EVALUATION OF DIANETICS
One year ago this writing, Dianetics
was first introduced publicly; twelve months of work by many hundreds
of people now make possible a first evaluation of what dianetics
actually has to offer, how much validity it has, and what it actually
is. It will take a century or so to determine the full and proper
rating of Hubbard's work, but a first-order approximation at least can
be estimated.
Briefly, dianetics itself is much
less than Hubbard believed it to be but is the essential, hitherto
missing key to everything Hubbard claimed, and considerably more than
he realized. In that respect. dianetics might be compared to money.
"Money won't buy happiness; you can't buy everything!" is the old and
very valid comment. But the other side is, "Yes: but have you tried
buying them without money?"
Similarly, dianetics will not do
everything, it will not assure happiness. But several millennia of
trying to do it without dianetics has adequately demonstrated that that
system definitely does not work. Whether you call it dianetics,
hoosanany, sprooplotics or anything else makes no difference;
psychology - psychiatry - philosophy and religion have not produced an
adequately high level of human happiness, or an adequately high level
of cultural sanity.
"Man's Proud History" is a seven
thousand year written record of murder, rape, war, and looting. It's a
record of the wastage of the best of human achievements, the
destruction of the best of human abilities, the crushing of high, fine
hopes and ideals. The world, at this moment, is busily harnessing the
finest achievements of human efforts - the sheer, clean beauty of line
of the fast jet plane, the great, sleek power of a great transoceanic
plane, the great aspirations of harnessed atomic energy - to the
purposes of mutual annihilation. Whatever philosophy, psychiatry, or
religion may have had to offer mankind-the proof of their
ineffectiveness is in the records of the years. Each of these great
efforts to help men has, whatever its inherent merits may "have been,
simply and conclusively failed.
Anyone who has tried to get a
fear-stricken child to accept a pill that will cure its lethal illness
knows, one physical equivalent of the situation. The medecine has. the
power to cure the child; the child is wildly resisting the the
admmlstratlon of the medecine. It makes no difference how good the
medicine is - unless it can be accepted, it is useless.
The psychoanalyst who says "He came
to me but I could not help him because he would not co-operate" is
expressing the problem, too. The self-evident fact that you can drive a
man to work with a whip, but you " can not force him to think as you
wish, is part of it. The analyst who says "he would not co-operate"
must recognize that that is not a failure of the patient; it is a
failure of psychoanalysis. The man came for help because he had mental
problems; the first problem was the mental 'Problem of gaining access
to the core of the problem. If the doctor cannot induce the child to
take the pill, that is not a failure of medecine, because medicine is
the science of physical illness. But if the psychoanalyst cannot entice
the patient to take the medicine, that is a failure of the technology,
for that failure is a mental problem.
Psychoanalysis wtll help those who
accept it. Philosophy, even more, can help those who accept and truly
understand. Religion has even greater power to help, for some. What is
it, though, that keeps men from understanding and accepting? None of
these helpful mental disciplines is applicable or useful until some
resistance that seems to be built into Man is somehow overcome.
Generations of philosophers and
mystico-ethical philosophers have repeatedly said, through thousands of
years, that the distractions of the flesh and of earthy things prevents
one from attaining to a higher understanding. That the individual must
overcome his fleshly wants to achieve the perfect peace of greater
understanding. That, it's been phrased in a thousand semimystical ways.
The essence is that you have to ignore and reject the body in order to
bring peace to the mind.
It hasn't worked for many people. A
handful of men in each generation, but not much more.
Actually, what Hubbard has in
dianetics is precisely the same basic recognition, with a complete
reversal of the answer to the problem. Dianetics is simply a technique
for facing and understanding the problems of the flesh, or in less
quasimystical terms, the mechanical problems of the environment are
impacted mechanically on our perceptic apparatus, the physical body,
and until those problems are considered, evaluated and resolved, we
cannot handle properly the problems of the mind itself.
Consider this; Suppose you are trying
to carry out some purely intellectual operation-writing an article,
painting a picture, computing a complex problem. This is a purely
mental function, with a minimum of physical problem. But you are
working in a room where the temperature is 100°, there is gravel in
your shoes, the humidity is ninety per cent, the seat of the chair is
broken, and pinches you every time you move, and a squadron of
mosquitoes is humming around the room.
There are, theoretically, two methods
of handling this situation. Number One is the ancient philosophical
method, the method of the mystics. You can be bigger than these petty
physical annoyances, ignore them: rise above them, refuse to pay any
attention to the distractions of the flesh, and go on to higher things.
If you succeed in getting yourself into a semihypnotic trance, you may
achieve that.
The second method is as follows: Get
a new chair. Take off your shoes and dump out the gravel. Get a D.D.T.
bomb and eliminate the mosquitoes. Get an air conditioner, or at least
a fan. Go take a shower to remove accumulated sweat, put on fresh
linen, and then buckle down and really tear that mental problem apart.
It seems clear that the second method
is more apt to produce more results in less time for most human beings.
Hubbard's dianetics is simply the
second answer to the problem of the "distractions of the flesh": stop
kidding yourself that they aren't distractions, stop trying to ignore
them; and find out what they really are. Then solve those.
After that, you can really tackle the
main problem; the problem of the mind.
Hubbard did not have, in dianetics,
the cure-all for mental problems, as he believed, but he did have the
essential missing key. Dianetics is a technique by which the mechanical
problems of the physical organism can be faced and resolved. After
that, the mental problems are clarified, and can be handled rapidly and
effectively. But no human being can handle the problems without facing
and resolving the problems of his own physical past.
However, when the physical problems
have been faced and resolved, then, the old philosophers were quite
correct; mental peace through understanding undoubtedly can be
achieved. But that is quite definitely beyond the scope of dianetics as
originally presented. The immense importance of dianetics is that it
gives us a technique whereby the physical problem can be tackled and
resolved.
Psychology has long maintained that
the human personality is made up of heredity and environmental factors.
Accepting their statement as correct and complete for the moment, it is
not complete; too many mystical philosophers have insisted that there
is something beyond those two factors to permit a true scientific
analysis to ignore it completely" we can analyze the factors they do
consider. Heredity is pretty clearly beyond therapeutic influence; if a
man has a certain set of genetic characteristics, that's pretty
thoroughly and definitely that. Then environment is all that's left to
be worked with.
Actually of course, "personality" is
the resultant generated by the interaction of heredity and environment,
and is absolutely distinct from either. Electrical charge is generated
when a conductor is moved through a magnetic field; personality is
generated when a certain structure: a human body determined by
heredity, is moved temporally through an environment field. But
elecetric charge is not magnetism, and is not mechanical energy of
translation: it's a separate thing in itself. Similarly, personality is
not heredity, it is not environment, but a thing in itself generated by
the interaction of a physical organism and its environment.
The confusion there is rather general
and has, led to some fancy misunderstandings..Hubbard developed his
work pragmatically, and his theoretical material needed a great deal of
re-evaluation and reformulation, the kind of work that required many
new minds.. Newton's famous Laws of Motion weren't theoretical
material: they were merely codification of observational data, and
generalizations drawn from those observavations. Einstein's work,
generations later, is beginning to give us a theory of gravity and the
laws of motion. But Newton's observational codifications have been
vastly useful. Hubbard's observation-codification is equally basic and
useful in the field of the mind, however far off his theories may or
may not be.
And the most important consideration
implicit in Hubbard's work is the recognition that environment and the
physical organism are both purely mechanical. The process of, thinking
is purely mechanical, as evidenced by the fact that computer machines
can duplicate most of the processes of thinking; only "greater
complexity is needed to get a fair approximation of the human thinking
process.
Environment is purely mechanical;
when someone speaks to you, no words reach your ears-sonly sound waves.
Sound waves have no meaning, no intelligence, no emotional connotation
except as your mind implants them. Consider the familiar wolf-whistle.
That is simply and solely a series of musical notes, a sound-wave
complex that a physicist could analyze, formulate, and re-synthesize.
Such a whistle, reaching the ears of a Roman girl of Caeser's time, for
instance, would have no emotional or intellectual evaluation
whatsoever. It is, was, and always will be a series of sound waves, and
nothing whatsoever beyond that.
Significance does not lie in the
environment; it lies in the integration of experience and
thought-emotion reaction. The environment is mechanical, wholly
mechanical, and solely mechanical. It can, therefore, be approached
only on the strictly mechanical level.
The human body is a biomechanical
structure. It has magnificent biomechanical engineering. A committee of
engineers studying the human body can find in its structures highly
developed examples of practically every engineering art. The architect
and strain-distribution 'specialist can study the human skull, and see
incredibly ingenious interlocking arch structures. The acoustic
engineer finds, in the ear, a marvelous mechanism for impedence
matching, to transfer sound energy from the thin medium of air . to the
denser medium of liquidand magnificent devices whereby that highly
efficient mechanism can be made less efficient at will, in order to
adjust for over-intense sound waves.
But that is mechanical.
Psychologists have long known that
human beings do record sound phonographically, sight photographically,
and all sense-impressions similarly. That was original with Hubbard in
a degree, but it was not a new discovery. These abilities are purely
mechanical; all memory is purely mechanical. A phonograph has no
intelligence, but remembers sounds. Punched-cards have no intelligence,
but can remember a man's description, his name and address, his
business, his fingerprints, and a thousand other details, if desired.
These memory functions are mechanical.
Association of ideas can even be made
mechanical, too. Punchedcard machines, fed data on a man's
fingerprints, can associate that data mechanically with the data of
who, where, and what.
Until the actual extent of mechanical
functions in Man is recognized, the true field of the typically human
function, as distinct from the mechanical, remains unallocated, and
therefore no effectively directed efforts at reaching and understanding
it can be made.
In his enthusiasm for the mechanical
side, Hubbard pushed the mechanical explanation too far; in their
enthusiasm for human individuality, psychology and philosophy have
tended to push the line too far the other way.
The thinking process is mechanical,
purely mechanical, and is not in any way part of the personality. It is
purely the reaction of the physical structure to the physical
environment.
Now the characteristic of mechanisms
is their ability to tell what when, how much, et cetera. They do just
fine at that. When a machine comes along, however, that refuses to do
so, and instead of reporting the neutron flux concentration at the
heart of an atomic pile, or the Bissell's Functions required, but
instead types out on its output register "Why should I tell you?"
something new has been added.
Hubbard's dianetics recognizes that
before any understanding of the mind is possible, some calibration of
the physical universe with respect to the mind is essential. It is a
technique of studying the past experiences and learning what, when,
where, who, how, and how much. So long as it goes that far and no
further, it can, and will, help the p~ysical ills of the physical
mechanism.
Only when it extends into the field
of pure philosophy· and asks "Why?" does it become a true mental
science attacking the true human problems.
Psychoanalysis failed because it
didn't determine with adequate detail what happened, and did not
understand what factors were important. Dianetics supplies the
technique necessary to gather that data. But philosophy, not
psychoanalysis or psychiatry, supplies the techniques for handling that
data after it has been garnered. .
Part of the essential problem has
been missed because of the cultural climate that originated about 1800.
Up to that time, physical sciences had been making little progress
indeed, because teleological, anthropomorphic thinking dominated
"science." In the terms of that time, the heat generated in burning
oxygen and hydrogen was the heat of the passionate embrace of the
hydrogen atom for the oxygen atom, and the ardor of their love was
equal to sixty-eight thousand calories per mole. Solving the problems
of physical science in those termS conspicuously faiied to
work-wherefore teleological thinking and anthropomo~ ism were given
theyo-heaveho and progress commenced. Things happened because there
were physicallaws, not because there were motives. Even today traces of
the old motive-type, teleological thought. remain in the language of
science. In gravitation, we speak of bodies attracting .each other, and
certain chemicals have an affinity for water.
Unfortunately, the success of the
nonmotivation, nonhuman thinking in physical science, and the rejection
of introspection as a proper technique for understanding the world,
spread to fields where it did not belong. Anthropomorphic thinking does
not apply to hydrogen atoms-but. it does apply to anthropos, to Man
himself. Introspection will not, for all the studying of the inward
whichness of the why, explain the Balmer series in the hydrogen
spectrum. But cyclotrons and spectroscopes have notably failed in
explaining why a paranoid believes every man's hand is against him. To
paraphrase the comment of a true thinker, render unto introspection,
the things that are introspective, and unto spectroscopes the things
that belong therein. Confusing things in either direction leads to
spectacularly wrong answers.
Atomic energy yielded to the
searching probe of the cyclotron; international insanity will not yield
beto that-it can only be annihilated by it. Because foam rubber proves
utterly futile in driving nails does not prove that foam rubber is
useless.
Dianetics, as Hubbard presented it,
was incomplete. The errors in it, the holes in it, were promptly,
loudly, and emotionally pointed out by those who were making equal
errors in the opposite direction. A relatively small percentage of
psychologists, psychiatrists, doctors, and philosophers did, however,
get in to the field and study the work. The reports of these men are
not yet available; it takes more than a single year to evaluate such
material. It can properly be taken as an indication of extremely
inadequate .evaluation if a man can report that "This is useless!" or
"This is the ultimate and complete answer!" in any six months study. No
adequate evaluation can be completed in less than five years. Certainly
no one-week study of a subject as fundamental as the theory of the
nature of the human mind can be considered meaningful.
Those who have studied dianetics
during the last year have only preliminary reports; summed up, they
uniformly say "There's something extremely important here!" Those who
condemn dianetics utterly because it is incomplete condemn their own
thinking; Newton's observational rules for motion and gravity were
incomplete. There have been attacks on dianetics beto cause Hubbard was
not a professional psychologist; Newton was not ed- ucated as a
physicist, Priestly was not a chemist, and Pasteur was not an M.D. In a
truly highly evolved science, where there are many definitively
explored fields o~ knowledge, years of professional experience are
needed. But in 'a field which is still only quasi-scientific, where
doctrine and authority and theory rather than law-of-nature rules that
is not the case. The test of whether a science exists is fairly simple;
can an experienced practicer of the field specify accurate tests, to
determine quantitative factors, se-I lect material on the basis of
those' tests, and predict with ninety per cent or better minimum
accuracy the response of that material to specifically prescribed
conditions? If he can, there is a science; if no man can guarantee such
perjormance, there is no science, but only an art.
Some branches of medicine, under that
rule, would be science; some are arts. The entire field of the mind,
however, is clearly, at this stage in human history, definitely an art.
Dianetics, as Hubbard presented it,
was incomplete; what was needed, however, was study, evaluation, and
further work to complete it. It was essential, however, that it be
presented for study, and that was done by this magazine.
Some thousands of people have, in the
succeeding year, studied it, worked with it, and are developing it. It
is far from complete; its mechanical aspects have, inevitably, at
tracted many people who are mechanically - mechanistically - inclined,
and relatively few who were philosophically, nonmechanistically
inclined. That is, actually. an inevitable tendency: and an unfortunate
handicap, since it tends to lead to further development of the already
fairly well developed mechanical side, rather than the largely
undeveloped philosophical aspects. Also, it is far easier for a human
mind to face the question "What happened to me?" in the mechanical
sense, than to face and solve the problem "What am I?" That one, as
many a philosopher has found, is exceedingly disturbing and
uncomfortable. But that latter question is, of course, the one that
must be answered.
That dianetics produces some
remarkable results is readily demonstrated. Individuals dying of
psychosomatic conditions have been brought back to good health.*
A man suffering from severe gastric
ulcers, scheduled for operation in two weeks, canceled the surgery
after one week, and celebrated the cancellation with a steak,
French-fries, and beer dinner. A relief, after several months on
strained baby foods. The ulcers were gone. A young woman with arthritis
of the shoulder lost all symptoms; X-ray plates before, during, and
after conclusiv&o ly showed that calcification existed before, was
in process of dissolving ten days after starting processing, and was
gone thirty days after processing began. Another young woman at a State
hospital for the insane was scheduled for prefrontal lobotomy as a
hoIfelessly, permanently and violently suicidal case, after forty-nine
electric shock treatments. After three months of processing, she had a
secretarial job, and was, according to her relatives, more stable than
she had ever been. The suicidal mania, incidentally, broke after half
an hour of processing; additional processing was necessary, of course,
before the acute neurosis was ended.
Acute compulsive neuroses have been
broken in hours; it does not mean that all cases will respond
spectacularly and swiftly, but that it happens at all means that there
is something new at work. Specifically, Hubbard's observational rule
thatneurosis of the acute level is direct. and literal carrying out of
a specific verbal command seems demonstrated. One man had developed a
compulsive neurosis to the extent that his driving was approaching
homocidal tendencies. When driving, if he saw a friend driving toward
him, he had a strong compulsion to drive right into the approaching
car. So far, he had succeeded in negating against it, and drawing up,
shaken mentally, for twenty minutes or so before he could proceed. This
neurosis disappeared after finding the statementcommand of !lis Mother
saying "I always like to run into my friends on the street." This case,
incidentally, was handled by one of the cooperating psychiatrists, and
has shown no recurrence of the neurosis.
Another decidedly undesirable driving
pattern showed up in a man who, after attending his father's funeral in
a town some fifty miles from his home, spent hours driving in circles,
and arrived home finally in a state of physical and nervous collapse.
His compulsive neurosis had forced him to turn right at every
intersection he came to. It was only by a violent effort of will that
he had been able to refrain sufficiently to get home at all. His father
had been a minister; the command-statement in this neurosis appeared to
have been: "You must always take the right road, son." Relieving that
particular situation, in any case, ended the neurosis. There seems
adequate evidence that Hubbard's thesis that direct and literal
interpretations of statements plays an exceedingly important part in
human neurosis.
Repression of normal caution was the
result of a different type of command. State Highway Safety directors
should be interested; the individual in this case had been in half a
dozen extremely severe smash-ups, usually at speeds between sixty and
eighty miles an hour, and had survived by a series of minor miracles.
He had led an adventurous life, with a number of narrow escapes. There
was a considerable and violent fear r~action when the command
statemen"t "Don't worry, nothing's going to kill you !" was finally
found and run out. The fear-reaction came from re-evaluation of the
various automobile crashes.
Life can be interesting, but usually
short, when such a commandstatement is in operation
Dianetics itself, the mechanical
approach to the human mechanism, is definitely valid. It's exact
extent, and its exact possibilities remain to be explored. And" the
immensely greater field of philosophy that must be evaluated beyond
dianetics, is still almost unexplored. Individuals who have cleared up
the physical problems, and then proceeded into the philosophical
problems, have already made many basic discoveries that seem extremely
important.
For example, psychology and
philosophy have long struggled with the problem of what emotion
actually is. Philosophical introspection seems the only possible means
of studying that question-and at the present time there seems to be
excellent indication that an answer has been found. Emotion seems to be
of only two true types; pure emotional pleasure, and emotional misery,
unhappiness. These, however, are simply the pain-pleasure drives
applied to the individual when he departs from basic, genetic behavior
patterns. Man is gregarious by inheritance; departure from that pattern
would be a defiance of the genetic behavior pattern-and would be
rewarded with unhappiness.
Evolution studies have largely been
devoted to the investigation of comparative anatomy-the physiological
side of evolution. But cows are herbivorous not simply because they
have herbivore teeth; a cow can digest meat with high efficiency. The
physiology is accompanied by a genetically determined behavior pattern.
The evolution of behavior patterns is extremely difficult to study-hut
it is certainly exceedingly important. That behavior patterns are
genetically determined is obvious-but the significance of those
behavior patterns in human beings has not been adequately studied. If a
genetic pattern exists, it is useless unless there is some means
whereby it can enforce itself on the organism. It's been popular, for
10, these many years, to talk about "mechanisms" and explain everything
in those terms. It works extrernelv well for atoms and 'molecules, 'and
even simple things like radar sets. It works very poorly with human
beings, or even animals. Living creatures are more complex; they have
motives, desires, wishes something beyond mere mechanism. And emotion
is simply the enforcing agency of the genetic patterns, apparently.
There has, incidentally, been a great
deal of philosophical condemnation of "Man's animal instincts"; the
next time some one brings up that old saw, I suggest you ask him to
name the animals-other than Man, of course-that torture their own kind
for amusement as a public spectacle, indulge in homosexuality, or
abandon their new-born young because they are inconvenient: And which
animal showed the more typically animal pattern, the Spartan parent who
exposed his child on a hillside, or the wolf that took the little
corpse home td feed her cubs?
It might be pointed out that genetic
behavior patterns are evolved, just as physiological patterns are, and
that a pattern of life that has undergone 2,000,000,000 years of field
testing, or 300,000,000 years, as the mammalian patterns have, are not
apt to be particularly given to destructive tendencies.
The other old saw about
"self-'preservation" being the first law of nature can stand some
healthy, critical inspection, also. A recent headline read: "Stewardess
Saves Ten, Dies Trying To Save Others." Does such a headline make you
feel, "The darned fool. 'What the blazes did she do a stupid thing like
that for-risking her neck for somebody she never saw before!" or was
vour reaction that that was what made being a human being worth
while-that that was something worth while? Now if self-preservation is
the first law, why, naturally, you'd feel embarrassed at the stupidity
of anyone like that stewardess, or Roger Young who knowingly gave his
life for his friends, or the silliness of a man who loses his life
saving a child he didn't know.
On the other hand, if genetic
behavior patterns are major factors in our lives and thinking-then one
would expect a different pattern of' response. Genetic behavior
patterns would have to euolt:«; they would be species patterns,
and would exist only if the species existed-would survive only if the
specks survived. That would have a tendencv to make species survival
patterns' have a greater chance of continuation than
individual-survival patterns. The tiger is a lone wanderer; tigers
don't team up. But human beings do; evidently we have a different
species survival pattern. And evidently part of it is that the group is
to survive, even if individuals have to give their lives for it. That
family-group must die for tribal-group, and tribal-group must die if
thus only can the race, the species, be protected.
Patterns that live through millions
of years, millions of generations- aren't apt to be destructive. And
violation of such a time-tried pattern of life should carry a penalty.
There are great possibilities of
understanding oneself, and that work has only begun. Dianetics, by
handling only the physical aspects of the problem, cannot assure
happiness- but it can act as the key to the greater problem. The
dianetic aspects, the physicar-mechanical aspects, can be handled by a
commercial, professional man, for money. But the deep selfunderstanding
that must be achieved for full happiness can be achieved only with the
help of someone who is strongly, warmly, personally-emotionally
attached to the individual. That deeper self-understanding will, and
must, be a home therapy, both because of the need of that personal
attachment, and because it takes many, many hours of thinking to rework
an entire life philosophy. Hubbard was much too optimistic on that.
The goal to be achieved, however, is.
something beyond anything hitherto sought. Psychoanalysis seeks
"adjustment"; philosophy seeks full understanding. The fully cleared
individual-a state not yet achieved by anyone-is one who has full
conscious awareness of all the sources of all of his motivations. The
first step, however," is the dianetic clear-one who has found all the
command-statements which have been serving as false motivations.
Incidentally, the goal of
psychoanalysis: "adjustment" is anything but desirable. It is,
actually, seeking to achieve a state of apathy, a state of accepting
the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and, by not taking arms
against the sea of troubles, to end caring about them. "You must face
reality and accept your environment, adjust yourself to it" is a
negation of precisely the characteristics that make man Man. Man, alone
of animals, does not accept his environment, and will not face reality.
The reality, at this moment, is that the night is cold, and wet, and
the wind is blowing, and my skin is thin and furless. But I have
refused to face realitv: I have taken reality by the ears and 'made it
face me. I have a steam-heated, electrically-lighted house, and warm,
dry clothes. The animals adjust themselves to reality; man adjusts
reality to himself. George Washington may have been neurotic in
psychoanalytical terms-he didn't face reality, either. He insisted on
changing it to meet his ideas. The ideal state achieved by the doctrine
of accepting reality is a nIce, even apathy: "Face the fact that your
skin is thin and hairless, and the night is wet and cold, and don't be
unhappy. Just accept it".
The man who first lands on the Moon
is going to be someone who as a kid, wouldn't accept that whe~ he
reached for the glowing Moon, it was too far away to reach. Some man
who's so "neurotic" he figures it's better. to try, even if it kills
you, than to gIve up and quit. Some fellow: who thinks. "impossible"
means "we haven't figured the darned thing out yet," who feels that
"reality" means "the raw material from which we intend to build what we
want."
I don't believe anyone ever found a
neurotic clam, however; they're beautifully adjusted to their reality.
Actually, what Man needs is to
understand reality-as-it-is in the greatest possible detail, figure out
what potentialities the situation-asit-is has, decide what he wants,
then go to work on that reality and make what he can of it.
Dianetics is a technique of facing
reality-the physical facts of which reality is, actually, made, and a
technique for distinguishing between the raw material and the vastly
greater power, man's mind, and thereby permitting a thorough
examination of each, separately, to prepare the way for a proper
program of interaction.
It needs a tremendous amount of
development.
*Limited clinical records to this
effect are already available; their value is, so far, indicative rather
than definitive because of the Inescapable factor of time. Hubbard's
own records are of relatively little value, because the necessary
elaborate before·and~after medical, psychometric and psychiatric
records were not prepared. The professional-level research in the field
began only after June, 1950; indicative results were obtained in the
first year, but these records are not acceptable as definitive until
the results then obtained have been shown to persist over a period of
years.
In consequence,
while rather
spedacular relief of acute conditions-suicidal mania, psychosomatic
ulcerative colitis, peptic ulcers, et cetera -have been obtained, time,
and only time, can. prove in the worth of the method. The medical
profession does not permit formal publication of clinical records on
any such new technique until years of testing stand behind it.
Thus formal
clinical records cannot
be expected before 1955' here we are dealing with human beings, not'
with a. physical science, and the problem is vastly dIfferent. In
phYSIcal SCience, an experiment is repeatable-the ingredients of the
experiment can be specified with accuracy, and the specifications
matched. In human SC!ence, this is not, and never will be. the case.
Even "identical" twins are not identIcal
John W, Campbell Jr.
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION, October
1951.
