FINDING DRAMATIZATIONS

A lecture given on 22 July 1950

Advice on Straight Memory

How one finds dramatizations is a problem of straight line memory. Keep plugging away at straight line memory hard enough and you will eventually turn up some dramatizations in a case.

Dramatizations immediately give wording which may be part of circuitry; they give the general temper in the bank. For instance, "Let’s go back to the last time you hit a hammer on your thumb. What did you say? What did you do?"

And the person will go back and say what occurred.

"Well, let’s go over this thing again." This time you get into it a little more closely. Finally he has got a little thumb somatic. Now, don’t bother with that, that’s not an engram. Simply say, "Let’s go to the first time that occurs in the bank." You have got him on an emotional restimulation and he will quite often follow down to the earliest part of the bank and run off somebody who has just hurt himself and erase the engram.

You don’t have to understand psychodrama in all of its ramifications to use it in Dianetics. Take a psychotic. Psychotics will very often dramatize for you on request. You say, "Well, let’s you be Grandma the time she died."

And a psychotic will say, "Da di da da da, okay, I’ll be Grandma." The next thing you know, she starts running off what she thinks is Grandma, and then suddenly she will say something like, "No, that hurts too much, I’ll dramatize something else for you."

And you say, "All right. What do you want to dramatize?"

"Well, I’ll dramatize a collie dog."

"No, let’s dramatize Mama." "Aw, I can’t dramatize Mama, I couldn’t do that."

And you say, "Oh, I bet you you could. I just dare you to. Be Mama at the moment Grandma died."

So, she will go ahead and dramatize Mama. Now, if you can get her to dramatize Mama a few times, and go over the act a few times, she is actually running an engram. It is not imagination, it isn’t something she’s playing, but you have persuaded her to do it because you have said it was play. Soon she will be half seized by emotion, and you can slide her into being the child, once you get the tension off Mama, and she will spill tears.

Psychodrama uses an effort to counterfeit an emotion to reach an emotion. We don’t use that particularly because it hasn’t been investigated as a technique and hasn’t been found necessary at this time.

If you know about engrams you can really play psychodrama to the full, because you know what it is supposed to do, why the patient is running that particular engram; you know the holders, you know the call- backs, you start spotting them, and getting him out of these shifts. You start to get him to repeat the holders, repeat the call- backs and take the tension off it.

Every once in a while in Dianetics you will shoot an engram full of holes and get the holders and so forth out of it on a psychotic. The person may have been raving mad for three years, then suddenly come up to present time and talk to you quite lucidly, and that really takes people aback. Unfortunately it doesn’t happen that suddenly or that often. I’m trying to find some way to make it happen every time, because it’s really a startler. The person is raving mad, you take the tension off the engram, and up he or she comes.

I hope this increases your understanding of circuitry, how valences add up and how circuits affect valences.

A circuit is different from a valence in that a circuit is in one place, and a valence is in another. That isn’t the only reason they are different; a circuit actually carves off a piece of the analyzer and uses it for computing, whereas a valence is a carbon copy of the individual down to the brand of cigarettes he smokes.

On circuitry, a person can have a circuit which is installed on a two basis. This is an engram with the valences of "I" and one other person.

This can be seen in people who say, "Don’t do as I do, do as I say." Take someone who has this command from Mama when he was a little child, "Now you’ve got to pick up your shoes and you’ve got to be tidy, and if you don’t, I’m going to spank you."

"I" gets back on the track in his own valence and he gets toward this thing and he gets sore about it, and if anybody tells him about it, he won’t do it. Ordinarily, drifting along in life, he leaves his shoes on the floor and he is untidy. Try to coax him out of it and he will get more untidy.

Very often you are persuading a person against a negation. He is negating against this circuit. He is not accepting it at all. He doesn’t want anything to do with this circuit. So anything this circuit tells him to do is liable to cause him to do something else to make it worse.

Now, this "I" grows up and becomes Papa, and what do we find? We find Papa’s clothes all over the house, the necktie over here and the shoes over there and Papa raising the dickens with his little boy because he is not tidy.

It has been inexplicable to a lot of people how people could do one thing and say another so often. One will find people who are moral cesspools, walking around giving lectures on the subject of how people have to be moral.

A circuit is saying, "You’ve got to be moral." "I" says, "I’m not going to be moral." But when this person slides into this valence, he dramatizes "Everybody’s got to be moral," so when he sees immorality, instantly he has got to preach against it.

This is a setup that you find most often in people who get in lots of arguments. There is a negation of "I" against a circuit. It is in an engram and it can restimulate.

So, "Don’t do as I do, do as I say" is an observation in the society, laid in with "You’ve got to pick up your shoes and be tidy, you little brat." Whack, whack, whack. "You’ve got to pick up your shoes and be tidy. Now you be neat around the house, you understand?"

And all the little boy can think of is to try to get away from that switch. He isn’t being convinced. Any time you get a child completely convinced, you have got a child that is defeated, and he is no good like that.

The saving grace of mankind is that he is a battling animal.

So, somebody comes along and starts harping on how he should be tidy, or mentions the fact that he should be tidy, of course it restimulates the earlier engram. This also accounts for childhood tantrums. You will see grown people going into childhood tantrums. How they malign childhood. Where did they get that tantrum from? They got it from grownups in the prenatal bank. Tantrums are not native to childhood.

Occasionally a person can have a flock of commands with some loopy circuits, such as, "I only believe what I hear myself say," and you will get someone whose every phrase thereafter becomes a lock on the engram.

That is particularly interesting when you are running line charge off a person who has this kind of a mechanism. Somebody who has had his case pretty well released and is starting to blow off the superficial computations that had him held down and aberrated him will start to laugh. It is not a hysterical or hebephrenic laugh, it’s a good hearty roar. I have seen someone do this for 48 hours; 24 is not uncommon, 7 or 8 is very ordinary.

Don’t be frightened if you see somebody doing this because they are just getting off a tone 4 line charge.

It is a type of a reversal of material that has been aberrative before, and it just starts knocking out charge all the way up the line. A case one time had a phrase "Seeing is believing," so that up and down the bank he would get this line charge off things he saw in the bank. He actually had to practically look at his whole life over again. It was all a lock on the engram.

I want to tell you something about how you get a person into an engram without ever telling him he is in the engram.

Example: Newspaper reporter sitting at lunch with me. He says, "Well, what’s all this about reverie, and what’s this about this and that and so on?"

I say, "Well, it’s very simple."

"How do you get a person in reverie anyhow?"

"Well, it’s not very hard."

"Oh, how do you do it?"

He has been giving me a bad time, so I say, "Now, for instance, have you had any dentistry done to you?"

"Oh yes, yes, uh— no!" he says, "No, I never had any dentistry."

"Well now, think it over. You can remember a time when you had some dentistry done. Surely you’ve had some dentistry done."

"Oh, yes, about 15 years ago. Yes, I had some dentistry."

"Well now, you remember how the office was set up there?"

"Yes."

"Who was working on you?"

"A dentist."

"Tall guy, short guy?"

"Short."

"Was there an anesthetist there?"

"Yah."

"How did she look?"

"White dress and so on."

"Was she a blonde or brunette?"

"Oh, brunette."

"Now, what did they do when you walked in? Did you sit down in a chair?"

"Oh, sure. Awful, hot, sticky chair." (Volunteered information, he’s into the engram.)

"Now, what did they do with the mask? Did they put it on your face?" "Yes. "

"And what did they tell you to do?"

"Well...."

"All right," I said, "time shift back five minutes and come up to present time." I didn’t want to get him to have a tooth out in the middle of a restaurant! However, we got him on another one a short time later. (This only applies to reporters, by the way.)

But, if the newspapers of the country continue to go around reporting everybody’s engrams, Dianetics will get some wonderful hot spots. Let’s just hope they hit a few manics in the sorting out.

In the example of the dental operation, you can trace through what was happening there. I just kept calling his attention to elements in the scene, introducing a new element which I knew must be there. If one has a dentist’s office, there must be an office there. There’s a chair there, there is a dentist there, there’s an anesthetist there, there are desks there. There may be phones there. It may be upstairs and it may be downstairs, and you get him to explain this.

Sometimes you can make someone argue himself straight into an engram by just disagreeing with his data, and naming odd things that really aren’t in the scene, and he will start to get annoyed and just to prove it to you, he will ease in on it. He says, "And then, of course, the only girl I knew there was Mary."

And you say, "Well, you didn’t like her."

He will say, "I liked her! She was a nice girl."

"But not pretty though."

"She was pretty. She was very pretty. Very nice."

"Well now, what made you think she was so nice?"

"Oh, she was pretty, and I remember very well she said to me...." You may never have been able to touch this case before, but you have just argued this person into being there so he can prove it to you. That is one method of going about it but that isn’t adroit.

I have argued or sympathized lots of people into engrams, or just explained them into an engram. I have had a pilot, for instance, explain to me in some detail just how an airplane crashed, and just what folded up.

I have pretended not to get these things clear. It is a very good trick for an auditor to pretend that he didn’t hear or didn’t understand, because it makes the patient repeat the thing again. You say, "What was that?"

And he says, "Oh, she was a blonde."

"Okay, and what did she say?"

"Well, she said, ‘I love you." ’

"I beg your pardon?"

"‘ I love you, ’ she said, ‘I love you." ’

You have fed him repeater technique although he doesn’t realize it. You can go on talking with a person like this adroitly, and you can pull him right square into an engram which can then be run out.

The pilot crashing the plane would never go near this airplane crash. So, in therapy, I made him explain to me why he wouldn’t, although he was sitting wide open on it. I asked him, "And why won’t you?"

"Well, it’s too horrible."

"What’s so horrible about it?"

"I don’t know. The plane starts coming down, the next thing you know, why, the ground starts coming up at you."

"Can’t you get out in a parachute?" "No, it’s stuck." Now he is getting a little bit grim about the whole thing.

So, you can get him right on down the line. And if you can get him into the accident once, then a second time, a third time, a fourth time, a fifth time, you have gotten him to run an incident which may have been very painfully emotional to him.

The somatic strip and the file clerk won’t go near painful emotion by command if the painful emotion is really deep and aberrative.

Let us take the example of a cathode- ray tube as an analogy. It is scanning back and forth like a television tube. There is a spot of charge on the front of this cathode- ray tube, so now the thing starts sweeping, but avoiding that spot. It is missing a memory, there is a warp in the scanning.

You try to scan the somatic strip through and it is just as though it’s going through and it’s hitting this spot and doing a bounce.

In the other areas it is sweeping normally. Now, as many times as you can actually bring the somatic strip through the incident you can get a little bit closer to this spot, until Snally you go right straight through it and you will get the incident. A person may be some distance off from the incident at first and getting exteriorized views of it. He can be in somebody else’s valence or he can be in a synthetic valence. He can have some sort of command that makes him set up valences for himself, but not be in a particular valence. Many actors are in that situation.

The way you handle that is as follows: Let us say the person gets a visio of himself crying. Now, if it’s going to close at all, if it isn’t also computationally shut off and shut off with a valence shift, you run him through it the next time and he’s a little closer in on it. He is not so far outside himself, and finally he will go into it and through it.

But asking him bluntly to go through it if he has circuitry is often fruitless. If he is telling you, "Well, it’s my grandfather and my grandfather died," and he starts to weep, know that there is charge on this.

Then you say, "Well now, close your eyes, let’s go back to the moment when your grandfather died."

And he runs it off, "Well, I get this letter which says, ‘Your grandfather’s dead." ’

"Go over it again."

"I get this letter that my grandfather’s dead. Yes, I get this letter and my grandfather’s dead." Then he adds carelessly, "I’m right there."

From his tone, you know he is no longer in the incident.

You didn’t sneak up on him. You have made it mechanical. You are expecting him to cry. This, because of computations in the engram bank, now becomes impossible. You have made him self- conscious of the artificiality of the situation.

At the moment when you first started talking about his grandfather, the situation was very real to him. Now you are enforcing it upon him that he is going to recall this in reverie. You have to take the artificiality out of it, and if you can do that you will have enhanced the reality a great deal.

For instance, he starts to tell you, "My grandfather died."

You can say, "Yes, my grandfather died too. I know how it is. Where were you when he died?"

"I was in school, and they had me come home."

"I bet it was an awful shock to you."

"Yes, it was a hard time."

"How did they tell you?"

"Well, they gave me a bad shock. I got it by wire, and it simply said that my grandfather was dead. Boo- hoo- hoo." You haven’t interrupted the reality of it but you have just stressed a little point.

Now, by talking to the patient, being clever about it, you get up to the point finally where you can coax him. This is skill. It is an art that you should master because you are going to have a lot of opportunity to use this.

A good professional auditor recently couldn’t seem to get the knack of coaxing somebody into an incident. He had to do it mechanically all the time, and he considered this a serious flaw in his technique, which it was.

There are incidents which depend for their reality upon a real approach instead of an artificial approach through therapy on the discharge line.

So, master this art, and when the preclear says, "Yes, my grandfather died," say something to the effect, "Well, who told you about it?"

"My mother told me."

He’s right there, wide awake, and he is in diagnosis. He is in straight line memory as far as he is concerned. But, start talking to him now on the basis of, "Did they send you a telegram, or something?"

"Yes, a telegram."

"Well, what did it say?"

"It said, ‘Your grandfather’s dead." ’

"And what did you do? Stand there reading it?"

"Yes."

"Oh, what did it say?"

"Your grandfather’s dead. Come home at once."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Your grandfather’s dead. Come home at once."

"Where were you when you received the telegram?"

Each time he has to look up and check where he is. He has to keep paying attention to the incident and keep giving you information. The more he pays attention to the surroundings of this incident, the more thoroughly he is returned to it.

Sometimes you will break the mood by guessing wrong if the patient is going in for painful emotion.

If you think it is wrong, then don’t guess. If you have decided that he probably received this news when he was at school, when he actually received it at home, the fact that you don’t agree with him seems to indicate to him that you are in disagreement with the whole incident because you are bringing him down to something where he is doing a lot of identified thinking. His analyzer is shut off, if you have really got him on top of something, so a disagreement about anything is serious. If you say, "Oh, your mother told you?" he may say, "No, it was my sister."

You want to know, "Who told you, was it your mother or your sister?"

"Oh, it was my sister."

If you had bluntly suggested to him that it was his sister he might take umbrage at you. Sometimes you will be quite amazed at the slash you get back from a patient when you guess wrong while he is going in toward painful emotion. He is irritated with you for being so unsympathetic. In actuality, you are merely trying to get more data.

So, it is better to be very doubtful about your own data, as though you didn’t quite know, as though you wanted to be informed. Don’t take it to the point where you are evaluating the situation for him. You are asking to be informed because you want to know. And when you do that, you will get the patient back into an incident and he will run it and discharge it very often when you have missed before.

The second stage of this technique is that you talk first in the past tense and then slide out of using tenses for a moment or two and then start talking in the present tense, and you have brought him down to a point where he is talking about it as though it is actually happening.

I have also had people who always recounted painful emotion in the past tense when they were right on the scene crying bitter tears about it. And it is pretty hard to get them to break the habit. This is peculiar to people who have been in psychoanalysis.

But one would antagonize a person by continually trying to change his mind about it. I try to coax the person to talk in the present tense by saying, "What is she saying, what is she doing?"

Sometimes you get from a preclear, "But I’m not really there, you know."

To which the reply is, "I know. Well, what is she saying?" and it will break through.

Although you play it by feel, there is a technique of trying to make a person build up the scenery so that he can tell you about it, getting him into it, talking to him in the past tense at first, then sliding over and talking to him in the present tense. And if he is tracking along with you he will start talking in the present tense, and he will go right on through the incident and get off the painful emotional charge.

It is extremely profitable to take a person back to a moment when he was afraid, and get him to run through that moment. It’s his own dramatization of the fear. And then just tell him to go to the earliest moment when he felt like that. Often enough he will go into the prenatal bank where Mama is saying, "I’m so afraid, I’m so frightened I don’t know what to do about it, I can’t get rid of it, I can’t keep it, I don’t know what I’m going to do with it."

If you get a person to go over a dramatization very many times, you are actually using repeater technique and the person will slide right straight back into the engram itself although he still thinks he is recounting a lock, because the lock lies right with the engram.

If someone starts recounting what Jones said when he was auditing Jones, know that this very thing is what is troubling him. You can say, "Now, where is your own engram on the subject?" and it will be lying right there. You will have him running through his own engram and sometimes it is that engram which is very necessary to resolve the case.