6407C30 SHSpec-32 "Psychosomatic" -- Its Meaning in scientology

     Medical treatment lies in what they call "psychic trauma".  Within 24
hours of LRH's setting out a program of helping the medicos, they goofed with
a Saint Hill student (Bill Webster-Johnson).  They gave him the wrong
blood-type during a transfusion and thereby possibly cost him his life.
That's pure damn foolishness!  In the first place, they monkey around when
they get outside their limited proper field.  This caused LRH to take a sharp
look at possible cooperation and made him question it.  Legislatures pass laws
about things that they know nothing about.  "There's nothing in the
Constitution that says you have to be sane to be a citizen, and yet ... if you
are pronounced insane, you are no longer a citizen and have no civil rights
whatsoever."  The right to say who is insane is given to people with no
training in the field of the mind, who think that the mind is the brain.  By
law, they do not have to be trained in anything but medicine, anyway.  There
is no bill or law that says that psychiatrists can practice in the field of
the mind, only that one must be an M.D.  Psychiatrists do not have to be
licensed, and the term, "psychiatrist" has no legal standing.

     To train an animal, you wait for the animal to do something and then say
the command word and reward the animal.  Association, according to Pavlov and
Thompson, is a concatenation of [events], by which one reaches a conclusion.
Freudian psychiatry is not currently practiced.  None of the current
practitioners was trained by Freud, and the original system may have called
for more intelligence on the part of the practitioner than seems to be used
now.  Freud probably used savvy and word-association to cone down on the
problem.  Free association is the lengthy procedure.  For contemporary
Freudians, amassing "enough" data appears to be their system.

But by the time one amasses enough data one is simply confused.  You need a
chance to apply the data.

     Technology is dicey stuff.  The more vias it goes through, the more
errors it becomes subject to.  LRH handles lots of tech queries from students,
instructors, MSH, etc.

     The right to practice depends, ideally, on the ability to do, not on some
state legislator's decisions.  Promoters and lobbyists determine what laws and
appropriations shall be made anyway, in order to get more money for their
department or industry or whatever.  That is why there are periodic attacks on
scientology.  It is being used as an example of "How bad it all is, over
there."

     If you hit someone, mentally or physically, with enough force, duress, or
bad news, you can make him give you something:

     Mass:  A physical blow

     Significance:  Saying how bad it is.

E.g., "Is seepage troubling your loved ones?" This is a mortuary bad news
come-on for expensive caskets.  Blackmail is based on the same principle.  So
is taxation and the draft.  The medical doctor uses this technique in
disease-fighting campaigns that scare people with how bad it is.  Instead of
getting their income from curing people, they use the scare tactic as a large
source of funds.

     If you understand how this law operates, you can usually put together a
good defense or counter-attack.  This scare tactic is also used by patients:
"I'm so bad off, you've got to give me...." With the next bad news artist you
run into, ask him boldfacedly, "What am I expected to give you?" You will stop
him cold in his tracks.  This "completely discombobulates" him.  You apply the
second half of the law that he is operating on (albeit unknowingly) before he
is ready for it.  You complete the cycle unexpectedly.

     You may not get a sensible answer to your question, but you will change
what he is doing his attention.  He may not doing this consciously.  He may
have you misidentified and be dramatizing something.  He surely doesn't expect
your response.

     "If you can make people laugh when they're crying and cry when they're
laughing, then you would know something about the human mind."  This is an
interesting point.  But "knowing the mind doesn't mean manipulating the mind."

     The medical profession means something else by psychosomatic healing than
what you mean by it.  They mean "the mind's influence on the body", but they
consider the mind to be the brain.  So "psychosomatic" means the brain's or
the nervous system's effect on the body.  This is like saying that the
switchboard is the causative element of the phone company.  So "psychosomatic"
has come to mean "the body's effect on the body".  Thus the subject of
psychosomatic illness has disappeared as a meaningful subject.

     The word, "psychosomatic" actually means "psyche -- soul, plus soma --
body", so a proper definition of "psychosomatic" would be "a thetan's
influence on the body".  That is our definition, but not the medicos'.  The
first downgrade was to translate "psyche" as "mind".  The thetan had lost his
identity and had become identified with the masses and machinery of the mind.
The second downgrade was to make "mind" mean "brain and nervous system".  This
makes "psychosomatic" mean about what "the influence of the switchboards and
telephone lines on the government" would mean.  That is what the M.D.'s mean.
Since the brain and nervous system are part of the body, you are just dealing
with the body's influence on the body.  Case has just fallen out of it.

     A better term, then, might be "spiritual healing", or the spirit's
influence on the body.  You can educate or process someone to recognition of
the effect he as a being is having on his

     You could ask him for times in his life when he was ill, following being
upset.  He might comm lag a long time, but getting a few of these out of the
way will improve someone's case.

     We have advanced beyond the tradition of psychosomatic healing because we
recognize three stages of influence:  The thetan (psyche) influencing the mind
(psycho), which then influences the body (soma).  We recognize that the mind
is doing something to the body.  Some retained memory has held a pain or an
experience in place, keeping the body ill or predisposing the body to illness
or injury.  You wouldn't have a somatic (body feeling) of feeling good,
because it would be you that felt good.  Dianetics was at the level of mind
over the body.  But even here, the mind was not totally causative.  We had to
recognize that something was doing something that was not the mind.  We
recognized that the thetan existed and could influence the mind to make it
stop influencing the body for the worse, and that makes us different.  We have
found the thing that the thetan can influence: the mind.  He may not be able
to influence the body directly, but he can influence the mind which, in turn,
is influencing the body.  This is more effective than earlier healing
practices, because asking the thetan to influence the body directly is too
great a gap for him to jump.

     Scientology handles predisposition to illness, and we are the only ones
who can, just as we are the only ones who can handle prolongation of illness.