Author: Hubbard, L. R.
Document date: 1950, 24 July
Document title: Diagnosis Data: Using the Dramatization as a Key
Document type: lecture transcript
Event: Professional Course
Location: Elizabeth, New Jersey
Document ID: 5007C24
Description: Hubbard talks about people in Savannah who submitted his Dianetics research as therapy with the persistent belief that he was a doctor.
I was quite pleased with our results in Savannah, picking up people there who were carried through on what the South considered an adequate education for a Negro. By the time he got through a Negro high school he was about as well educated as a third grader! And they wondered sometimes why they were a little bit backward. If they had paid attention to that educational quota they would have seen that country advance.
But these people were not responding on an educated basis at all. I would try to explain to them, sometimes without calling it Dianetics, how the mechanism worked. “Yes, yes,” they would reply very politely, “you’re an awful smart man, Mr. Hubbard. Yes, sir. Yes, doctor.”
“I’m not a doctor.”
“Yes, doctor.”
That was the sort of reaction I received. And yet I would ask them to give me flash answers, and I would take them down the track, breaking a couple of locks, and getting these blow-offs and smiles, with the person feeling very cheerful and happy about it.
And I would ask them, “What are you laughing about, why are you so cheerful?”
“I don’t know, doctor. It just seemed funny. Ain’t it supposed to be funny?”
And yet when they got to thinking over it, they were laughing about their mother’s death or something. In other words, the technique was working on them.
Hubbard, L. R. (1950, 24 July). Diagnosis Data: Using the Dramatization as a Key. Professional Course, (5007C24). Lecture conducted from Elizabeth, New Jersey.