Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [21]
For all the talk about a "poor man's psychoanalysis," Dianetics was turning into a pricey undertaking. One $25 session with a Dianeticist cost $10 more than many psychiatrists at the time charged for a consultation. The ten-day intensive cost more than thirty times that amount. But Hubbard's therapy promised a cure. And, according to John Campbell, Dianetics delivered. Gushing in a letter to Jack Williamson that just "fifteen minutes of Dianetics can get more results than five years of psychoanalysis," Campbell, a board member of the Elizabeth Foundation, claimed that Hubbard's technology had cured homosexuals, asthmatics, arthritics, and nymphomaniacs. "It produces the sort of stability and sanity men have dreamed about for centuries. And a sort of physical vitality men didn't know they could have!" he said.
Such claims were very hard to verify. Though Hubbard craved the approval of the medical and psychological establishment—and indeed, a stated purpose of the Dianetic Research Foundations was to stimulate further research—he rejected numerous pleas by Dr. Winter, now the Elizabeth Foundation's medical director, to submit his findings for peer review.
Instead, Hubbard hit the lecture circuit, adopting the dignified mien of a professor while simultaneously holding large demonstrations at concert halls or on university campuses. The Los Angeles Daily News described him as "a personality, a national celebrity and the proprietor of the fastest-growing 'movement' in the United States." Gracious to the press and imbued with a huckster's exuberance, he posed for pictures and entertained reporters with stories of his life as an engineer, explorer, and nuclear scientist.
At times, Hubbard would fail to produce a promised result in front of an audience of thousands. For example, on one occasion he presented the "World's First Clear"—a woman, Hubbard claimed, who would be able to demonstrate "full and perfect recall of every moment of her life." Yet, as witnessed by the crowd, she couldn't even remember the color of Hubbard's tie. Nonetheless, Hubbard continued to pull in sellout audiences. "I thought he was a great man who had made a great discovery, and whatever his shortcomings they must be discounted because he had the answer," said Richard De Mille, the adopted son of the film director Cecil B. De Mille. Then just out of college, De Mille was present at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on August 10, 1950, the night of the Clear disaster. He'd brought his girlfriend, who dismissed Hubbard as a fraud; De Mille, though, was unswayed. "He promised heaven," he explained. "It did not matter that his qualifications were suspect; he held the key. People present new ideas that they say are going to change the world and there are always a certain number of people who believe them. Lenin was the Hubbard of 1917. Hubbard was the Madame Blavatsky of 1950."
Another person who believed in Hubbard was Helen O'Brien. She was a young, recently married housewife living in Philadelphia when she read in the New York Times that the American Psychological Association had publicly condemned Dianetics. O'Brien didn't pay much attention to fads, and the word Dianetics was new to her. Nor did the article shed much light on the concept. What the article revealed was what she later called the "immoderate, almost panicky tone" that the psychological establishment took when discussing this new therapy. Intrigued, O'Brien bought the book and read it in one sitting.
Not long afterward, Dr. Joseph Winter came to Philadelphia to lecture on Dianetics at a local church. O'Brien had read Winter's glowing introduction to Hubbard's book, in which he stated that Dianetics was "the most advanced and most clearly presented method of psychotherapy and self-improvement ever discovered."
But now, during the lecture, Winter seemed far less enthusiastic. In the audience, O'Brien wasn't sure why. She guessed he was feeling pressure from the medical establishment. "You could practically see the AMA