Let's Sell These People a Piece of Blue Sky: Hubbard, Dianetics and Scientology (23 page)

The original idea in Dianetics was that the Reactive mind
could be completely “erased,” thus turning homo sapiens into the new man, “homo
novis,” the Clear. Otherwise the basic theory was not original, and the therapy
a modification of earlier techniques. Dianetics was initially successful
because it was so readily accessible, and because it was espoused by a
brilliant publicist, John Campbell. All the reader needed was a copy of the
book and a friend to “co-audit” with, and they could start erasing their
engrams. Amateur Dianetic groups sprang up throughout the English speaking
world.

In June 1950, Hubbard gave the first full-time Auditor
training course to 10 students at the Elizabeth Foundation. Hubbard said students
there were charged $500 to “hang around the office and watch what was going on”
for a month.
³⁶
August found him in California,
³⁷
where he
lectured for a month to 300 students.
³⁸
The fee was still $500.
Professional auditing was charged at $25 an hour.
³⁷
There were hundreds
of thousands of dollars involved.

Dianetics emerged against a backdrop of international tension
and fear. Russia had added Czechoslovakia to its empire in 1948. The United
States had re-introduced the draft. 1948 also saw the Soviet blockade of
Berlin, and the US airlift. In September 1949, the Soviets successfully tested
an atomic bomb. The Communists came to power in China, under Mao Tse-tung, the
following month. At the beginning of 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy announced
that he had a list of 205 card-carrying Communists in the employ of the US
State Department. The McCarthy Communist witch-hunt was to last four years. In
June, the North Koreans, using Soviet arms and tanks, invaded the South, and
the Korean war began. In
The New York Times
, Frederick Schuman's review
of
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health
played to the fears of
the United States. America: “History has become a race between Dianetics and
catastrophe,” echoing Hubbard's own sentiments.

In 1950, Dianetics was a craze. Campbell wrote that
Astounding was receiving up to a thousand letters a week. Within a year, the
book had sold 150,000 copies. The Hollywood community eagerly embraced the new
system. Aldous Huxley received auditing from Hubbard himself, and, although he
did not complain about the therapy, he simply could not locate any engrams,
even under Hubbard's direction.
³⁹

N.B. In the 1980s the page numbering of DMSMH was changed
for the first time since 1950. Page references are to the earlier editions.

1.
   
p.409.

2.
   
Astounding
Science Fiction, US edition, December 1949, p.80.

3.
   
Letter to the author from a board member of the Hubbard Dianetic
Research Foundation.

4.
   
Winter, A
Doctor’s Report on Dianetics.

5.
   
see 3
& 4; also Wallis, The Road to Total Freedom, p.23.

6.
   
CSC v. Armstrong exhibit 500-4A; Armstrong in CSC v. Armstrong, p.1908.

7.
   
Incorporation papers.

8.
   
see 4; also Wallis, p.43.

9.
   
see 3

10.
 
see
3; CSC v. Armstrong exhibit 500-4L and vol.12 pp.1946-7.

11.
 
p.8.

12.
 
p.15.

13.
 
p.170
& 367.

14.
 
p.90.

15.
 
p.312.

16.
 
pp.
8 & 382.

17.
 
pp.51-2,
92, 156, 181, 364.

18.
 
p.96.

19.
 
p.171.

20.
 
p.51.

21.
 
p.68.

22.
 
p.17.

23.
 
p.392.

24.
 
Freud,
the Clarke lectures of 1909, published in Two Short Accounts of
PsychoAnalysis.

25.
 
Freud,
Studies in Hysteria
, vol.2.

26.
 
See 3 Hubbard claimed to have been practicing
hypnosis since his teens (see
Evolution of a Science
, pp.22-25). He used hypnosis in his “research”: for
example, Evolution of a Science, p.96. See also
Dianetics: The Modern
Science of Mental Health
, p.56, pp.93-4, 124-5
& 201 (“Hypnotism was used for research, then abandoned”); see also this
author’s 1995 paper
‘Never believe a hypnotist’
.

27.
 
Wallis, p.31; William Sargant,
Battle for the
Mind.

28.
 
Such
non-evaluative therapy has a basis in the work of Carl Rogers.

29.
 
 pp.60
& 65.

30.
 
p.132.

31.
 
pp.156
& 158.

32.
 
p.242 and Hubbard,
Evolution of a Science,
p.93.

33.
 
p.299.

34.
 
Malko,
p.52.

35.
 
p.410.

36.
 
Technical
Bulletins, vol.1, p.14.

37.
 
ibid
,
pp.22-3.

38.
 
Van
Vogt in California Association of Dianetic Auditors, Journal vol.17, no.2.

39.
 
Bedford,
Aldous Huxley a Biography, vol.2, pp.116-7.

Chapter twelve

“Charlatanism is almost impossible where Dianetics
in any of its principles is being practiced.”

—L.
Ron Hubbard,
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health
¹

By the end of 1950, five new Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundations
had been added to the first at Elizabeth. They were in Chicago, Honolulu, New
York, Washington and Los Angeles.
²
The L.A. Foundation was headed by
science-fiction writer A.E. van Vogt. That year, much of the letters section of
Astounding Science Fiction
was devoted to Dianetics, where letters were
answered by both Hubbard and Winter.
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental
Health
was on the best-seller lists for several months. But despite the
tremendous popularity of Dianetics, and the river of cash pouring into the
Foundations, there was trouble on the horizon.

The first signs of trouble came in August 1950, when Hubbard
exhibited a “Clear” at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Despite claims of
“perfect recall,” and the fact that she was majoring in Physics, the “Clear”
was unable to remember a single physics formula. When Hubbard turned his back,
she could not even remember the color of his tie.
³

The Shrine Auditorium lecture has been published as part of
Hubbard's immense collected works.
⁴
The girl, Sonya Bianca, is
renamed “Ann Singer” in the Scientologists' version. The transcript has been
edited, but the question about the tie remains, as does one about physics, with
a vague answer. A Scientology account says Hubbard “spoke to a jammed house of
over 6,000 enthusiastic people.”
⁵
According to author Martin Gardner
when Sonya could not remember the color of Hubbard's tie, “a large part of the
audience got up and left.” The incident had a marked effect on Hubbard's
credibility, and he became cagey about declaring more Clears, avoiding public
demonstrations of their supposed abilities from then on.

In September, The
New York Times
published a
statement by the American Psychological Association
⁶
:

 “While suspending judgment concerning the eventual validity
of the claims made by the author of
Dianetics
, the association calls
attention to the fact that these claims are not supported by the empirical
evidence of the sort required for the establishment of scientific
generalizations. In the public interest, the association, in the absence of
such evidence, recommends to its members that the use of the techniques
peculiar to
Dianetics
be limited to scientific investigations to test
the validity of its claims.”

The following month, Dr Joseph Winter and Arthur Ceppos, the
publisher of
Dianetics
, resigned from the Board of Directors of the
Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation. Winter described his experiences in the
first book critical of Hubbard,
A Doctor’s Report on Dianetics
. Winter
felt Dianetics could be dangerous in untrained hands, and asserted that
repeated attempts to persuade Hubbard to adopt a minimum standard to test
student applicants had failed. Winter felt Dianetics should be in the hands of
people with
some
medical qualification. He had changed his mind since
writing the introduction to
Dianetics
a year before. He had also begun
to feel that “Clear” was unobtainable. In a year of close association with Hubbard,
Winter had not seen anyone who had achieved the state described in the book.

Winter also said he saw no scientific research being
performed at the “Research” Foundation. He was tired of Hubbard's disparagement
of the medical and psychiatric professions, and alarmed by Hubbard's use of
massive doses of a vitamin mixture called “Guk.” Winter was even more alarmed
by the auditing of “past lives,” which he considered entirely fanciful. Winter
wrote, “there was a difference between the ideals inherent within the dianetics
hypothesis and the actions of the Foundation ... The ideals of dianetics, as I
saw them, included non-authoritarianism and a flexibility of approach ... The
ideals of Dianetics continued to be given lip-service, but I could see a
definite disparity between ideals and actualities.” Winter set up a
psychotherapeutic practice in Manhattan, and gradually drifted away from
Dianetics.

In an article in
Newsweek
, entitled “The Poor Man's
Psychoanalysis,” American Medical Association representative Dr Morris Fishbein
labeled Dianetics a “mind-healing cult.” Dianeticist Helen O'Brien has said
that one member of the Elizabeth Foundation resigned because in a month when
$90,000 income was received, only $20,000 could be accounted for.
⁷
A
Board member of the time denies this,
⁸
but there are certainly
questions about the disbursement of income. Later events suggest that much of
it went into Hubbard's pocket. One early associate says Hubbard “spent money
like water.”
⁹

In November, 1950, the Elizabeth Foundation set up a Board
of Ethics to ensure that practitioners were using the “Standard Procedure” of
Dianetic counseling approved by Hubbard.
¹⁰
Innovators had been
adding their own ideas to Dianetics, which was anathema to Hubbard who called
techniques he had not approved “Black Dianetics,” insisting they were
dangerous.
¹¹
This was in spite of his pronouncement in Dianetics
that “if anyone wants a monopoly on Dianetics, be assured that he wants it for
reasons which have to do not with Dianetics but with profit.”
¹²
Hubbard obviously excluded himself from this pronouncement.

Hubbard moved to Palm Springs to work on his second book,
Science
of Survival
. He was living with a girlfriend, and drinking heavily.
¹³
He sniped at Foundation directors, trying to force their resignations. Distrust
of his associates and subordinates manifested itself repeatedly throughout his
life. Hubbard's paranoia had already shown itself in Elizabeth where he had
assured a Foundation Director that American Medical Association spies made up a
high proportion of the student applicants, the Preclears, and even the
customers in the restaurant below the Foundation.
¹⁴

The Los Angeles Foundation co-operated with two university researchers,
who tried to validate Dianetics by knocking a volunteer out with sodium
pentathol, and reading him a passage from a physics textbook, while inflicting
pain.
¹⁵
In six months of “auditing” the subject failed to remember
any of the passage. Hubbard dismissed the matter in
Science of Survival
writing that “Psychotherapists with whom the Foundation has dealt have been
eager to plant an engram in a patient and have the Foundation recover it ...
The Foundation will accept no more experiments in this line ... A much more
natural and valid validation [sic] of engrams can be done without the use of
drugs.”
¹⁶

For some time Sara Hubbard had been Ron's personal Auditor,
now they were living apart, and her confidence in Dianetics had slipped so far
that she urged the Elizabeth Foundation to obtain psychiatric treatment for her
husband.
¹⁶

A few months later Hubbard wrote a secret missive to the
FBI, giving his own account of his separation from Sara. He described himself
as a nuclear physicist who had transferred his expertise into a study of
psychology. He said that he had thought Sara was his legal wife, before
realizing there was some confusion about a divorce. Sara was accused of
destroying one of Hubbard's therapeutic organizations. She had supposedly
forced him to make out a will, in October, 1950, bequeathing to her his copyrights
and his share of the Foundations. Later that month, Hubbard claimed he had been
attacked while sleeping, since which time he had been unable to recover his
health. Hubbard blamed Sara for an incident in Los Angeles in which Alexis,
their baby daughter, had been left unattended in their car, and for which
Hubbard himself had been put on probation. In December, he was again supposedly
attacked in his sleep.