Hubbard’s theory is that the mind has two parts. The analytical, or conscious, mind is the center of awareness, the storehouse of all past perceptions. Nothing is lost from its data banks. Every smell or pattern or sound attached to one’s previous experiences is present and capable of being completely recaptured. This is the mind that observes and thinks and solves problems. It is rational and aware of itself.
The other form of mentality is the reactive mind. It is the single source of nightmares, insecurity, and unreasonable fears. It doesn’t think. It is a repository of painful and destructive emotions, which are recorded even while an individual is sleeping, or unconscious, or still in the womb. The recording is not the same as a memory, in the sense of being a mental construct; it is physically a part of the cellular structure and capable of reproducing itself in generations of new cells. “Cells are evidently sentient in some currently inexplicable way,” Hubbard speculates. When awakened by some stimulus, the recording—Hubbard calls it an “engram”—turns off the conscious mind and seizes control of an individual’s actions or behavior.
Hubbard compares the engram to a posthypnotic suggestion. He describes a man in a trance who has been told that every time the operator touches his tie, the subject will remove his coat. When the subject is awakened, he is not consciously aware of the command. “The operator then touches his tie,” Hubbard writes. “The subject may make some remark about its being too warm and so take his coat off.” This can be done repeatedly. “At last the subject may become aware, from the expressions on people’s faces, that something is wrong. He will not know what is wrong. He will not even know that the touching of the tie is the signal which makes him take off his coat.” The hypnotic command in his unconscious continues to govern his behavior, even when the subject recognizes that it is irrational and perhaps harmful. In the same way, Hubbard suggests, engrams work their sinister influence on everyday actions, undermining one’s self-confidence and subverting rational behavior. The individual feels helpless as he engages in behavior he would never consciously consent to. He is “handled like a marionette by his engrams.”
Although there were no recorded case histories to prove his claim that hundreds of patients had been cured through his methods, through “many years of exact research and careful testing,” Hubbard offered appealing examples of hypothetical behavior. For instance, a woman is beaten and kicked. “She is rendered ‘unconscious.’ ” In that state, she is told she is no good, a faker, and that she is always changing her mind. Meantime, a chair has been knocked over; a faucet is running in the kitchen; a car passes outside. All of these perceptions are parts of the engram. The woman is not aware of it, but whenever she hears running water or a car passing by, the engram is partly restimulated. She feels discomfort if she hears them together. If a chair happens to fall as well, she experiences a shock. She begins to feel like the person she was accused of being while she was unconscious—a fickle, no-good faker. “This is not theory,” Hubbard repeatedly asserts. It is an “exact science” that represents “an evolutionary step in the development of Man.”
Hubbard proposed that the influence engrams have over one’s current behavior can be eliminated by reciting the details of the original incident until it no longer possesses an emotional charge.4 “Dianetics deletes all the pain from a lifetime,” Hubbard writes. “When this pain is erased in the engram bank and refiled as memory and experience in the memory banks, all aberrations and psychosomatic illnesses vanish.” The object of Dianetics therapy is to drain the engrams of their painful, damaging qualities and eliminate the reactive mind entirely, leaving a person “Clear.”