I can remember, back in 1950, a high school friend telling me about some new thing his mother was involved with. He said it was called "Dianetics" and made it possible for you to remember things which had happened to you when you were just a baby. Then he said - and it was hard to believe, coming from an intelligent, level-headed guy - that Dianetics could make you experience things which had happened to you *before* birth. Why would you want to do that, I wanted to know, know things which had happened before yon were born? As I remember, he didn't seem to know. He showed me a copy of the book his mother was studying, *Dianetics: The Modern Science o[ Mental Health*.
Reading it recently, that moment came back to me, particularly the book's first sentence. If ever a opening sentence introduced a theme with matchless daring, it was Hubbard's declaration that "the creation of dianetics is a milestone for Man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his inventions of the wheel and arch."
What was Dianetics, a word manufactured from the Greek word *dianoua*, meaning thought? It was a science of the mind, "an exact science and its application is on the order of, but simpler than, engineering. Its axioms should not be confused with theories since they demonstrably exist as natural laws hitherto undiscovered." Hubbard said his new science was simpler than physics or chemistry but on a much higher level
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- he called it an "echelon" - of usefulness. "*The hidden source of all psychosomatic ills and human aberration has been discovered and skills have been developed for their invariable cure* [italics his]."
To give us all some perspective with which to appreciate the magnitude of his discovery, Hubbard, after a synopsis, an introduction, and instructions on how to read the book - "read straight on through....Treat it as an adventure" - began Chapter I as follows: "A science of mind is a goal which has engrossed thousands of generations of Man. Armies, dynasties and whole civilizations have perished for lack of it. Rome went to dust for the want of it. China swims in blood for the hope of it; and down in the arsenal is an atom bomb, its hopeful nose full-armed in ignorance of it."
Without in any way lessening the impact of the complete text, here is the essence of what Hubbard had found. He postulated that the mind consists of two parts: the analytical mind (what Freud called the "conscious"), which perceives, remembers, and reasons; and the reactive mind (what Freud called the "unconscious"), which neither remembers nor perceives, but simply records. Normally, the analytical (conscious) mind is dominant. But, according to Hubbard, injury or anesthesia or, more important, acute emotional shock or physical pain, can "switch off" the analytical mind. Then the reactive mind goes into operation. This reactive mind does not record memories, but what Hubbard termed *engrams* - complete sound impressions on protoplasm itself, "a complete recording," as he put it, "down to the last accurate detail, of every perception present in a moment of...unconsciousness." Unhappiness, emotional upsets, even the common cold, were caused by the existence of these engrams. Dianetics therefore was the discovery, study, and technology for dredging up these troublemakers and getting rid of them.
Probably the first man to learn something about Hubbard's discovery and immediately accept it was John Campbell, Jr.,
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editor of *Astounding Science Fiction*, the magazine which had published many of Hubbard's stories and serials. Hubbard had explained his extensive theories and techniques to Campbell, and provided dramatic proof by alleviating Campbell's chronic sinusitis. Campbell was enormously impressed, so much so that he and Hubbard quickly established a Dianetics organization in Bay Head, New Jersey, a town not far from Elizabeth, New Jersey, where Campbell's magazine was headquartered. At the same time (this was July of 1949), Campbell wrote a long letter to Dr. Josephus Augustus Winter, a general practitioner from St. Joseph, Michigan, who had published several articles on medicine in *Astounding Science Fiction*, telling him all about Hubbard's investigations. "L. Ron Hubbard," Campbell wrote, "who happens to be an author, has been doing some psychological research....He's gotten important results. His approach is, actually, based on some very early work of Freud's, some work of other men, and a lot of original research. He's not a professional psychoanalyst or psychiatrist...he's basically an engineer. He approached the problem of psychiatry from the heuristic viewpoint - to get results...." Campbell went on to describe some of Hubbard's results, particularly the taking of an amputee veteran right through a period of unconsciousness to discover why he was feeling so troubled, why be thought there was nothing to live for.
When Dr. Winter, as he was later to describe it in his book, *A Doctor Looks At Dianetics*, wrote Campbell asking for more details of what, at first glance, clearly looked interesting, Campbell answered with another long letter that once more urged the doctor to come and see for himself, and then added, in substantiation of Hubbard's work: "He has one statistic. He has *cured every patient* [italics his] he worked. He has cured ulcers, arthritis, asthma." Winter found this blatant confidence almost too much to believe, but refused to dismiss Hubbard outright. Instead, he wrote directly to
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Hubbard, asking for even more details. Hubbard wrote back to say that he was "preparing, instead of a rambling letter, an operator's manual for your use....Certainly appreciate your interest. My vanity hopes that you will secure credit for me for eleven years of unpaid research, but my humanity hopes above that that this science will be used as intelligently and extensively as possible, for it *is* a science and it does produce exact results uniformly and can, I think, be of benefit."
Dr. Winter arrived in Bay Head on October 1, 1949, and was quite impressed with Hubbard's theories and the few demonstrations he witnessed. His feelings, however, were not fully secured until after he had returned to St. Joseph, Michigan, to spend Thanksgiving with his family. There, when his little son's fear of ghosts became quite serious, Dr. Winter decided to try some of Hubbard's dianetic methods. When, with only a little assistance, the boy was able to describe accurately the moment of his own birth and the certainly frightening image of the white-masked doctor who had brought him into the world, Dr. Winter was forced to acknowledge that not only had he discovered his son's "ghosts," but L. Ron Hubbard's discovery appeared to be a working science precisely as claimed. Dr. Winter returned to Bay Head to continue his work with Campbell and Hubbard. After another short trip back to Michigan for Christmas, he decided he must devote all his energies to Dianetics. He closed his practice and, with his family, moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey, which was now Hubbard's headquarters. In April of 1950 the first Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation was incorporated, with Dr. Winter as its first medical director.
The world at large, meanwhile, was only beginning to learn something of this revolutionary discovery. Under what Hubbard has described as enormous pressure from followers, he finally allowed John Campbell to publish, in May of 1950, in *Astounding Science Fiction*, an article called "Evolution of a Science." This caused great turmoil among science-fiction
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devotees and was followed, very quickly, with the appearance of the book, *Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health*. Much to everyone's surprise, it became an immediate best seller, the first book to achieve such instant success since Thomas Merton's *The Seven Storey Mountain*. Though most of the reviews were adverse, people all over the country were not only buying the book, but enthusiastically organizing themselves into coven-like Dianetics groups eager to practice the phenomenal techniques Hubbard revealed in his tome. While sociologists dismissed the whole thing as just another American fad, more of that postwar hysteria which had produced pyramid clubs and canasta marathons, they could not pretend that everybody wasn't getting into it.
I have already mentioned that Hubbard had tried to sell the book under another title, *Original Thesis* - this was the volume he sent Dr. Winter, the "operator's manual" which inspired the doctor to go personally and see what Dianetics was all about. Naming his science "Dianetics" and then generating a great deal of talk through the *Astounding Science Fiction* article finally made the difference and put Dianetics on its feet. Hubbard himself has discussed the torturous path he followed to develop his science, but not only in terms of hitting upon just the right name and achieving the right kind of exposure. "In a lifetime of wandering around," he wrote in the *Astounding* article, "The Evolution of a Science,"
many strange things had been observed. The medicine men of the Goldi people of Manchuria, the shamans of North Borneo, Sioux medicine men, the cults of Los Angeles, and modern psychology. Amongst the people questioned about existence were a magician whose ancestors served in the court of Kublai Khan and a Hindu who could hypnotize cats. Dabbles had been made in mysticism, data had been studied from mythology to spiritualism. Odds and ends like these, countless odds and ends....First, attempts were made to discover what school or system was workable. Freud did occasionally. So did Chinese acupuncture. So did magic healing crystals in Australia and miracle shrines in South America.
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But eclectic as his bent was, the answers had to be worked out by Hubbard and Hubbard alone. After many long years of wrestling with these questions, he concluded that man, possessed of a brain which is in fact a miraculous, perfect computer, needs a *dynamic* (italics his) principle by which to examine his existence. With this firmly in mind, L. Ron Hubbard began to postulate, build, and conclude. In charting the hitherto unknown mysteries of man's true existence, he was constantly guided by one basic principle: "a science... is something pretty precise....It has to produce predictable results uniformly and *every time* [italics his]." I must emphasize one thing here: in all the millions of words which followed the appearance of *Dianetics*, in all the contradictions and verbal gymnastics which have led followers into labyrinthine confusion as well as predetermined insights, Hubbard has managed to sustain his dedication to this one scientific notion of validity-through-workability with startling fidelity.
In moments of rare candor, Hubbard has boasted that it actually took him a mere three weeks to write the entire weighty text of the original Dianetics book. I don't doubt him. It is known that he wrote on a special IBM electric typewriter which had much-used words such as "the," "and," and "but" slugged in as entire keys. He also typed on a continuous roll of paper to avoid the interruptions of changing sheets.
However long it actually took Hubbard to write *Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health*, the style of the book is diffuse, rambling, and repetitive, and very quickly introduces us to one of the basic characteristics of a new school of thought: its own vocabulary. Words such as *Anaten, Basic-Basic, Chains, Clear, Denyer, Perceptic*, and many more, peppered the writing, bringing a reader to a grinding halt as he stopped to ask himself exactly how Hubbard had chosen to employ a particular word. Hubbard justified his rampant neologism in a lengthy footnote - footnotes becoming an essential
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technique in everything he wrote. He explained that verbs and adjectives were being used as nouns because old terminology was useless in defining the elements of his new science. It was much simpler to invent language and give it mint-new definitions.
Dr. Winter's book, *A Doctor Looks At Dianetics*, threw more candid light on Hubbard's use of language. Winter said that when he and Hubbard and Campbell first developed the advanced aspects of Dianetics, organizing it and codifying its principles, "we concluded that terminology should be revised with the following criteria in mind: Older terminology or terminology from other medical fields should be avoided, because the acceptance of a term from a certain school of thought might imply acceptance of the tenets of that school of thought." Whenever possible, "we would coin a new term," so that Dianetics would possess its own validity, its own substantiation of its discoveries.* The usefulness of this tactic has been, through the years, reinforced by a small *Important Note* which appears as the frontispiece of virtually every book written on either Dianetics, or its successor, Scientology: "In studying Scientology (Dianetics) be very, very certain you never go past a word you do not fully understand. The only reason a person gives up a study or becomes confused or unable to learn is that he or she has gone past a word or phrase that was not understood. If the material becomes confusing or you can't seem to grasp it, there will be a word just earlier that you have not understood. Don't go any further, but go back to BEFORE you got into trouble, find the misunderstood word and get it defined."
* A curious exception to this neologism was the word *engram* itself. It had already been defined as a psychical change caused by some sort of stimulation in 1936, in the 17th Edition of Dorland's *Medical Dictionary*. Even earlier, in 1923, Richard Semon used the term in his book *Mnemic Psychology*. Dr. Winter hotly denied that the term had been lifted from the Semon book, though he acknowledged finding it in the Dorland.
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Once we actually understand the definitions of Hubbard's analytical and reactive minds, we are introduced to the high drama of how engrams become implanted. Wrote Hubbard:
A woman is knocked down by a blow. She is rendered "unconscious." She is kicked and told she is a faker, that she is no good, that she is always changing her mind. A chair is overturned in the process. A faucet is running in the kitchen. A car is passing in the street outside. The engram contains a running record of all these perceptions: sight, sound, tactile, taste, smell, organic sensation, kinetic sense, joint position, thirst record, etc. The engram would consist of the whole statement made to her when she was "unconscious": the voice tones and emotion in the voice, the sound and feel of the original and later blows, the tactile of the floor, the feel and sound of the chair overturning, the organic sensation of the blow, perhaps the taste of blood in her mouth or any other taste present there, the smell of the person attacking her and the smells in the room, the sound of the passing car's motor and tires, etc.
The intensity of an engram's moment of implantation was balanced by the delicate probing designed to dredge it up years later. Called auditing, it was performed when a person was in what was called *dianetic reverie*, a supposed partial sleep which simplified recalling an engram, bringing it up to the surface and, in the ever-expanding jargon of Dianetics, "boiling it off." The one engram dianetic auditors were determined to locate as quickly as possible was the one Hubbard named the *Basic-Basic*, or BB, which, Dianetics believed, was formed a few weeks after conception, or even earlier, in the zygote, the fertilized ovum. Tracing a BB was extremely sophisticated auditing, and one usually "ran" countless lesser engrams which had been experienced prior to the moment of birth before confronting this ultimate nemesis. That there were plenty of engrams to locate from the time of the formation of the embryo is argued convincingly by Hubbard in his description of life in the womb. "Mama sneezes," he wrote in
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*Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health*, "baby gets knocked 'unconscious.' Mama runs lightly and blithely into a table and baby gets its head stoved in. Mama has constipation and baby, in the anxious effort, gets squashed. Papa becomes passionate and baby has the sensation of being put into a running washing machine. Mama gets hysterical, baby gets an engram. Papa hits Mama, baby gets an engram. Junior bounces on Mama's lap, baby gets an engram...."
There are also the noises, the incessant cacophony of the interior universe: "Intestinal squeaks and groans, flowing water, belches, flatulation and other body activities of the mother produce a continual sound....When mother takes quinine a high ringing noise may come into being in the foetal ears as well as her own - a ringing which will carry through a person's whole life."
The techniques of auditing and locating engrams were made immeasurably simpler by Hubbard's strongly held conviction that there was one engram common to almost all of us. "What happens to a child in a womb?" he wrote rhetorically in "The Evolution of a Science." "The commonest events are accidents, illnesses - and *attempted abortions!* [italics and emphasis his] Call the last AA. Where do people get ulcers? In the womb, usually, AA. Full registry of all perceptics down to the last syllable, material which can be fully dramatized." Much as we would do, Hubbard asks the question which is on our minds. "How does the foetus heal up with all this damage?" His answer: "Ask a doctor about twenty years hence - I've got my hands full."
But what he was talking about was not just *one* attempted abortion: "Twenty or thirty abortion attempts are not uncommon in the aberee, and in every attempt the child could have been pierced through the body or brain." Pierced, because the AA is usually done with knitting needles. It is no wonder that he firmly believes these horrible experiences produce the worst possible engrams.
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A large proportion of allegedly feeble-minded children are actually attempted abortion cases [he wrote] whose engrams place them in fear paralysis or regressive palsy and which command them not to grow but to be where they are forever.Morning sickness [he writes further] is entirely engramic, so far as can be discovered....And the act of vomiting because of pregnancy is via contagion of aberration. Actual illness generally results only when mother has been interfering with the child either by douches or knitting needles or some such thing.
If the husband uses language during coitus, every word of it is going to be engramic. If the mother is beaten by him, that beating and everything he says and that *she* says will become part of the engram....A woman who is pregnant should be given every consideration....*For every coital experience is an engram in the child during pregnancy* [italics his].
Hubbard's extensive discussion of things sexual, his concern with abortions, beatings, coitus under duress, flatulence which causes pressure on the foetus, certain cloacal references, all suggest to me a fascination which borders on the obsessive, as if he possessed a deep-seated hatred for women. All of them are being beaten, most of them prove to be unfaithful, few babies are wanted. According to everything he has written, however, Hubbard is merely trying to describe how man responds to threats, no matter what dramatic form they may take. Hubbard believes that man is motivated by the need to survive; he writes it in capitals, SURVIVE, and calls it his First Dynamic. To this he adds three more Dynamics, the urge to survive via the sexual act, the urge to survive as a group, and the urge to survive as Mankind.
During auditing, with a patient in *dianetic reverie*, there was a reported tendency to yawn and stretch, immediately interpreted as visible proof that the session was progressing successfully and engrams were being brought to the surface. Unexpected aches and pains also appeared mysteriously, and then disappeared just as mysteriously. These, Hubbard
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explained. were the lingering effects of psychosomatic ills which would never return. After the particular, long-sought-after engram was finally brought up and 'boiled off," the patient had a sense of enormous relief, so intense that he often began to laugh uncontrollably. Dr. Winter reported that shortly after arriving at the Foundation in Elizabeth he was completely taken aback by the sight of a patient who had been extremely morose suddenly breaking out in laughter, not to stop for several hours. Hubbard brushed this off as being normal, and said there was one patient who had laughed for two days.
*Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health* contains several vivid examples of auditing at work. At one point Hubbard described a technique he called the "repeater," and gave a vivid example of how it was used on a young girl who had resisted confronting her "basic area" for seventy-five hours. The technique involved the repeated use of what ap- pears to be a key phrase in the person's life to take them back to that time, that "basic area" where trouble originated. The incident is reprinted in script form, with the auditor's and the girl's dialogue accompanied by parenthetical observations explaining what is happening and why. The auditor leads the girl, whom he (Hubbard) describes as being "very bored and uncooperative," back to where she suddenly feels a pain (somatic) in her face which grows stronger and stronger. Suddenly the girl hears a voice, her father's. The auditor asks her to repeat his words, The girl says he is talking to her mother, and complains of the pain, or pressure, on her face being uncomfortable. The auditor prompts her to repeat the words she hears. The girl says she hears her father telling her mother he won't "come in you now." As we realize the girl is remembering her parents having sexual intercourse while she was in her mother's womb, the girl is telling the auditor that the moment she recalled her father's voice, the pressure on her face became less. The auditor, patience personified according to the script, insists the girl stay there
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and repeat what her mother is saying. The girl says her mother is angry, and is telling her father she doesn't want him. "Say," the girl says at this point, "the somatic stopped." The parenthetic explanation is "(Coitus had ended at this point.)" The auditor then asks the girl to start all over again. She does, wonders what her parents are up to, realizes herself what is happening, and is momentarily embarrassed. The auditor calmly asks her to go through the event once again. She does so, in detail, recalling her father's words and then her mother's angry answer. The auditor insists on yet another repetition. This goes on until, according to Hubbard, the pain disappears completely. He ends the scene by saying that the girl "feels quite cheerful...but doesn't think to mention that she doubted prenatals existed."
According to Hubbard, it takes some twenty hours of auditing before a person who is aberrated becomes a "release," someone free of all major neuroses and ills. Hubbard calls it "a state superior to any produced by several years of psycho-analysis, since the release will not relapse." Beyond being a release lies becoming a *preclear* and finally a *clear*, someone completely free of engrams. "Clears," Hubbard explains, "do not get colds," their wounds heal quickly if injured, their eyes are keener, and their I.Q.'s visibly increased. "The dianetic clear," he put it quite simply, "is to the current normal individual as the current normal is to the severely insane." An auditor, the person responsible for bringing someone to this obviously desirable state, needed very little qualification to practice his ability. A careful reading of the original dianetic text was considered sufficient, though student auditors were strongly urged to go to Elizabeth, New Jersey, and take the professional course at the Foundation.
What with best-sellerdom and the extensive coffee-klatch practicing of dianetics techniques, L. Ron Hubbard, Dianetics, and the startling results it claimed received so much attention that it was inevitable that before too long, professional
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associations would take a closer look at his activities. The Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation, Inc., had, early in the summer of 1950, made a presentation of Dianetics to a group of psychiatrists, educators, and lay people in Washington, D.C. It was the only genuine such presentation ever made, and Dr. Winter found it to be something of a failure.
Some of the psychiatrists [he wrote in his book] - perhaps the more progressive and open-minded ones - had evinced an interest in the novel postulates and intriguing conclusions of dianetics....I did not feel that the Washington venture was a successful one - at least, not from the medical point of view. It was noteworthy that most of the people whose interest in dianetics had been augmented by this presentation were members of the laity, rather than the profession, and I thought that I could detect in their attitudes the fervor of the convert, rather than the cool, objective interest of the scientist. The professional people evidenced an interest in the philosophy of dianetics; their interest was repelled, however, by the manner of presentation of the subject, especially the unwarranted implication that it was necessary to repudiate one's previous beliefs before accepting dianetics.
In September of 1950, the American Psychological Association called on psychologists not to use dianetic therapy, "in the public interest." Struggling to maintain circumspection, the Association unanimously adopted a resolution at the last session of a meeting of its council of representatives which stated that, "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 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 designed to test the validity of the claims."
From Los Angeles, where he was lecturing and setting up
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another Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation, L. Ron Hubbard answered that he was ready to furnish proof of every claim made in his book. He went on to say that as long as a year earlier he had made such an offer to the American Psychological Association and had never heard from them. He said he had already submitted proof to several scientists and associations, and expressed total agreement with the notion that the public was entitled to proof. He said he was ready and willing to give it in detail. And then he made what I can only charitably call a tactical blunder.
Speaking to 6,000 people in the Los Angeles Shrine Auditorium, Hubbard introduced a girl named Sonya Bianca and said she was a *clear*, possessing total recall of all *perceptics* (sense perceptions) for her entire past, as well as kinetic abilities. It was a disaster. Miss Bianca not only could not remember basic formulas in physics, the subject she was supposedly majoring in, but could not give the color of Hubbard's tie when his back was turned, and certainly could not, exercising her kinetic powers, knock off somebody's hat at fifty feet. In a matter of minutes the audience was streaming out of the hall in moods ranging from gagging hilarity to plain disgust. But Hubbard, with a sense which suggested anticipation, explained the whole thing away as having been his fault. He had, he said, called Miss Bianca on stage by saying, "Will you come here *now*, Sonya?" and in doing so, using the "now," trapped her in present time.
At about the same time, the first cracks began to appear within the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation in Elizabeth. Dr. Winter was growing increasingly annoyed at Hubbard's authoritarian behavior and his flat refusal to use some semblance of a scientific approach - scientific in Dr. Winter's terms. In his lectures in California, Hubbard was already talking about something he called the *Theta*, and MEST (a conglomerate word created from the first letters of matter, energy, space, and time). There was also talk of doing away
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with *dianetic reverie* in auditing sessions and replacing it with something called an electropsychometer, a crude polygraph or lie detector developed by an inveterate West Coast gadgeteer named Volney Mathison. Rather than be in reverie, a person being audited would hold two cans connected to the small box which had a meter on it, and a minute current would be passed through the person's body, giving various readings on the meter as the person answered various questions. Dr. Winter, hearing these reports, grew increasingly apprehensive. Jack Horner, who was at the foundation taking the auditor's course, remembers the disagreements which flared between the two men, particularly with regard to the business of "past lives," which was offensive to Winter who was struggling for order and scientific neatness. Yet he was constantly being undermined. "There was a bulletin on the board," Horner tells, "which said: 'Any Student Running Past Lives Will Be Suspended.' So of course everybody started running past lives."
In October of 1950 Dr. Winter finally severed his relations with the Foundation and left to establish his own dianetic practice. The book he wrote soon after, *A Doctor Looks At Dianetics*, is revealing not only because of the way he openly criticizes Hubbard and some of his methods, but because Dr. Winter argues emphatically that there are valid and valuable aspects to Dianetics. To begin with, he strongly doubted that what Hubbard had called a patient's "sperm dream" actually occurred. He also disputed, rather critically, Hubbard's claim that anyone could be an auditor - Hubbard had once described a potential auditor as "any person who is intelligent and possessed of average persistency." Dr. Winter wrote that "something more than enthusiasm for a new idea was needed to make a good therapist." Finally, the doctor wondered aloud why he had never encountered anyone who was actually *Clear*. While he did support the principles of the existence of prenatal engrams, and the importance of precise methods for locating troubles whose cause was psychosomatic, he was
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completely put off and angered by the science-fiction elements of Hubbard's thinking.
At about the same time that Dr. Winter was leaving the New Jersey foundation, the flamboyant, totally confident Hubbard was already having problems with the board of his California Research Foundation, barely a few months old. Jack Horner had been sent to Los Angeles to help establish the training courses and remembers one incident when Hubbard summarily fired two men from the L.A. staff. "It seemed very unjust," Horner told me, "so I went to see him about it. You have to understand that I was only about twenty-one at the time." Brash, committed, and unafraid to face the boss. "I went to his office and I said, 'This is ridiculous. These people are not Communists!' And he paced up and down, and he said, 'Look, I've got a battle to fight. I may lose some people along the way, but I'm going to win the battle.'" If Hubbard meant the frictions between himself and the Los Angeles staff, and problems with Dr. Winter back in New Jersey, and mounting criticism from outsiders, then the battle had surely been joined.
In January of 1951, the New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners instituted proceedings against the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation, Inc., for conducting a school which, it was charged, was teaching medicine, surgery, and a method of treatment, without a license. The New Jersey operation quickly closed its doors, and Hubbard moved to Wichita, Kansas, where he incorporated another Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation.
Despite all the movement and allegations and internal difficulties, the work of the foundation had by this time taken on a somewhat formal look. Both the West Coast and Wichita foundations offered a one-month professional Dianetics auditor's course for $500. There was a second course consisting of a series of fifteen lectures involving two teams which would "co-audit" each other. This course cost $200 per person or
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$350 per team. A third course consisted of one two-hour session conducted by a "professional auditor" who would lead each member of a team through *dianetic reverie* - it was still being used - under the observation of the team member, the "co-auditor" in training. This course cost $15. In addition to the courses, the foundations advertised "associate" memberships in the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation. This entitled one to receive copies of *The Dianetic Auditor's Bulletin*, the foundation's official publication which told subscribers all about the latest developments in Dianetics. The "associate" membership cost $15 a year.
The public excitement and controversy generated by Dianetics at this time was matched by upheavals in Hubbard's personal life. He had married a second time, and in April of 1951, Sara Northrup Hubbard sued him for divorce, testifying that doctors had told her that her husband was suffering from "paranoid schizophrenia." She also charged that he had subjected her to "systematic torture" by beating and strangling her, and denying her sleep. The divorce was granted in June and gave Mrs. Hubbard custody of their fourteen-month-old son, Alexis, and $200 a month support. In a surprise move, however, it was Hubbard who actually won the divorce decree on a cross petition in which he charged gross neglect of duty on the part of Mrs. Hubbard. The ex-Mrs. Hubbard eventually remarried.
Meanwhile, Hubbard's relations with the Los Angeles Dianetic Foundation had deteriorated to such a point that he summarily broke with them that same year, 1951. The operation in Wichita was also doing badly and on February 21, 1952, filed a voluntary petition for bankruptcy. A Wichita businessman eventually bought it from the bankruptcy court, publicly announcing that he would have absolutely nothing to do with Hubbard. To anybody underestimating Hubbard's imagination and resilience, it seemed obvious that he was finished.