Alice:

I beg to differ with you on a couple of key points. First, the subject of Dianetics itself was surviving the controversy stirred up by Hubbard's exaggerations and the controversy he engendered witht he APA and AMA. But another, more important change, had more to do with the transition to Scientology. Early Dianetics, involved with tracing traumatic experiences through prior chains of similar associated experiences, made a hypothesis that since all traumatic chains seem to center around the incident of birth, it was possible that the key element in resolving human neurosis and psychosis lay in addressing that period of time. But people, being ornery as they are, did not uniformly respond by turning into "clears" when birth traumas were addressed. Instead, they began to come up with pre-birth experiences. The code of conduct which governs Dianetics requires that the practitioner accept whatever information the client comes up with, without challenging it. This principle is also espoused by some, but not all, other psychological practices. Rogerian therapy is a case in point.

Anyway, in a significant number of cases, people came up with not only pre-birth but prior lifetime experiences. THis shattered the Dianetic model of memory and mind, which up to that time was brain and cell-based. Several years of trials and testing of one angle or another on this question led to a couple of conclusions. One was that there were enough instances of this sort of thing to be meaningful, and that addressing such experiences as genuine produced relief of affect and symptoms in enough cases to make it mandatory not to ignore them; because it was found when they were ignored, and the client was constrained only to running this lifetime's experiences, they did not achieve those results. And at that time, the hope of achieving results was the major motivation of all Dianetic activities.

Unfortunately the notion of prior lifetimes was not popular, and the then Board of the Dianetic Foundation tried to insist that these findings be suppressed in order not to interfere with the popularity wave Dianetics was still enjoying, by dampening the enthusiasm of the market.

Hubbard chose, instead, to expand the model to include these discoveries, and migrated to a spiritual rather than a cellular model of thought and its concomitant confusions. This meant trying to learn more about the entity that survived from one lifetime to another, its role in human nature and its potentialities. Since the Board at the time would not release the copyrights and trademarks of Dianetics, Hubbard founded an organization around this rather dramatic new direction, which was called scientology. He later won back the Dianetic trademarks in litigation, a course of action he was perhaps overly fond of.

So I think your shorthand popular press version is perhaps less well-researched than you assert, and your facts are a bit too few to justify your conclusions, or those of your sources.

I have compiled this abridged history from Hubbard's writings, conversations with him and those who knew him, and the dates of various technical papers he published on his explorations.

The argument about using religion to describe the activities of the organization once it made the leap from the cellular model to the more spirit-centric one is complicated, but essentially I think it was justifiable given the territory into which he was entering at the time.

In the final analysis, I don't really much care about the organization he left behind, as I find it, like the Church of Rome, to be heavy-handed and dogmatic, as to a large degree he himself became in later years. As, too, the Mormons, Baptists, Muslims and Jaynes have become. The notion of spiritual renewal or discovery gets old very fast when it is mixed up with sanctimony, unwarranted authority and dogmatic certainty, IMHO, regardless of what label is used to brand it.

But I do like to get all sides of the story onto the table; I think that is only fair.

A.