PSYCHOTIC PATIENTS AT HOLLYWOOD SCIENTOLOGY
I admit it. I was a Scientologist once, for about six weeks in Salt Lake City. After I graduated from UCSB, I did the requisite summer trip to Europe and then returned to my parents home in Riverside, and proceeded to glorify my college education by building houses in Palm Springs. Then I announced to my folks that Carl was getting the hell out of Riverside and heading north to Salt Lake City to be my world's most desired occupation: ski bum.I found a place in SLC near the university at 2 South and 13 East in some apartment building then managed by a fairly attractive lady in her early 30s, vegetarian, quite kooky, but outgoing and fun, and she wanted to mate with a blond guy to produce more offspring. Like, me. So we mated. She then told me about Scientology, which I had never heard about, but she steered me downtown SLC for free introductory lessons. I also did some research at the local library to learn something more about the place and the religion and this guy called Hubbard.
I never fell for the rap and story and e meters and engrams -- I've had enough religion and mythology in my life -- but it was an interesting experience to see a fanatic religious sect in action. Wait, no, I was raised as a Mormon, and so I know about such things.
Tom Cruise has fallen through the rabbit hole and I doubt we will ever see him again, aside from his new role as preacher for radical religion.
Scientologists vs. Psychiatrists
Why they don't get along.
By Daniel Engber
Posted Friday, June 24, 2005, at 3:28 PM PT
In an interview shown on NBC's Today this morning, celebrity Scientologist Tom Cruise railed against modern treatments for mental health problems. "I've never agreed with psychiatry, ever," he said. Do all Scientologists have a problem with psychiatry?
Yes. Scientology has its roots in a maverick form of psychological counseling that rejects the principles of modern psychiatry. In 1950, L. Ron Hubbard published Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. (He founded the Church of Scientology a few years later.) The book outlined a philosophy of mental and physical illness and a method for treatment. Hubbard rejected the notion that psychiatry could provide lasting cures for psychological problems and condemned psychiatric treatments he deemed inhumane, like electroconvulsive therapy.
The extent of the feud might stem from the immediate backlash that Hubbard received from mainstream mental health organizations. Dianetics was published in May 1950; by September, the American Psychological Association had advised therapists to avoid it. Not long after, the board of medical examiners in Hubbard's home state of New Jersey pursued legal action against him for practicing phony medicine.
Hubbard responded by challenging conventional mental health practitioners to a sort of therapy-off. "Two neurotic individuals" would be subjected to one week each of dianetics and psychiatry; if the psychiatric patient turned out better, Hubbard would withdraw his claims. It's unclear if this showdown ever took place.
According to Hubbard's principles, the mind has an "analytic" and a "reactive" component. Under certain circumstances of emotional or physical distress, the analytic brain shuts down and the reactive brain records a deep, "cellular" memory (what he called an "engram") of the stressful event. These memories can extend back to the moment of conception and to past lives.
Hubbard claimed that mental and physical problems are often psychosomatic manifestations of those memories. If a patient could be coerced into re-experiencing that engram through a process of "dianetic reverie," the memory might be erased and the condition cured. He said that even infections like tuberculosis were susceptible to dianetic therapy.
Scientology emerged a bit later as the spiritual outgrowth of the dianetics movement. With the development of Scientology came some of Hubbard's more far-out concepts, like the prehistoric invasion of Earth by space aliens.
