Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [19]
Hubbard proposed Dianetics as an alternative. Done with a partner who, Hubbard suggested, could be a family member or a friend, it was interactive. It was also efficient—only a few sessions, he said, could rid a person of an engram. It was noninvasive, unlike the groundbreaking new psychiatric treatment of the time, the lobotomy; some twenty thousand had been performed by 1950 in the United States. And Dianetics was affordable: all it cost to get started with Dianetics, at least initially, was the money required to buy L. Ron Hubbard's book.
By the summer of 1950, Dianetics was making its way up the bestseller lists. College students were interested in it, as were their professors. In suburban living rooms, people began holding "Dianetics parties," auditing one another playfully, as if the activity was the equivalent of a game of charades. In southern California, home of all things new and experimental, it became particularly popular with avant-garde members of the Malibu Colony and other artistic enclaves. Some Los Angeles booksellers, in fact, reportedly had so much trouble keeping Dianetics in stock that, fearing a run on the books, they began to sell Dianetics under the counter, offering it only to those who asked for it by name.
"A new cult is smoldering across the U.S. underbrush," declared Time magazine on July 24, 1950. By August of that year, more than fifty-five thousand copies of Dianetics had been sold and more than five hundred "Dianetics clubs" had sprung up across the nation. (It held, for many, the same excitement that The Secret would hold for audiences more than fifty years later.) By the end of 1950, more than half a million people had bought Dianetics. "The trail is blazed, the routes are sufficiently mapped for you to voyage into safety in your own mind and recover your full potential," Hubbard wrote. "You are beginning an adventure. Treat it as an adventure. And may you never be the same again."
Certainly, L. Ron Hubbard never was.
Few books of the past sixty years—at least few that were so successful—have been as widely derided as Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. Within weeks of its publication, a score of physicians and psychologists rushed to point out that there was very little science in it: citing a lack of "empirical evidence of the sort required for the establishment of scientific generalizations," the American Psychological Association denounced the practice of Dianetics as dangerous. Some of Hubbard's key premises, including one that held that embryos had "cellular memory," were deemed unprovable. And so, in many respects, was Hubbard's overall view of human behavior.
The book Dianetics depicts most people as victims of their own unfortunate prenatal experiences. Hubbard wrote voluminously of life in the womb, a noisy and rather chaotic place, as he described it. The baby was captive to everything that happened outside the womb, all of which could prove engramatic. The most crucial engrams seemed to be the result of domestic violence—there are abundant examples in Dianetics of women being thrown down the stairs, pushed, shoved, kicked, or yelled at by angry husbands. But even worse were those caused by attempted abortions, or "AAs," as Hubbard called them. In an era preceding