Scientology Part 2
Hubbard’s official biography, which has been rigorously promoted by the Church of Scientology, presents him as a modern-day Ulysses: a restless explorer and spiritual seeker whose youthful adventures led him to the far corners of the Orient, where he visited Buddhist lamaseries, befriended Manchurian warlords, and even lived for a time with bandits in the hills of Tibet.
Significantly less glowing assessments of Hubbard can be found in a number of court transcripts, affidavits, and even some of Hubbard’s own early writings, which present the founder of Scientology as a fabulist whose claims contained certain embellishments, together with, in many cases, outright fabrications.
For Ron, an only child, it was an exciting but alienating way to spend his childhood, and loneliness would remain an issue throughout his life. “When I was very young, I was pathetically eager for a home,” Hubbard wrote in the early 1940s.
Harry Hubbard, as the journalist Russell Miller noted in his critical yet comprehensive biography of Hubbard, Barefaced Messiah, was “a deeply conservative plodder, a man ruled by routine and conformity.” Ron Hubbard, by contrast, was a dreamer who saw himself as the hero of his own adventure story
Hubbard viewed himself as a young Jack London; he penned swashbuckling accounts of his (greatly embellished) heroics in his journal, and later projected his fantasies onto fictional (and often, like him, redheaded) heroes: sailors, spies, pilots, soldiers of fortune. He had a sponge-like ability to absorb facts and details about the places he’d visited, no matter how briefly, and he wrote breezily, “as if he was a well-traveled man of the world,” Miller noted, and “a carefree, two-fisted, knockabout adventurer,” not the gawky, freckled teenager he actually was.
In 1929, Hubbard entered Swavely, a preparatory school in Manassas, Virginia, in anticipation of what his parents hoped would be his next step: the U.S. Naval Academy.
But appointment to Annapolis was not to be—terrible at math, Hubbard failed that portion of his entrance exam and was also discovered to be nearsighted, instantly disqualifying him from becoming a cadet.
The following summer, Hubbard chartered an aged four-mast schooner, intending to lead an expedition around the Caribbean in search of pirate treasure.
He promoted the trip as a research and motion-picture voyage—he dubbed it the Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition. Placing an ad in local college newspapers for “adventurous young men with wanderlust,” he managed to recruit some fifty other students to go with him, at the cost of $250 per person.
Hubbard, however, maintained that the trip had been a great success, even telling his college newspaper that the New York Times had agreed to buy some of the group’s photographs.*
The ability to spin a setback as a triumph was a quality that would define Hubbard throughout his life.
He was an immensely charming young man whose stories, while sometimes dubious, were often, by virtue of his own salesmanship, utterly convincing. Garrulous, with self-deprecating humor and a ready wit, he attracted people like a magnet and made them believe in his dreams. What’s more, he seemed to believe in them himself. A naval commander named Joseph Cheesman “Snake” Thompson had imparted to the youthful Hubbard a crucial bit of wisdom: “If it’s not true for you, it’s not true.” Hubbard took that as a motto. “If there is anyone in the world calculated to believe what he wants to believe,” he later said, “it is I.”
he tried his hand at freelance journalism but soon gave it up for mass-market fiction, action-packed stories that constituted one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the 1930s—a precursor, in many ways, to TV. Published in cheap, dime-store magazines known as “pulps,” the narratives generally featured hearty, adventurous men who’d fly spy missions over occupied Germany, engage in battle on the high seas, or romance weak-kneed women held captive in enemy forts—a perfect format, in other words, for Hubbard to express his own lusty sensibilities.
Frank Gruber, a writer of western and detective stories, recalled one New York get-together during which Hubbard, then twenty-three, regaled a group of writers with tales of his adventure-filled life. Fascinated, Gruber took notes. “He had been in the United States Marines for seven years, he had been an explorer on the upper Amazon for four years, he’d been a white hunter in Africa for three years … After listening for a couple of hours, I said, ‘Ron, you’re eighty-four years old, aren’t you?’”
It was a joke, but Hubbard, as Gruber recalled, “blew his stack.”
For years, the Church of Scientology has maintained that Hubbard, who would later give himself the self-styled rank of Commodore, was a “master mariner” and a fearless war hero.* This was an image Hubbard carefully nurtured, boasting to fellow sailors of his lengthy experience on destroyers.
But Hubbard’s naval records show that he had an inglorious wartime career. Boastful and often argumentative, with a propensity for having his “feelings hurt,” as one superior noted, he was a behavior problem from day one.
Depressed and suffering from ulcers, Hubbard spent the rest of the war drifting from post to post, taking part in various training programs, serving as the navigator of a cargo ship, and studying for several months at the School of Military Government at Princeton.
There, Hubbard would later claim, he healed himself of not just ulcers, but of war wounds that had left him “crippled and blinded.”* He also, according to his later statements, did groundbreaking research into the workings of the human mind.
The affirmations went on for pages, as Hubbard repeatedly avowed his magical power, sexual attractiveness, good health, strong memory, and literary talent. He would make fortunes in writing, he affirmed. “You understand all the workings of the minds of humans around you, for you are a doctor of minds, bodies and influences.”
Hubbard, like the Freudian disciple Otto Rank, believed that the “birth trauma” lay at the root of many contemporary neuroses and psychosomatic ills.
On May 9, 1950, Hermitage House published Hubbard’s book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. Weighing in at a hefty 452 pages, it opened with a dramatic statement: “The creation of Dianetics is a milestone for Man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his inventions of the wheel and the arch.”
Painful or traumatic moments are recorded in the reactive mind as lasting scars, which Hubbard called “engrams.”
These, Hubbard asserted, are the source of many present physical and psychological problems.
To get rid of them he advocated a new therapeutic process called “auditing.”
To get rid of them he advocated a new therapeutic process called “auditing.” In an auditing session, a patient was led through a series of commands intended to call up the minute details of an engramatic incident.
The first questions might deal with a recent problem—an illness or injury, perhaps. But with each request for “the next incident needed to resolve this case,” the patient, lying on a couch, eyes closed, would become aware of incidents farther and farther back in the past, all the way to what Hubbard called the “basic-basic,” or prenatal incident.
Once that had been identified, the subject would be asked to “run,” or reexperience, the incident numerous times until its impact was neutralized.
This form of therapy was not new. In the late nineteenth century, Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalyst Josef Breuer had used similar techniques in their early treatment of hysteria, often hypnotizing patients to uncover buried memories and lead them to relive traumatic incidents, a process known as “abreaction” therapy.
“But what especially aroused my criticism was the fact that not a few traumata were simply inventions of fantasy and had never happened at all.”
After World War II, the American system of mental health care was stretched as at no prior time in its history, the result, at least in part, of the tremendous psychological damage caused by the war and the specter of the atom bomb. In 1946, Veterans Administration hospitals had some forty-four thousand patients with mental disorders. By 1950, half a million people were being treated in U.S. mental institutions, a number that would increase dramatically by the middle part of the decade, when psychiatric patients were said to account for more beds than any other type of patient in U.S. hospitals.
Though psychiatry was not a new discipline, there were still only about six thousand psychiatrists in the United States in 1950, most working at mental hospitals. Few options existed outside these facilities for those needing mental health care. Only six hundred or so psychoanalysts (practitioners of the most popular form of outpatient therapy at the time) were available; they practiced psychoanalysis, a technique based on Freud’s theories, which usually required a commitment to years of therapy involving multiple sessions per week, at a cost of time and money that most people could not afford.
In southern California, home of all things new and experimental, it became particularly popular with avant-garde members of the Malibu Colony and other artistic enclaves. Some Los Angeles booksellers, in fact, reportedly had so much trouble keeping Dianetics in stock that, fearing a run on the books, they began to sell Dianetics under the counter, offering it only to those who asked for it by name.
Some of Hubbard’s own colleagues found the book’s premise preposterous and its prose almost unreadable. “To me, it looked like a lunatic revision of Freudian psychology,” said the writer Jack Williamson. Isaac Asimov was less generous. “I considered it gibberish,” he said.
But many others found them comforting. Perhaps the greatest attraction of Dianetics was that it offered concrete answers. The vastly complex problems of the human condition could be solved not through prayer, or politics, or through the work of great philosophical teachers, but through the application of a set of basic scientific techniques. The foggy, fuzzy precepts of psychoanalysis could be replaced by straightforward, foolproof actions that could be practiced at home, by anyone. The result of successful Dianetics therapy, Hubbard promised, would be a person liberated from all aberrations, infinitely more powerful and free; according to his system, this person was known as a Clear.
For a man with no prior business experience, L. Ron Hubbard proved very adept at turning Dianetics into a phenomenon. Weeks before the book was published, Hubbard and Campbell had set up a training school, the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation, across the Hudson River from Manhattan, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. As the book’s popularity grew, devotees made the trek to the so-called Elizabeth Foundation to be trained as licensed Dianeticists, or practitioners, for which they received a certificate. Soon Hubbard had opened similar Dianetic Research Foundations in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Honolulu, and Washington, D.C. Each center offered a similar package. A five-week course, priced at $500, including lectures and demonstrations (often delivered by Hubbard personally), would turn a starry-eyed fan into a “professional auditor,” as Hubbard called those who, having completed the course, often hung a shingle and began seeing clients. A one-on-one session at one of the foundations with a Dianeticist cost $25. More aggressive therapy, offered in ten-day processes known as “intensives,” could be had for between $600 and $1,000, depending on the experience level of the auditor.
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.
Now struggling to maintain control of a ship that was sinking fast, Hubbard grew intensely paranoid, sniping at foundation officials for minor infractions and accusing his staff of using irregular, non-Hubbard-approved methods, or “Black Dianetics,” as he called them. The New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners began an inquiry into the activities of the Elizabeth Foundation, as it was apparently practicing medicine without a license. Feeling persecuted, Hubbard began to believe that some of his students might be spies. His fears worsened when Look magazine published a scathing article in December 1950, in which the head of the famous Menninger Clinic, a leading psychiatric hospital, denounced Hubbard as a charlatan and condemned his techniques as potentially harmful.
Hubbard by now had many other problems to worry about. Because the existing foundations were in shambles, he had accepted the offer of a wealthy supporter named Don Purcell to leave Havana and start a new Dianetic Research Foundation in Wichita, Kansas, which he did. But Purcell was not prepared to assume the debts of the other foundations, particularly not the Elizabeth Foundation, which closed its doors for good at the end of 1951, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. In 1952, a court ruled that the Wichita Foundation was liable for the Elizabeth Foundation’s debts. Purcell implored Hubbard to file for voluntary bankruptcy, which he refused to do. Left with no choice, Purcell held an emergency meeting of the Wichita Foundation’s board of directors in February 1952, which voted to go ahead with the bankruptcy proceedings.
Furious, Hubbard resigned from the board and sued Purcell for mismanagement, breach of faith, and breach of contract. To no avail: the court auctioned off the foundation’s assets, which Purcell bought for just over $6,000. Hubbard launched a bitter campaign to discredit Purcell, accusing him of accepting a $500,000 bribe from the American Medical Association to destroy Dianetics.
It was no use. Purcell owned Dianetics; Hubbard was left without rights to any part of his creation, including its name. His great scientific adventure, it appeared, was at an end. Hubbard needed to reinvent himself, once again.