"I'm cold; why don't you build a fire?" These were the words - all the words - in an engram that for forty years had kept my wife chilled whenever the thermometer dropped below seventy.
We had been reading L. Ron Hubbard's book, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, and it was as we reached a point about halfway through the book that I decided to become an auditor, ad hoc, so to speak. We had been ready to go to bed and, in fact, she was already tucked in under three blankets, wearing a flannelette nightgown and a bed jacket, with a hot water bottle at her feet. But, clad warmly enough to sleep comfortably in a tent during an Arctic blizzard, she was shivering with cold in our only slightly cool bedroom. Sitting on the side of my bed, dressed only in thin pajamas, I felt no need for extra covering, so even allowing for differences in tolerance toward cold, I knew something was wrong.
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She agreed to a session, and so, with what I am afraid was something less than professional skill, I began. After the preliminaries, including the canceler and the running of pleasant experiences, what follows is the significant portion of that session.
AUDITOR: You will now return to the earliest available instant on the chain essential to solving the present problem. The file clerk will hand up the data. (Silence.) Have you returned to the incident asked for?
PRECLEAR: Yes.
AUDITOR: Give me a flash answer: what is your age?
PRECLEAR: Three.
AUDITOR: Months or years?
PRECLEAR: Months.
AUDITOR: Prenatal or postnatal?
PRECLEAR: Prenatal.
AUDITOR: I will count to five and snap my fingers, and the file clerk will give the first words of the incident. One, two, three, four, five (snap).
PRECLEAR: I'm cold.
AUDITOR: Is there more?
PRECLEAR: Yes.
AUDITOR: Please recount the additional words. (Silence. Auditor suddenly remembers the correct procedure.) Please repeat, "I'm cold."
PRECLEAR: "I'm cold. I'm cold. I'm cold; why don't you build a fire?"
AUDITOR: Who is talking?
PRECLEAR: Mother.
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AUDITOR: Is there any more?
PRECLEAR: No.
AUDITOR: Please repeat the whole phrase.
PRECLEAR "I'm cold; why don't you build a fire?"
AUDITOR: Repeat it again. [See Note 1 at the end of this session.]
PRECLEAR: "I'm cold; why don't you build a fire?" [This is repeated several more times. Auditor did not remember that a somatic should have keyed in along about here. Preclear yawned a couple of times after about the fifth repetition and became bored with the whole thing. Auditor decides the engram has been erased. See Note 2.]
AUDITOR: Is this the earliest incident on this chain?
PRECLEAR: Yes.
AUDITOR: You will please return up the time track toward present time, contacting the next incident on the chain. The file clerk will hand up the data.
PRECLEAR: Stay there till I call you. [See Note 3.] It's a cold day, and I'm sitting on the front steps. I've never been so cold in all my life. There is no one to play with and nothing to do. The sky is grey and there are no leaves on the trees. I just sit here, waiting for Mother to call me.
AUDITOR: Please return to the beginning and recount it.
PRECLEAR: Stay there till I call you.
AUDITOR: Again, please.
PRECLEAR: Stay there till I call you. (Repeats this several more times. Becomes bored and begins to yawn. She almost falls asleep, but, after all, the hour is late.)
AUDITOR: You will come up the time track toward pre-
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sent time. (Tests her to make sure she is in present time, says, "Canceled," and ends the session.)
My wife fell into a sound sleep, but in the middle of the night she awakened, hot and perspiring. She threw off two of her three blankets and doffed the bed jacket, after which she slept comfortably for the rest of the night. She has had no return of this susceptibility to cold since that night.
Now, a professional auditor would turn slightly green around the gills over this session. It had several errors in it, referring to the numbers in the text of the session: (1) After a second repetition of the phrase, "I'm cold; why don't you build a fire," no somatic had keyed in. Without a somatic, no engram would have been installed, so there had to be one in there somewhere. Mother may have huddled herself together because she was cold, putting pressure on the fetus and making it anaten. The pressure would have certainly been recorded. (2) The auditor, meaning me, was wrong: the engram was not erased because the somatic was not contacted. However, it was effectively reduced. (3) "Stay there 'till I call you" is a most efficient holder, and it is a wonder that the basic engram could have been contacted while this holder was still on the track. In this case, the incident was not entirely engramic, since most of it was in her memory, although not as sharply as it was produced by returning. It was actually a lock rather than an engram on the chain, but as the primary lock, one that has keyed in an engram, it was necessary to
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reduce it. Her anaten was not very deep, since there was no sudden shock or pain, but only the discomfort of the cold and the unhappiness at having to sit on the steps with nothing to do but shiver. There can be no question about the effectiveness of this session, because nearly twenty years have elapsed since that night and she has never suffered unreasonably from nonexistent cold again.
A few years later, I ran into an engram which had exerted a rather tragic influence upon its victim. The wife of a fairly prominent businessman, this preclear was urged by her husband to try Dianetic auditing after we had discussed it at a party one night. She agreed, and we began the first of our sessions a few days later. However, before then, her husband confided to me that his wife had suddenly become a kleptomaniac some ten years earlier, without having shown any signs of this unfortunate affliction previously. I questioned him about anything that might have happened to her just prior to the onset of her kleptomania, and after cudgeling his brain for a bit, he assured me, "I can't think of a thing that might have caused her to begin taking things. Oh, she fell off a horse, but she wasn't too badly hurt and only spent a couple of days in the hospital while she was being checked over. But that couldn't have anything to do with this." I did not argue the matter with him, he was so certain of the truth of his words.
I did not let his wife know that I was aware of her particular problem, in order to avoid either or both of two possibly inhibiting factors: one, that she might hold back in order to prevent me from delving into her
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"shame;" and two, to prevent a lie factory from going into business manufacturing all sorts of reasons why she should be so afflicted.
During her first three sessions, she moved sluggishly, or not at all, on her time track. When she did return to an earlier period, she could not contact an incident. I tried her with flash answers on phrases and single words, but this yielded no better results. With nothing to go on, I began giving her phrases for repeater technique with no better success. Then, during our fourth session, the door began to open when I tried a phrase that is probably present in one form or another in all kleptomania cases.
AUDITOR: Please repeat the phrase, "Take that," and return to the earliest time available on the track.
PRECLEAR: "Take that. Take that. Take that." (She was quite apathetic, having lost what little faith she might have had in Dianetics. She stopped after about six repetitions.)
AUDITOR: Continue, please, contacting it very closely.
PRECLEAR: "Take that. Take that. Take that..." Ow, my head is beginning to hurt.
AUDITOR: Please continue, contacting it more closely.
PRECLEAR: "Take that. Take that." It's hurting more. "Take that and see how you like it." It really hurts.
AUDITOR: Continue, please.
PRECLEAR: "Take that and see how you like it." Ouch. "Take that and see how you like it, and that, and that." That's my father's voice. Why is he hitting me?
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AUDITOR: Listen to what he is saying and repeat it to me from the beginning, please.
PRECLEAR: He is saying, "Take that and see how you like it. Take that, and that. Don't you try to tell me what to do. I'll take a drink whenever I feel like it." And Mother is saying, "Oh, please, George, don't hit me." And he says, "You come back here, or I'll kill you." And she says, "Oh, please don't." Say, my head has stopped hurting.
AUDITOR: Please return to the beginning and recount the incident, contacting it more closely.
PRECLEAR: (She does so, feeling the pain again, but not so strongly. After Mother asks him not to hit her, new percepts key in.) I hear glass breaking and a crack like wood being splintered. (She is sent through the engram three more times, the somatic becoming less on each run through. On the sixth repetition, there is no somatic, and the words begin to drop out.) "Take that...take a drink...Come back...kill you...please..." (She yawns a couple of times and becomes quite unconcerned about the proceedings.)
AUDITOR: YOU will move forward along the time track to the next incident on this chain. Please contact it closely and tell me what you hear.
PRECLEAR: (Pause.) "Take that bridle and hold him so I can Pet this woman's foot out of the stirrup." Oh, my head hurts, and so does my ankle. The man's voice says, "Come on, take it; I can't do it all myself. One of you guys call an ambulance. She needs a doctor."
AUDITOR: Please return to the beginning and recount the incident.
PRECLEAR: (She does so, running it several times. The
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pain is gone, she becomes bored with it, and the words begin to disappear.)
AUDITOR: Please move up along the time track, contacting any other incident on this chain.
PRECLEAR: I hear a glass breaking. Somebody must have dropped a piece of glass in the street. I suddenly get this terrible headache, and I tell my husband about it. He says, "I'll get you a couple of aspirins." He comes back with the tablets and some water, and says, "Here you are; take that and you'll feel better in no time." Something inside my head keeps saying, "Take, take, take," and I feel I have to get out of the house. I go to a store. There's a pretty handbag on the counter, and I take...Oh, my goodness. Could that be why I have to take things? I'm a kleptomaniac, you know. Could that be the reason,
AUDITOR: Please return to the beginning and recount the incident.
This was a lock, since most of it was in her memory banks. There were no more engrams on the chain, but any number of locks, all now blown off by the erasure of the basic. She asked if I thought she would now be free of her unfortunate compulsion, and it was difficult to avoid giving her a straight answer. I finally said, "My job is not to evaluate your data; I only try to find and run engrams. Whenever an engram is erased, things are bound to improve." When I ran into her husband, some three years later, he reported that she had committed no further thefts. She was also a much happier person.
An attractive young woman, although her appear-
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ance was decidedly mannish, came to see me one day. She had called earlier for an appointment, introducing herself as a friend of someone for whom I had done some Dianetic work. One learns early in this game not to make too quick judgments about people at first sight, but try as I would, there was no avoiding the distinct impression that my caller was a lesbian.
But I did not have to remain in a state of conjecture for long, because almost the first thing she said to me after we sat down to talk was, "I want to be perfectly frank with you. I have only one problem and it is the only reason I wanted to see you. Whenever I become passionate, I get a dull headache, and it can be extremely annoying at times. I don't want you to try to change anything else about me. I happen also to be a lesbian, but I am quite happy to be one, and I don't want you to change that. Will you promise me not to try to change that)"
I answered, in a nice straightforward equivocal manner, "I couldn't change anything about you if I tried. Whatever changes are made will be of your own choosing. In fact, you will be in full control of yourself at all times. Whenever you don't like what is going on, you can pull right out of it."
With that taken care of, the session began, but it did not get very far. The girl remained in present time, using only memory in recounting earlier pleasant incidents. I soon realized that there was something holding her in present time and this would be the first problem to solve. I did not want to question her about family and friends, since this might have led to the forbidden area
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and a feeling that I was trying to interfere in her private life. This meant that the only avenue was by way of repeater technique. She had said that she did not want to change three times in one short conversation. This might have been one of the demon phrases that can do so much harm. As you will see, repeater technique worked beautifully.
AUDITOR: Please repeat the phrase, "I don't want to change."
PRECLEAR: "I don't want to change."
AUDITOR: Please continue repeating it. The somatic strip will go to the beginning of the incident.
PRECLEAR: "I don't want to change. I don't want to change." (She repeated this about ten times, each time becoming a little more tense. The following was said in an outburst of anger.) "My God, you want to make an old woman out of me. I'm a man, and I don't want to change. I'm never going to change. I wear the pants in this family, and don't you ever forget it." My head is beginning to ache.
AUDITOR: Please repeat the incident, contacting it more closely.
PRECLEAR: "My God, you want to make an old woman out of me." Somebody just hit me on the head. "I'm a man, and I don't want to change," etc. (Repeating the engram.)
AUDITOR: Who is speaking?
PRECLEAR: That's my father's voice. I can hear my mother crying.
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AUDITOR: Please repeat the engram.
PRECLEAR: (Repeats the engram, the somatic growing weaker each time. After about six repetitions, the somatic disappears and the phrases begin to drop out.) [We must pause here to mention the subject of valence, a word which, in Dianetics, takes a special meaning, that of one of the characters in the cast of the drama that is an engram. The person who owns an engram in which there is some sort of conflict going on between others, will, out of his desire for survival, choose the role of the victor. No one wants to line up with a loser. Thus, in obeying the commands of this particular engram, the preclear is said to be in her father's valence, since he is the obvious winner, doing all the talking, while Mother only sobs. When a person contacts an engram in someone else's valence, viewing it from the other person's imagined outlook, there can be no reduction until he gets back to being himself. In this case, as in most others, repeater technique accomplishes this.]
AUDITOR: Please move forward on the time track toward present time, contacting any incident on this chain.
PRECLEAR: My head is hurting.
AUDITOR: What do you hear?
PRECLEAR: Nothing, but my head aches.
AUDITOR: When I count to five and snap my fingers, you will tell me the first word that pops into your mind. One, two, three, four, five (snap).
PRECLEAR: "Never."
AUDITOR: Please repeat "never," and contact it closely.
PRECLEAR: "Never. Never. Never. Never change it." My head hurts worse.
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AUDITOR: Please repeat the phrase and tell me what else you hear.
PRECLEAR: "Never change it. Never..." No, "It will never change. It will always be like this." My head is really bad. "It will never change. It will always be like this. That woman will be the death of me yet."
AUDITOR: Please return to the beginning of the incident, contact it more closely, and recount it.
PRECLEAR: (Repeats the incident three more times.) My head doesn't hurt so much now.
AUDITOR: Please continue to recount it.
PRECLEAR: (Repeats it several more times until the somatic disappears. She becomes quite cheerful.)
After the session was concluded, she sat up and asked, "What was that all about? I gather that my father and mother were having a fight. I know she tried to dominate him, but I guess he finally won. Anyway, I feel like someone who has just read the middle installment of a three-part serial novel. I'd like to know what went on before and what happened afterwards."
I told her, "I'm always hearing parts of dramatic stories, though I seldom find out what happened. But my interest is not in learning plots, only in erasing engrams. I don't know what happened, and I really don't care as long as you were helped."
There is no doubt that she was helped, and in a way she had not wanted. About six months later, she called to invite me to her wedding, saying, "Without you, there wouldn't have been any wedding." Apparently,
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she was not too displeased with the way she had been helped. She went on to say that she had not had a lesbian encounter since that one session. She had finally tested herself and found the very idea repugnant. She had decided that the only course for her was to be what she seemed to be, a woman.
I did attend her wedding, and found that the bride, although unchanged in her outward physical appearance, which had been most attractive even when she was trying to be a man, was now completely feminine. I'm still not quite sure whether I broke my promise to her, the one I made when she came for her session, and frankly I couldn't care less.
The last example is from the case of a young woman who had gone through five sessions without any apparent result other than a strong implication of painful emotion somewhere on her time track, as indicated by her inability to return more than a little way into her past. I had tried her on repeater technique, but lacking a clue from some conspicuous phrase in her normal way of speaking, I could only resort to sheer guesswork. Prior to the time for her sixth session, I sat down to review the limited data brought to light in her case and began to recall all of our conversations from the very beginning. It was then that I noticed the frequent occurrence of two little words, so common as to pass without notice: "That's good." It dawned on me that she used this phrase as a sign of her agreement with something that had been said, as well as of approval, and she used it to the exclusion of other, more appropriate expressions. It seemed that this might be the key for
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which I had been searching, the key to unlock at least the first of possibly many doors into her tightly occluded engram bank. The pertinent portion of the session produced dramatic results.
AUDITOR: Please repeat the phrase, "That's good."
PRECLEAR: "That's good. That's good. That's good." (This was repeated some ten or twelve times.)
AUDITOR: The somatic strip will return to any incident containing the phrase, "That's good." The file clerk will hand up all the percepts in the incident. Please continue to repeat the phrase.
PRECLEAR: "That's good. That's good. That's good, that is. You sure had me fooled."
AUDITOR: Please repeat, and contact the incident more closely.
PRECLEAR: "That's good, that is. You sure had me fooled. Well, I'm through. I quit." (A tear rolls down her cheek.)
AUDITOR: Who is speaking?
PRECLEAR: It's Miss Grey, my nurse. Oh, I can see her now, telling me goodbye. She was my only friend. (She has moved away from the incident and is now remembering.)
AUDITOR: Please return to the beginning of the incident and repeat the words in it.
PRECLEAR: "That's good, that is. You sure had me fooled. Well, I'm through. I quit." She turns and goes toward our room, hers and mine. She takes her suitcase out of the closet and begins packing her things. I say,
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"Please, Miss Grey, don't leave me," and she says, "I have to, Nancy. Now you be a brave little girl and don't cry." (The tears are beginning to flow faster.) She kisses me, takes her suitcase, and goes out the door. I just throw myself on the bed and start to cry. (She is weeping bitterly, and continues in this way for several minutes.)
AUDITOR: Please return to the beginning and roll it again.
PRECLEAR: (Repeats the incident three more times. The tears stop and she becomes quite cheerful about the whole thing. Then she starts to laugh, beginning with a slight chuckle which develops into full scale laughter. This continues for some five minutes, dies down, and then starts up again. Finally, it stops for good. The grief has been thoroughly released.) [During this period of laughter, I had time to consider my next move carefully Normally, I would have sent her down the track in search of the earliest available moment of pain, but there was still something about Miss Grey that had to be solved. Obviously, she was an ally, and this reactive mind computation needed looking into.]
AUDITOR: The file clerk will please find an earlier incident involving Miss Grey, one that is necessary for the solution of our present problem.
PRECLEAR: (Long pause.) "That's a good girl. Just be quiet and Miss Grey will take care of you." Oh, I'm hot. I have a fever, and I'm burning up. Now I feel a cold cloth on my head, and it helps a little. There, she's speaking again. "Poor Nancy. Nobody loves you but me. As long as I'm here, you'll be all right."
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AUDITOR: Roll it again, please.
PRECLEAR: (She runs it several times. The fever goes, and finally the words begin to vanish.)
After the session ended, she wanted to talk about her case. I told her to say whatever she wanted, but not to ask me to evaluate any of the data. She understood, and said, "I guess it was soon after Miss Grey left that I began to feel as though nobody loved me. I blamed my father for sending her away, and my mother for permitting him to do it. I used to long to see her, if only for a little while; I even dreamed about her. And a distance seemed to grow between my parents and me. Now, as I look back, I realize that it wasn't their fault. Oh, yes, I remember something else. Before I had that fever, I didn't really care too much for Miss Grey. I guess she put the whole idea into my head. You know what? She was no friend of mine, in fact, she was probably the worst enemy I ever had. Gosh, I haven't seen my folks for six months. I think I'll go see them tomorrow."
Miss Grey, that wonderful friend and ally, turned out to be a real shrew. Nancy's father had sent her packing after she had put on a most flagrant display of insolence and bad manners, certainly a poor example for a little girl. And Miss Grey had strewn the scene with as much trouble as she could have desired. The case had been held up during five previous sessions because of grief, and the grief could not be released because it could not be discussed ("Just be quiet."). Perfectly good parents had been rejected because "Nobody loves
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you but me." Yet this troublemaker could not be dispensed with because "As long as I'm here, you'll be all right." Poor Nancy, indeed. That was a heavy burden to load upon the back of a child. Fortunately, with Miss Grey disposed of, the rest of the case ran very well, and Nancy reached a high level of release.
This, then, is Dianetic processing, and it took the country by storm in the early 1950's. But its popularity was short-lived, not because of the attacks that were made upon it, and not because it did not work far more effectively than any previous method of therapy, but for a rather strange reason: it was supplanted by a new form of processing. This conquering rival did not arise from any outside competition, but from the founder of Dianetics himself, and it produced even more dramatic results, as we shall see in succeeding chapters.
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