Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (62 page)

The subject of auditor-restimulation, where the auditor restimulates the pre-clear or the pre-clear restimulates the auditor, does not include the routine aspect of therapy that the preclear is always being artificially restimulated via standard therapy. An engram can be restimulated by being touched several times and so it will lift. The auditor-restimulation problem is a specific one where the auditor is a pseudo-enemy, a similarity to a person who has harmed the patient. Wild antagonism on the part of a patient to an auditor is usually traced to this. Some patients have such a hatred of men that only women can work them, some have such a hatred of women that only men can work them. But even when there is a wild antipathy, if there exists no other auditor or person who can be trained quickly as one, therapy can proceed anyway: and it will accomplish results.

REBALANCING A CASE

Any case dropped out of therapy will rebalance itself in a few weeks, which is to say, it will settle to a new high for the individual. Unless drug hypnotism or some other dianetically illegal method is used, all cases will so rebalance, much benefited. Restimulations can be expected to die down if they are due to therapy. The patient will gradually find his own level in the released state. Cases do not have to be carried forward to clear if auditor time is short, but it is, of course better if they are and, indeed, the majority of patients will insist that they be.

WORKING TIME IN THERAPY

The usual period of a dianetic treatment is two hours. In these two hours, with the usual patient, everything is going to be accomplished which can be accomplished on that day.

Working every day is not necessary, but working every two days or every three days is desirable. Working with periods a week apart is not optimum, for the case tends to rebalance.

Further, there is a “sag” in a case, usually every fourth day when it is not worked in periods as short as three days. The fourth day “sag” is a natural mechanical thing: an engram, keyed-in, when it is restimulated in life, takes about four days to cut in sharply. In therapy, three days is sometimes required to “develop” an engram. This does not mean that three days have to elapse before it is available and it does not mean that work has to stop for three days, but it does mean that engrams, not being memories and articulate as such, take three days, sometimes, to come to the surface.

To be more clear, an engram can be asked for on day one and will be found on day three. Meanwhile the auditor is getting other engrams. This process is so automatic that it requires no attention and will not come to notice except in cases that are being worked once a week. The engram is asked for on day one, is ready to reduce on day three, sags on day four and is rebalanced by day seven.

The three day aspect is interesting in another sense. This time of three days is just an observation of the average behavior of pre-clears. Precision investigation may fix it at 2.5 days or 3.6 days (it varies in individuals), but three days is close enough for our purposes. When one is doing just a release on a case, he will sometimes find that it is necessary to take a late engram and run it: the physical pain engram of later life (post-birth) will appear to rise, will remain constant for three days and then will “sag.” When it sags, the auditor will have to go 241

back to it and run it again. Taking out these “sags” will eventually make the later life engram stay in a recessed state.

Euphoria often sets in on a case when the auditor touches an engram which contains a manic. The patient will then go around saying how wonderful dianetics is because he is now in magnificent condition and is so happy. Watch out. In three or four days this manic will have sagged back to a depressive state. Be wary if somebody experiences one of these sky-rocket

“recoveries” for it is about as permanent as the fire of a burning match. It goes out and leaves very cold ashes. The auditor, seeing this euphoria, had better enter the case again and reduce the engram it contains more thoroughly or get a more basic engram.

The length of time it takes to clear a person is quite variable. By blowing despair charges and working a few early engrams, an auditor can get a better state of being in the patient than in any past therapy in twenty or thirty hours: this is a release. It compares to two or three years of past therapeutic work. The length of time it takes to get a clear cannot be compared to any past standard because a clear is something no past standard ever dreamed about.

In a sonic case, where recall is in good condition, a clear can be obtained in a hundred hours. In a case which has thoroughly shut down recalls, anything can happen up to, in extremity, a thousand hours. Similarly, the imaginative case which has things which never happened, may be long.

Look at it this way: we can get the results of two or three years of psycho-analysis in a score or two of hours of dianetics and what we accomplish with dianetics does not have to be done again, which is not true with psycho-analysis. This is the release. He can go about his business in a far more competent fashion, his emotional charges being largely freed. In the clear we are attempting and can achieve a supernormal state of mind. Thousands and thousands and thousands of hours were spent in the education of a man: the expenditure of two or even ten thousand hours of work to make him rank about what would formerly have been possible for him is work well spent. But we do not have to spend anything like this amount of time.

People have been cleared in anything from thirty hours, when they had sonic and little volume, to five hundred hours when they had shut-down recall plus imaginary recall. What an auditor can do with his first few cases by way of time is a question mark. He will get to the clear eventually and certainly in less than twelve hundred hours in a severe case. All the time he is working toward a clear he is achieving a higher and higher release which, after at least fifty hours, rises well above the current norm and keeps right on soaring. Improvement is such that from week to week the charge is physiologically noticeable and psychologically startling. If one thinks the reach for clear is a short jump and a small gain, then he has no conception of just how high that goal is.

Most auditors will try for release at first and are wise if they do. When their own case is finally cleared, only then will they suddenly realize that the state was worth far more time than was expended to attain.

It is impossible to forecast, with a new auditor, just how much time he will consume in making errors, learning his tools, attaining skill. It is therefore impossible to estimate for him how long it will take him to gain a clear in a patient. A well trained auditor never takes more than eight hundred hours with the worst of cases: five hundred is high.

DATA FROM RELATIVES

The auditor will always be plagued by the anxiety of the patient to get data from relatives or friends. The request for this data itself is restimulative both to the pre-clear and the relative. Mothers have been made very ill by being given the restimulators of their own past illnesses by the child who has “suddenly found out.”

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It is a uniform experience that the data obtained from relatives, parents and friends by the pre-clear is absolutely and utterly worthless. Here we are depending upon an aberree’s memory when we have at hand, with dianetics, a reliable source of accurate material. Auditors have had cases progress very smoothly and then suddenly stop progress: on inquiry it is discovered that the pre-clear has been running around to his parents and relatives for material and they, wanting nothing more than that he forget all about what they have done to him, throw him red herrings which have to be carefully eliminated. These are the villains of the piece, the people who have done the things to the pre-clear which made him an aberree. If one expects accurate data from them, one might as well expect the moon to be green cheese.

If the auditor wants data from these people and requests it, by-passing the pre-clear, he may get somewhere. But any data so received has a value which, in intelligence, is used to label “Incompetent Source -- Improbable Material.”

Warn a pre-clear not to bother his relatives and parents and explain to him that he can make them ill by asking for data, on the restimulator principle. If we want confirmation of the data received, the only way to get it is put the parent or relative in therapy. At such time, we shall get the basic dramatization sources: in the prenatal life and childhood of the parent. This is a problem of research, not of therapy.

If the auditor has Mama available, he can run off the child’s birth and then Mama giving birth, keeping the two apart, and get his check on the accuracy of therapy. And there are other data that can be so compared, using proper safeguards.

The subjective reality, not the objective reality, is the important question to the auditor.

First, last and always, does the patient get well?

STOPPING THERAPY

The woman scorned has a violent rival in the pre-clear on whom therapy has been stopped by the auditor’s decision.

Keeping the pre-clear in therapy, no matter how seldom are the sessions, satisfies in some measure the effort his basic personality makes to fight clear of the aberrations.

The basic personality, the file clerk, the core of “I” which wants to be in command of the organism, the most fundamental desires of the personality, may be considered synonymous for our purposes. There is an enormous surge of this basic self -- which is really the individual himself -- to conquer the engrams. The engrams, borrowing life from their host, appear as things which do not want to be conquered. As mechanistic as all this actually is, the auditor will often find himself wondering at the resistance the engrams can make and marveling at the efforts of the basic personality to conquer the engrams. He works with the basic personality, the individual himself, and ignores the engramic efforts to interfere. But there is a situation in which the basic personality seems to give free play to the engrams in an effort to accomplish therapy.

In work, a “patient” might have been skeptical, sarcastic or even vicious to the auditor.

Or the patient may have been thought to be completely neglectful of his engram bank. Or the patient may even rage that he hates therapy. For some of these reasons the auditor may injudiciously decide to cease working the patient. The patient is so informed. For a short while, perhaps, the patient may manifest no reaction but in a few minutes, a few hours or a few days, basic personality, denied a route out, may begin to use every weapon to hand to compel the auditor to resume therapy.

Disturbed by cessation of therapy, even though he may have insisted upon its being stopped, the ex-patient may begin either to rapidly decline or to attack to his face or behind his back the auditor and even therapy itself. The woman scorned has rarely made such thorough 243

upsets as ex-patients who have been refused continuance of therapy. Auditors have been personally reviled, have had other pre-clears searched out and undermined by violent attacks upon therapy itself, have been targeted by all manner of accusations and whispering campaigns and have been made most uncomfortable by pre-clears who have had further therapy denied to them before a release had taken place. Even solid, legitimate releases, whose psycho-somatic ills have disappeared and who should be quite cheerful, have been observed to create turbulence when the auditor would not take them through to clear. Any number of mechanisms may be used by the ex-patient. as many mechanisms as men use to force other men into action.

One of the mechanisms is a resumption of apathy and a “swift decline.” Another is wild campaigning against therapy. Another is personal attack of the auditor. Each has, as its provable intention, the resumption of therapy.

The mind knows how the mind works. And the mind which has tasted a way out of pain and unhappiness may be expected, if that way is blocked, to use all methods to cause therapy to be resumed.

No matter how thoroughly disagreeable the ex-patient has been, the moment the auditor starts therapy upon him again, the attitude alters. No further destructive efforts are made against the auditor or therapy but all is almost as well as it was before the cessation was declared.

Do not suppose, however, that the pre-clear, if he has been neglectful, recalcitrant or generally uncooperative before, will now embrace therapy as chastened patient. Far from the case, he is now at least as difficult to work as he was before plus some additional antagonism engendered by the cessation order.

In such a case the auditor is damned if he does and double-damned if he doesn’t. But there is a way out of this. The phenomenon of “transference,” where the patient simply transfers his griefs to the practitioner, is not the mechanism here at work; transference is a different thing, bred of a thirst for attention and a feeling of needed support in the world.

Transference can be expected to keep up forever if permitted; the patient of a doctor, for instance, may go on and on having illnesses just to keep the doctor around. Transference may occur in dianetic therapy, the patient may lean on the auditor solidly, beg the auditor for advice, appear to hold out engrams in an effort to keep the auditor working hard and available and interested; all this is the resultant of a sympathy computation and is aberrated conduct. The clever auditor will not give advice or attempt to run anyone’s life, for a person works well only as a self-determined organism. In dianetic therapy, no matter what the attitude of the patient, no matter how great his “desires to be ill” or his transference of burden, no matter about even his vicious remarks to the auditor during sessions, the condition cannot obtain forever.

Basic personality is trying to get through; “I” is trying to integrate self. Even indifferent work will eventually release enough charge from a case and reduce enough engrams to bring a higher stability to the patient. Basic personality gets stronger and stronger and therefore more self-reliant. The introversion occasioned by continual effort to reach the interior world of the engram bank de-intensifies and extroversion comes more and more into being as the case advances. The way out is to work the patient smoothly and well and one day he will be well released or clear. But meanwhile, if you stop therapy on anyone, don’t be surprised at anything that happens; you can only remedy it by resuming the case.