Geotrickster’s Note: The following is the third guest post by Brandon Hensley, who previously gave us such book review posts as ‘The Centrist Manifesto‘ and ‘Hope Never Dies.’ All other words are his.

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Dianetics, Revisited

A thought experiment. You are in need of some mental health therapy to help mitigate the triggering responses of some traumatic event. They have intruded upon your day-to-day activities and you’re tired of it. Pushing open the door to the Therapeutic Center for Mental Health, a lobby with two doors greets you. Above the first door is a sign: “Modified abreaction therapy with a licensed practitioner who will recuperate the cost of licensure by billing you for the treatment.” Above the second door is a sign: “Modified abreaction therapy delivered via a convenient self-help manual.” Which door do you choose? (And we’ll clarify what is abreaction therapy as we move along.)

In the ever-expanding world of mental health destigmatization and expansion of therapeutic access, choosing a practitioner can be troublesome, and that’s before you even begin the journey toward treatment. And then, once you’re embarking on a course of treatment, there’s plenty of room to criticize the underlying theories of some of those treatments. Which door, in this period of late capitalism where the advancement of costs of living annually outpaces advances in wage growth, does one choose?

Enter Dianetics Therapy. Or really, re-enter. The second door in the lobby of our hypothetical Therapeutic Center for Mental Health contains a copy of L. Ron Hubbard’s 1950 best selling self-help book, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.

A famous Scientologist, Hubbard was also interested in alternatives to lobotomies and electroshock therapy—both popular treatments in 1950—for the promotion of mental health. In fact, it was this interest in mental health treatments that led to the publication of Dianetics in the first place, and only later (1952) did Scientology become a thing. While it is impossible to discuss Dianetics or Hubbard without also mentioning Scientology, for the purposes of this review it is also important to remember that Hubbard did not start out the head of an alleged cult, and Dianetics was published with the intention of promoting a novel psychotherapeutic treatment, not to be the foundational text of an allegedly predatory cult. 

It is precisely because Dianetics gets all the flak of Scientology’s alleged abuses while predating it and being patently uninterested in religious trappings for the first two years of its life that I have always wanted to read it. But, much like my interest in Hillary Clinton’s Masterclass (If you know, you know), I never wanted a penny of my own money going to the people who stood to profit off my purchase of a new copy (If anyone has a login to Hillary’s masterclass they’re willing to sell for $3.99, let’s talk).

Having spent my $3.99 on a used copy of a book which has a listed MSRP of $4.99 from 1986 (about $15 in today’s money according to an internet inflation calculator) I immediately dug into it and was…honestly, surprised.

The first few chapters are startlingly reasonable. Hubbard argues that the fundamental dynamic of human life is to Survive! (bold formatting Hubbard’s), and that all life processes are driven toward that one goal. He introduces some concepts that I don’t think are particularly relevant for this brief review, such as the tone scale and the four dynamics—these things are all readily available on Wikipedia—before getting into what I think is the meat of the theory.

According to Hubbard, we all possess two minds: the analytic mind and the reactive mind. The analytic mind is what we are aware of when we are conscious. Because life processes do not stop when we are unconscious, Hubbard’s explanation is that that is when the reactive mind is active (this is important). He describes the analytic and reactive mind in computational terms. The analytic mind is responsible for processing memories and experiences so that we as individuals can react and behave appropriately. The reactive mind, however, is responsible for collecting sense data and making quick associations that help feed relevant input into the analytic mind. The problem is that the reactive mind cannot analyze, and so it fills up with associations that lead to aberrations.

The example given by Hubbard is of a fish that swims into some brackish water to feed on shrimp. While feeding, he gets knocked on the fin. Startled, the fish flees the brackish water. The startle is a moment when the analytic mind shuts off momentarily and allows the reactive mind to take over. The reactive mind takes in all the sense information—brackish water, shrimp, knock on the tail—and files it away under the heading “startle” (he actually spends a lot of time discussing filing and cross-filing, but we’re keeping this simple). Later, the fish returns to the brackish water because the analytic mind remembers that there was plenty of shrimp to be found. However, just as soon as the fish enters the brackish water, the analytic mind pulls from the files related to brackish water and discovers important information about being startled. Suddenly, the fish develops a minor twinge in the tail which triggers the reactive mind’s associations in this regard, and the fish, without ever getting to the shrimp or being knocked in the tail decides to avoid the brackish water.

This becomes the basis of the engram, or a negative memory with the power to override a normal analytic process. Hubbard’s example is of entering 1+1 into a calculator while also holding down the 7 key. Ignoring that most calculators will either not let you push two keys at once or just produce a bunch of 7’s, we can run with the imagery. You’re putting in 1+1 but getting out 8. Or you multiply 1 by 10 and get 70. The 7 input is the engram stored in the reactive mind associated with the 1+1 program. Every time the analytic mind goes to run the 1+1 program, it reaches for all the files cross-referenced with it and the reactive mind is more than happy to supply a 7.

Hubbard links this behavior of the reactive mind to evolutionary processes and allows for the development of engrams as part of the survival process in an earlier stage of evolution. However, given the state of the human animal in the modern world, it is clear that these engrams no longer serve the purpose of promoting human survival and flourishing and must be cleared out.

The goal of Dianetics Therapy, then, is to clear these engrams so that the analytic mind can operate optimally and promote that singular essential dynamic: Survive!

How does this work?

The auditor and the preclear establish a rapport and trust between each other with the auditor assuring the preclear that they will know everything that happens during the session. The preclear then closes their eyes and enters “dianetic reverie”. The reverie is simply a term used to help the preclear think they’re entering an altered state, however Hubbard does say that optimal reverie will be noticeable due to a trembling of the eyelashes. A “canceller” is installed (basically a form of post-hypnotic suggestion that will be used to end the session) and then the session really begins.

The auditor asks the preclear to locate an incident in the past (Dianetics to a degree treats this like time travel; based on what I’ve heard the CoS treats this as literal time travel) and describe it. The auditor then asks the preclear information gathering questions about what is happening in this incident, to try and get as much data as possible. When the preclear hits a roadblock, the auditor brings the preclear back to the beginning and asks them to start again. This procedure is done over and over again until the session time is run out.

The same incident will be rerun over and over again over multiple sessions until the preclear’s attitude about it becomes positive. This is the sign that the aberration that led to the engram is purged, and the incident’s memory is refiled from the reactive mind to the analytic mind. Going “clear” is when the reactive mind is entirely purged. Focusing on individual incidents and specific engrams is called a “release”. 

All of this can be done from the comfort of home using Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, because Hubbard intended it to be thus. 

At the heart of dianetics therapy is abreaction therapy. “Abreaction Therapy focuses on reliving a traumatic event and going through the emotions associated with them to heal and move forward. Originally created by Sigmund Freud the method gives patients a way to release their unconscious pain and escape from the memories and feelings that have kept them from moving forward.” The mechanism by which Hubbard describes this working is the novelty introduced (along with his biological/physiological claims), which leads to specific claims about why the therapy is needed in the first place. Remember, according to Hubbard, we are full of engrams. These do not promote survival, but instead inhibit it. If we utilize dianetics to get to the state of “clear”, then we can optimize our survival and push human evolution forward. Thus, Dianetics becomes less a self-help book and more a manifesto of personal flourishing. In a way, it is the original Influencer Manual to Selfcare and Glowups (if this doesn’t exist, someone could make a mint). 

Interestingly, ignoring the runaway freight train that is “going clear”, dianetics is regarded as pseudoscientific nonsense despite a very similar treatment being one of the most popular and widely evangelized treatments today.

If you don’t know what EMDR is (Eye Movement Deconstruction and Reconstruction) then you are probably a shut-in with no friends and no internet access. If you’ve had the unsettling feeling over the last 5-10 years that every minor inconvenience is being diagnosed as trauma, you’re not alone. The “traumafication of everything” is a discussion for another time, but it has correlated to the rapid destigmatization of mental health and allowed the proliferation of services such as BetterHelp (itinerate scandals aside) to help democratize access to therapy. Hand in glove with this destigmatization and democratization has been a growing chorus of people championing EMDR.

The following section is indebted to YouTuber Neurotransmissions and his video “A Hard Look at EMDR and its Unscrupulous Founder” . In the interests of transparency, Neurotransmissions and I have never spoken, this is not a sponsored plug, and I gain nothing by pointing people to his channel. However, the algorithm popped this video up while I was in the middle of reading Dianetics and it provided plenty of verified source material that didn’t necessarily confirm my suspicions but at the very least gave credence that I wasn’t imagining the parallel.

EMDR is an endorsed treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder discovered by Francine Shapiro. Discovered is the correct word, since, in her own retelling, she discovered it entirely by accident one day while taking a walk. While thinking about things that generally troubled her, she noticed her eyes moving rapidly back and forth. This caused her to lose focus on what she was thinking about, so she returned to thinking about whatever it was that was troubling her, and she discovered that she didn’t feel so troubled about it anymore. Shapiro decided to test her finding by thinking about something else that troubled her, intentionally moving her eyes back and forth a bit, and then revisiting it only to discover the same result: she didn’t feel so badly about it anymore.

Shapiro went on to more fully develop the theory and promote it as a treatment for PTSD. A general rundown of an EMDR session looks remarkably similar to a dianetics audit:

1. History and treatment planning, in which traumatic events are identified to be reprocessed.
2. Preparation, in which the therapeutic relationship between patient and practitioner is established and the process is explained.
3. Assessment, in which the specific event to be reprocessed is identified “including images, beliefs, feelings, and sensations” associated with that event.
4. Desensitization, in which the eye movements or other bilateral stimulation is used while the event is recounted internally by the patient. It is during this period that the patient is encouraged to produce new thoughts, images, feelings, and sensations while subjectively rating how troubling the patient feels about the event. The goal is to get this subjective rating to zero.
5. Installation, in which a positive belief is associated with the event until this belief feels completely true to the patient.
6. Body Scan, in which the patient holds onto the target event and the installed positive belief while scanning the body and processing any lingering disturbance from the body with bilateral stimulation.
7. Closure, in which the practitioner helps return the patient to a state of calm in the present moment.
8. Reevaluation, in which the process is repeated in subsequent sessions.

One of the enduring critiques of this setup is that in controlled trials, the bilateral stimulation (or, according to the EMDR International Association, BLS since BS would have been too accidentally hilarious, probably) did not actually add anything to the therapeutic effectiveness. Neurotransmissions recounts how in the early batch of these controlled trials, Shapiro responded to this criticism by saying the researchers had not been properly trained. So the next batch of trials was done by people who paid for and took the training, producing the same result. Shapiro’s response was to say that they only had Level 1 training when they needed Level 2 training. So the researchers paid for the Level 2 training and so on and so forth. You get the idea.

If this sounds like the ever-increasing “you need more training to do advanced auditing to ascend the Bridge to Total Freedom” costs of Scientology, it’s because it is. If you google “EMDR and Scientology” there’s not a few links to people asking on various platforms if anybody else is noticing the similarities. And when you follow those links you’re greeted with plenty of testimonial from people who underwent EMDR whose lives were reportedly saved by it trying to refute the claim at the heart of the question. We shouldn’t ignore the fact that positive testimonials for dianetics also exist. There is a reason that cults are able to sustain themselves even amidst widespread and consistent allegations of abuse, precisely because they are able to offer something that people find useful or lifesaving. If we can adjust the old adage of “the difference between a cult and a religion is money and time” a bit, the difference between a cult and a religion very often has as much to do with the people at the top. Dianetics and EMDR, both just dressed up abreactive therapy, work. But they work for the same reason that abreactive therapy work, and the additional dressing up of the therapy is just there to help earn a buck for the one who added the accessory. And in the case of Scientology, the additional dressing up has been particularly and uniquely lucrative.

Yet, it is not the point of this digression into EMDR to make the positive case that EMDR and Dianetics are the same thing. I actually do think it’s more a case of parallel development. Dianetics claims to cure many physical ailments and in fact diagnoses things as somatic illnesses that are clearly and irrefutably physical or genetic. This fact alone is enough to dismiss Dianetics out of hand, even if the basic therapy on its own would otherwise be effective. So clearly, EMDR is in the clear on this?

According to the EMDR International Association, EMDR can be used to effectively treat “OCD, chronic pain, addictions, and other distressing life experiences”  (emphasis my own). Oh my. At least there is clinical support to back up the claims that EMDR is at least effective.

Except, as Neurotransmissions points out in his video, almost all the individual studies done on the effectiveness of EMDR that haven’t been dismissed by EMDR’s leadership have been done by practitioners who have a vested interest in seeing it be presented in a positive light. Accompanying metastudies don’t show an appreciable difference in effectiveness from other therapies, such as abreactive therapy or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. However, as he (also a trained and licensed therapist) points out, the cost of EMDR certification is substantially higher than most other treatment certification programs, which only adds the sunk cost fallacy to people’s vested interests in seeing EMDR succeed. So if all the clinical studies around EMDR have potential issues, and the overall form and function isn’t radically different from what is correctly denounced as pseudoscience, then at least a sufficient pile of anecdote lends some credence, right? Well, sure, but only if you extend the same to Dianetics.

What I haven’t bothered to find out is if Shapiro ever uttered the famous sentiment of every cult that ever existed: “Disagreeing with me is proof of concept”. Hubbard, however, does. When discussing the interactions between Auditor and Preclear, he specifically addresses someone complaining about the auditing and questioning its efficacy. Instead of stopping, the Auditor is urged to persist and encourage the Preclear to continue. By stopping, Hubbard says, the Auditor will actually implant an engram that associates the Auditor with sympathy, and the Auditor-Preclear relationship will be shattered. Questioning the efficacy of dianetics is proof of its efficacy, and proof that the Preclear just needs more.

So why spend so much time interrogating the surface-level similarities between EMDR and Dianetics? I bring it up not because I am skeptical of EMDR (I actually am, but that is beside the point), but because of a broader cultural phenomenon surrounding the ascendant moralism of “bettering oneself”, “selfcare”, and “doing the work”. This entire aside connecting EMDR and Dianetics applies just as well to other current personal improvement endeavors from New Age “shadow work” to HR ED&I initiatives. Any of these would have provided for a provocative essay, but few have as many direct parallels as EMDR. They all are based on the premise that outward negative manifestations stem from internal traumas or aberrative learned processes that need to be purged in order to operate like a normal human being (and that’s before we get to people like Robin DiAngelo who insist that the original sin of being of European stock is insurmountable, so the option of going “clear” in anti-racist action for her is off the table entirely). Had Dianetics been written in 2015, we would have seen BLM protestors and veterans of Occupy Wall Street flocking to Dianetics Auditing Centers around the country and championing the purging of their reactive minds. “Decolonize your mind,” indeed.

The unsettling truth is that Dianetics, when you strip it down to its bare essentials, is actually a very reasonable and understandable conceptual framework for treating the postmodern condition, while at the same time avoiding the Victorian, finger-wagging moralism of much of the contemporary moment. In that way it actually holds up a mirror to a lot of the supposed magic bullets being bandied around by today’s enlightened liberal. The underlying technique is still used in therapists’ offices today. So when we get right down to it, the takeaway comes down to this:

Hubbard had a remarkable imagination, and it helps pad out his book to over 500 pages. But whereas you need to spend thousands of dollars to learn how to administer EMDR, you can spend $3.99 to administer Dianetics. I am not advocating this, but it’s there. The allure of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, is because of the controversy surrounding Scientology and because of the alleged abuses and the alleged OTVIII material (of South Park fame). But at the end of the day, Dianetics is little more a boring snapshot of the state of mental health therapies in 1950 and one man’s imaginative alternative to electro-shock therapy and lobotomies.

Good for him.