GETTING A CASE ROLLING

A lecture given on 10 July 1950

Practices

Therapy technique is such at this time that you can be fairly confident that it is going to stay standard for quite a while, although there will be minor changes occurring within these steps, and there is plenty of room to have such an adjustment. Therefore it is of the greatest interest to you to cover this.

We are teaching a new subject which has never before appeared in the periphery of man’s activities, therefore we are the only accrediting body. Degrees in Dianetics will be, when awarded, D. Dn., Doctor of Dianetics; M. Dn., which would be Master; and B. Dn., Bachelor of Dianetics.

Such degrees would be reserved not only for training, skill, and practice in the subject, but also for initial contributions and papers on the subject of Dianetics, which would include the art or the science of Dianetics.

Those degrees are not available at this time, but when they are you can at that time submit a thesis for a doctorate. It will have to be a real contribution, but it will be credited to you.

The examination itself will be an oral one. It will also be based upon classwork. Students are often surprised how well we get to know them and their auditing.

Somebody comes up in tears and says, "I don’t know what I’m going to do, I’m just going to blow into forty million pieces. Dianetics is just horrible."

You look at him for a moment and say mildly, "Who audited you last?"

"Why," he says, "it was Hobson- Jobson."

And at this moment you say, "Yes?" softly, and you mark it down in your little black book. But it doesn’t have to get that fat. Sooner or later If there is a marked turn in the case, put your name to it because you have got to get credit for it. We look through these casebooks as we go along.

Complete casebooks are also needed for the subject of Dianometry, a word we have coined which covers more space than psychometry because it also covers logic while psychometry does not.

Dianometry is the measurement of thought and especially includes a system of infinity valued logic with transfinite cardinals, and a few other things, based on topology. Topology is a German mathematics— evidently symbolic logic plus.

Research was undertaken into the effects of a drug, the name of which I will not attempt to relay to you, composed of herbs, which was supposed to have the remarkable quality of turning off psychosomatic illnesses. I had heard its repute and seen it in action as far as the engram bank was concerned. It was an interesting drug, it let you locate any engram you wanted in the bank, but once you started rolling the incident you could roll it about 500 times with no relief, with all the phrases stuck right there on an area of the track next door to basic- basic where you ought to get a good, solid reduction, but not a single yawn and no unconsciousness came off it. Nothing happened.

This drug was remarkable. It evidently took all the unconsciousness in the bank and turned it into glue. Then this glue stayed right there and the words were all mixed up with it. This is an indicator that, biochemically, something can happen to engrams and to unconsciousness, and if something can happen to glue them down, something undoubtedly exists which will pick them up.

This drug kicked up the circuitry, and the preclear didn’t just autocontrol now, he was liable to try to control the whole house. It apparently picked up the force of engram commands sharply.

The conclusion made on this- was that that drug didn’t work, but that engrams could be affected chemically.

The next big advance that I expect to see made is on the chemical front. And another big advance is going to be the accessibility front, which may also be on the chemical front, concerning the accessibility of psychotics.

You’re not going to have to worry about that for a little while but it will come up in the future. You’re going to have someone come in and say, "You know, my wife’s acting a little peculiarly lately, she has a pain in her ear. Can I bring her down so that you can give her a bit of a run?"

And you will say, "Why, sure, anytime."

In comes his wife, you ask her, "What’s your name?"

"Well, my name’s Ophelia this morning."

I had this happen with an actual case. He was such a nice guy, and I never realized that he was so dumb that he didn’t know a psychotic when he saw one!

She had some peculiar ideas. She thought that pop and lemon cream pie was what you should give a man for breakfast, so he ate it. She spent nearly all day in bed and she would get up in time to go to the movies. According to him, that was all right, after all he didn’t know how wives were supposed to act.

She was actually a case with an enormous number of delusions. She thought men were walking around behind her all the time, and so on. There were dozens of engrams in there all cross- latched which caused these various delusions.

The Junior case has the horrible aspect of having a counterfeit valence which is actually his own. And of course everyone in the family usually says, "You’re just like Joe," which is already all through the prenatal bank. Or, "That’s just like Joe," whoever the Junior is named after.

The Junior case is not fatal, but it does heap a lot of hours on the auditing of the case. It’s not an easy one, but it will resolve.

Don’t start running for one of these aberrations on a demon circuit unless that demon circuit keeps on getting in your hair. Then keep on solving it. You are going to find a demon circuit is planted maybe dozens of times, but it will knock out.

Usually it is latched up on some grief or something postpartum, and there is a lot of charge on the case. Keep on working as early as you can and the person will probably bat out that circuit completely.

For instance, I worked on a case one time for about 125 hours, trying to get out three demons which were knocking around in this case. I was getting some erasures in the basic area but these demons were talking to one another and there was a lot of confusion. Then one afternoon all three of them blew fuses and that was the end of the demons.

After that we got a Wall Street ticker tape going tickety- tickety- tick. Then we had a visio circuit in there which eventually blew, and after a while the person had full sonic. It was just a matter of attrition on the quantity. But try to knock it out as early as you can in the case.

You can waste a lot of time in reaching for emotion if there is an emotional shut- off in the case. Try and find the shut- down. It will probably be on the control chain which you will be looking for anyhow if it is there. Most emotional shut- downs seem to run parallel with control.

I have found cases who didn’t have any demon circuits at all. They had nobody around them telling them they were like somebody else. There were no valence cross- ups on the case either. This doesn’t mean that they couldn’t have somebody around them telling them they were like somebody else, and have a valence shift which would throw everything off. There could still be a "control yourself" on the case.

There was an interesting demon circuit in one case. The person ran for a long time. It was fairly early in Dianetics, and we were just potshooting the case. Finally it got down to a real erasure that was rolling off in one, two, three recountings as we came up the line, with incidents disappearing, maybe a yawn or two and so on, all the way up the case to about the age of 3 on the erasure.

Ostensibly the whole prenatal bank was now empty. We got up to the age of 3 and the person suddenly said, "That’s funny, I thought we lived in that house for a certain length of time but the whooping cough I was telling you about actually happened when I was 6, and there was something which was supposed to have happened at 2. But that was when my father was in the automobile accident...."

And I said, "What automobile accident?"

We started looking this thing over and all of a sudden the somatic strip and the file clerk bogged down.

A latent circuit had been activated, and you will find this happening in a lot of cases. In this particular one I suspected that there was an emotional shut- off very early. We got all sorts of painful emotion off. Evidently this demon circuit had never been contacted before and it suddenly sprang into view. Earlier, this case had gotten off some late life dramatizations of Mama and Papa and tried to assure me that this was not in the bank. For instance, we would be working on the phrase "Get a grip on yourself. You’ve got to get a grip on yourself," and the patient would say, "There’s nothing in there about it."

"Well, let’s go over it! ‘Get a grip on yourself, ’ repeat it."

So the patient would repeat chokingly, "Get a grip on yourself, get a grip on yourself, get a grip on yourself, get a grip on yourself, get a grip on yourself, get a grip on yourself."

"Well, now look, there’s something here somewhere."

"No, no, nothing here at all. No somatic."

The patient this late had swapped valences and had gone into Mama’s valence, and sonic was much reduced. She hadn’t bothered to tell me that she hadn’t heard any voices for a long time, and we had just walked straight over an automobile accident back in the middle of the prenatal area on to which this 2 year old incident was latched. Then we hit and activated the earlier one where right after the accident Papa crawled out from the wreckage and said to Mama who was screaming hysterically, "Get a grip on yourself."

This is what we were shooting for. It was full of denyers and was lying underneath the bank. I knocked that out. It was also in the bank many times before. We scared up about 35 engrams with that phrase in it, and we took it down early until we finally got to the automobile accident, and erased on up the line, knocking out all this material. But only when we got the automobile accident, and not until, did we get a release of the circuit.

We got lots of engrams that had that circuit in them without deintensifying this one, because it was very severe. We erased that and immediately the somatic strip and file clerk went right back to work.

That is why it is very important to get out the basic engrams— to shoot holes in the bank. Whether you get the person into his own valence or not, when you have done this then you can walk up the bank and reduce engrams until you find the one that will knock out. A case sometimes takes quite a while to get into a situation where you can reduce everything. The moment it gets into that, recognize it. Now you can use repeater technique, you can simply pick up a dictionary and start one word repeater from A right straight on through, and you will get a reduction on everything you hit. Although that is a very inefficient way to do it, it can be done.

You will find a lot of cases, however, which have the whole basic part of the case latched up into some late incident that has to be separated. It is not always as smooth as it might be, which is why we are hitting it on the chemical side.

Cases are resolvable, they have been resolvable for quite a while, but we have now got a technique which will resolve them a lot faster than they have ever been resolved before. Witness some of the things happening in the way of reductions, erasures, and so on. Cases today are opening and rolling better and sooner than anything ever has happened before in Dianetics.

Don’t take things out by chains, ask for them chronologically, and then how they go off is up to the file clerk.

Work with the file clerk, but you sometimes have to push the file clerk a little bit on the basis of the earliest moment of pain or discomfort which can now be reached, because the file clerk doesn’t quite understand the fact that you have got to have it consecutively.

Having a wide variety of auditors has its advantages and its disadvantages. When you have a wide variety of auditors and the case hasn’t been opened yet, every auditor that walks in on it is going to waste some more time. Once somebody has started a case opening, he ought to stick with the case for a while until it gets running.

I have worked on a case where I was reducing about the middle of the bank. I was hitting a rough one. The preclear’s birth, for instance, was sitting up above the bank. That got knocked out and then there was an AA and there were some other things that got clipped out. Then he would go home and yawn about 40 times and go to sleep. Later he would get up, start to feel sick and then he would yawn a lot and go back to sleep, after which his case really started running.

Just because a case starts erasing, don’t think that it won’t bog suddenly because it may, and if it does, start looking for circuitry or valence shift. You have clipped something. Remember that in therapy you can restimulate an engram which will then activate even though it may be a very mild activation. Usually when some of the basic area is erased and the tension is off the case the activation will be very mild.

Nevertheless it is enough to stop the file clerk and somatic strip from working with you, and to throw the person over into a valence. At that moment you may find sonic shutting off and all sorts of weird things happening.

You will find various somatics dragging with the patient, occasionally, but don’t worry too much about it, just keep working with the file clerk and that somatic will pop out. The case may bog slightly and you will have to fish to find out why. You may run out everything up to the first missed period. Then birth is suddenly there and the case won’t work too well until you knock out its tension, after which the case will go on erasing.

This is why working closely with the file clerk is very desirable. You can get in practically no trouble working with the file clerk, and you will get very rapid results.

One should try to avoid life restimulators. l Try not to take them up. It may be necessary to blow out a key- in on straight memory without entering an incident, because if you enter one you will start running it and the very phrases in it will bring the preclear square down and all of a sudden you will be in birth or somewhere you don’t want to be. But by having the preclear sit right in present time and knocking the thing out in present time you can keep on going with it.