L. Ron Hubbard Devises a “Science of Mental Healing”

Fifty-six years ago today, on May 9, 1950, a science-fiction writer named Lafayette Ron Hubbard published a book called Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. It contained the first kernel of what would become scientology.

Hubbard’s earlier books included titles like Slaves of Sleep, published in 1939, and Final Blackout, the following year. Earlier in the spring of 1950 he had an article published in the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction that first laid out the principles of his theory of Dianetics. The book, with its fuller treatment, sparked immediate interest and controversy.

Some readers hailed Hubbard as a visionary and an innovator. Others reacted more skeptically. Many reviewers, particularly those trained in medicine, were appalled by his ideas, which one critic called “abortions and monstrosities of theory and practice.” But Hubbard was launching an ideology that would gradually move from the edge of American culture into the center of the public eye.

In 1950 L. Ron Hubbard was in the prime of his life. Born in 1911 in Tilden, Nebraska, he had attended a prep school and then traveled around East Asia as a young man. After spending a few years at George Washington University, where he studied engineering, he left college without a degree. He served in the Navy during World War II before returning home to continue his career as a fiction writer.

At times he claimed to have begun developing Dianetics as early as 1938. Most indications, however, suggest that he started far later, perhaps as late as 1948. Why would he fib about that? His harshest critics said he did so to endow his work with a sense of gravity, presenting it as the product of more than a decade of mental labor, rather than two years or less.

However long he took, the ideas he outlined in Dianetics were startling, strange, and, to some, alluring. He announced the existence of “engrams,” mental recordings of information similar to memories but with powers of their own and the ability to harm human mental health. Engrams caused our psychological pain, and Dianetics proposed a solution, a kind of hypnotic therapy in which a therapist called an “auditor” would lull a patient into a state called a “reverie.” While in this semiconscious state, the patient would tell the auditor about the painful information stored in his brain, and airing it would cause the information to disappear. A person who had undergone successful and complete elimination of his engrams was a “clear.” Hubbard compared clears, in their mental health and abilities, to Jesus Christ and Buddha.

Part of the attraction of Hubbard’s theory was its accessibility to ordinary people. He initially claimed that anyone could serve as an auditor and help a patient become a clear. But almost immediately serious questions arose about the scientific integrity and safety of the program. In the same year he published Dianetics, he held a public demonstration in Los Angeles in which he introduced to a large audience a woman he said was a clear with a perfect memory. During the show, however, she displayed serious flaws in her ability to recall information; for instance, she couldn’t say what color tie Hubbard was wearing when he turned away from her.

People began to question both the effectiveness of Hubbard’s techniques and the safety of amateur hypnosis. Meanwhile the small Dianetics movement fell on hard times because of internal strife. The Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation began to succumb to disorganized administration and financial mismanagement, and its image suffered from the scandalous story of Hubbard’s divorce from his second wife, who accused him of “systematic torture, beatings, strangulations, and scientific torture experiments.”

In response to widespread rejection of his theories, Hubbard and his followers began to close themselves off from the world. In the mid-1950s, what had so far been a self-help fad took on a religious and exclusive aspect—thus becoming even more unusual. According to Hubbard’s followers, auditors began reporting that during reveries their patients were recalling memories from earlier lives. Hubbard’s explanation for this confuses many. He said that human beings were possessed by immortal, spiritual souls called “thetans,” which moved from one person to the next and bore with them recollections of previous lives. To achieve happiness, Hubbard said, people would have to find ways to free themselves of their thetans’ influence. In Los Angeles in 1954 he founded the Church of Scientology, which would offer treatment for these woes after the fashion of Dianetics.

Scientology has grown greatly over the years. It has targeted celebrities in particular for recruitment; Hubbard once said: “They are important people because they reach a lot of people. They set trends in society.” By reaching out to the rich and famous, Scientologists have hoped to raise their profile and legitimize themselves with American society at large. Among their successful converts are the entertainers Kirstie Alley, Jenna Elfman, John Travolta, and, perhaps most notoriously, Tom Cruise.

In spite of—and often because of—their celebrity outreach, Scientologists and the heirs of the Dianetics movement are still widely regarded with wariness. While Tom Cruise has made Scientology more famous, it is not clear that his participation makes it more appealing to average Americans. For most people, half a century after the publication of Dianetics Hubbard’s theories remain a curiosity.

—Alexander Burns, an undergraduate at Harvard College, is a frequent contributor to AmericanHeritage.com.