telling them that there is only one God— the God of goodness and love. This priest is doing a good job. In past ages the civilization got carried into the backwoods by these means, and one wouldn’t say that every priest that went out was crazy merely because he said, "I’ve got a better answer than you have, boys."

Take somebody who has been studying engineering who suddenly finds out that if you mix concrete with such- and- so you can double its tension. You don’t say that that man’s crazy because he runs down the hall and starts telling people about it.

The shamanistic call is a different proposition. I have seen one at work. The person was frothing at the mouth. He would throw himself down on the ground and claw at the earth and then he would scream like a wild animal. Then he would jump up again and say, "I have a message." Everybody would gather around and listen for this message. He was crazy. But things came to him in visions and his message would be to the effect that the fish were going to be very good down in the river the next day. That was the shamanistic call at work.

One of these people had Dianetics on the brain and was saying, "Contact that auditor. Contact that auditor. Contact. Now you can do this. You know you can do this. You know you can do this. Contact that auditor. I have a clear brain, I’ve been cleared. It just came over me all of a sudden. I’m a clear, I’m a clear now. You can go to bed with me." There was nothing rational about it at all. She had been beaten and hypnotized by a professor of psychology who precipitated a break. Before that time she had been trying to sell him Dianetics. He "fixed" her. Fortunately Dianetics works and the case in question was brought out of it and is doing fine.

Work a psychotic on the principle of knocking out the engram in which you find him, or knocking out the demon circuits, especially the command "Control yourself" and its ilk, "I can do this. I’m the only one that can do this," which may have as its underlying command, "You can do it and I’m going to make you."

You are working then in the interest of springing the psychotic out of the engram in which he is stuck and preventing a further break. When the demon circuits are knocked out, the chances of a break are not just reduced, they are wiped out. It is the circuit that makes the break possible in the first place. I have never yet seen a psychotic who wasn’t running on the computation that he had no control of himself and he couldn’t control himself, as a demon circuit, or on the other hand who had one that said he had to control himself. Some had both— he can’t control himself but he has to control himself. So the problem of circuitry is quite sharp when you address the psychotic.

The sort of language you use to spring him depends on your imagination, because you may find that you use the word pain and he goes four feet off the floor and begins to crawl up the walls; you use some other word and it’s equally restimulative. But a psychotic will generally tell you. The file clerk gets through somehow, in most cases. You have got to persuade him to get through, and he will generally give you clues as to how to work him, although it is like playing through fog with somebody who is trying desperately to get out. You will listen to the dramatization and it will appear to you at that moment that the last thing he wants to have done to him is to be helped, but right on the tail end of it he will say, "But of course if you say you want me to do it...."

"Okay, I’d like to have you do it."

"No, no, if you want me to."

"All right, I want you to."

"All right. Now what do you want me to do? Put on a play? I’ll put on a play for you if you want me to."

"Well, all right, let’s put on a play."

"Okay. What kind of a play do you want?"

"I want the play of a little girl whose grandma died."

"That one’s too difficult, the parts are too difficult."

"Oh, come on. I’m sure you’re up to it. After all, you’re a remarkable person."

"All right."

"Well now, let’s take the part of the little girl."

"No."

At that moment you get a big restimulation and the person races around the room, a whole lot of meaningless words are thrown at you, and accessibility is shut down again. But you keep it up and you say, "Well, I want you to see if you can try Mama’s part."

"What were we talking about?"

"Well, you wanted to do a play."

"No, you wanted me to do a play. But did you say, ‘I want you to’?"

"Yes. All right. I want you to."

"All right. Now what do you want done?"

"You play the part of Mama when Grandma died."

"Okay." Wham! Down on the floor she goes and lets out several piercing screams. "Now what does the little girl say?"

Real tears, and a discharge.

"And what was Mama saying to her?"

"Scream, scream, scream, scream"; no great release, but enough if you keep working at it. She is playing off the engram of Grandma’s death, and it’s real. The words are there. Those are the right words, but as long as she’s playing the part, you will see her flick across these valence walls. She is Mama. There is no "I" regulating this. Then she is someone else. Then suddenly there is a little bit of "I" present, very aberratively trying to make sense out of it. If you can keep that up, and if your eardrums will stand up to it long enough, you will play out that engram and discharge the whole thing.

I have seen one of these engrams played off with about the same volume of pitch about 20 consecutive times without any remarkable decrease in it. Those engrams are not behaving irrationally, they are irrationality. But you have got your hands on the basic rules of the game, and if that occurs, you are not down the track far enough. There is other material below that is holding it up.

You can blow the charge in the psychotic’s valence, but you have got to get the voices which were addressed to her. Grandma may have had a lot of things to say and Mama may have had a lot of things to say, but perhaps what was aberrative was the doctor or the undertaker. So, you have to use your imagination to find out who was there, and reconstruct the scene, because she is not going to do it for you.

It doesn’t do any good to hand the psychotic parts which are not parts of engrams. It succeeds only when it parallels the engram.

There is nothing like experience when it comes to such people. Sometimes you will walk in and find a psychotic who is merely extremely frightened, and simply by talking to them for a little while, knowing your Dianetics, you can actually work them on straight memory: "Who used to be afraid?" and so on, and in that way you can sometimes clip off a good section of it. But if they just keep telling you, "I’m afraid, I’m afraid, I’m afraid," don’t make the mistake of getting them to repeat "I’m afraid" and expect them not to be afraid any longer, because "I’m afraid" is not a holder. It’s an engram command and it may very well be what is making them afraid; but adjacent to it there is a holder, or a call- back, or something of the sort. You want more of the engram than "I am afraid." In such a case I very often say, "Who else is talking?" and he sometimes tells me.

In working anybody, the rough things which you will encounter are the mechanical things: the bouncer, the call- back, the denyer, the holder. These are what you are looking for. But you are looking for them whenever you run engrams. They are the only reason you can restimulate an engram, why it won’t go back to where it belongs, why you can’t get the patient up past it, why people get stuck on the track and so on. That doesn’t mean that by sticking somebody on the track you are going to make a psychotic. The psychotic has volume.

You could probably take an incipient psychotic and just by batting around "I," and telling "I" it is wrong, and that it is no good, you may have a break on your hands. That makes an institutionalized psychotic rather rough to handle, because they get this every day. "I" knows that "I" has been made completely wrong. If you can catch a psychotic when he breaks the first time and get his cooperation, you can play off the psychosis and it will break fast. But let him spend two months in an institution and it won’t break as fast. Let him spend five years in an institution, and roll up your sleeves to really put in some work. I ran into one that had been 25 years in a cell, he had had 250 electric shocks, 119 insulin shocks, 10 metrazol shocks and prefrontal lobotomy!

They have been doing this for 2,500 years without any real success. The status quo has been riding forward since the time of the Aesculapians who used hellebore to produce convulsive shock in an effort to do something to people.

Alcoholism can come about through commands in the prenatal area, although these commands are very unstable. They are usually in postpartum manics, and cases usually show the most marked improvement when one hits the postpartum manics that have been handed out by Mama, nurses, Grandma and others on the subject of bottles.

Yet I have run into a person who had a fine setup to be an alcoholic, by engram command and by valences. He was in the valence of a person who was an alcoholic, but he himself didn’t drink. It upset him too much. Mama drinking a lot while the child is on the way can produce the remarkable setup that the child will get sick when he drinks. It’s a restimulator for pain and tight corsets and he doesn’t like it, it’s dangerous, even though it may contain along with it a lot of things. There was one case who could drink all sorts of whiskey but he couldn’t stand beer. Mama had been on beer binges practically every Saturday night all the time he was on the way. Another case came up in Greenwich Village, where a baby was born and was in very bad condition for three or four days. The doctor finally said, "Well, let’s put a tablespoonful of gin into his formula at first and then lessen the quantity gradually. We will have to taper him off," which they did. He was breaking a nine months’ drunk!

There are a lot of combinations that can cause alcoholism. Alcoholism gets set up on a biochemical basis too, which is quite interesting. A person can’t eat sugar, and so takes alcohol in lieu of it. Check the number of alcoholics who can eat candy, for instance.

Then there is demon circuitry: "Come on, have a drink. Just have another drink, let’s have some fun. Have another drink. Now you know you’ve got to take another one with me. Go on, have another drink." I ran across this one in an alcoholic one time. It was Papa’s standard dramatization. He was trying to make a drunkard out of Mama and he succeeded with the baby. He didn’t succeed with Mama. Mama was a member of the Christian Temperance Union.

It takes imagination to handle psychotics. We are working on methods of heightening the potentiality of "I," so that "I" can come into view on another track. The whole problem of handling psychotics is getting them at a moment when they are accessible. Other than that, they don’t represent very difficult cases.

It is not necessarily true that a psychotic uses nothing but volume, but it has been my bad luck that most of them on whom I have worked turned up the full control on the radio set! I have worked on psychotics with cotton in my ears and my hands over them, and still sound waves were coming right on through. Don’t work a psychotic in a residential district! I suggest a soundproof room.

In alcoholism the case is sometimes complicated by the existence the alcoholic has led as an alcoholic. He is called a drunk. He is pushed around. He is thrown out of bars. He is hurt. People keep calling him names and thereby reinforce existing circuitry and install new circuitry.

The deterioration of an alcoholic on a psychic line is quite rapid. People start telling him how irresponsible he is, that he can’t be trusted, that this and that and something else is wrong with him. And, of course, if the fellow is drunk he is in a state where he can receive high- powered locks, and when he is thrown out of a bar, they aren’t locks, they are engrams.

Start handling an alcoholic, and very often you have to undo lock after lock in order to get to some source on it.

It is really pathetic sometimes. You run off engrams with their wives and mothers pleading with them, people trying to reason with them, and the doctor trying to show them the error of their ways. Most of this "advice" is of a highly engramic order. It’s just plain "You know you can’t go on doing this. You know you’ve got to quit it. You must stop. You must think of other people. You mustn’t go around thinking about yourself. Now...."

Unfortunately, the methods which are being used currently in an effort to do something about alcoholics are sometimes more dangerous to them than helpful.

I have read a lot of patent medicine testimonials telling wives, "You can slip this into your husband’s drink and he will not thereafter drink. It will cure him." This is all very interesting, but I have seen it used on several people and I have never seen it work.

Now we know the mechanisms of dramatization. We know that a person dramatizes or he gets the pain. This is observable, we see this too often. He either does what it says or he catches it on the pain level. So he has to do one of two things, he has to dramatize or quit and really fold up.

When a person has manics which dictate to him that he must drink, the whole society seems to combine against him. It has developed into quite a social aberration. Alcoholism was at one time, I suppose, very serious in the society when it was unchecked, and the whole society tends to combine against the alcoholic to break his dramatization so he has no choice but to be either drunk or sick.

In the case of Alcoholics Anonymous, you have people who have been cautioned so much against drinking that they now have a new set of dramatizations. The mechanism becomes the ex- alcoholic who now saves alcoholics. Not that it isn’t a very worthwhile organization, I am merely showing the mechanism at work. Unfortunately if somebody turns against them, or restimulates their own dramatization thoroughly, they have to dramatize it by getting drunk again. It is very sad, but you can handle those cases.

An alcoholic is not a serious psychotic. He is easier to handle than most psychotics, by and large, but he is messy and he will get on your nerves.

One alcoholic wouldn’t work unless he was drunk. Another one would only work when he was sober. It depends on the character of the engram. One fellow would get drunk and get pugnacious, but wouldn’t work when he was drunk. Another fellow would get mild and happy when he was drunk.

All of these people had dozens of engrams which compelled them to drink. In one case, Mama and the grandparent around this child would never have thought for a moment they were making an alcoholic out of him, because their whole solicitude was for him, and saving him from pneumonia. And they would try to get him to drink his medicine. He would be delirious and then they would plead with him, "Please drink. Please, for my sake. Please. You’ll die if you don’t," and so on. Both of these people were violently anti- alcohol, so that made a very strange situation. He also had an alcoholic valence he could go into— his grandfathers In addition, there was a terrific manic in the engram itself, because they would stand by and tell the doctor what a smart, intelligent, worthwhile child he was, and what wonderful things he was going to do someday. They just had to save his life and be good to him and pull him through somehow, and they were going to stay right there and make sure that he came through.

There were also phrases like, "I’ll be back to see him in a minute. You stay right there, now, honey," and, "I’m coming over to see you this afternoon." All of this went on for about two weeks. If those women had been available at the moment when I was running this— because it was taking me days to run this material out— I would have given them a piece of my mind!

This was not really a dramatization on their part, it was apparently rational concern. And they were minus the datum we have in Dianetics that an engram can be installed in an unconscious person.

In handling a psychotic, you are generally talking to engrams. The most puzzling psychotic will be that one who is operating on demon circuitry, where somebody other than the one who’s running a straight engram is talking. There are also other parts to that engram, and you must use your wits and imagination in order to break these things down. Furthermore, you have clues as to the trouble with this psychotic which you can get simply from listening to him. You don’t have to see his parents or his wife, but it very often will help to get all the data on him that you can, and after you have gotten it then discount three quarters of it, if you get it from somebody else.

The psychotic is handled exactly as you would handle any engram bank. Of prime importance in any of these people is to break the repressor circuit, the "control yourself" circuit, the things which tell him that he is unable, or that he must.

It is very good sense to break those in any case, right at the beginning, no matter how sane a person is.

We are not dealing with a strange and unknowable beast when we deal with the psychotic. I was in an institution a few weeks ago and there was an old lady who was running off a coitus engram as she was being toted down the hall. Something had restimulated it in the reception room and she had started to run it off. It said nothing whatsoever about coitus, it merely said, "I’m coming. Don’t come. You’ll have to take care of what you’re doing, dear; We don’t want another one, do we?" It would seem to me that with this sort of thing going on so observably over so many years, someone would have sooner or later spotted the fact that a couple of people were talking about coitus, because you will find such phrases in many cases.

There was another psychotic who was running off an AA, over and over, endlessly. The AA was about 15 minutes long and you could time it by the clock. She would run off the incident and run it off again and again with the same words. The medical diagnosis, of course, was that she was crazy. However, such cases can be handled with standard Dianetic procedure.

There are two things you have to get off a psychotic— painful emotion and basic- basic. If you get neither of them off, and you’re sanguine enough to believe you have there a psychotic that won’t break, you are mistaken. The psychotic will break again.