DIAGNOSIS DATAA lecture given on 24 July 1950Using the Dramatization as a Key In view of the fact that the preclear will be answering to a large degree on hearsay evidence, the data which he gives the auditor is a long way from the final word. I have run a case that responded somewhat in this order: "Did your father beat you?" "Oh, yes. I was beaten all the time." "Now, let’s remember one specific beating." "Oh, I can remember lots of them, I’m sure." "Just remember one specific one." The preclear gave it a lot of thought, but no specific beating turned up. And a check of the case finally, as it was brought in toward release, demonstrated that exactly no beatings ever took place. A lot of threats of beatings took place and the threat added up to the fact as far as the child was concerned. On the other hand, one can go through the same routine, with a person saying, "Lots of beatings, lots of beatings," but he can’t remember one. You go halfway through the case and you at length become convinced that this person was not punished by his father. Then you suddenly crack a large beating of Mama by Papa in the prenatal area which was occluding the whole chain. And suddenly there leap into view 150 engrams of punishment by Papa. It can also happen in reverse, "No, my father never laid a hand on me, he never touched me. He was a sweet man, he was always good to me." And we get back into the case, we get to thrash around in it for a while and suddenly discover that Papa made a nightly habit of beating the tar out of this preclear Then, of course, we have the case which says, "Papa never laid a hand on me, he was very nice and sweet to me." And Papa was. What this means is that at the beginning of the case when you are just asking for information and before you have gotten the person’s straightwire recall in good working order, don’t trust the information too much. If he has told you that Mama says that it was a very bad birth and so forth, although he may have talked in terms of fire, there is at least a little smoke. Conversely, she might have talked in terms of smoke but in reality there was a blazing conflagration. Mama’s evidence is never very good, and neither is Papa’s. After all, you are listening to evidence which itself is given by a person who is to a large degree occluded and aberrated. You run into it in case after case. You work people where the individual tries to get his evidence validated. He says to his father, "Papa, did we do so- and- so?" And Papa says, "No, that was when you were 2 years of age." The first couple of times I heard this I was rather inclined to trust the parents. However, I got a couple of mothers in therapy whose grown children I was treating. And the check back from one to the other showed some astonishing holes in the mother’s memories. I got a reaction somewhat on this order: I picked up an actual engram out of the child, and then I placed Mama in reverie, and just reached back into the notebook and said, "Well, now let’s go over the phrase so- and- so and so- and- so," trying to get her into the lock, and then into her own engram on this subject. But all of this was very occluded. People are apt to remember complimentary things about their own conduct on behalf of their children, and rather prone to forget the other things they have done to their children. The child, unfortunately, has a tendency to remember the unpleasant things, so it is an unbalanced picture both ways. Parents are very seldom demons and ogres. They are also very seldom equipped with an excellent, clear recall on everything that happens. Life has a habit of being rather tough on people occasionally, and parents go through many vicissitudes. This is peculiarly true of early married life where things are economically unstable and unsettled, and where their own parents may not yet have fully consented to the state of things, or are actively trying to disrupt them. You are likely to get a different aspect of life entirely around the childhood of your preclear than there is around his adulthood as regards his parents. There may even be two or three periods of wide change in the patient’s life. The prenatal bank may add up to and close off a certain period of quarrels and activities on the part of the parents that don’t thereafter reappear. It is very interesting to note that a woman who is pregnant has a tendency to dramatize her own prenatals if she is in her mother’s valence. You will sometimes discover that in the first pregnancy on the part of a woman she gets along fine, no trouble whatsoever, no morning sickness, it all carries along very beautifully, nice birth, the child is very happy, and everything’s fine. Child number two, all of a sudden Mama has done a shift in valence through this period. Something has happened to unsettle her. She goes through the second birth with terrific morning sickness, all kinds of upset, she is quarrelsome, ornery, mean. What could have happened is that Mama could have gone all the way through life without any of this being keyed in. And at the time she gave birth to the first child something happened in her own delivery engram which keyed in her own line. Thereafter she is a changed person. She has got a whole array of engrams keyed in that were not there before. Perhaps her own birth engram keys in and on a dwindling spiral the rest of it keys in. This follows a general law that when an engram is keyed in it can thereafter restimulate and in the process of restimulating lower the general tone of the individual. The next step, because of that lowered tone, is to receive restimulation or key- in of a second engram, which of course lowers the tone of the individual slightly more. This makes it more possible to key in engrams, so we get a third keyed in, which lowers the tone again, and then a fourth, fifth, and sixth key in, and then all the engrams from ten to a hundred and fifty severe ones key in with their chains and locks and engramic locks. This is the old dwindling spiral at work, and down we go to tone zero. Because of the natural resilience of life, most people settle down in about the second to third band. Band zero is apathy. Next up the line is anger, starting in with the person barely able to show any resentment, which is called covert hostility. The person comes up finally, crosses over the line from being angry into the line of merely being bored. A person who starts out way up above the line in childhood can gradually shift these things and start down the line. When he is down at the bottom, because of the logarithmic deterioration curve, he is pretty hard to pick up, but the reverse process is to try to pick him back on up again, and if you release quite a few attention units you will do so. It is always possible that a change may take place in the life of the preclear’s parents. For instance, Papa is getting along just fine early in the child’s life, with no business reverses, everything going along smoothly. But when the child is 5 years of age, Papa loses his position and an investment simultaneously. After that it gets a little bit tougher. Or, we may find Papa in the late bank as a sour old grouch dramatizing, being mean and ornery, but when we go back into the early period prior to 5 years of age, we find him a very nice guy. And the reverse can happen. An engram could be keyed out by some tremendous personal triumph, causing a resurgence in life. Or we may find Papa as a young man who is shaky financially, he has gotten married and he doesn’t like it. Up to that time he has been free as a bird, but suddenly he is burdened with all the cares of the world, and most apt at that moment to go into his own father’s valence. It doesn’t mean that he will. He may go into his mother’s valence. The manifestations then of the human being from period to period during his life are not constant, but the dramatization of engrams is a constant. If Mama dramatizes an engram during the prenatal period, some part of that engram will display itself postnatally. It is true that she may dramatize one half of it prenatally and the other half postnatally, but she is dramatizing the engram more or less. She is dramatizing Mama’s half of it when she is pregnant and then she goes over into Papa’s valence and dramatizes his half of it after she is a mother. Shifts of valence account for changes in dramatization. But if an aberree will dramatize something once, you can count on it being dramatized again. The general tone of an individual may be high or low, but the dramatizations are constant. In the good periods, the person will dramatize slightly and in the bad periods he dramatizes a great deal. And on a descending spiral there will most likely be a rage dramatization. But if these dramatizations are broken, if people will not permit him to dramatize, he then starts to drop into the apathy bracket. He will still dramatize, but in a very much milder tone, usually with another valence. So, it is the same set of engrams at work, but with different valences being dramatized in different intensities. The great bulk of patients will be found in the apathy band. Close to zero is insanity. That is the catatonic schizophrenic, the person with fear paralysis. Near this range is the person who looks out of the corner of his eye with his lip curled as if he would like to tear one’s guts out, meanwhile being so "nice," even servile. He is extremely dangerous because he can’t dramatize directly, so he dramatizes circuitously. And as long as one is talking to this person, he is completely unable to dramatize it all the way because the presence of another human being has maybe tended to lower his tone. His tone will come up just a little bit when he is off by himself, and he will think, "How do I get even with him?" although he is not quite sure why he has to get even, but perhaps some fancied statement gives him an idea there is something wrong. This is the phenomena of covert hostility. It is easily broken as an engram, but it’s broken on the tone scale. That covers the subject of tone and its importance as a prelude to diagnosis. It would be very nice, when you found the patient down around tone zero, still able to communicate, if you had a method of bringing up his tone rapidly so that he was easier to work. The principal way of doing this is by deintensifying locks. What an aberree does once he may continue to do in the way of dramatizations. An engram early on the time track will gather locks. The key- in may happen from the time he is zero years of age, and stay keyed in right on up to the time he is 70. Or the engram may slumber for many years with no restimulation. Then one fine day he hits a situation which is similar. Of course, he already has engrams in restimulation, so he is already slightly analytically reduced. On that day he may be tired, although he doesn’t have to be if the circumstances are very sharp and very similar. But if he is very tired and they are only vaguely similar, the engram will key in. For instance, let’s say there is a lock when the preclear was 12 years of age and his grandfather suddenly walked in and kicked him out of the house. His grandfather had, much earlier, told his mother that if she didn’t straighten up and mind herself as a good wife, he would see to it that she got kicked out. His grandfather’s standard dramatization was "I’m going to kick you out of the house." Going back through this person’s life, the auditor says, "Now let’s see, did you like your grandfather?" "No, I hated my grandfather." The auditor then finds out that his grandfather took great care of him. Furthermore he finds this person manifesting certain tokens of his grandfather, such as wearing a hat in the house, or using a certain vocabulary. The auditor knows that when the preclear is using someone’s tokens he is obviously in that person’s valence. He could most easily go into an ally valence, and yet here we have an engram restimulated somehow. This engram is liable to be out of sight unless some pressure is used to get ahold of it. The 12 year old incident is merely a lock. But he will attribute all of his woes to that moment. The lock contains no physical pain. (An engramic lock contains physical pain and unconsciousness on its own behalf but is so similar to one earlier that it is just part of a long chain and in order to get at any part of that chain one would have to get the first engram in the chain.) This, according to him, was when everything went wrong. There are attention units on it. The auditor wants to release attention units. The more attention units he releases on the case the easier it is going to work. He can well afford to spend quite a bit of time releasing attention units on a case which is down in the apathy range. By close questioning we discover this incident in straight line memory. We don’t go back and run it out, we force him to remember it, and at the moment the preclear remembers it, it keys out. It doesn’t kick out very thoroughly, but it kicks out enough to release attention units out of it so that the person stops worrying about it. And the most astonishing changes will take place in people just by keying out a lock. Therefore, diagnosis has some very important aspects. The first part of diagnosis consists of filling out the diagnosis sheet. That’s for the auditor’s record, but it also gets the person thinking about his own life when he answers the questions on this sheet. He has to think about himself. The auditor’s next step— if he is using straight line diagnosis— is to find out whether or not the person is in his own valence, what circuitry he has, who invalidated his information, and to rehabilitate his reality. All of these things can be done on diagnosis. If I am tackling a new patient, I generally run some straight line diagnosis on him just to find out what I am working with. But you don’t have to. You can put him down on the couch immediately and start going in for engrams. Your time is sometimes saved by doing this. But make that initial test and you may find yourself with a pianola case on your hands— it plays itself; the somatic strip is very obedient, the file clerk gives exactly what you want, you are getting engrams and you can discharge grief off the case. The case is working rapidly and well. So, just as a matter of saving time, you can do this to a patient, but the number of patients who will do this at first glance are not many— certainly not more than 30 percent. If you want to make that test, you will save time. If you discover anything wrong with that case, what I’m telling you here is of vast importance to you. I am entering here upon the field of diagnosis, valences, circuitry. The preclear’s recognition of the exact mechanics is not important. You can work people who are quite ignorant of any of the mechanics of life, much less the mechanics of Dianetics, who know nothing about identification, differentiation, semantics. If we just pick some boy up in the backwoods who barely knows how to read and start shooting these things at him, we will get exactly the same reaction. I was quite pleased with our results in Savannah, picking up people there who were carried through on what the South considered an adequate education for a Negro. By the time he got through a Negro high school he was about as well educated as a third grader! And they wondered sometimes why they were a little bit backward. If they had paid attention to that educational quota they would have seen that country advance. But these people were not responding on an educated basis at all. I would try to explain to them, sometimes without calling it Dianetics, how the mechanism worked. "Yes, yes," they would reply very politely, "you’re an awful smart man, Mr. Hubbard. Yes, sir. Yes, doctor." "I’m not a doctor." "Yes, doctor." That was the sort of reaction I received. And yet I would ask them to give me flash answers, and I would take them down the track, breaking a couple of locks, and getting these blow- offs and smiles, with the person feeling very cheerful and happy about it. And I would ask them, "What are you laughing about, why are you so cheerful?" "I don’t know, doctor. It just seemed funny. Ain’t it supposed to be funny?" And yet when they got to thinking over it, they were laughing about their mother’s death or something. In other words, the technique was working on them. You may have somebody who lucklessly was born of one set of parents and was from that moment forward raised by another. Where these things get restimulated, when they do, you have a very tangled situation. Your straight line isn’t going to do you a bit of good. Now let’s suppose that the person’s foster parents never told him that he was an adopted child. Let’s suppose that he was adopted from a family who spoke a foreign language which he has never heard since. The chances of this person having sonic turn on are excellent, and you depend on that for your one saving grace. He runs off strange syllables throughout the case, and this case will progress rather rapidly. But, supposing his foster parents were not particularly good to him and managed to get everything into restimulation one way or the other; they bullied him, punished him, twisted him around and gave him a fine sonic shut- off. Now we are trying to run a case that we don’t even know is solid Slovenian all the way through the prenatal area. That is a very interesting case. I have had one, and I don’t want to fight through another one. His foster mother was so terrifically aberrated that every time the child became a little ill— the child had had a very abused prenatal life with his own parents— Mother would hang over him telling him the most engramic things imaginable. She would wait until the baby’s temperature went up to about 103 and then say, "Oh, he’s going to die, I just know he’s going to die, I feel it in my bones. He’s going to die." This person had a lot of trouble with his bones. Mother would cry and plead and fling herself dramatically on the bed and so on. None of this early data compared with the prenatal data but it was severe enough in itself to cause engrams. So I had to work this case just as though he had two separate time tracks. Fortunately, most bilinguals know that they are bilingual and in such a way it’s not so difficult. Now, let us say that Grandma lived up to the eighth month of the child’s gestation. And she is solid in the bank from the basic area right on up. Maybe she hated Papa, and all through the bank she’s busy saying, "Oh, he’s just like his father. He’s just like his father. I detested him." Then around the eighth month, she steps off a streetcar backwards, or has a heart attack or a stroke and dies. Now we have got a big grief charge at that moment. The person has been around constantly, but the preclear has never set eyes on her, and that is the source of the valence shift. We can’t reach this valence shift on straight line memory. The preclear says, "I don’t know of anybody who said, ‘You’re just like your father. ’ Nobody said it, throughout the whole bank." This becomes a mysterious case. However, when you get down into it and start running these engrams off, you find out that here was an ally of the child’s that died. Let’s say she was always telling Mama to be careful of herself and not bump into things and not fall off things and eat just so and, "You have to be careful of the baby," and so on. So we have got an ally all the way down the bank, and that can be a massive case that won’t solve very easily. That is sometimes saved by the fact that Mama dramatizes Grandma’s engrams and we sometimes find the dramatization in Mama’s mouth. Mama, after Grandma died, was more or less in Grandma’s valence solidly and is dramatizing very heavily things that Grandma said, although up to that time she was perhaps in Grandpa’s valence. These are some of the traps that are laid for you. All is not sweetness and light on diagnosis, and this is one of the reasons why this technique only works a certain percentage of the time. The optimum working of a case would be this: "Close your eyes. The file clerk will now give us the engram necessary to resolve the case. The somatic strip will go to the beginning of the engram. When I count from one to five and snap my fingers the first word of the engram will appear in your mind. One- two- three- four- five (snap 1) . " He says, "I can’t tell." "I can’t tell" is repeated over and over. He gets solidly into the engram and then in running the rest of the engram off it reduces. One must just keep it rolling, and tell him, "Now let’s go to your grandfather’s death." And he says, "Okay, somebody’s giving me the news. I don’t know where I am at the present moment." "Well, which room are you in?" "Oh, I’m not in a room, I’m in the office." "What part of the office are you in?" "I’m standing by the water cooler, somebody calls me to the phone, and they say, ‘Your grandfather’s dead."‘ Maybe we have a little trouble there for a moment, but then if we can’t get the grief off right away we go back early when Grandpa was being very nice, when he was playing with him, amusing him, and so on. He gets very interested in Grandpa and then all of a sudden we bring him straight into the death again and we get a grief discharge. That is the standard technique. When you get a grief discharge off the case you can again run engrams out of it, and it will run right on through to clear, unless somebody invalidates his data or beats him over the head or does something with him to upset him. If, however, the case doesn’t do this, you start asking him questions and blowing out locks. You are simultaneously accomplishing the freeing of attention units and picking up data out of the dramatizations of the people around him, and out of his own dramatizations which of course will be the wording of the engrams he has in him. You are picking up the reasons why he is out of valence, and you will know all these reasons, and then by picking up those exact words you can with repeater technique now take him back down the line or just send him down the line to the moments these engrams were implanted in him, in the earliest part of the bank. By repeating them down, you get maybe an engram here and an engram there which won’t reduce. Every time you get one that won’t reduce, you take him earlier on the same line until you finally get the line where it will reduce. And then you reduce the whole engram in which you find it. It is very simple. But a person has to be on the qui vive with this. He operates on the general law that that thing which a person thinks about himself which is derogatory or suppressive in any way is something which has been said to him and which is contained in nis engram bank. He also goes on the knowledge that by remembering a specific incident when this happened, which will be a lock on the engram, he can free for the preclear’s use attention units now contained in that lock. That is the whole theory behind this. Here is an example: A gentleman called me from Mississippi. He had been detained in a hospital because he had tried to commit suicide. They had picked him up and pumped out his stomach, and he had thought it over for a while. But he said, "I tried to commit suicide. I’m very worried about myself and you must do something to help me. I’ve read your book, but I can’t get anybody around here to believe me. Nobody here will audit me or even try. I’m desperate, now what can you do for me, please?" He was scared. Here was a person who was about twelve hundred miles away with no auditor anywhere in sight. This is a moment when you use the 15- minute technique by phone! And you fix him up so that he won’t blow his brains out or do something else to himself. You free enough attention units, and take enough tension off his grief so it won’t spin on him. This is the way I did it. I said, "What has happened to you recently?" "My wife left me about a month ago. We have a little daughter, 2 years of age. Honestly, it’s the child I’m worried about." "Anybody in your family ever separated?" "No." "Anybody in your family ever commit suicide, or try to commit suicide?" "No." "Were your parents separated?" "No, never were." "How long is it since you’ve been married?"— taking his mind off it for a moment. "Four years, something like that." "All right, how many times did your parents separate?" "Twice. " (There is this jog of his memory. He actually couldn’t remember it the first time, but if you can take him off the subject, the subject pops back in again.) So I continued, "All right. How old were you when the first one occurred?" "Five or six." "Which is it?" "Five or six." "Which is it?" "Five." "Where were you?" "I was just a little boy of 5. I remember sitting in the lawyer’s office." All of a sudden he says, "Yah, I was sitting in the lawyer’s office. I remember my mother very clearly. She said, ‘He’s led me a dog’s life."‘ "What did your wife say to you when she left you a month ago?" "Oh, she said I was a drunkard, a dope addict and so on. My mother had gotten hold of her behind my back and had told her a lot of things about me that weren’t true." Then he started to tell me all his woes, but that doesn’t take any tension off the case. What one wants is to knock out a lock. So, I said, "What did your mother tell your father about himself?" "Heh- heh, dog’s life," and he started to laugh. It was the same scene, but that, of course, didn’t last but a moment. Then I said, "Well now, who worried about the child?" Having staked out the initial data that’s important there, I put him at a certain dramatization when his wife left him by asking him, "Who worried about the child when you were being separated?" "Ha- ha, my father." "What did he say about the child?" "To stay together." "Who said you were like your father?" "We have the same name." "Who said you were like your father?" "Almost everybody." "Well, remember a specific incident when somebody said you were like your father." "Oh, my Aunt Isabel, ha- ha- ha- ha." A little more laughter. Here are attention units surfacing with the person coming up to present time on it. "Well, now is there any similarity between your mother’s and father’s parting and the parting you’ve just gone through?" "Ha- ha- ha, yes." He said, "I crawled on my knees, I begged her not to leave me. I said we shouldn’t think about leaving each other. We don’t have to live together as husband and wife but think about the child, think about the child." "Did you ever see your father do that?" "Ha- ha- ha— yes! Gee! I feel a lot better." He felt a lot better because he had keyed out some of these engrams. He won’t blow out his brains now for two reasons: There was somebody interested in his case, me. But more importantly, he had gotten attention units back, he had gotten the similarity of computation. I gave him as homework to remember every person who had ever said he was like his father, and to remember the moment it happened. So I kept his mind busy. Every time he remembers one of those he will get a chuckle out of it and he will probably go on wondering why he is laughing. The reason he is laughing is because being squeezed over into that valence is practically murder as far as he is concerned. The natural mechanism is to go to the winning valence. But by engrams a person can be crowded into a secondary valence and Papa was the losing valence in this case, a very weak, soft, wishy- washy character. And Mama was very dominant, very piercing and so on. Mama, of course, had ruined his married life on some computation of her own running along in the same line. "Every wife," I guess, "leads a dog’s life at the hands of her husband." The above demonstration was using straight line memory. Going over the words in an engram when you are not on the site of the engram, or going over the locks without remembering them on straight line memory, but just repeating them in present time, will of course result in no more therapy than a replay. It won’t release. But by repeating these words which suddenly turn up as in the engram, a person could actually suck himself down into it, get it into artificial restimulation and then it won’t release. That’s what the trouble is with auto and control circuits. A person thinks he can control himself but he isn’t controlling himself. What he has got in there is the computation of a pseudo- auditor inside his head that says, "You’ve got to do this yourself, you’ve got to control yourself." It isn’t "I." And the person will chase up and down the time track and restimulate himself. But anybody could pick up something he knows that he says chronically, and just start repeating it. One of two things will happen: He will either fortuitously land up in some point that will release, sometimes with a bit of a chuckle, or he will suck himself down into an engram which won’t release. He will get the top one in the bank, his analyzer will flip off and he will stop repeating. He will put that top engram on the chain into restimulation, but he has got to get to the bottom of the chain in order for that engram to release. That is why you have to have an auditor. The only time you want a person to restimulate himself is when you are clearing him, when you are driving your own brains out trying to find the last of his engrams. And here is this preclear feeling beautifully sane. He doesn’t know why he has to have any more therapy, yet the auditor is saying, "Well now, there may still be some engrams. Let’s try." "All right, I’ll try." "Let’s go to this engram. All right. Now let’s run it through. What are you doing?" "I’m sitting here eating a turkey dinner." "Let’s go to an engram!" "I’m having too good a time." "I" has gotten so much in control of himself that people talking to him don’t influence him. He becomes a real altitude problem at that time. This is to show that you can sit in present time and remember the things that have happened to you in spite of the social aberration that unpleasant things are best forgotten. You can set yourself the project of remembering the things that have happened to you on this basis: If you have found yourself thinking something that you didn’t like about yourself, think back to a time when somebody told you that and you will blow the locks. The specific difference is that instead of just thinking generally about how wronged one has been in life, which is simply restimulative, a person sets himself up and says to himself sharply, "Who used to be sorry that they didn’t say something to somebody when they had a chance? Ha- ha, my father." And out goes the dramatization. It is a good mechanism, and if a person can do this, he can start clipping off his own dramatizations. If he can find himself dramatizing, and if he has got enough attention units left to pull himself into a recollection of the dramatization—" Who used to dramatize like that?"— he can do self- therapy. And that is the only way I know that self- therapy can be done. It is not done by repeater technique or by going over engrams one thinks he has himself, which won’t work, because the moment he gets into the engram, that engram contains as part of it unconsciousness, with the net result that he will go unconscious. This is the mechanism: Every time the mind has gone back to try to remember an incident, it gets close to the engram which has this miasma of foggy unconsciousness around it and the attention units blank out. They go right into the engram and the person will take the next two or three days to drift groggily out of it. Anybody who keeps telling you, "I can run this out myself, why don’t you let me run this out myself?" or, "I can handle this myself," has a circuit. And you have gotten the words of the circuit right there, which if you take the person back down the track near the prenatal bank you can track down to the earliest time it is uttered in the case and reduce an engram. Then he won’t have that circuit any longer and the case will work a lot better. The first action on a case is to try to find out whose valence the person is in, because valences are very bad in shutting off cases. Try to find out who said he was like who, by asking, "Did anybody ever say you were like anybody else?" If you draw a blank on it, it was too general. The next question is "What is your chronic psychosomatic?" And if the reply is "Well, I have this dermatitis," ask him, "Who died of cancer?" "I think my grandmother did." "Who used to say you were like your grandmother?" "Nobody. Oh, yes, they did. My mother used to say it. Yes, she used to say I took after my grandmother and that I was just like her." "Let’s remember a specific incident." We have, with this approach to the problem, started knocking out the locks on the valence shift commands and we have started at that moment to knock out dermatitis in the case. So, the first thing you try to get is circuitry or valence shifters, and if you can’t work a person very well on valence shifts, work circuitry, and vice versa. Ask the preclear who used to tell him to control himself. If he comes up with "Nobody," you can say, "Well, who was the most self- controlled person in your family?" "Oh, Grandmother." This means that if Grandma was self- controlled, Grandma had self- control engrams and she would dramatize them. Grandma is an ally. That means her words are very potent, and we have got to find a specific incident when Grandma says, "You’ve got to control yourself." The auditor knows the answers as to how the bank goes together and what it does, so he must ask the leading questions which pry it all apart; he must ask them properly, ask them cleverly and the whole case will fall down like a house of cards right in front of him. He will get the circuitry, he will get the valence shifters and the general condition, thus causing the bank to open up. He can get a person actually remembering right straight back to birth if he really tries. Suppose the person keeps saying, "I can’t remember that. I just can’t remember it." "Who used to tell you that you couldn’t remember it?" "Nobody." "Who had a bad memory in your family?" "My mother. She used to lose things all the time." "Oh, what did she used to say?" "Well, ‘I can’t remember where I put things. I can’t do this, I can’t do that. I can’t remember, ’ and so on." "Let’s remember a specific moment when she was saying it." The person is liable to suddenly come up with something like this: "You can’t remember a damn thing. You’re the awfullest boy alive." This demon circuit was dramatized toward the preclear and as a result he got it full blast as a new demon circuit. Grandpa, let’s say, is a very bombastic character. He is always snorting about the tax situation. He has a dramatization which he will hire as a justification of his right to blow off. (Actually it will be the engram which causes him to blow off.) So he is liable to have uttered it some time down the line, such as, "A man’s got a perfect right to speak his mind. I’ve got a right to say what I please. I’m a free American citizen." That engram you will find in the child. It may have gone in postpartum, or it may have gone in via Mama or Papa. By following the channel of contagion expertly the auditor will recover the engrams and blow out the locks. This requires some cleverness on his part. He has got to be able to add up on the equation: What the aberree does is because he has engrams which make him do it. What the aberree says about himself has been told to him. A man does not believe bad things about himself unless he has been told those bad things. Whatever is wrong with this man has been poked into him and told to him. It is not taken to the extent of finding the burglar, and because he has dramatized the robbing of a bank, deciding that somebody told him he had to rob banks. That would not be what the engram would be. The engram would probably be something like, "You’ve got to take it. You’ve got a perfect right to it. Why should I work all my life for nothing. I have a right to some of the good things of this society. Nobody’s going to stop me. Actually I hate people." I saw a criminal series of engrams once start out on a very innocent line: AAs with 16 statements of "Take that and that and that and that," which became kleptomania. In addition to the demon circuit that told him to take it, he had another set of circuitry that told him he didn’t dare spend any money and some other circuits that told him to steal, but these were milder. It was this AA that brought him right off the couch, after which he stopped kleptomaniacking. So, the problem of circuitry is firstly the problem of diagnosis, to free attention units; and secondly to discover the dramatizations of the people who surrounded the life of the individual, and the dramatizations of the individual himself. The next thing to do after you have discovered and freed some attention units is to run the patient back into a dramatization— a lock. Run it as if it is an engram and you will get the whole content of the engram. This is the only time you start using repeater on a case. I got a letter recently that made my hair stand on end. It said, "Everybody around here has been getting excellent results in Dianetics except my brother and myself. At the beginning of our cases we both thought we had good sonic and good visio. But now we have no sonic or visio in spite of the fact that we have used repeater technique on each other ever since we started, and we still don’t get any engrams." Oh! Some poor auditor has got to take those two poor cases apart, all in 100 percent restimulation! Perhaps if they are left for 10 days, they may settle out. But they won’t settle out to the point where they were before because they have brought engrams into restimulation which were out of sight heretofore. One uses repeater technique when one has something specific that one knows is in the bank. We can get these in very cunning ways. In one case I got ahold of the preclear’s wife and ran his dramatizations out of her! I took them down word for word and by the time I finished I practically had a record of his engram bank. Then I figured out what the dramatizations would be and started shooting holes in his case, and that case gave up the ghost fast. It couldn’t help it. Before that, he could not be forced into repeating anybody’s dramatizations because one of his key dramatizations was "I don’t dare tell anybody, they would be so ashamed of me and you’ve got to keep quiet too." He would tell this to his wife at the least provocation. But he had married her when she was 21. The person who had that dramatization around him had handed it to him when he was in the first month of gestation. As a consequence, it wasn’t aberrative enough with his wife to make an occlusion, but it had been aberrative enough with him to make a complete occlusion. In another case, a husband and wife team had started misapplying the materials on each other and got themselves badly snarled up. I stepped in. They were playing patty- cake (tacit consent), using nothing but repeater technique, and getting halfway into an engram, then deciding it was too cruel on the other one to go through it, so they would draw off it and leave it restimulated. And both of them had secrecy circuits galore. But they had a 3 year old child. And one day the child was out on the porch, so I left the pair of them sitting inside the office and I went out and gave the kid a lollipop, and within 15 minutes I had a nice list of engramic phrases. I asked him, "Do your parents ever fight?" The child looked at me solemnly and said nothing. So I continued, "Well, that’s all right. You can tell me. It isn’t like telling everybody. Okay." His engrams weren’t keyed in enough to really do a block- out on him. So he could tell me about Papa throwing the piano stool at Mama, and a lot of things that probably, socially, would have been better left unsaid, but Dianetically had better be known quickly! The whole secrecy engram was in there. They had spanked him and spanked him and he still kept telling people things. He hadn’t been broken yet. So there are ways to get information on the worst of cases! If they really block you down, start being surreptitious about the whole thing and you will get the data, not necessarily from the horse’s mouth but perhaps from the wife or child. When I can get engrams out of dogs, I will really be able to tell what engrams are in their masters. Dogs accumulate quite a few engrams. In tackling any case, what you do first and foremost is to:
Grief is very important, but point 2 is even more important in the long run. People who say, "Dianetics is wonderful; I haven’t played around with prenatals though," are way offside. They are not going to get any results out of Dianetics. They may key out somebody’s ulcers by simply getting the locks off, but they will have to break hundreds of locks, and when they try to run off these postpartum locks, they have got the same content down in the prenatal Sometimes a person starts to recount a lock four or five times and all of a sudden he starts to get a tough somatic. You say, "How old are you?" And he keeps trying to tell you that he’s 5 years of age but this is not so, he has slid down the bank. He is still trying to keep abreast of this lock, but you have pulled the engram and the lock close together and you are actually running a patient in the underlying engram. The thing to do then is to try to scale on down the line and get the bottom of the chain. This really requires picking and choosing. It is this step of Dianetics, trying to knock these engrams out, that has broken the heart of many an auditor. But it not only can be done, it is relatively easy to do, although it requires persistence, patience and good sense. An element of luck enters in here. You may run into an engram which has its basic further up the track. For instance, basic on the chain was actually Uncle Oscar who sailed into the scene and made his pernicious influence felt at the age of 7 months after conception. He is a vast ally of the child postpartum, and one of his principle statements is "You’ve got to do it yourself if you want to be a man. You’ve got to learn to stand up to life, that’s what." And he has told the child this constantly. Only it’s in the bank prenatally where he was telling it to Papa when Papa was boohooing about a business failure. And after birth people kept saying, "You know, he’s just like his Uncle Oscar. He isn’t like anybody else in the family. He’s mean, just like Uncle Oscar." In searching for basic on this chain, the auditor would be remiss not to have discovered that it was Uncle Oscar he was shooting for. Of course Mama is always in the basic area but it’s not true that Papa is always there. I have found Papa at 3 months just then marrying the girl, and not the father of the child. Perhaps Papa has been away on a trip for four or five months and he was supposed to marry his bride when he came home, and now she’s pregnant. That really complicates things because now we have strangers down in the basic area. We don’t know what their dramatizations were because Mama was old enough at the time they showed up not to receive a very hard transplantation of engrams. So she isn’t dramatizing in the basic area and we have got a lost set of engrams down there. In that way, by using other mechanisms such as running a fight, where the person himself was fighting, you pick up the emotion in the patient and see if you can get that turned on. Then skip him down to the first fight you can find in the bank by having him go straight to it. You may turn up with personnel you never suspected were there. An example of doing a diagnosis to get data would be as follows:
By doing this, you have asked the person to remember a specific incident when something happened. Remember that a preclear’s file drawers can be sticky. They haven’t been used for a long time and they get sealed up. This is an interesting datum. For instance, if you examine a student on a subject he has not had for some time on Monday, and then examine him again on Wednesday or Thursday, he will usually get a much better grade on Wednesday or Thursday, because he got the file drawers out. One gets the thing restimulated a little bit and the next time it is easier to reach. This is a very definite mechanism of the mind. So, if your straight memory technique doesn’t work too well on a person today, keep asking him questions, keep hammering at what you want, keep crowding the preclear’s memory down on the standard banks. Don’t be afraid to ask him the same question tomorrow, because tomorrow you may get the answer. If he doesn’t answer tomorrow, ask him the next day and you may get the answer there. If you let a week go by however, the file drawer has gotten stuck all over again, because this works on a three to four day period, maximum. On the fourth day, the file drawer starts to get stuck up again, and on the fifth day is about right back where it was unless the thing has been actively remembered on straight line. Then there is a record of it and it is in sight. You can break the occlusions in a bank with great thoroughness if you keep this up with the patient. One of our auditors was working nothing but straight line memory on a psychotic recently, and this psychotic didn’t remember whether it was raining or Tuesday. Finally, just on straight line technique, after six hours of therapy over a three day period, the preclear was remembering all kinds of things clear on back to his early childhood. On the third day his memory had picked up remarkably. One young lady recovered the moment when she was rocking a cradle weeping, "My child is dead, my cradle is empty, my lap is empty." She was at some town in Pennsylvania in the 17th century! She started to spill painful emotion and her auditor, who had been waiting for a late life incident, shot her right ahead into this lifetime and knocked off a painful emotion incident there and he got it for the first time. It is interesting that one can disturb a patient about his material fairly easily in this lifetime. For instance, he’s running through this scene when his father died. It was all in the newspapers and completely validated and one says, "Well, you know very well your father didn’t die that day." And he thinks it over for a moment and says, "Well, probably he didn’t, I guess I don’t know." Then one takes him back to one of these former deaths and he says, "There I am lying there. And this guy has just put four feet of rapier through me," and so on. If one then said, "Well, you know that isn’t true," the person would say, "Who do you think you’re talking to? What’s the idea?" and he would probably get up off the couch and look at the auditor with the four feet of rapier through him and explain how it was that way. There are all sorts of incidents on the past track. A gentleman recently was having trouble with his leg, and he had to go back to the Revolutionary War to clear up his somatic. Another datum on this is that a person had a double eye somatic all the way through the prenatal bank and had been having trouble with this. His auditor got him back down the track and evidently picked up an incident where he was having his eyes burned out and that handled it. So, don’t argue with people about it. It won’t do you any good. People get much better perceptics back in that period than they get up in the current life. |