Psychosomatic Illness

It has taken me quite some time to pick up this book again. The disappointment of journeying a fifth of its pages and not picking up any solid results caused me to rethink why I was spending my time reading it. I remembered that I'm reading it in order to analyse it and determine why I am missing its message.

Here we go again.

The FIRST FUCKING PARAGRAPH no less...

"Psychosomatic illnesses are those which have a mental origin but which are nevertheless organic. Despite the fact that there existed no precise scientific proof of this before Dianetics, an opinion as to their existence has been strong since the days of Greece, and in recent times various drug preparations have been concocted and sold which were supposed to overcome these sicknesses."

You can not prove psychosomatic illness. You can merely disprove a physical cause. That's it.

Not only that, but if Dianetics claims it has scientific proof ... OK, where is it? I don't see any in this book so far.

This is then followed by more unsubstantiated facts and figures.

I take a moment to bring to the fore some of the writing, "That all illneses are psychosomatic is, of course, absurd, for there exist, after all, life forms called germs which have survival as their goals." I bring this forward because there has been the argument that in Scientology the belief is that all illnesses are the result of the mind. The writing here, clearly recognises that not all illnesses are as a result of the mind. Indeed page 132 does give a clear picture on this subject.

On its passage in to the next page, however, things do become slightly muddier. "Treatment for accidental injury, surgery for various things such as malformation inherent in the body on a genetic basis and orthopedics, which actually can be classed under both, remain properly outside the field of dianetics, although it can be remarked in passing that almost all accidents are to be traced to dramatization of engrams and that Clears rarely have accidents." Discussion of this last sentence really does need to be backed up with figures from scientific study, which, of course, are conspicuous by their absence.

Perhaps one of the most contradictory and firm statements does come on page 133 "For example the common cold has been found to be psychosomatic. Clears do not get colds. Just what, if any, part the virus plays in the common cold is not known, but it is known that when engrams about colds are lifted, no further colds appear - which is a laboratory fact not so far contradicted by 270 cases."

With a quick search, that paragraph was blown to hell with numerous references at the bottom for you to get stuck in to. The common cold is not psychosomatic.

"At the present time, Dianetic research is scheduled to include cancer and diabetes." Good grief. All I can continue to ask is WHERE THE HELL IS THIS BLOODY RESEARCH!!!

I did a search but all I could readily come up with was more of the same of a Why We Protest discussion about Scientology beliefs and this discussion about Scientology publication, "Clear body, clear mind," which all seem to fly in the face of the previous assertion, "That all illneses are psychosomatic is, of course, absurd."

I can't find any actual note of any scientology research facility or actual papers which have been reviewed and accepted by international peers. If they've got a proper medical research facility, it seems to not be on any radar.

On the subject of alteration of physical sensory performance by hypnosis, this is held up to the reader as, "So with the various senses. Here we have simply the spoken word going in to the mind and causing physical function to change." which completely ignores the anecdotal evidence of people losing their sight and their hearing improves to compensate; that the human body is actually capable of the higher range of hearing but that the conscious mind simply isn't paying any attention to it ... that an individual with perfectly functioning eyesight can walk in to a room with a particular object, but they still don't, "see," it. The differentiation between hearing and listening is thus explained by dianetics, as a function of engram alteration rather than difference of concentration.

It is an interesting hypothesis to which, you've guessed it, there is no substance or research to back it up.

Another bold claim with no reference is this... "Mental tone makes body tone go down. Body tone, then being down, makes mental tone go down. This is a matter of inverse geometric progression. A man starts to get sick and, having engrams, he gets sicker. Clears are not subject to this dwindling spiral. Indeed, so entirely superficial is this horrible stuff called psychosomatic illness that it is the first thing which surrenders and can be alleviated without clearing."

The situation itself is nothing new; it was brought up much earlier on in the book with me bringing up the example of a person in a hospital lacking the will to live. What is different here is the claim that clears do not suffer from this and that it is a situation which it is so superficial that it is alleviated easily. Now, how you go about giving someone who has lost the will to live, a reason to live, is not something which I would call a situation which is easily recovered from, by any stretch of the imagination. Also, there remains no independently validated research which confirms that clears do not suffer from this.

Indeed, if a person has engrams, then they are not clear. So this actually highlights a flaw in the entire process; that once the state of clear has been achieved, it is something which is actually easily lost. It does make me ponder the actual value of the effort required to become clear in the first place. This is something I need to consider further as I read on.

Unfortunately, the rest of the chapter continues on these lines, perhaps at its height the unsubstantiated claim on page 146 that a clear is not easily made ill.