Lecture: Havingness
Author: Hubbard, L. R.
Document date: 1954, 15 December
Document title: Havingness
Document type: lecture
Event: Ninth Advanced Clinical Course
Location: Phoenix, Arizona
Document ID: 9ACC-08
Description: Hubbard gives a case history of a boy whose mother, a Christian Scientist, warns the lad that if he continued to masturbate, he'd go insane.
I would say, offhand, that it would be impossible to do very much for a psychotic without getting him to handle solid objects. I real – just impossible. I mean, we might read a lot of fancy things, we might think of a lot of fancy things, and so forth, but unless we actually did get him in contact, good thorough communication with a solid object, we would have left him in the position where he had to remain connected with a psychotic terminal. Some energy mass, some bank or another that has swept in on him or he’s using as an old game. You know, psychosis is quite a game itself. There is nothing like an eccentric behavior to command a great deal of scurry on the part of the environment.
We have this boy Hutson out here, psychosis is just a game to this boy. It’s revenge. His mother, a Christian Scientist, laid into him on the subject of masturbation and invented all kinds of reasons why and had herself tell him, had other people tell him very convincingly, that if he continued with this practice that he would go insane. 1
Now, it isn’t then that masturbation would make anybody insane, but you could certainly convince somebody, couldn’t you, who could then pick this up as a terminal exchange and in lack of any other game make a game out of craziness. You see? He could make a game out of this. How (to) constrict and restrain.Now, this boy started to come out of the soup the moment we started to run 8-C on him, just keeping you on a running report on an interesting preclear in the vicinity, started to run 8-C on him. By the way, his first contacts with the objects were like this. And then he would suddenly go over to something and grab hold of it and shake it in a rage. Then he’d relapse and would miss several auditing commands, just wouldn’t do any of them, and then go like that, see? And then get mad at some other object. Then he started to come right on up the scale. You understand what he wouldn’t do? He won’t take his attention off of that mass which is generating energy. See? He won’t take his attention off of that mass until he’s got something solid he can put his attention on, demonstrating another terminal. This psychotic terminal over here is a much better terminal than no terminal. And the solid object is the only thing it could supplant.
Well, I kept you much longer than I ordinarily do.
Thank you.
Audience: Thank you. (end of lecture)
Hubbard, L. R. (1954, 15 December). Havingness. Ninth Advanced Clinical Course, (9ACC-08). Lecture conducted from Phoenix, AZ.
Notes
- Cf. The Admissions of L. Ron Hubbard:
I have a very bad masturbatory history. I was taught when I was 11 and, despite guilt, fear of insanity, etc. etc. I persisted. At a physical examination at a Y when I was about 13, the examiner and the people with him called me out of the line because my testicles hung low and cautioned me about what would happen if I kept on masturbating. This “discovery” was a bad shock to me. I had to be so silent about it that now when a bedspring squeaks I lose all libido. I eventually found out I would not be insane, or injure myself but the scars remain.