Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

claimed were the most common cause of pre-natal engrams. 'A large proportion of allegedly
feeble-minded children', he wrote, 'are actually attempted abortion cases . . . However many billions
America spends yearly on institutions for the insane and jails for the criminals are spent primarily
because of attempted abortions done by some sex-blocked mother to whom children are a curse,
not a blessing of God . . . All these things are scientific facts, tested and rechecked and tested
again.'
When the women in Hubbard's 'case histories' were not thrusting knitting needles into themselves,
they were usually being unfaithful to their husbands, or they were being beaten up, raped or
otherwise abused. Almost without exception, they allowed the wretched embryos in their wombs to
be grievously mistreated. 'Fathers, for instance, suspicious of paternity, sometimes claim while
trouncing or upsetting mothers that they will kill the child if it isn't like Father. This is a very bad
engram . . . it may compel an aberee into a profession he does not admire and all out of the
engramic command that he must be like the parent. The same engram, he added mysteriously,
could also cause premature baldness or lengthen the child's nose.
Hubbard gave many illustrations of the problems caused by pre-natal engrams, some of which
might have strained the credulity of even his most gullible readers. If a husband beat his pregnant
wife, for example, yelling, 'Take that! Take it, I tell you. You've got to take it!', it was possible the child
would interpret these words literally in later life and become a thief. Or a pregnant woman suffering
from constipation might sit straining for a bowel movement muttering to herself, 'Oh, this is hell. I
am all jammed up inside. I feel so stuffy I can't think. This is too terrible to be borne.' In this case, he
explained, the child might easily develop an inferiority complex from a engram which suggested to
him he was too terrible to be 'born'.
Some of the worst pre-natal engrams were caused by naming the child after the father. If the
expectant mother was committing adultery, as so many of Hubbard's pregnant women were wont
to do, she was likely to make derogatory remarks about her husband while engaged in sexual
intercourse with her lover. The foetus, obviously, would be 'listening' and if he was given the
husband's name he would assume in later life that all the horrible things his mother had said
about his father were actually about him.
After women, Hubbard's secondary target was the medical profession, towards which he directed
almost rabid hostility, accusing neurosurgeons of reducing their 'victims' to 'zombyism' either by
burning away the brain with electric shocks or tearing it to pieces with a 'nice ice-pick into each
eyeball'. 'In terms of brutality in treatment of the insane,' he wrote, 'the methods of the shaman or
Bedlam have been exceeded by the "civilized" techniques of destroying nerve tissue with the
violence of shock or surgery . . . destroying most of his personality and ambition and leaving him
nothing more than a manageable animal.'
Indisputably the most portentous section of the book was that which explained to the reader how to
put Dianetics into practice. Artfully employing the jargon of modern technology, Hubbard called the
process 'auditing'. The practitioner was the 'auditor' and his patient was a 'pre-clear'. To become
'clear' of all engrams was the goal devoutly to be pursued for 'clears' were free from all neuroses
and psychoses, had full control of their imaginations, greatly raised IQs and well-nigh perfect
memories.
Auditing began in a darkened room by inducing in the pre-clear a condition Hubbard described as
'Dianetic reverie', which could apparently be recognized by a fluttering of the closed eyelids. It was
not so much a hypnotic trance, he was careful to point out, as a state of relaxation conducive to
travelling back along the time-track. Once the reverie had been induced, the auditor placed the pre-