All straight memory processing is based on the following computation: An aberree is repetitive, in that the aberree in dramatizing an engram will not dramatize it only once but will ordinarily dramatize it many times, and this gives an apparent consistency of statement from an aberree.

This has often been mistaken for personality, and it was used by Charles Dickens as characterization. Dickensian characterization depended upon picking up some dramatization out of an individual that he met in the streets of London and then causing the individual throughout the story to repeat this dramatization.

The aberree who has an engram keyed in can count on dramatizing it many times. Therefore, if we find Mama saying “I am a goat,” we can be sure that Mama has probably said “I am a goat” many times. The aberrated pattern of the parents re-expresses itself in a varied pattern in the child.

In straight memory we want to find the first key-in of the engram. We may find the engram being dramatized many times by Mama during the childhood of our preclear, but there was a first time. If we can find that first time by straight memory and recall it in full view, with full memory in the preclear, we will knock out the key-in of the engram.

Straight memory has this additional benefit: Anything which is actually remembered is validated to the preclear This is not true of something he picks up on the track in reverie; that is not necessarily validated. He can run an engram with sonic and visio and still be unsure of the fact of whether it ever happened or not. But if he can be caused to remember the incident by straight line memory, one can be fairly sure that it will be validated to him and he will be aware of its reality. Straight memory has this advantage, then, of normally having a greater reality than running engrams in reverie. With Straightwire, or straight line memory, the auditor is acting more or less as a telephone linesman. He is actually stringing wire between “I” and the standard banks in such a way that material will come out of occlusion and into full view.

In Dianetics, straight memory is distinctly different from free association or any such technique, because it is very precisely directed and controlled by the auditor. The auditor must know the very precise laws of operation of straight memory. Knowing these things, he can recover the specific material which is assisting the aberration in the preclear, and which is the material of the supercharge on the bank. He is lightening up the charge on the bank and toughening up and making bigger the “I” of the individual.

This has about as much to do with free association as ice skating has to do with running a streamliner train. The point here is controlled memory. The auditor is actually stringing communication lines between the preclear’s “I” and the preclear’s standard bank and is recovering moments of the past which, when recovered, will be valid to the preclear. Their recovery will take some of the charge off the case and restore attention units to “I.”

This technique will actually knock out chronic somatics in about twenty percent of the cases it reaches.

Psychoanalysis, with free association, occasionally stumbled into a straight memory technique and was able to recover attention units to “I.” That is why free association works. And if you want to go on and free associate for five or ten years with the preclear, that is all right, but it can better be done in fifteen or twenty minutes in Dianetics. If you are going to improve this person by straight memory, you will be able to do it rapidly by knowing these various laws.I am not against free association; that was the best they had. Free association offered itself up as a technique. I looked for the push button which had to do with free association. I knew there was something in it which would suddenly bring about a release, a changed aspect of the preclear, and looking it over, knowing about engrams, I tried to find what factors there were in free association that matched up. The results of those factors are straight line memory.

Straight memory is a very precisely refined technique which was built up because I figured, quite logically, that if one knew about engrams and knew the basic material of aberration he could certainly devise a straight memory technique, because there was such a technique that occasionally worked. And trying to find out why it worked brought about the laws which are straight line memory.

Anything that can be accomplished by psychoanalysis and free association — and more — can be accomplished by straight line memory.

If we merely had straight memory, all by itself, we would be rich in terms of being able to administer therapy. You can go out into the society and with straight line memory alone make a terrific name for yourself being able to knock out diseases and aberrations. Just by knowing it you will be able to produce results, and not mild results either; they are sometimes very spectacular. Straight line memory will sometimes result in the shut-off of hay fever after you have worked on somebody for a few minutes. A medical doctor in New York City told us he was using straight line memory, and that he has turned off three out of five cases of Parkinson’s disease.

But results from straight memory are very pale compared to actually knocking out the engrams, because straight memory will only handle about twenty to twenty-five percent of the aberrations in cases.

Don’t overlook straight memory as one of your tools, because there will be many preclears that you won’t want to put into reverie, or that you won’t want to have around for a lot of processing. There will be many times when people around you are uncomfortable and you see no reason to put them down the track into reverie and go through this and that; you only want to spend five or ten minutes with them and cheer them up. You can do that with straight memory.

Quite ordinarily, it turns off acute somatics. You can turn off little temporary somatics with it in almost anyone. An acute somatic is one which has just taken place in the last day or so. For instance, Bessie gets up this morning with a headache; she doesn’t ordinarily have headaches. The auditor gets her to remember this and that with straight memory, and all of a sudden the headache is gone. That is because it is an acute somatic. It is very temporary. What the technique touches twenty to twenty-five percent of the time on the chronic somatic basis are somatics that are with a person year in and year out — for instance, the person has terrible migraine headaches. If you use straight memory on this type of somatic you will be able to turn about twenty percent of them off, but eighty percent you won’t be able to touch. So straight memory has tremendous value as far as acute somatics are concerned, but as far as chronic somatics are concerned it has a very limited value.

Where straight memory goes wrong is in a case which has one set of personnel in the prenatal bank and early childhood, and another set from there on. A change of personnel in the early part of a person’s life will of course knock out the early pattern of aberration, because the new people that the person is with are not dramatizing the engrams which were laid in, so you get a very strange selective pattern of restimulation. You get into the preclear’s childhood and start making the person remember things, trying to put him into somebody’s dramatization. You tell him to go to the first time this occurred and you find yourself still in childhood. And you keep doing this. Such a case is not as easy to work, but straight memory still applies.

It is quite common for somebody to have been raised in a foster home and to have not known it. People are very chary of telling children “I am not your real papa and that’s not your real mama.” They tend to let the child coast on this. As an auditor, you’ll find out fast enough.

So if straight memory doesn’t do much for the person, and every time you get into an early dramatization in reverie and try to skip down into the prenatal bank by running this dramatization you get no place, you should start suspecting that the dramatic personnel of the prenatal area have been altered after birth.

It is seldom that the mother is killed until after the child is born, but it is not too rare for mothers to die in childbirth, though it is getting more and more rare. You won’t find this as many times on the younger people you process as on the older people.

In working straight memory, you are looking for very specific things. All those non optimum, nonsurvival thoughts the preclear has about himself, about society, about the future, about children and about mankind are out of engrams.

For instance, someone says, “I just know, somehow, I am doomed. I can’t face it. From day to day I’m just unable to face life. I don’t know what’s going to happen next.” The auditor immediately wants to know whose dramatization this is. He tries not to be so blunt about it that he convinces his preclear that everything he thinks is bad, because an actual review of preclears will demonstrate quite adequately that about ninety percent of all the thinking and talking they do is not out of engrams. But these non optimum, worrisome things with emotional connotations and so forth are out of engrams, and you are trying to hunt down those identities and things and pin them on somebody else.

For instance, somebody thinks of himself as a mean, rather wicked person, and he doesn’t like himself for it. You are going to try to find what valence he has been forced into unwillingly. Who was the person he thinks he is?

There was one person who thought of himself as bossy, overbearing, rather mean and ornery. He also suffered from very bad ulcers and stomach upsets. By straight memory over a period of half an hour we located the dramatization of his father concerning his own stomach upset. The actual hole in the person’s stomach was an administered injury of some sort. We didn’t bother to contact that; all we contacted was the fact that this was Papa’s dramatization. Papa used to stand around and worry about his stomach. We contacted a specific moment when Papa was worrying about his stomach, and then we contacted the earliest time that could be contacted in this sequence when Papa was worrying about his stomach, and the ulcers went away.

Months later, there were still no ulcers. He had identified that part of the valence which he had been forced into, and having identified it, abandoned it immediately. Differentiation alone was enough. That is the power of straight memory.

This person was worked in reverie afterwards, and that material didn’t pick up again. Once in a while a valence shifter would get hit that would throw him into Papa’s valence and he would get everything that Papa had in the way of habits and so forth, but he didn’t afterwards get the ulcers or the stomach upset. This had belonged to Papa and did not belong to the individual himself.

Straight memory, then, individualizes a person by separating from him all the non optimum characteristics of the individuals around him. The analytical mind differentiates. If you can get a person to remember conditions about other people in his vicinity all during his life, then differentiation will take place. Engrams are built on identity thinking: A=A=A=A. This person has said “I have a stomachache,” so the preclear has a stomachache. It is a command somatic. If you can just make him remember who used to have stomachaches, there it is.

Straight memory is invaluable for locating circuitry. For instance, you are trying to sort out circuitry and you say, “Well, now, who used to say ‘Control yourself’ in your family?”

The preclear may say brightly, “I did. I tell myself that all the time.”

“All right. Well, somebody else might have.” “Oh no, nobody else, just me.”

Of course, if you went on along the line and just asked him the same question over again, maybe in a few days he would finally fish up an answer. But he would probably get mad at you because you are doing a contradiction with him, and you want to stay in affinity with him and keep an agreement going.

So you can ask, “Well, who was the most super controlled person in your vicinity when you were a child?”

Sometimes you will get this: “Why, that was Mama!” “What did Mama used to say?”

“Well, she used to say ‘Control yourself.”’ “Can you remember a specific moment?”

You are trying to get up a lock, a specific moment when Mama said “Control yourself.” And the preclear thinks and tries to postulate it. Now you help him out. You say, “Where was she standing?” and try to get the scene built up for him. “Where were you standing?”

This person says, “Oh, I can’t remember a specific moment at all, but I do know that she said it.”

“Well, when she did say it” — you don’t take no for an answer — ”where was she standing?” “Oh, she wasn’t standing; she was sitting. Yes, she was sitting.”

“And where were you standing?”

“I wasn’t standing either. I was sitting.” “Was it in the kitchen or the living room or “ “Oh, it was the kitchen.”

You have now got the scene built up that far, and now you say, “What exactly was she saying?”

“Oh, it’s something like ‘Control yourself’ or something like that.”

You go on and talk about something else for a moment, and all of a sudden the preclear may kick through the lag on this thought and say, “Oh, she used to say ‘I can’t stand people who can’t control themselves.’ Yeah, that’s right.”

There is the source of a circuit. You have knocked out the efficacy of that circuit in that person’s mind simply by making him remember it.

A serious circuit could not be installed by example alone without words. It takes both the example and the words to lay one in. There could be such a lock and it might be of some efficiency, but you will find out that the real tough circuits require the mechanical aspects of the engram plus the statement.

With the use of straight memory you can accomplish quite a bit in the line of therapy. Your goal in this is only to turn over to “I” the attention units which have been caught up in these locks. If you can turn enough of these attention units over to “I,” then “I” will be able to move on the track, will be able to perceive better, will be able to interiorize instead of exteriorize, and so forth. It’s all a matter of getting charge off this case.

The first and easiest method of getting the charge off is to pick up these locks by straight memory and break them. The specific worst offenders along the line are the affinity, reality and communication locks.

A typical instance is a person who has a chronic somatic of a bad arm, and we get by straight memory the fact that his grandmother died with a bad arm, or something similar, and we see by separating it out that he comes out of his grandmother’s valence. Sometimes we find people telling him that he is like his grandmother, and we can break that lock by getting this material into view. But there are other things you can ask for.

This gives you a large amount of material that you did not have before in straight memory.