Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

Chapter 9
The Strange Début of Dianetics
'My vanity hopes that you will secure credit to me for eleven years of unpaid research, but my
humanity hopes above that that this science will be used as intelligently and extensively as
possible, for it is a science and it does produce exact results uniformly and can, I think, be of
benefit.' (Letter from L.R. Hubbard to Dr Joseph Winter, August 1949)
• • • • •
In the spring of 1949, Ron and Sara had moved to the New Jersey shore, to a beach cottage at Bay
Head, a discreetly genteel yachting resort on the northern tip of Barnegat Bay. Rich New Yorkers
who could not quite afford the Hamptons kept large summer houses at Bay Head where they
sailed the ruffled blue waters of the bay, played tennis and attended each other's cocktail parties.
The Hubbards' rented cottage was one of the smallest properties, but Sara, who suspected she
was pregnant, was delighted with it. She was weary of their peripatetic lifestyle; she calculated that
in only three years of marriage they had set up home in seven different States and had never stayed
in one place for more than a few months. Bay Head, with its country club aura,did much to lift her
spirits.
John Campbell had persuaded them to move from Georgia and had found them the cottage which
was less than a hour's drive on the Garden State Parkway from Plainfield, where he and his wife
lived. He wanted Ron close by because he wanted, passionately wanted, to be involved in what he
considered to be the historic genesis of Dianetics.
It was predictable, in the course of their working relationship as science-fiction editor and sciencefiction
writer, that Campbell and Hubbard would spend time together discussing ideas and that
Ron would test his theories on a man as responsive as the editor of Astounding. Campbell was an
intellectual maverick: he had studied physics and chemistry at college, had a mechanistic
approach to psychology and was fascinated by gimmicks and technology, but he also flirted with
psychic phenomena like dowsing, telekinesis, telepathy and clairvoyance. Ron could not have had
a more attentive audience when he first began to propound his theory that the brain worked like a
computer which could be made markedly more efficient by clearing its clogged memory bank.
Always a persuasive talker, Hubbard possessed a natural ability to marshal a smattering of
knowledge into a cogent and authoritative thesis, interwoven with scientific and medical jargon. His
'scientific' approach to unravelling the mysteries of the human psyche precisely accorded with
Campbell's own view that humanity could be investigated with the techniques and impersonal
methodology of the exact sciences,[1] and although Ron's ideas stemmed more from his exuberant
imagination than from any research, to Campbell what Hubbard had to say was tantamount to a
revelation on the road to Damascus.
He compared individual memory to a 'time-track' on which every experience was recorded. Using a
form of hypnosis, he believed painful experiences could be recalled and 'erased' with consequent
beneficial effects to both physical and mental health. Ron offered to demonstrate on a convenient
couch at Campbell's home in Plainfield. He drew the blinds, told Campbell to relax, close his eyes
on a count to seven and try to recall his earliest childhood experience. Gently prompted by Ron to
produce more and more details, Campbell was surprised to find he could resurrect long-forgotten