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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dianetics | 2/4 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dianetics | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:18:44.107872+00:00 | kb-cron |
== Concepts == In the book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, Hubbard describes techniques that he suggests can rid people of fears and psychosomatic illnesses. A basic idea in Dianetics is that the mind consists of two parts: the "analytical mind" and the "reactive mind". The "reactive mind", which operates when a person is physically unconscious, acts as a record of shock, trauma, pain, and otherwise harmful memories. Experiences such as these are dubbed "engrams". Dianetics is proposed as a method to erase engrams in the reactive mind to achieve a state of clear. In Dianetics, the unconscious or reactive mind is described as a collection of "mental image pictures", which contain the recorded experience of past moments of unconsciousness, including all sensory perceptions and feelings involved, ranging from prenatal experiences, infancy and childhood, to even the traumatic feelings associated with events from past lives and extraterrestrial cultures. The type of mental image picture created during a period of unconsciousness involves the exact recording of a painful experience. Hubbard called this phenomenon an engram, and defined it as "a moment of 'unconsciousness' containing physical pain or painful emotion and all perceptions and is not available to the analytical mind as experience". Hubbard proposed that these engrams caused "aberrations" (deviations from rational thinking) in the mind, which produced lasting adverse physical and emotional effects. When the analytical (conscious) mind shut down during these moments, events and perceptions of this period were stored as engrams in the unconscious or reactive mind. In Hubbard's earliest publications on the subject, engrams were variously referred to as norn, impediment, and comanome before "engram" was adapted from its existing usage at the suggestion of Joseph Augustus Winter. Some commentators noted Dianetics's blend of science fiction and occult orientations at the time. Hubbard claimed that engrams were the cause of almost all psychological and physical problems. In addition to physical pain, engrams could include words or phrases spoken in the vicinity while the patient was unconscious. For instance, Winter cites the example of a patient with a persistent headache supposedly tracing the problem to a doctor saying, "Take him now", during the patient's birth.
[The reactive mind] can give a man arthritis, bursitis, asthma, allergies, sinusitis, coronary trouble, high blood pressure ... And it is the only thing in the human being which can produce these effects ... Discharge the content of [the reactive mind] and the arthritis vanishes, myopia gets better, heart illness decreases, asthma disappears, stomachs function properly and the whole catalog of ills goes away and stays away. According to Bent Corydon, Hubbard created the illusion that Dianetics was the first psychotherapy to address traumatic experiences in their own time, but others had done so before as standard procedure. Hugh Urban wrote it was clear that Hubbard's work had been influenced by Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank, and Hubbard himself mentioned similarities between Dianetics and Freud. Hubbard claimed that by using Dianetics technique the reactive mind could be emptied of all engrams; "cleared" of its contents. A person who has completed this process would be "Clear". The benefits of Clear might include a higher IQ, better relationships, or career success.
== Procedure ==
The procedure of Dianetics therapy (known as auditing) is a two-person activity. One person, the "auditor", guides the other person, the preclear, through the procedures. The preclear's job is to look at their mind and talk to the auditor. The auditor acknowledges what the preclear says and controls the process. The auditor and preclear sit down facing each other. After getting settled, the auditor tells the preclear to close their eyes and locate something that happened to them in the past. The preclear tells the auditor what happened in the incident like he is re-experiencing it again. The auditor coaxes the preclear to recall as much as possible, and goes back over the incident several times until the preclear is cheerful about it, at which point the auditor may end the session or find another incident and repeat the process.