PAB: A Critique on Psychoanalysis
Author: Hubbard, L. R.
Document date: 1956, 10 July
Document title: A Critique on Psychoanalysis
Document type: Professional Auditor's Bulletin
Book title: The Technical Bulletins of Dianetics and Scientology
Edition: 1991
Volume: III
Page(s): 443-449
Location: Los Angeles
Publisher: Bridge Publications
Description: Hubbard discusses the origins of Dianetics and Scientology, and claims a direct connection to Sigmund Freud through his friend, mentor and supposedly analyst, Commander Joseph Cheesman Thompson. Hubbard attributes his definition of transference to Thompson. Claims he has "bettered the results of Freud."
It is necessary to understand first that we are actually indebted to psychoanalysis and its originator, the debarred doctor, Sigmund Freud. My basic, if unappreciated, education in the field of the mind came from Commander Thompson of the Medical Corps of the U.S. Navy, who was Freud’s personal student. Better than others, then, some sixty-two years after Freud’s original declarations, I could be considered qualified to criticize the failure of not only the basic work of Freud but the later offshoots which, while following his original tenets, yet sought to expand information on psychoanalysis. Very few living analysts today have as direct a connection with the subject as I do and there are few who can boast of the successes with the subject which I can. For I have used psychoanalysis as a practitioner and have achieved some certain successes with it, were one to call a success the sporadic eradication of the severe neurosis in a known mental patient. Further, there is my own enfranchisement by the Freudians when they were all but obliterated in Europe by Russia.
Having established then my possible qualifications to criticize and having compounded such right by having bettered the results of Freud, I feel it is necessary to overhaul rapidly the points of failure of psychoanalysis as we understand the mind today.
[...]
TRANSFERENCE
We find another error in psychoanalysis under the heading of “transference.” The actual definition of “transference” in psychoanalysis is sufficiently unstable to bring about considerable argument as to what is meant by transference. In fact, in Dianetics we had to reestablish an entirely different condition which we called “valences” to denote the shift from one’s own personality into that of another.
Transference in psychoanalysis was used to denote the transference of the patient into the valence of the practitioner. This was the way which Commander Thompson described the phenomenon to me and nothing has been learnt from later analysts to disprove this basic definition of Freud’s.
Hubbard, L. R. (1956, 10 July). A Critique on Psychoanalysis (Professional Auditor’s Bulletin 92). The Technical Bulletins of Dianetics and Scientology (1991 ed., Vol. III, pp. 443-449). Los Angeles: Bridge Publications, Inc.