His personal papers also make it clear that he was deliberately pretending war-related ailments so that he could claim a pension increase.

By this time, Hubbard was already addicted to the barbiturate drugs originally prescribed for his ulcer. His drug use continued during his Scientology career, even though he was to sponsor the Scientology anti-drug group Narconon. Although Dianetics claims to overcome compulsions with ease, Hubbard was unable to kick the tobacco habit, and chain-smoked over 80 cigarettes a day.

DIANETICS

"Hypnotism was used for research, then abandoned." - L. Ron Hubbard, Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health.

Hubbard gave stage demonstrations of hypnosis in 1948, and wrote to his literary agent about a new project with many selling "angles". Marrying hypnotic technique to research long abandoned by Freud, Hubbard came up with Dianetics. In 1950, he modified the hypnotic technique without further "research" to write the book Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health.

In a 1909 lecture, Freud explained a method for uncovering traumatic memories. Patients were asked to recall earlier and earlier life incidents on a "chain" until the emotional "charge" was released. Hubbard not only took the technique, he even retrained several of the expressions used by the translator of these lectures.

Freud had abandoned the technique, because it was laborious and completely failed to uncover key repression's. In fact, after sometimes providing initial relief, Dianetics all too often deteriorates into the dangerous conviction that entirely imaginary incidents are literal truth.

Hubbard took Freud's technique, added a little of the then-popular General Semantics, and asserted that the "basic" or original traumatic incidents had occurred in the womb. In this he was following the work of Otto Rank, Nandor Fodor and J. Sadger. Hubbard also asserted that it was actually possible to recall prenatal incidents, right back to conception (the "sperm dream''). Fodor too had written of prenatal memory.

Hubbard redefined the existing term "engram" as a label for traumatic incidents where the individual has lost consciousness. Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health proclaims that by "erasing" the engrams, the individual is freed from compulsions, obsessions, neuroses, and such conditions as heart trouble, poor eyesight, asthma, colour blindness, allergies, stuttering, poor hearing, sinusitis, high blood pressure, dermatitis, migraine, ulcers, arthritis, morning sickness, the common cold, conjunctivitis, alcoholism and tuberculosis. Hubbard soon claimed cures for cancer and leukaemia.

No scientific evidence for these claims has ever been produced.

Once the first engram (or "basic-basic") has been erased, the individual is supposedly "Clear", free from all deficiencies, and possessed of a high IQ. After repeated challenges, Hubbard eventually put a Clear on show in August 1950, at the Shrine Auditorium, in Los Angeles. Despite Hubbard's claims that a Clear would have "a near perfect memory", the woman, a Physics major, was unable to remember a basic physics formula. She could not even recall the colour of Hubbard's tie when his back was turned.

Dianetics sold 150,000 copies before being withdrawn from sale by its publisher. The American Psychological Association cautioned would-be Dianeticists that no scientific evidence for the many claims made in Dianetics had been forthcoming. There can be no doubt that Hubbard had invented both cases and statistics to write the book.

Hubbard's following diminished as people realised that his claims were grossly exaggerated, and with the collapse of the first Dianetic Foundations and Hubbard's second marriage. Sara Hubbard charged that her husband had tortured her with sleep deprivation, drugs and physical attacks. She claimed that he had once strangled her until the eustachian tube to her left ear ruptured, leaving her hearing inpaired. Hubbard fled to Cuba, after seizing their baby daughter, in what proved to be a successful attempt to silence Sara.

With the backing of millionaire Don Purcell, Hubbard was able to return to the United States, where Sara accepted a divorce settlement. She withdrew her earlier claims, in return for their infant daughter, whom she had not seen for several months.

The new Wichita Foundation soon ran into trouble, and Hubbard abandoned it to its creditors, accusing Don Purcell—who had earlier saved him—of accepting $500,000 from the American Medical Association to ruin him. This was far from the last display of paranoia of Hubbard's part.

SCIENTOLOGY

"We've got some new ways to make slaves here."

-L. Ron Hubbard, Philadelphia Doctorate Course lecture 20, 1952.

February 1952 found Hubbard penniless, and stripped of both the rights to Dianetics and most of his following.