Any auditor knows that the self-determinism of the preclear is reduced markedly and alarmingly by evaluating for the preclear on the subject of his own case; in fact, one can make a test of this with the end product near insanity. One has a person tell him what the person is worried about in life and then one informs that person the reason why this is so and informs him with sufficient force and logic to bring about an utter conviction on the part of that person that this is the case. What happens here is that one adds confusion to the case rather than otherwise.

All a practitioner can hope to do is steer the person in certain directions where that person will then make certain discoveries and where that person will be able to reconsider and cognite to the end of having a more proper view of things.

The real thing wrong with evaluation is that data or significances have a tendency to eradicate masses when they are intimately applied. It is quite one thing to say what all life is about and to give an individual the basis for a better and wider look at life as we do in Dianetics and Scientology, and it is quite another thing to find that the person is in his mother’s valence, and then begin to evaluate for him concerning his mother.

The most harmful example of this is to find someone upset, for instance, about his father, and then to explain to him, as the analyst does, that his father is probably a very good man and meant all for the best. To do this is to throw the patient into an apathy. As apathy is at least quiet, it has in later years been considered a desirable state for people who might have some socially destructive impulses. Apathy became, then, the end goal of later analysts, and is, of course, the only goal of the psychiatrist. That is why these people evaluate for their patients in the manner given.

When a patient in an asylum has told her “doctor” that she was recalling incidents from the mother’s womb, the “doctor” is prone to tell her that is all nonsense, she has to face reality, and so forth, which evaluates for her.

The real crime of evaluation is to tell the patient he is wrong. Evaluation itself as a broad subject is not particularly harmful so long as it does not completely invalidate the person to whom the remarks are addressed. Thus you could give a person a general framework of life so long as you are not crowding it against an entirely different framework of life. As an example, a Scientologist tells some religionist whose life is entirely oriented on religious principles of some archaic and antiquated creed that his beliefs are all wrong and that the truth lies otherwise. As the Scientologist is going straight up against a life entirely oriented by these ancient creeds, he is apt to produce in his action a considerable apathy on the part of the religionist. He is not apt to get in truth a convert to Scientology. He is apt to get a candidate for a mental hospital instead.

A person can be led out of any serious fixed beliefs by getting him to agree that there are wider beliefs to assume, but this must be done in full observance of ARC, and is not done by direct evaluation. This is, by the way, why we sometimes fail to convert people in older “healing” methods to Dianetics and Scientology. We simply fly into the teeth of their stable data and leave them all confused. We, knowing life, are far too convincing. “They” cannot but partially agree.

Evaluation for a person could be defined as the action of shaking his stable data without giving him further stable data with which he can agree or in which he can believe.

The analyst from Freud’s time onward has been supremely guilty of this. That it must be called guilt is observable in the fact that evaluation — reversal of the patient’s beliefs and data directly to the patient — has placed many psychoanalytic patients in hospitals.

The subjects of significances, evaluation and invalidation have become interdependent in Scientology.

In invalidation we have more fully than in evaluation a capital crime.

With significances we are simply discussing reasons why. With evaluation we are only giving new stable data, but with invalidation we are overtly and consciously knocking whatever props the patient may have out from under him.

The greatest invalidation, of course, is to be struck when one does not expect to be struck, to be criticized when one does not think he merits criticism. Essentially it is the act of telling a person that although he thinks he should be there, he is really not supposed to be there and the use of thoughts or force in order to accomplish his not- thereness. Reversely, it is also making a person sorry for his absence. In essence it is saying that a person has no validity, therefore that a person’s thoughts and postulates have no validity.

The commonest conduct by analysts in hospitals is to invalidate. Actually the entire activity of psychiatry, with its drugs and shocks and restraints, is invalidation.

In actuality evaluation belongs more properly to the field of psychoanalysis than does invalidation. Invalidation belongs to the modern psychiatrist, since it can have considerable brutality connected with it.

Another reason why psychoanalysis has failed lies in its failure to observe.

It would be thought that if many thousands of men financed by many, many millions of dollars were to look for a long period of time at insane people, they would sooner or later codify certain definite theories of observations, which when added up would bring about certain conclusions. In fact, one could not expect less than this from the most mechanical computer arranged.

Analysis must have been based upon erroneous premises. It must have been, because it led to no additional observation. A Dianeticist or a Scientologist setting out to observe phenomena will cover the track of Dianetics and Scientology. This is fairly certain, because it has been done now for many years by many, many people. The observations of Dianetics and Scientology have been productive of a considerable number of new observations. This is not the case with psychoanalysis. Only those few examples which seemed to validate the basic principles of psychoanalysis were observed by the analyst and where data fell outside this sphere it was not observed and codified.

A true and proper scientific method as given in Book One, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, is as follows:

1. Make a series of careful observations.
2. These observations must be repeated, and are acceptable as observations only if many people following the prescribed techniques can duplicate the results.
3. Variations of the prescribed techniques must be tried to eliminate the possibility that the observed results might be due to a factor other than that intended. As a gross example, suppose it is reported that a magnet will attract objects. Demonstration shows it does attract and lift iron balls; that is Step (a) above. Now variations of the experiment show that the magnet attracts iron but not copper, silver, etc. The observed effect — attraction — is real. Variation of the original experiment is needed to show the actual limits of the effect.
4. Combining all relevant data, from all relevant experiments, formulate a hypothesis.
5. The hypothesis must explain all observed data.
6. It must not demand as a consequence of its logical development, the existence of phenomena that do not, in fact, exist.
7. But it should indicate the existence of real, hitherto unobserved facts.
8. Using the hypothesis, predict new facts.
9. A logical structure broad enough to explain all observed, relevant phenomena will necessarily imply further phenomena that have not yet been observed. Use this mechanism to predict the existence of something which, under previous theories, would not exist.
10. Perform an experiment and make observations on these predictions.
11. As a result of the experiment, discard the hypothesis, or advance it now to the status of “Theory.”
12. Make further predictions, further experiments, and collect more observational evidence until a contradictory relevant fact is found.
13. Discard the old theory, take the new total of observational data, and form a new hypothesis.
14. See Step Three.

It is as though the psychoanalyst from Freud forward was looking for confirmation of his own beliefs.

The most serious defect which a researcher can have is a fondness for his own beliefs so great that he looks only for confirmation of these. A researcher must possess the ability to discard and reassume theories at will. He must not nurse to his bosom one theory and then try to align all data to that theory. He must align data to a theory, it is true, but when that data does not add up to that theory, that theory must be discarded and a new one must be assumed. Only in this way is progress made. That the basic tenets of psychoanalysis were never abandoned or reformed shows a certain fondness for them which was not borne out in actual practice or observation.

The dramatization of the mental image picture (the engram), the demonstration of overt act-motivator sequences and a hundred thousand other Dianetic and Scientology phenomena, went entirely unobserved by psychoanalysts. They even looked at them and saw them not. In that healing consists of getting at what is wrong and making it right, the approach of the Dianeticist was intensely successful. In that what was wrong with the patient was not a psychoanalytic theory was enough to cause the analyst to invalidate the patient and remain secure in his theoretical assumptions, the analyst actually did not make people well; and this is the primary reason why: He failed utterly to observe the data of the patients.

Probably the most fundamental error of psychoanalysis was its early dependence upon hypnotism. Breuer, as Freud’s co-worker, actually exhumed the original data on which Freud based his libido theory in 1894. Breuer used hypnotism.

The use of hypnotism denotes an anxiety to produce an effect beyond the power of the individual to produce an effect by normal knowledge and means. It is the belief that the patient must be in a comatose state before something can be done to him. The medical doctor and the analyst and psychiatrist alike have held this tenet.

Basically, a good therapy would wake people up, make them more alert, make them more able, happier, more competent. Hypnotism is the exact reverse to this. We have here another failure to observe. Anyone observing hypnotic patients would see that after they have been hypnotized they are less able.

Narcosynthesis and other nonsense has had to be run out of more Dianetic preclears than I would care to count before their cases could advance. The continual use of hypnotism (and an inexpert use it was, to one versed in Eastern hypnotism!) and the use of hypnotic drugs to “diagnose” or “plumb the depths” of some patient is a confession that one does not know the general rules of life. If one does not know these general rules, of course, he is apt to look almost anywhere, even into the wastebasket, for an answer.

Hypnotic command or hypnotic diagnosis does not lead to well patients. It leads to slaves, and if you will observe any people who have been continually hypnotized you will find that it has been detrimental to them. This does not even require very much close observation.

There is nothing essentially wrong with hypnotism so long as one can undo hypnotism. We can undo hypnotism, therefore it is not very important whether we hypnotize people or not; but the analyst could not unhypnotize people. He did not even know what the mechanism of hypnotism was, and as a result he was not thereby entitled to use it. Only that person who is able to produce both the kill and the cure should be permitted to kill. If you could bring a dead man to life at once without any bodily harm to him, it would be all right for you then to kill men — providing you brought them back to life. It is perfectly all right for you to hypnotize people so long as you can unhypnotize them. Psychoanalysts and psychiatrists cannot do this. Therefore this particular phenomena in the mind should be well beyond their reach.

We think very poorly of the auditor who abandons cases without doing much for them. It must be harshly said, on ample evidence, that the analyst does very little else but abandon cases.

The first hours in analysis are usually spent, according to a survey made back in Dianetic days, finding how much the patient can pay. After that, the patient is persuaded to believe that it will require about a year of four separate sessions of one hour each per week to establish whether or not analysis can do anything for him. At the end of a year, of course, he is so habituated to coming to the analyst and handing over almost the entirety of his pay check that he does not stop doing so, and forgets that the analyst has ever said that it would require a year just to find out. Nothing is being done for the patient but he does not notice this. When the patient runs out of money, he is abandoned. This is our unfortunate finding in the case of psychoanalysis.

It is quite one thing to leave a case when one has bettered it of its current worries, and it is quite another to leave it when one has worsened it. The Dianeticist does the former quite often. The patient expects to be a Dianetic clear and does not reach that goal-only recovers from a couple of psychosomatic illnesses and two or three deep neuroses, and yet wants more auditing. The auditor is then entitled to tell him no. But in the case of the person who is worsened by the therapist, the abandonment of that case becomes inevitable, if the therapist ever could have done anything for the case in the first place.

Naturally we are walking on rather thin ground here since there are many people around who believe that Dianetics did not do all for them that it should, and I am the first to agree with this, since we had too few skilled practitioners and we ourselves were too pressed for time which was being consumed by long and arduous processes to pay attention to every complaint which came our way. But our intention in Dianetics was never otherwise than to do all we possibly, humanly could for the preclear. I am afraid that the analytic approach does not fall within this category. The analyst must have known when he first enlisted the patient that the patient would worsen, since the analyst rarely experienced anything else in his practice. Therefore we have a basic intention which is entirely at variance with our ideas of the way the world ought to run.

It is interesting to note that our attempt to survey psychoanalytical suicide met with many savage rebuffs. Yet we were able to discover that some 35% of the people “in” psychoanalysis committed suicide either during an analysis or within three months after the analysis. In our efforts to discover the why of this we received only one answer common to all of the analysts interviewed, and that was, “He came to me too late.”

It can be seen that this is a rather shallow way to look at things, for any of us today in Scientology could say, “Well, the human race came to us too late,” and we could then throw up our hands and not do anything about it, whereas, as a matter of fact, the remark is almost correct. Yet we are still doing something about it and in Dianetics and Scientology we have gotten no great number of suicides. As a matter of fact, I know of but one actual suicide in all the hundreds of thousands of cases which we have had our hands on and that one was political, not therapy.

It might be asked in this modern age why psychoanalysis never permitted itself to be before and after tested. This is probably the greatest condemnation of the entire subject of psychoanalysis.

One looks in vain for actual authentic records of improvement of cases because of psychoanalytic sessions. While the psychoanalyst is very anxious to have us in Dianetics validate our science, he himself has never validated his. Had he done so, we would have to hand an accurate record of cases tested before analysis and after analysis.

The whole idea of testing does not belong to either the psychoanalyst or the psychologist. Testing goes clear back to the dimmest days of Greece. Man has always been testing man to discover his existing state or changes in it.

The oldest precursor of testing known to us is probably graphology, but on the other hand it may be phrenology. The ancient witch was in essence doing a psychometric test on her visitor. Tests of guilt and innocence by responses was a subject for medieval courts. So at no time could the psychoanalyst have said that he was not familiar with the whole project and idea of testing.

In modern times testing (erroneously within the framework of “psychology”) has been excessively available to the analyst, and yet he has never produced to my knowledge any booklet or pamphlet concerning the various differences of patients before and after an analysis and has certainly never codified his subject.

Why has he not done this? Is it because he could not? I am afraid that is the reason why. I am afraid that psychoanalysts have tested their patients before and afterwards and have found them worse afterwards and so have never released the results. It would be nearly impossible for a practitioner not to attempt this sometime during his career. Therefore we find all the results of psychoanalysis based upon the opinion of the analysts themselves. If one has ever sat in a coffee house talking to auditors about the wonders which have been produced in cases which one knows are still spinning, one will see that it is a human error to assume a greater result than has been achieved. Now, however, in fairness to these auditors most of their results are factual and they have every right to brag about them. But in the case of the analyst, one never hears about recoveries. One hears only about symptoms. If one has ever had the painful experience of spending an evening with analysts, one would realize that the dramatization of the patient’s symptoms was the entirety of the conversational fare. If one can talk only about symptoms and never about the release of symptoms, one then assumes that the release of symptoms has not been accomplished.

Well, how does all this affect us? Are we in any way affected by the fate and failures of psychoanalysis?

Yes. In two ways.

In the first way, we are able to sort out of psychoanalysis various don’ts, and, as these crept into early Dianetics from psychoanalysis, it is necessary for us at this time to reassess and evaluate what we are doing. One can summarize these rather rapidly. One does not force a person to communicate who is low on havingness. One does not specialize entirely in recalls. One does not occasion or force a transference into another personality. One does not concentrate on the second dynamic. One does not specialize in significances. One does not evaluate for or invalidate the patient. One observes what he is doing from the patient and not from the textbook, making sure that one is actually observing the patient. One does not use hypnotism. One does not abandon cases when they have been worsened. One does not fail to validate by testing, and one sees security in the general expansion and advance of a subject itself. We can learn these don’ts because we see a corpse lying there very dead because they did not know these don’ts, so we should not repeat them.

Is there any other way we are affected by the psychoanalyst? Yes. The psychoanalyst and various mental practitioners have not conducted themselves ethically in this society. The psychoanalyst, the psychologist, and the psychiatrist have been guilty of not delivering. Whatever may be said about Dianetics and Scientology, whatever may be said about me or my enthusiasm, I can assure you that we and I have delivered. We mean what we say when we write down in a summary of case histories that we cured so many cases of so-and-so, and we alleviated so many cases of such- and-such; we are not guilty of anything but what we actually did. We are guilty occasionally in misinterpreting exactly how we achieved these alleviations. A case in point is in 1947 when I was using a recall method which rehabilitated the confidence of the person to face his pictures. This brought about a cessation of his stimulus-response mechanisms in their entirety, and so created a clear. Even by the time Book One had come along some of this technology (because it wasn’t properly understood) had been forgotten or overlooked. But later on it was rehabilitated and brought to the fore, and it is in full use at this time. We have said we would deliver so-and-so and we are delivering so-and-so, and those things which we have intended to deliver and have not yet delivered we still intend to deliver and will continue to strive down to the last thought wave to accomplish. Our efforts and activities are sincere. There has never been a more sincere group on the face of Earth than those who are in the ranks of Dianetics and Scientology. These people can be trusted. You can go to almost any person practicing Dianetics and Scientology and receive some part of the benefit inherent in these subjects. He will try, he will try decently and he will make the best changes he can accomplish take place in your case. This is more true than ever today with our new programs of indoctrination and training, and I would say that in a relatively short time the totality of result to be obtained from Dianetics and Scientology will be obtainable from each and every properly certified practitioner throughout the world.

We have here an intensely sincere group. We have a fine ethical background. We are trying, we are honest, we are decent.

How does this make psychoanalysis in any way affect us? Well, I am very sorry to have to say this, but the psychoanalyst has not been honest, he has victimized the public. A psychoanalysis costs better than $9000 (£3219) and yet does not attain as much result as one opening of session by one auditor (£2). In fact this $9000 “cure” is apt to deteriorate the case entirely. The psychoanalyst has made specious and large statements concerning his abilities to act, and has never even tried to press forward and bring those conditions into existence. He has joined hand and glove with the psychiatrist, and is murdering and butchering his patients. It is the least safe thing that one could do to place himself in the hands of an old-time practitioner today.

The public is entirely and intensely aware of this. The public is aware of the fact that the last person you want to see is a psychoanalyst or a psychologist or a psychiatrist. The public is forced to go to these people by the law, and the only reason they go near them is because they were at one time the faint hope that existed, but their faint hope no longer has to have recourse to them. These practitioners have had to enforce their position by law, lacking results.

Psychoanalysis, psychology, and psychiatry have influenced the Christian ministry today to place even members of congregations into their hands (based on an actual poll of 1,700 ministers). The psychiatrist, the psychoanalyst and the psychologist may have a fight one with another amongst themselves, but they hold this in common: They have given into the public the rightful opinion that the mental practitioners prior to the year 1950 were entirely valueless and were not earning their salt. They have given rise to a public atmosphere of disdain and contempt for anyone practicing in the field of the mind. Therefore they do to some slight degree affect us. Therefore we should make very very clear to the entire public that we are not psychologists, psychoanalysts, or psychiatrists, and any of us who fall from grace and attempt to use these old cloaks to further our own pocketbook should be despised by their fellow auditors. The one chain of logic we must break is that “people who work in the field of the mind are all crazy; they can do nothing for us, therefore we must not go to them.”

My own attitude, whether I am known to be me or not, when I am confronted with the idea that I am connected with old-time mental healing, is to become enormously amused and to make it completely clear that Scientology and Dianetics had to come about and had to be called by different names because they did something that the old-time fields of mental activity never did do.

You are to some slight degree affected by the repute of the psychoanalyst and he has not helped us out. He has attacked his patients sexually under drugs. He has lied about his cases. He has worked himself up in a legal position before the courts so that he is listened to by the judges, and yet only opinion is used by him to declare people insane and sane.

This is an empire which we are today inheriting. It is an empire we must clean up. It is an empire which has not been clean. Therefore it is up to us to do the very best we can to make this new empire of the mind a good solid ethical thing in which people can believe, and to make that empire something which serves man, rather than victimizes him.