From: lindsay+@cs.cmu.edu (Donald Lindsay)
Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology
Subject: Re: Dianetics books.
Date: 4 Oct 92 16:17:40 GMT
Organization: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon

-----------------------< hubbard.sources.FAQ >--------------------------

Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science is L. Ron Hubbard's incredible
story of how he discovered the reactive mind and how he developed the
keys to unlock its secrets.
	-- Scientology blurb quoted by jerry@lds-az.loral.com (J Barbera)

Ron, never one to hide his light under a bushel, modestly described
his discoveries as a "milestone for Man comparable to his discovery
of fire and superior to his invention of the wheel".
	-- Russell Miller in Punch, 19feb88 p.46-

The following is the stuff I have about where Hubbard obtained his
"discoveries".
---
Article 1046 of alt.religion.scientology:
From: lippard@uavax0.ccit.arizona.edu (James J. Lippard)
Subject: Origin of Dianetics
Date: 6 Jan 92 04:04:00 GMT

Reprinted with permission from The Arizona Skeptic, vol. 5 
no. 2 (September/October 1991), pp. 1-5.  (Sorry about the poor paragraph
formatting.)

Dianetics: From Out of the Blue?
By Jeff Jacobsen
L. Ron Hubbard, author of the book Dianetics: The Modern 
Science of Mental Health and founder of the Church of 
Scientology, was a science-fiction writer before penning the 
book that would launch his fame.  Dianetics is a self-help 
book published in 1950 which claimed to include new and 
unique theories on how the mind works.  Hubbard claimed that 
this work was totally unprecedented; "Man had no inkling 
whatever of Dianetics.  None.  This was a bolt from the 
blue."1   So there would be no doubt as to the originality of 
his ideas, Hubbard wrote that "dianetics borrowed nothing but 
was first discovered and organized; only after the 
organization was completed and a technique evolved was it 
compared to existing information."2  According to Hubbard, 
some philosophers of the past helped provide the foundation 
of Dianetics, but the remaining research had been done "what 
the navigator calls, 'off the chart.'"3
Dianetics became a New York Times bestseller in 1950, and 
has since sold many millions of copies.
Was this a totally unique theory of the mind wrought from 
Hubbard's "many years of exact research and careful 
testing,"4 or was it a loose composite of already existing 
theories mixed with novel, unproven ideas?  This paper 
proposes to show that, despite Hubbard's claims of 
originality, many of the ideas in Dianetics were already 
existing and even in vogue before Dianetics appeared.  Either 
Hubbard really studied other works before he wrote Dianetics, 
or he wasted years of his time re-inventing the wheel.
Although there are no reference notes in Dianetics to see 
what are Hubbard's ideas and what are borrowed, we can 
quickly eliminate the idea that Dianetics appeared "from the 
blue" by Hubbard's own statements.  In Dianetics itself is 
the statement that "many schools of mental healing from the 
Aesculapian to the modern hypnotist were studied after the 
basic philosophy of dianetics had been postulated."5  Alfred 
Korzybski, Emil Kraepelin, Franz Mesmer, Ivan Pavlov, Herbert 
Spencer, and others are mentioned as resources in Dianetics, 
so we must assume Hubbard was crediting these people to some 
degree.  He must certainly have known, then, of at least some 
of the research from his time which will be mentioned in this 
article.  Hubbard in other settings acknowledged Sigmund 
Freud (especially through Commander "Snake" Thompson),6 Count 
Alfred Korzybski,7 and Aleister Crowley8 as contributors to 
his ideas on the human mind.  In a speech in 1950, Hubbard 
stated that he had spent much time in the Oak Knoll Naval 
Hospital medical library in 1945 during a stay for ulcers, 
where "I was able to get in a year's study."9
In fact, most of the theories and ideas in Dianetics can be 
found in scientific literature previous to the first 
publishing of Hubbard's theories.  Parts of Dianetics, for 
example, have striking resemblance to two articles found in 
Volume 28 (1941) of the Psychoanalytic Review.
Dianetics theory posits the existence of engrams.  These 
are memories of events that occur around us when our 
analytical mind is unconscious, and they are recorded in a 
separate area of the mind called the reactive mind.  A 
seemingly unique theory in Dianetics is that these memories 
begin being stored "in the cells of the zygote--which is to 
say, with conception."10  These engrams can cause problems 
for the person throughout life unless handled through 
Dianetics auditing.
Dr. J. Sadger, nine years before the introduction of 
Dianetics in 1950, wrote that several of his patients were 
not cured of their psychological problems until he had taken 
them back to their existence as sperm or ovum.  He declared 
that "there exists certainly a memory, although an 
unconscious one, of embryonic days, which persists throughout 
life and may continuously determine an action."11  Sadger 
spends much time explaining how his patients' memories of the 
time when they were zygotes or even sperm or ovum had 
affected their adult behaviors, noting that "an unconscious 
lasting memory must have remained from these embryonic 
days."12   There were "unmistakable dreams" of being a sperm 
in the father's testicle.
Engrams, those unconscious memories of Dianetics, are said 
by Hubbard to be stored in the cells of the body and passed 
on to their clone cells and finally on to the adult being.  
Hubbard claimed to discover that "patients sometimes have a 
feeling that they are sperms or ovums... this is called the 
sperm dream."13  It was impossible, he claimed, to deny to a 
pre-clear that he could remember being a sperm.  But Sadger 
wrote about this first, and Hubbard could well have read this 
in his "year's study" at Oak Knoll Hospital.
Another coincidental discovery of Hubbard and Sadger was 
that mothers often attempt to abort their child.  Sadger 
states that "so many a fall or other accident of a pregnant 
woman is nothing else than an attempt at abortion on the part 
of the unconscious, not to mention those cases where the 
mother seeks to free herself more or less forcibly from the 
unwanted child."14   Hubbard concurs; "Attempted abortion is 
very common,"15 and in fact "twenty or thirty abortion 
attempts are not uncommon in the aberee."16  Again, not an 
idea "from the blue."
Life in the womb was not very kind, according to one of 
Sadger's patients:  "Perhaps when father performed coitus 
with mother in her pregnancy I was much shaken and rocked.  
Shall that have been one reason that I so easily became dizzy 
and that all my life I have had an aversion even as a child 
from swings and carousels?"17  Hubbard, in a similar vein, 
insists that the mother "should not have coitus forced upon 
her.  For every coital experience is an engram in the child 
during pregnancy."18  "Papa becomes passionate and baby has 
the sensation of being put into a running washing machine."19
There are at least three other similarities like the "sperm 
dreams", commonality of abortion attempts, and fetus 
discomfort during parental sex.  This seems quite a 
coincidence, but it is not known whether Hubbard read 
Sadger's article.  Suffice it to say that these are major 
ideas in Dianetics, but they are not new ideas.
The second article under discussion from Psychoanalytic 
Review deals with the unbearable conditions during birth and 
the affects of these in later life.  Grace W. Pailthorpe, 
M.D., argued in this 1941 article that patients should be 
psychoanalyzed more deeply into the period of infancy, or at 
least to the 'trauma of birth'.  Otherwise no lasting 
therapeutic effect could be expected.  Birth has traumatized 
all of us, she declares, and these unconscious memories drive 
us in our adulthood.  "It is only when deep analysis has 
finally exposed the unconscious deviations of our vital 
force"20 that we can recover and enjoy life.
In Dianetics, the reader is left with the impression that 
the ideas of birth and pre-birth memories and traumas, 
multiple abortion attempts, and fetal discomfort in the womb 
are new discoveries.  As can be seen, this is not the case.  
And there are many other impressions of "new" and "unique" 
that are incorrect as well.
With Pailthorpe's article, for example, we can also note 
the dramatic similarities of Dianetics with simple Freudian 
psychoanalysis.  There is in both the return to past times in 
the patient's life to search for the source of his or her 
current problems.  Once these problematic memories are 
discovered and treated the problems vanish.  In Pailthorpe's 
article we have a man who was hopelessly traumatized by the 
events at his birth.  He was cruelly kicked out of his "home" 
in the womb, and his resistance to this was assumed to be the 
cause of the immediate traumas of the nurse's and mother's 
attentions (which were "painful to the child's sensitive 
body"21).  These traumas caused headaches and social 
disorders in adult life.  Psychoanalysis discovered the 
causes (birth trauma) and when these were brought to the 
conscious level with their meaning explained, the headaches 
and social dysfunctions were alleviated.
Dianetics follows this line of reasoning to a great degree.  
According to Hubbard, engrams (past traumas) are discovered 
in the pre-clear's past, and bringing these engrams into 
consciousness (from the reactive to the analytic mind) 
alleviates the disorder.  Hubbard claims that after auditing 
people (he had the pre-clear lie on a couch in Freudian 
imitation), "psycho-somatic illness...by dianetic 
technique...has been eradicated entirely in every case."22
A theory in psychoanalysis known as abreaction is so 
similar to Dianetics (and preceding it by many years) that it 
must be mentioned in more detail here.  A 1949 article by 
Nathaniel Thornton, D.Sc., gives a brief overview of 
abreaction and his views on its value.  Abreaction began with 
Freud and was considered early on to be "one of the very 
cornerstones of analytic therapy."23  This is a method of 
freeing a patient "from the deleterious results of certain 
pathogenic affects by bringing these affects back into the 
conscious mind and re-experiencing them in all their original 
force and intensity."24  A patient of one of Freud's 
colleagues, under hypnosis and "with a free expression of 
emotion"25 was freed of all her psycho-somatic symptoms using 
abreactive therapy.  Pierre Janet is credited in the article 
with utilizing abreactive therapy to restore painful memories 
to consciousness and thus relieving a patient's symptoms.  A 
patient being treated with this method must continually work 
through such painful memories until the patient "could accept 
the fact that the original experience no longer loomed up as 
a threat to him."26
Thornton concludes that abreaction is a useful tool simply 
because "confession is good for the soul", and that talking 
to someone about one's problems is almost always therapeutic.
"Auditing" in Dianetics is a virtual clone of abreactive 
therapy.  Auditing basically is searching through a person's 
past until an engram is discovered, then continually 
reexperiencing the event when the engram (painful memory) was 
instilled "until the pre-clear is no longer affected" by the 
memory.27  Hubbard takes abreaction to an extreme and 
declares that once a person has removed all his engrams, then 
Dianetics has done its job and an almost god-like human 
results.  Once again, the similarity of an already existing 
theory on the mind is presented as a great discovery in 
Dianetics.
Alfred Korzybski, mentioned in passing in Dianetics,28 owes 
a debt to Hubbard for making his theories well-known, 
according to some former followers of Dianetics.  Bent 
Corydon, a former Mission holder of Hubbard's Church of 
Scientology, has made a convincing comparison of Dianetics 
and Korzbyski's writings, demonstrating that there is in 
essence little difference between many aspects of the two.29  
In support of this comparison, it should be noted that there 
was a "Korzybski fad"30 sweeping through the science-fiction 
community in the 1940's, of which Hubbard was a member, and 
that Hubbard, as mentioned above, had stated the contribution 
Korzbyski made in his research.
Corydon also mentions the book The Mneme published in 1923 
by Richard Simon, wherein not only the idea of engrams, but 
the very word itself is used.  The word "engram" is listed in 
the Oxford English Dictionary as deriving from Simon's book.
Cybernetics, published in 1948,31 compares the human mind 
to the newly developing technology of computers.  Dianetics 
also tells us to "consider the analytical mind as a computing 
machine."32  Cybernetics speaks of "affective tone" scales,33 
as does Dianetics in a remarkably similar vein.34  
Cybernetics was a very popular work at the time Hubbard was 
writing Dianetics.
We have seen that many of the ideas in Dianetics which were 
claimed to be unique were in fact current in the study of the 
mind at the time of, or just before, the introduction of 
Dianetics.  It is difficult to see whether Hubbard had 
studied some of these works during his "many years of exact 
research,"35 but as mentioned previously he does acknowledge 
other researchers.  At any rate, no book is written in a 
vacuum, so we may conclude from the evidence that Hubbard was 
aware of at least some of this research previous to writing 
his work.  Barring acknowledgment somewhere by Hubbard, or a 
list of articles and works he had read, we can only guess as 
to the others.
It seems safe to conclude that the theories presented in 
Dianetics did not arrive "out of the blue" as claimed, but 
were instead a synthesis of previous, uncredited works.  In 
that case, is there any reason to discount the ideas in 
Dianetics?  There certainly is.  There are outlandish, 
unsubstantiated claims made by Hubbard, including the 
possibility that cancer may be cured by Dianetic 
processing,36 that colds and accidents can be eradicated,37 
IQ improved,38 life extended,39 and total recall enjoyed.40  
None of this is proven in any way other than constant mention 
of previous research.  The problem with this research is that 
there is no tangible evidence of its existence.  Hubbard in a 
lecture stated that "my records are in little notebooks, 
scribbles, in pencil most of them.  Names and addresses are 
lost... there was a chaotic picture...."41  A certain Ms. 
Benton asked Hubbard for his notes to validate his research, 
but when she saw them, "she finally threw up her hands in 
horror and started in on the project [validation of research] 
clean."42  He was putting this into the hands of valid 
researchers "whose word can't be disputed" so Dianetics could 
be legitimized by the scientific professions.
Unfortunately, none of Hubbard's claimed research, nor 
those of his valid researchers can be found today, if they 
ever really existed.  And if the methods and statistical 
results of the supposed research are not available, they 
cannot be checked and duplicated as the scientific method 
calls for.  Anyone can make as many outlandish claims as he 
wants, but the research must be accessible and reproducible 
to support those claims if he brandishes scientific validity.
Dianetics is designed as a how-to manual for 
psychoanalysis.  Anyone who reads the book should be able to 
perform Dianetics auditing and help his fellow man become 
"clear".  "Dianetics is not being released to a profession... 
it is insufficiently complicated to warrant years of study in 
some university."43  It is better to audit someone, said 
Hubbard, regardless of how well, than to not audit at all.
But this seems a bit reckless.  Auditing can produce "tears 
and wailings,"44 and "a patient...that...bounces about, all 
unconscious of the action."45  Regardless of the auditor's 
abilities, and regardless of how traumatic a session becomes 
for the pre-clear, "If an auditor...can sit and whistle while 
Rome burns before him and be prepared to grin about it, then 
he will do an optimum job."46  This sounds more like quackery 
than therapy.
Children often have engrams that are restimulated by their 
parents.  Hubbard states that it may be necessary to remove 
the children from their parents if this is the case, until 
the engrams are processed.47  Here again we have Hubbard 
making an outlandish proposal of splitting families in order 
to produce healthier people.
The cells of the zygote, according to Dianetics theory, 
record sounds during a period of pain (Hubbard often uses a 
husband beating his pregnant wife as an example), such as 
"'Take that!  Take it, I tell you.  You've got to take 
it!'"48  From this engram we are to believe that the child 
grows up to be a thief.  Cellular recordings of sounds by the 
cells can even be in another language unknown to the adult or 
child and still cause similar problems.  All of this, again, 
has no evidence accompanying it, and without such evidence it 
may as well be classified as mere science-fiction.
We have in Dianetics a work by a science-fiction writer who 
claims to have created a totally new and foolproof handbook 
of the mind with no documentation to prove his claimed 
research.  This book has been actively sold by Hubbard's 
Church of Scientology for many years, and yet it is simply a 
synthesis of already published ideas with bizarre, 
unsubstantiated claims thrown in.  The theories in this book, 
other than those found in previous works by others, have 
never been scientifically validated, and in fact, one attempt 
came up dry.49  There is little scholastic or societal 
benefit to be derived from this work.  S.I. Hayakawa put it 
well in his review of Dianetics:  "The appalling thing 
revealed by dianetics about our culture is that it takes a 
452-page book full of balderdash to get some people to sit 
down and seriously listen to each other!"50

Copyright (c) 1990 by Jeff Jacobsen.  For permission to 
reprint this article, contact:
Jeff Jacobsen
P.O. Box 3541
Scottsdale, AZ  85271
1quoted in L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman?, by Bent 
Corydon and L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. (Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 
1987) p. 262.
2L. Ron Hubbard, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental 
Health (Los Angeles: American Saint Hill Organization, 
1950), 12th printing, paperback, August 1975, p. 340.  
(Henceforth Dianetics.)
3ibid. p.400.
4ibid. p. ix.
5ibid. p.122.
6Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah (N.Y.: Henry Holt & Co., 
1987), pp.230-231.
7L. Ron Hubbard, cassette tape, "Introduction to Dianetics," 
Dianetics Lecture Series 1.  1950.  Bridge Publications, 
Inc.
8Stewart Lamont, Religion, Inc.: The Church of Scientology 
(London: Harrap, 1986) p.21.
9"The History of Dianetics and Scientology" cassette tape.
10Dianetics, p.130.
11Dr. J. Sadger, "Preliminary Study of the Psychic Life of 
the Fetus and the Primary Germ."  Psychoanalytic Review  
July 1941  28:3. p.333
12ibid. pp.343-4.
13Dianetics, p.294.
14Sadger, p.336.
15Dianetics, p. 156.
16Dianetics, p.158.
17Sadger, p.352.
18Dianetics, p.158.
19Dianetics, p.130.
20Grace W. Pailthorpe, M.D., "Deflection of Energy, as a 
Result of Birth Trauma, and It's Bearing Upon Character 
Formation."  Psychoanalytic Review  July 1941 28:3  pp. 
305-326, p.326.
21ibid. p.307.
22Dianetics, p.91.
23Nathaniel Thornton, D.Sc., "What is the  Therapeutic Value 
of Abreaction?"  Psychoanalytic Review 1949 36:411-415. 
p.411.
24ibid.
25ibid. p.412.
26ibid. p.413.
27Dianetics, p.206.
28Dianetics, p.62.
29Corydon and Hubbard, Jr., pp. 266-269.
30Albert I. Berger, "Towards a Science of the Nuclear Mind: 
Science-fiction Origins of Dianetics", Science Fiction 
Studies, 1989, vol. 16:123-141. p.135.
31Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or Control and Communication 
in the Animal and the Machine (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New 
York, 1948).
32Dianetics, p.43.
33Wiener, p.150.
34Dianetics, p.323ff.
35Dianetics, p.ix.
36Dianetics, p.93.
37Dianetics, p.92.
38Dianetics, pp. 90, 193.
39Dianetics, p.170.
40Dianetics, p.417.
41L. Ron Hubbard, cassette tape, "What Dianetics Can Do," 
Dianetics Lecture Series 2.  1950.  Bridge Publications, 
Inc.
42ibid.
43Dianetics, p.168.
44Dianetics, p.253.
45Dianetics, p.278.
46Dianetics, p.179.
47Dianetics, pp.154, 155.
48Dianetics, p.212.
49Jack Fox, Alvin E. Davis, and B. Lebovits, "An Experimental 
Investigation of Hubbard's Engram Hypothesis (Dianetics)," 
Psychological Newsletter 1959, 10, 131-134.
50S.I. Hayakawa, "From Science-fiction to Fiction-science", 
Etc.: A Review of General Semantics, 1951 Vol. 8 (4) 280-
293.  p. 293.

Jim Lippard              Lippard@RVAX.CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU
Dept. of Philosophy      Lippard@ARIZRVAX.BITNET
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721
----
Article 16757 of sci.skeptic:
From: mmm@cup.portal.com (Mark Robert Thorson)
Subject: Karl Lashley and L. Ron Hubbard
Date: 20 Oct 91 00:33:40 GMT

I recently was reading a book describing the work of Karl
Lashley and his students at the University of Chicago, and
was struck by the similarity of his work and the "technology"
of Dianetics.

I already knew that Lashley coined the term "engram".  In fact,
Lashley is famous in the field of neurobiology for his decades-
long search for the engram (i.e. memory trace).  Most of these
experiments took the form of teaching a rat or a pigeon some
sort of stimulus-response relationship, then performing brain
surgery (like removing or slicing up some small part of the
brain), allowing a period of recovery, then testing for the
continued existence of the learned response.  Despite spending
virtually his whole career looking for the seat of memory,
he never found it.  His work is considered to be strong
evidence against the existence of any sort of "memory organ"
in the brain.

In his book _Studies_in_the_Dynamics_of_Behavior_
(University of Chicago Press, 1932), Lashley and his students
Stone, Darrow, Landis, and Heath report on their early work.
What caught my attention is how intensively they used one
particular analytical tool, namely galvanic skin response (GSR).

They looked at many different aspects of GSR, including
magnitude of response, recovery time, baseline shifts,
spontaneous responses, initial resistance before stimulus,
and minimum resistance achieved during examination.
This data was correlated (using factor analysis) against
questionnaires designed to measure specific personality
traits.

Here are some of the questions they used.  Note the similarity
to questions on the famous "personality test" which is often
a person's first contact with Scientology.

Do you often feel self-conscious about your personal
appearance?
Do you think you are regarded as critical of other people?
Do you have the habit of contradicting people?
Have your friends ever turned against you?
Are you frightened by lightning?
Do you often experience periods of loneliness?
Does it bother you to have people watch you at work?
Do you get tired of people quickly?
Were you your parents' favorite child?
Do you consider yourself a rather nervous person?
Are you frequently troubled with nightmares?
Do people think you are selfish?
Does it make you uneasy to go into a tunnel or subway?
Can you stand the sight of blood?
Are you bothered much by blushing?
Do things often go wrong for you by no fault of your own?
Do you think you know yourself well from having observed
your own mind?
As a child did you like to play alone?
Are you troubled by thoughts of death?
At night are you frequently troubled by the idea that
somebody is following you?
Is there anyone you want to get even with?
Do you think most people are self-seeking or malicious?
Do you have a great fear of fire?
Do you usually sleep well?
Do you lose your temper quickly?
Do you dread the sight of a snake?
Do you feel life is a great burden?
Do you feel that you are not satisfactorily adjusted to life?
Have you found books more interesting than people?
Are you troubled with shyness?
Do you frequently talk to yourself?
Do you have difficulty in making friends?
Do you frequently talk to yourself?
Do you usually sleep well?
Are your feeling easily hurt?
Are you often in a state of excitement?
Were you considered a bad boy (or girl)?
Do ideas often run through your head so that you cannot sleep?

It seems to me that Hubbard borrowed extensively from
Lashley's work, which is reasonable considering that it may
have seemed the most advanced scientific work in psychology
at that time.  But today, Hubbard's Dianetics is an
anachronism, like a time capsule from a university psychology
department of 60 years ago.

Of course, Hubbard added much of his own stuff, like the
auditing procedure and the theory of "negative engrams".
He turned GSR, a tenative scientific tool, into the E-meter,
a tool for his own brand of mass psychiatry.

Can anyone tell me if Hubbard ever acknowledged the
contribution of Lashley's work to Dianetics?  And did
Lashley ever comment on Scientology?  (Lashley lived to
be quite old -- I believe he died around 1975.)

[As I understand it, Dianetics and E-meter are trademarks
of the Church of Scientology, referring to their brand of
mental therapy and galvanic skin response meter, respectively.]

-----------------------------< END >------------------------------




-- 
Don		D.C.Lindsay 	Carnegie Mellon Computer Science
Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology