Dianetics
Dianetics is a set of ideas and practices, invented in 1950 by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, regarding the human mind.
[1]: 106–107 It involves a process referred to as "auditing", which utilizes an electrical resistance meter, ostensibly to remove emotional burdens and "cure" people from their troubles.
[9] The stated purpose of Dianetics technique, called "auditing", is to erase the contents of the reactive mind—the holder of painful and destructive emotions which can act on a person as posthypnotic suggestions.
[11]: 25 Hubbard claimed that Dianetics could increase intelligence, eliminate unwanted emotions and alleviate a wide range of illnesses he believed to be psychosomatic.
Conditions purportedly treatable with Dianetics included arthritis, allergies, asthma, some coronary difficulties, eye trouble, ulcers, migraine headaches, and sexual deviation.
In these works Hubbard claimed that the source of all psychological pain, and therefore the cause of mental and physical health problems, was a form of memory known as "engrams".
[13]: 30 Two of the strongest initial supporters of Dianetics in the 1950s were John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction, and Joseph Augustus Winter, a writer and medical physician.
[19]: XIV–XV [20] In the book, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, Hubbard describes techniques that he suggests can rid individuals of fears and psychosomatic illnesses.
[21][22] 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 pre-natal experiences, infancy and childhood, to even the traumatic feelings associated with events from past lives and extraterrestrial cultures.
"[23][better source needed] Hubbard proposed that these engrams caused "aberrations" (deviations from rational thinking) in the mind, which produced lasting adverse physical and emotional effects.
[24]: 165 [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.
Had dianetics been presented as fiction [...] it might have been, like other ingenious science-fiction, good entertainment.In August 1950, amidst the success of Dianetics, Hubbard held a demonstration in Los Angeles' Shrine Auditorium where he presented a young woman called Sonya Bianca (a pseudonym) to a large audience including many reporters and photographers as "the world's first Clear".
Hubbard explained Bianca's failure to display her promised powers of recall to the audience by saying that he had used the word "now" in calling her to the stage, and thus inadvertently froze her in "present time", which blocked her abilities.
It presents case histories and a number of X-ray plates to support claims that Dianetics had cured "aberrations" including manic depression, asthma, arthritis, colitis and "overt homosexuality", and that after Dianetic processing, test subjects experienced significantly increased scores on a standardized IQ test.
The American Psychological Association passed a resolution in 1950 calling "attention to the fact that these claims are not supported by empirical evidence of the sort required for the establishment of scientific generalizations.
Professor John A. Lee states in his 1970 evaluation of Dianetics: Objective experimental verification of Hubbard's physiological and psychological doctrines is lacking.
To date, no regular scientific agency has established the validity of his theories of prenatal perception and engrams, or cellular memory, or Dianetic reverie, or the effects of Scientology auditing routines.
Harvey Jay Fischer tested Dianetic therapy against three claims made by proponents and found it does not affect any significant changes in intellectual functioning, mathematical ability, or the degree of personality conflicts;[43] Jack Fox tested Hubbard's thesis regarding recall of engrams, with the assistance of the Dianetic Research Foundation, and could not substantiate it.
The key elements of Hubbard's so-called science don't seem testable, yet he repeatedly claims that he is asserting only scientific facts and data from many experiments.
Commenting on the example cited by Winter, the science writer Martin Gardner asserts that "nothing could be clearer from the above dialogue than the fact that the dianetic explanation for the headache existed only in the mind of the therapist, and that it was with considerable difficulty that the patient was maneuvered into accepting it.
"[52] But even the limited good that dianetics may do by introducing a single, narrowly-defined role-playing technique into interpersonal relations is probably more than offset by the damage it can do with its accompanying pretentious and nonsensical doctrines.
The lure of the pseudoscientific vocabulary and promises of dianetics cannot but condemn thousands who are beginning to emerge from scientific illiteracy to a continuation of their susceptibility to word-magic and semantic hash.
