22 Facts About Dianetics

Dianetics is a set of pseudoscientific ideas and practices regarding the metaphysical relationship between the mind and body created by science fiction writer L Ron Hubbard.

Dianetics is practiced by followers of Scientology and the Nation of Islam .

Dianetics was originally conceived as a branch of psychiatry, which Hubbard would later despise when various psychoanalysts refused his form of psychotherapy.

The goal of Dianetics is to erase the content of the "reactive mind", which practitioners believe interferes with a person's ethics, awareness, happiness, and sanity.

Practitioners of Dianetics believe that "the basic principle of existence is to survive" and that the basic personality of humans is sincere, intelligent, and good.

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When Hubbard formulated Dianetics, he described it as "a mix of Western technology and Oriental philosophy".

Hubbard differentiated Dianetics from Scientology, saying that Dianetics was a mental therapy science and Scientology was a religion.

Dianetics predates Hubbard's classification of Scientology as an "applied religious philosophy".

The atmosphere from which Dianetics was written about in this period was one of "excited experimentation".

Dianetics shared The New York Times best-seller list with other self-help writings, including Norman Vincent Peale's True Art of Happiness and Henry Overstreet's The Mature Mind.

Posthumously, Publishers Weekly awarded Hubbard a plaque to acknowledge Dianetics appearing on its bestseller list for one hundred weeks, consecutively.

In 1978, Hubbard released New Era Dianetics, a revised version supposed to produce better results in a shorter period of time.

Dianetics is proposed as a method to erase these engrams in the reactive mind to achieve a state of clear.

New Era Dianetics uses an E-Meter and a rote procedure for running chains of related traumatic incidents.

Dianetics claimed that "the atheist is activated by engrams as thoroughly as the zealot".

One of the key ideas of Dianetics, according to Hubbard, is the fundamental existential command to survive.

Procedure of Dianetics therapy is a two-person activity.

Critics of Dianetics are skeptical of this study, both because of the bias of the source and because the researchers appear to ascribe all physical benefits to Dianetics without considering possible outside factors; in other words, the report lacks any scientific controls.

Dianetics described Hubbard as "absolutistic and authoritarian", and criticized the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation for failing to undertake "precise scientific research into the functioning of the mind".

Dianetics recommended that auditing be done by experts only and that it was dangerous for laymen to audit each other.

Hubbard's original book on Dianetics attracted highly critical reviews from science and medical writers and organizations.

MEDLINE database records two independent scientific studies on Dianetics, both conducted in the 1950s under the auspices of New York University.