4 E-METER METAPHYSICS

The E-Meter and the Polygraph

To start, what is an E-Meter, and what does it do? In Scientology, as Jonathan Eburne describes it, the E-Meter separates “the immortal, transcendent, and otherworldly part of man—called the thetan, an immortal spiritual being—from the bodily.”¹² While the E-Meter’s theological use materializes this distinction between spirit and body, the technical design of the E-Meter merely measures electrodermal response, like the polygraph or the Dynograph of our previous chapter. As such, the E-Meter has regularly been compared to a lie detector. Eburne states that the E-Meter “is basically a lie detector,”¹³ and artist Jamie Allen included the E-Meter in a survey of technologies designed, in some way, to transduce the body’s physiological signals, distinguishing “truth” from “lie.”¹⁴ Hubbard himself compared the E-Meter to a lie detector, differentiating the two technologies while also emphasizing their similarity. In a lecture from 1952, around the time of the earliest uses of the E-Meter, Hubbard remarked:

The difference between this machine and a police department machine is elementary: a police department machine is just more of it. A police department machine measures respiration, blood pressure . . . and electronic impulse. . . . The point is, this machine measures solely the electrical resistance of the body.¹⁵

Further explaining the similarities and differences between the E-Meter and a lie detector, Hubbard would claim later in 1952 that “the E-Meter is never read for lies, but only for stress.”¹⁶ These comparisons are relatively vague, and, for one skeptical of Scientology, do not really separate the E-Meter from a polygraph. Further attempts to differentiate the two, which delve fully into Scientology’s metaphysics, also do not help in this differentiation. In his book Scientology: A History of Man, published the same year as these above comments, Hubbard remarks that police who have experimented with the E-Meter “become startled half out of their wits to discover that some of the crimes they find on their machines were committed two or three ‘lives’ ago by the criminal under test.”¹⁷ Rather than finding lies, Hubbard claims, the police find “thetans” with an E-Meter; they find not the “truth” of criminality, but ancient, immortal beings who transcend the physical body under examination. The difference between a lie detector and an E-Meter becomes, then, the separation of body and soul mentioned by Eburne.

This comparison—obfuscated by Hubbard’s use of “stress” to describe whatever it is the E-Meter measures, his claim that the E-Meter separates the material body from an ancient self—distorts how the E-Meter differs from the polygraph and the Dynograph, if only subtly, if to great effect. Hubbard’s attempt to distinguish the two ultimately defers to vague nonconcepts and metaphysical themes, not the technologies themselves. I want to highlight this technical difference, though a focus on the technical basis also highlights similarities. The technical methods these technologies employ to measure the electrical resistance of the skin are similar, if not identical. Both a traditional lie detector and an E-Meter rely on a circuit called a “Wheatstone bridge,” a circuit used to determine an unknown electrical resistance. It was invented in 1833 by Samuel Hunter Christie and popularized in 1843 by Sir Charles Wheatstone, used by Wheatstone to analyze and compare soils. The Wheatstone bridge is known for its sensitivity and accuracy, and variants of this circuit have a wide range of practical applications throughout engineering and medicine.¹⁸

So why should the E-Meter and the polygraph be taken as different technologies, given all these similarities? Both the polygraph and Dynograph are technologies for writing on paper, a writing that inscribes temporal change. This is not the case for an E-Meter, which only “writes” through temporary movements of a needle. The movement of the needles of the polygraph and Dynograph result in specific marks to be interpreted after the fact, a form of graphical inscription that has a lengthy history that links art, science, and media.¹⁹ With the E-Meter, the movements of the needle themselves are to be interpreted without the additional graphical writing. The distinction here—between writing on a scroll and patterns interpreted in a needle’s movement—may seem superficial, but results in significant distinctions in how electrical resistance, as measured by these devices, is understood.

A polygraph, after calibration to determine a base level skin resistance, writes changes in electrodermal response identified through the inspection of a written scroll of paper. A polygraph “test,” which refers to a set of nine to fifteen questions asked while a subject is attached to the machine, is often repeated and is part of a longer “examination.” Throughout, test and exam work to create baselines and standards that allow comparison. The deviation from the baseline separates truth from lie.²⁰ The Dynograph also measures change, but a change that signals anticipation and regret. With the Dynograph, deviation signifies a mind thinking of the future, a mind judging what has happened and what will happen. The E-Meter, in contrast, never establishes a genuine baseline and is never used for an accurate comparison between a baseline and its deviations, simply because it never writes. It never makes the same temporal associations of the polygraph and the Dynograph because its signs cannot be compared in the same way. Its measurements depend entirely on techniques that would be, for a polygraph examination, about determining this baseline resistance. Even though Scientology does not admit as such, the function of an E-Meter is to secure a consistent baseline rather than change. Thus the goal of a “test” administered with an E-Meter would be for the person under examination to somehow maintain a relatively constant electrical resistance that is read through specific, physical movements of the meter’s needle.

That the E-Meter does not really measure change, but instead depends on identifying a generally stable, quantified electrical resistance, suggests the device does not reveal the truth of a brain and body, at least not in the sense employed by psychology and law. Scientology has developed an elaborate system for interpreting what inconsistencies in electrical resistance may mean, along with what the bodily capacity for electrical conductivity indicates—signs that denote not lies, but the presence of cosmic traumas to be worked through therapeutically, traumas completely beyond the conscious knowledge of an individual, traumas that may emerge from other lifetimes, from thousands, if not millions, if not trillions of years in the past, from an existence lived on other planets beyond our universe. The E-Meter comes to measure not temporal change, but the simultaneous coexistence of all temporal frames. The device reveals gnostic knowledge that transcends time, space, and materiality by presenting electricity, as measured through electrodermal response, as an energy that exceeds physical existence.

This turn to the mystical out of technology is not a reversal or perversion of science, I suggest—or at least, not completely. The E-Meter is evidence of a dialectical intertwining in which the technical deferral to an unseen truth guides both scientific knowledge and its spiritualist negation. This argument, which claims that a cosmic, science fictional theology is a plausible—even necessary—outcome of technical measurement, one generally equivalent to the claims of experimental psychology, relies on several links that aren’t often elaborated or are generally dismissed elsewhere: first, the radical changes Hubbard made in his writings between 1950 and 1952, and second, Dianetics’ similarity to psychoanalysis along with the American reinvention of both therapy and self-help publishing in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Discussions of Scientology in critical and cultural theory frame it as symptomatic of new age themes that embraced the occult, the religious, the mystical, the science fictional to address postwar trauma and the social instability of the 1960s.²¹ The specific function of the E-Meter, when addressed, is a technical means for accessing this science fictional, gnostic beyond.²² Scholars of new religions, however, argue that Scientology is not simply a symptom of postwar social unrest but a unique religion distinct from other new age or occult movements from the same time. They emphasize the E-Meter as that which legitimates the “science” of Scientology,²³ serving as a metonym for Hubbard as the singular “source” of the religion. As noted on the E-Meter itself, the technology “does nothing” (Figure 34), though this statement derives from various legal battles that prevent Scientology from saying its techniques have therapeutic results.²⁴ Nonetheless, the machine, as a device that “does nothing,” is assumed to stand in for Hubbard’s authority when his presence is otherwise displaced.²⁵ I generally agree with all these arguments, to some degree, but tend to side with the scholars of religion. There’s something specific about Scientology irreducible to other forms of spiritual experience. At the same time, Hubbard and Scientology do speak to broader social structures reinvented around 1950—structures not only related to alternative forms of spirituality, but to the midcentury popularization of psychology, best seen in the rise of therapy and self-help in the 1950s.²⁶ I do not think the E-Meter can be described as an artifact that primarily stands in for Hubbard’s authority, at least without some qualification, though it helps legitimate Hubbard’s arguments through the deferral to the mechanical objectivity of an instrument.

My goal in the remainder of this chapter is to highlight how Hubbard’s methods are a deviation and dissemination of popular trends derived from American psychology, arguing that the E-Meter is one of the most direct conjunctions of the practices of experimental psychology with a “pseudoscience” that remains illegitimate in the eyes of psychological science. I now turn to the transition from Dianetics as a form of popular psychoanalysis to the birth of Scientology. I’ll then delve into Scientology’s system for interpreting the movements of the E-Meter’s needle as an occult technological practice. Scientology’s eventual journey into outer space reveals a problem for psychology—and for science more broadly. Around 1950, the E-Meter represents how a deferral to mechanical objectivity, as a substitute for the fallibility of empirical experience, could lead to conclusions even more “unscientific” than those made by William James when he would dabble with spiritualism.

Dianetics as a Materialist Therapy

Hubbard’s first attempt to create his own version of psychology and, specifically, his own version of psychoanalysis, went by the name “Dianetics,” which can be traced to a series of published and unpublished texts he started writing in 1938.²⁷ “Dianetics” is a therapy to treat “all inorganic mental ills and all organic psychosomatic ills, with assurance of complete cure in unselected cases.”²⁸ It would lead to not only mental well-being but improved sensory capacities, such as a gradual return to perfect eyesight. Successful completion of his therapy, Hubbard claimed, would even grant one telepathic perception.²⁹ Dianetics gained widespread popularity upon publication of Dianetics: A Handbook of Dianetic Therapy in May 1950,³⁰ though many of Hubbard’s first devotees encountered his ideas through an excerpt, “Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science,” published the same month in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction.³¹

Dianetics does not presume any essential metaphysical belief system. It instead proposes a therapeutic relationship, called “auditing,” which involves an “auditor,” the person administering Dianetic therapy, and a “preclear,” sometimes stylized as “pc,” the person undergoing therapy on their path toward an end state called “clear.” In achieving the state of “clear,” one is effectively healed and thus gains perfect eyesight and the other supernatural abilities Hubbard claims will result from his therapy. In a session of Dianetic auditing, the auditor asks the preclear a series of questions to discover latent, unconscious traumas called “engrams,” traumas that are both physical and psychological, traumas framed as repressed memories from one’s past.

Abstractly, this relationship between auditor and preclear is almost identical to the analyst–analysand relation in psychoanalysis.³² Identifying “engrams,” as well, is relatively interchangeable with the Freudian goal of revealing unconscious traumas that the analysand is compelled to neurotically repeat. The most overt distinction between Dianetics and psychoanalysis is that Dianetics was initially designed with a specific goal, an end.³³ Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, never really ends, and the possibility of its completion has been debated since some of the earliest days of its existence.³⁴ In 1948, Hubbard wrote to a friend that, in developing Dianetics, he believed he had “cut psycho-analysis down from a two year job to about two nights,”³⁵ which indicates how the terminability or interminability of analysis was one of the main distinctions Hubbard saw between Dianetics and the methods of Freud.

Dianetics relies on a materialist conception of mind that links mental therapy with physical wellness. An engram, as a psychic trauma, exists in the body’s cells as a vitalist form of memory. According to Hubbard,

Unless we postulate a human soul entering the sperm and ovum at conception, there are things which no other postulate will embrace than that these cells are in some way sentient. . . . The cells as thought units evidently have an influence, as cells, upon the body as a thought unit and an organism. We do not have to untangle this structural problem to resolve our functional postulates. The cells evidently retain engrams of painful events. After all, they are the things which get injured. And they evidently retain a whip hand of punishment.³⁶

This cellular theory of traumatic memory is obviously speculative, though it resonates with vitalist or materialist philosophers Hubbard was likely to have read, like Henri Bergson.³⁷ And furthering his debt to a materialist conception of the body and mind, Hubbard’s earliest writings on Dianetics draw heavily on behaviorist and materialist psychology, suggesting most physical and mental problems are conjoined in their mutual neurological foundations. Mind, body, and brain are united through the materiality of the neuron,³⁸ a “materialism” that also characterizes the early writings of Freud completed while he worked under the supervision of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière.³⁹ If we recall some of the arguments of the previous chapter, Hubbard was, therefore, anticipating counterarguments to the anti-psychiatric claims of Thomas Szasz, counterarguments that would eventually lead to pharmaceuticals and other medical means to correct mental illness.⁴⁰ For Szasz, psychiatry is an invalid science since “mental illness” is, for him, a contradiction—mind cannot be reduced to body for Szasz.⁴¹ Hubbard suggests, however, that mental illness is “real” because mind is, in fact, physical. Therapy will result in very literal, physical changes in sensation. Dianetics, in this initial formulation, anticipates the changes psychology and psychiatry would undergo in the wake of Szasz, if through the embrace of psychoanalytic talk therapy rather than psychiatric techniques of electroshock and drugs.⁴²

Thus Hubbard initially considered Dianetics—or at least wanted it to be—a plausible, materialist extension of (and rejoinder to) psychoanalysis, comparable to the versions of psychoanalysis advanced by Carl Jung or Wilhelm Reich, writers at the fringes of science who shared the same audience to which Hubbard’s work appealed in the 1950s and ’60s. While exposure to Dianetics occurred, for many, through a magazine that published pulp sci-fi, this striving for legitimacy can be seen clearly through the political economy of book publishing. Dianetics was initially published by Hermitage House, a New York publisher of psychological and psychiatric books. It was marketed, like many of Hermitage House’s other publications, as a textbook.⁴³

Psychoanalysis as Self-Help

Why would Hubbard want to create his own form of therapy, initially promoted though a textbook excerpted and advertised in a science fiction magazine? And, for that matter, why would he have based his therapy on Freudian psychoanalysis? In the United States, the popularization of psychoanalytic therapy as a legitimate medical treatment began after the positive reception of Freud’s 1909 lectures at Clark University, which introduced his ideas to many American psychologists and psychiatrists. Freud’s theories were embraced by some American psychologists after the successful use of psychoanalysis to treat bombshell trauma, or “shell shock,” during World War I,⁴⁴ though psychoanalytic approaches to shell shock were more influential in Europe than the United States, where they were combined with hypnosis and other techniques derived from French therapies for hysteria.⁴⁵ Psychoanalysis was further disseminated throughout the military during World War II, when psychologists and psychoanalysts were employed to administer army personnel, treat mental health, and develop propaganda.⁴⁶ After the war, psychoanalytic practice—and psychology more broadly—expanded widely. The membership of the American Psychological Association grew by 1100 percent between 1940 and 1970, signifying how rapidly varied forms of therapy exploded in postwar America.⁴⁷

Psychoanalysis, in other words, was first popularized in the United States as a therapy for dealing with trauma, especially those derived from the horrors of war. This goal of treating trauma was worlds away from what was going on in the psychology departments of American universities around the same time, even if there were similar imbrications between empirical psychology and the military. Experimental psychology was focused on demonstrating psychology’s significance for daily life, an applied psychology that could use the arguments of Wilhelm Wundt, Edward Titchener, and Robert Woodworth, among others, to help people succeed at work, help them maintain friendships, and help them become more effective public speakers. This drive toward practical application was guided most overtly by William James’s colleague and successor at Harvard, Hugo Münsterberg, who saw the function of psychology as an attempt to solve everyday social problems.⁴⁸ As the Northwestern psychologist Walter Dill Scott mentions in the introduction to The Psychology of Public Speaking from 1909, “It should be remarked that psychology, as studied to-day, is one of the most practical and fascinating of all the sciences.” And because of advances in psychology, “much has been done in the last few years to advance the study of psychology among business men.”⁴⁹ Following the models of Münsterberg and Scott, American psychology was interested in the improvement of business, teaching, advertising, public speaking, and law enforcement, among other “practical” and “applied” uses. The goal of psychology was to foster efficiency in persuasion, in self-presentation, in interpersonal relations.

The treatment of trauma and psychopathology was given to Freud and his followers, despite how the American experimentalists would denigrate Freud’s methods—and even the treatment of mental disorders as a whole—as beyond the scope of psychology because psychoanalytic therapy did not (and could not) follow techniques of instrumental, positivist objectivity.⁵⁰ American experimentalists did, however, contribute to the development of psychological testing in the military. Or, psychoanalysis was used to cure, experimental psychology was used to predict. During World War I, Robert Woodworth developed tests for emotional stability designed to weed out soldiers who were already said to experience neurotic symptoms, symptoms he believed would correlate with an eventual susceptibility to shell shock.⁵¹ At the time, the American military believed that shell shock was a temporary condition, an injury that would go away on its own after a few months of treatment. After returning from battle, soldiers were evaluated as to their potential to be cured. The incurable were sent to the Army’s asylum or another public asylum. Those deemed curable, which was the evaluation for most soldiers, were sent to a neuropsychiatric ward of an Army hospital. There, the military provided four months of care, after which soldiers were then sent to either federally managed hospitals or a public asylum. The majority of soldiers receiving treatment for shell shock were not cured in the four months allocated by the military. As the U.S. Army Surgeon General’s office faced budget cuts, the military eventually decided not to treat shell shock and instead emphasized screening for potential neurotics following personality inventories derived from Woodworth’s, as treatment was far more costly than prediction.⁵²

Hubbard was first exposed to Freudian ideas in a military context, and eventually became an example of a soldier the military would not treat. Hubbard’s father was a Navy veteran who rejoined the military in 1917 to serve during World War I. In 1923, the Hubbard family took a trip from Seattle through the Panama Canal to Washington, D.C., where Hubbard’s father was posted as a member of the Navy. During this trip, Hubbard met Joseph C. “Snake” Thompson, a neurosurgeon and ex-spy who had trained with Freud at the behest of the Navy,⁵³ an example of the military’s investment in psychoanalysis after the First World War. While it’s not known precisely what Thompson taught Hubbard, there’s evidence that he introduced Hubbard to Freudian ideas at this time. In a lecture Hubbard gave in 1950, he remarked on meeting Thompson, and how Thompson “had just come from Vienna. And his mouth and mind were full of associative words, libido theories, conversion and all the rest of it. . . . The old man had a tremendous influence upon me and I’m sorry that he is not alive today.”⁵⁴ It’s possible that Hubbard went through some form of psychoanalysis while he was enlisted in the Navy during World War II, though there is no clear evidence that he had any direct familiarity with Freudian methods beyond his encounters with Thompson. But Hubbard, in the 1940s, did believe that psychoanalysis had positive therapeutic effects. In October of 1947, Hubbard wrote the following in a letter to the VA:

I am utterly unable to approach anything like my own competence. My last physician informed me that it might be very helpful if I were to be examined and perhaps treated psychiatrically or even by a psychoanalyst. . . . I avoided out of pride any mental examinations, hoping that time would balance a mind which I had every reason to suppose was seriously affected. . . . I cannot, myself, afford such treatment.⁵⁵

There’s no record this plea led to actual counseling. But Hubbard’s letter indicates how, from the 1920s to the years immediately prior to the publication of Dianetics, he was aware of psychoanalysis and its uses in dealing with mental trauma. At the same time, Hubbard was also aware of the financial costs of psychoanalysis, how this treatment was inaccessible to him unless approved by the military, and how the very status of psychoanalysis and psychological therapy was, as it had been since World War I, something the military had an uneasy relationship with, given the sheer cost of therapy. The military became very invested in prediction, but not very interested in therapy.⁵⁶ This lack of access to treatment became one of the points through which Hubbard’s therapy would flourish.

The parallels between Freudian psychoanalysis and Dianetics deserve further explanation, not only to highlight the debt of Dianetics to Freud, but to foreshadow these Freudian concepts before we transition into the development of Scientology. In Dianetics, Hubbard would describe something he called the “reactive mind,” an “unconscious” mind that acts on a cellular level, potentially “recording” everything one experiences. The reactive mind “does not ‘think’: it selects recordings and impinges them upon the ‘conscious’ mind and the body without the knowledge or consent of the individual.”⁵⁷ Consciousness is reframed as the “analytical mind,” and the point of Dianetic therapy is to address the points in which engrams—traumas—stored by the reactive mind prohibit or block conscious functioning.⁵⁸ To be “clear” is to reach a state in which engrams no longer block and distort conscious experience. As mentioned above, Dianetics works toward “clear” through a series of techniques in which the auditor asks the preclear to return to points in their personal history, repeating them, and talking through them. The auditor does not comment upon what the preclear says, they merely listen and ask guiding questions designed to confront and address past trauma.

Hubbard’s understanding of the mind is similar to the one proposed in Freud’s “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad,’” a short essay representative of how Freud often conceived of the unconscious, unique because of its foregrounding of writing in its description of mind and memory. Freud compares his theory of the unconscious to a child’s toy, a Wunderblock, “a slab of dark brown resin or wax with a paper edging; over the slab is laid a thin transparent sheet, the top end of which is firmly secured to the slab while its bottom end rests on it without being fixed to it.”⁵⁹ When one writes on the transparent sheet, words form on the paper. But then one can lift the sheet and the words vanish, though the wax slab underneath retains traces of the words one has written. The Mystic Writing-Pad serves as an analogy for the relation of consciousness to the unconscious, Freud tells us. “The layer which receives the stimuli,” which refers to both the transparent sheet and consciousness alike, “forms no permanent traces,” while “the foundations of memory,” the wax slab and the unconscious, “come about in other, adjoining, systems.”⁶⁰ Not only that, the transparent sheet, like our varied psychic defenses, prevents consciousness from acknowledging or understanding experiences the mind otherwise represses. For Freud, the unconscious, as a storehouse of memory and experience—a storehouse, especially, of traumatic memory and experience—can never be addressed directly. The unconscious emerges through the symptom—the forgetting of words and names, parapraxes, mistakes both mental and physical, the condensations and displacements of dreams.⁶¹ Hubbard, however, claims he has a method for directly accessing these forgotten, displaced traumas—traumas that result not only in anxiety, but in pathological mental illness, which is the case for Freud and Hubbard alike. Hubbard claims that his method is easier, cheaper, and faster than Freud’s. While there are countless meditations on the specificity of the analytic situation in psychoanalysis—discussions of transference and countertransference, for instance, how this relates to the visibility of the analyst to the analysand, and so on⁶²—Hubbard takes the basics of psychoanalysis as a therapy for trauma, reduces it through a language of his own devising, and sells it as a manual for cheap and easy self-therapy.

The rise of self-help in America coincides with the rise of psychology and psychoanalysis after World War II, and provides a necessary counterpoint to Hubbard’s knowledge of psychoanalysis as a military therapy. Dianetics was not merely a book written as an extension of psychoanalysis, but an attempt to reinvent Freudian themes for a market that only began to emerge in the 1940s. Modern self-help literature is often associated with Dale Carnegie’s massively successful How to Win Friends and Influence People, from 1937.⁶³ Carnegie began his career by teaching and then writing books on public speaking, popularizing arguments like those made in Walter Dill Scott’s Psychology of Public Speaking.⁶⁴ Yet Carnegie’s books are less predecessors to contemporary self-help books than today’s business literature, providing advice for maintaining business relationships, increasing influence and prestige, achieving financial success through work, and becoming a better speaker—generally, the same grounds that Scott and Münsterberg thought psychology could help in everyday life. These early instances of “self-help,” if we can truly use this term to characterize Carnegie’s early works, follow the model of applied experimental psychology. Carnegie’s How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, from 1948, however, moves beyond business relationships toward strategies to avoid personal anxiety, worry, and fatigue, advising that positive thinking will help one achieve their desires.⁶⁵ Carnegie begins this book by telling of widespread anxiety, of a world where “more than half of our hospital beds are occupied by people with nervous and emotional troubles.”⁶⁶ His book, however, does not focus on these individuals in hospital beds, and instead implies that the mental hospital is a logical endpoint for those who do not follow mandates for positive, resilient thinking.

The shift in context between How to Win Friends and How to Stop Worrying is important—one was published several years before the outset of World War II, the other several years after the war’s end. Nonetheless, How to Stop Worrying is still grounded in Carnegie’s previous work. While it begins by describing “pathological” states, Carnegie provides advice for rectifying anxieties about money, anxieties about friendships, anxieties about productivity—not the kind of anxiety associated with the traumatic neuroses addressed by Freud. Hubbard’s Dianetics, conversely, emphasizes not generalized worries or unhappiness, but emotional traumas that would usually be addressed through psychiatric methods such as “drugs, hypnotism, surgery, shock or other artificial means.”⁶⁷ Hubbard is talking about methods the military used to treat shell shock. He regularly describes hearing voices in his early books, not only in terms of negative thoughts—self-criticism as a taunting voice in one’s head—but as symptoms that would be otherwise interpreted as evidence of schizophrenia.⁶⁸ Hubbard was therefore both radically expanding the space pioneered by Carnegie and revising the very subject of self-help in the wake of postwar trauma. Hubbard’s topics included everyday social anxieties, like Carnegie, but also embraced disorders which would, for a psychoanalyst or a psychiatrist, warrant hospitalization—including schizophrenia and psychosis.⁶⁹ Hubbard also refused to directly contrast Dianetics with psychoanalysis, given how Freudian methods did not necessarily rely on medication, surgery, or shock.⁷⁰ Bizarrely, though there is ample evidence of Hubbard’s engagement with Freud in his writing of Dianetics,⁷¹ Freud is not mentioned in the book.⁷² Dianetics, then, should be taken as a covert attempt to make psychoanalysis into self-help, and not just any variant of psychoanalysis—the version that was used by the military to address shell shock and other psychological traumas. The popularity of Dianetics spoke to a context in which the everyday anxieties addressed by Carnegie had drifted into postwar trauma, trauma which could not be solved by positive thinking and mental resilience alone.

Despite their similarities, Hubbard’s reinvention of psychoanalysis emerged at a precise moment in which the monetary cost of psychoanalysis (and its ability to “cure”) was increasingly questioned while, at the exact same time, the general social permeation of anxiety, malaise, and psychological distress were coming to be broadly acknowledged. W. H. Auden’s long poem The Age of Anxiety, for instance, published in 1947, charts the particular “anxieties” generated by postwar uncertainty and meaninglessness—one example of the widespread malaise and alienation experienced after World War II.⁷³ “But in war-time,” Auden states in the prologue of his poem, which begins in a bar, “when everybody is reduced to the anxious status of a shady character or a displaced person, when even the most prudent become worshippers of chance, and when, in comparison to the universal disorder of the world outside,” then the safety of alcohol, of intoxication “seems as cosy and respectable as a suburban villa.”⁷⁴ Auden tells of a world in which individuals no longer know their social role, no longer believe in or trust social bonds, and no longer believe that these feelings can be cured. The characters of his poem use alcohol to “establish a rapport in which communication of thoughts and feelings is so accurate and instantaneous,” that different individuals “appear to function as a single organism.” They seek “that state of prehistoric happiness” through drunkenness, a restoration of self and soul that requires a transcendence of space and time, permitting the achievement of “that rare community which is otherwise only attained in states of extreme wakefulness.”⁷⁵

While restoring a traumatized, anxious self through alcohol is a theme of Auden’s poem (a restoration that is illusory and temporary), the psychoanalytic restoration of a “whole,” untraumatized, prewar existence was central for the embrace of Freud as a treatment of shell shock. Auden tells us how this dream of a psychoanalytic restoration, like the trance of intoxication, is also illusory and temporary. A poet long influenced by Freud, Auden began to reject some of Freud’s methods and theories in the early 1940s, refusing the idea of a psychological cure, writing in the magazine Commonweal:

Psychoanalysis, like all pagan scientia, says, “Come, my good man, no wonder you feel guilty. You have a distorting mirror, and that is indeed a very wicked thing to have. But cheer up. For a trifling consideration I shall be delighted to straighten it out for you. There. Look. A perfect image. The evil of distortion is exorcised. Now you have nothing to repent of any longer. Now you are one of the illumined and elect. That will be ten thousand dollars, please.”⁷⁶

Freud’s legacy, as Eva Illouz has argued, despite Freud’s own pessimism about the potential to achieve happiness and wellness, is “that we are the full masters in our own house, even when, or perhaps especially when, it is on fire.”⁷⁷ This fantasy of mastery was what Auden found false, and so he replaced Freud with the mythologically grounded psychoanalysis of Carl Jung in much of his thinking and writing, replacing Freud as a “teacher” and “healer” with the Jungian grounding of psychoanalysis in eternal myth and archetype.⁷⁸ He replaced therapy with quasi-mystical states generated through the reverie of intoxication—reverie that both restores and destroys—and the esotericism of a psychoanalysis derived from eternal myth. The problem with psychoanalysis, Auden implies, is its denial of its own paganism, its essentially religious morality that suggests mental wellness to emerge from the proper mirror, the proper technique through which one can see the world and their own existence within. The problem of psychoanalysis, Auden suggests, is that it promises gnostic truth but can only deliver financial debt.

The rise of psychoanalysis and psychology in public life around 1940 and 1950, Carnegie’s move from the lessons of experimental psychology to the postwar emotional anxieties more often addressed by psychoanalysis, and Auden’s turn away from Freud to the mysticism of Jung—these all tell us about the context in which Dianetics was created and popularized. Hubbard’s book foregrounded trauma and promised a cure—moving beyond Carnegie’s version of self-help into the space occupied by Freud. But Dianetics came on the scene also as a range of people had lost faith in psychoanalysis—as Auden would suggest, because of its false promise of a cure through self-knowledge only accessible through an exorbitant fee. Hubbard, of course, did not reject the idea of becoming “illumined and elect” through therapy, to use Auden’s words. In fact, he further embraced the idea that therapy could allow one to become “elect” through completion. He just thought (initially) he could reach that state much faster than Freud and his followers, and (initially) at a cost that would be accessible to the everyday American. Yet while Dianetics was published as a textbook, a therapy accessible to most beyond the expensive clinical setting that characterized psychoanalysis, Hubbard would ultimately embrace the payment model initiated by Freud, institutionalizing his Dianetics through the training and credentialing of auditors.⁷⁹

Auden’s turn to Jung also indicates how the failure of a seemingly rational form of therapy drove him toward a psychoanalysis of universal, cosmic architypes, away from science and toward the occult.⁸⁰ To some extent, the move from rationality to spirituality in the 1940s is a recursion of a history that parallels many moments in Western modernity. The histories of Frances Yates, for instance, demonstrate the deep intertwining of Enlightenment science and medicine with the mystical and the occult.⁸¹ Yates describes second-century Europe as a point in which logic seemed no longer sufficient as a guide: “Since reason seemed to have failed, [second-century thought] sought to cultivate the Nous, the intuitive faculty in man. Philosophy was used, not as a dialectical exercise, but as a way of reaching intuitive knowledge of the divine and of the meaning of the world, as a gnosis, in short, to be prepared for by ascetic discipline and a religious way of life.”⁸² The feelings Yates describes gave rise to a range of esoteric philosophical writings, writings that have been profoundly influential throughout modern Western thought, guiding the birth and persistence of countless movements and secret societies, such as the Rosicrucians and Freemasons. But these feelings also resonate more broadly with many moments scattered throughout the twentieth century. In the aftermath of World War II, says Peter Sloterdijk, “the earth’s weapon potential sufficed for a multiple extinction of every citizen on earth,” with the “atomic bomb . . . the real Buddha of the West, a perfect, sovereign apparatus without bonds . . . the triumph of technical rationality and its sublation (Aufhebung) into the para-gnostical.”⁸³

Auden—along with Hubbard—are themselves archetypal figures in a turn away from rationality toward a mystical wholeness. Hubbard’s embrace of the mystical is unique because of his explicit use of technical measurement to do so. The realization of technical rationality’s essence is the literal annihilation of the world—the bomb, Sloterdijk suggests, is the culmination, synthesis, and revelation of the world spirit at the end of history, the true gnosis of modernity. Hubbard represents an early example of those living in the wake of postwar atrocity, traumatized by the potential of global destruction and individual insignificance, who seemed, like those second-century gnostics Yates describes, to seek a different rationality: a rationality in which technology can be used to refine and affirm the self and spirit. This rationality would embrace a spirituality that emerges after the triumph of technical being, which is what we see in Scientology. Hubbard’s true deviation from Freud coincides with the reasoning of the experimental psychologists. Freudian psychoanalysis cannot cure, not because a “wholeness” achieved through therapy is impossible, but because psychoanalysis does not measure and make its prescriptions objective. Spirituality must be made a science, this logic follows, through instrumental measurement. And “truth” is determined by proper access to and use of a specific technology.

Scientology versus Dianetics

“Scientology” refers to a particular system of metaphysical beliefs that emerged out of Dianetics but only came to fruition in 1952. While it incorporates the foundational claims of Dianetics, Scientology emphasizes not mental therapy but spirit and soul—a jarring shift given how, in Dianetics, Hubbard denies the role of the soul in the perpetuation of engrams. In moving toward Scientology, the traumas identified by Dianetics cease to be physical, and cease to be about an unconscious repression registered bodily throughout one’s lifetime. At its most basic level, Scientology is a religion of past lives and reincarnation.⁸⁴ At its most extreme, Scientology presumes a “space opera” in which we are immortal, intergalactic beings engaged in an eternal war.⁸⁵ Critics of Scientology often act as if this relation to science fiction is hidden or concealed.⁸⁶ But Hubbard’s first official book about Scientology, Scientology: A History of Man, begins with the line, “This is a cold-blooded and factual account of your last 76 trillion years,”⁸⁷ going on to describe “thetans,” the true “I” of an individual, along with how thetans are immortal, live on planets that may be beyond our physical universe, and can only be addressed through the assistance of the E-Meter. With Scientology, the body becomes a “vegetable”⁸⁸ to be used by thetans, and traumas discovered in Dianetic auditing may refer to events from one’s lifetime or may be evidence of traumas from trillions of years in the past. These traumas, as well, may have happened to the specific thetan under auditing or may have happened to someone else. Hubbard describes thetans as telepathic and constantly making “facsimiles,” copies of others’ traumatic memories.⁸⁹

There are several arguments as to why Hubbard created Scientology. The most common is that Hubbard wanted to make money.⁹⁰ Branding his movement a religion was a way to avoid taxation. While this argument is repeated in many journalistic exposés of the church and in the personal narratives of defectors, religion scholar Donald Westbrook suggests that it ignores how Dianetics predated Scientology—and Dianetics was a “mental health movement, not a religion.”⁹¹ The money argument hinges on a cynical understanding of American religion and the tax-exempt status of religious organizations in the United States. That Hubbard began by peddling a therapy he wished to be recognized institutionally does not fit with this claim. Others suggest that the transition happened because of Hubbard’s desire to preserve an authoritarian control over his organization. Given how Dianetics did not initially assert Hubbard as its singular source—while Scientology does—this appears true.⁹² Dianetics was marketed as an activity people could do on their own at home with family and friends, but Hubbard’s second Dianetics book, Science of Survival, warns of unqualified auditors operating without official training.⁹³ Hubbard faced several personal and professional humiliations in the early 1950s—including a failed public demonstration of someone supposedly “cleared” through Dianetics,⁹⁴ financial difficulties, and the loss of copyright control over the name “Dianetics.”⁹⁵ Rebranding was one way of regaining control over his organization.

The shift from Dianetics to Scientology cannot be explained entirely through these personal and economic factors. The entire ontology of Dianetics presumes that psychological problems are based in physical traumas—they are fundamentally material and biological. Scientology assumes that these traumas are immaterial and supernatural. Westbrook argues that the best explanation for the turn to religion was, rather than making money, an attempt to avoid prosecution by the United States government for practicing medicine without a license, combined with an actual change in Hubbard’s beliefs. I find the former claim convincing, as it provides broader contextual reasons for Hubbard’s shift from mind to soul. Hubbard was effectively de-medicalizing his theories—though Scientology’s later attacks on psychiatry and psychology suggest that he never completely abandoned the desire for Dianetics to be a credible alternative to psychiatry and psychology. Through the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, the anti-psychiatric organization Hubbard cofounded with Thomas Szasz, Scientology has produced popular documentaries and engaged in public lobbying committed to exposing instances of violent malpractice performed in the name of mental health. The Citizens Commission has been influential in generating anti-psychiatric activism around the globe.⁹⁶ The continued centrality of anti-psychiatry to Scientology is a hallmark of its theology, with Scientology regularly emphasizing itself as an alternative to psychiatry and psychology.⁹⁷

The desire to de-medicalize Dianetics was, in the early 1950s, particularly urgent. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), following the powers granted to it in 1938 by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, would often seize and destroy equipment, drugs, and books that they found to be falsely advertised as medical or therapeutic. In 1958, for instance, the FDA raided a Scientology-affiliated distribution center in Maryland to confiscate and destroy tablets of a vitamin called Dianazene—which was inaccurately advertised as protecting against radiation.⁹⁸

A similar target of the FDA at the time was psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, a major psychoanalytic figure who could be considered to occupy a similar space as Auden—Reich was a gifted psychoanalyst who broke with Freud, turning toward the mystical to “restore” the psychic lives of his patients. Hubbard was likely aware of Reich’s harassment by the FDA in the early 1950s. The two have been compared as similarly charismatic psychological frauds,⁹⁹ and, given the resemblance of many of their ideas, Hubbard probably stole from Reich’s writings.¹⁰⁰ Reich claimed that his methods, which involved harnessing a vital energy he termed “orgone,” could lead to countless health benefits, most notably the curing of cancer.¹⁰¹ Orgone is a term derived from both “organism” and “orgasm” but is better defined as a singular, animistic force that grounds the emotions, among other things.¹⁰² Reich argued that cancer was the result of emotional and sexual repression, leading to “anorgonia,” or a deficiency of orgone energy, to be treated with therapies which would successfully harness orgone.¹⁰³ The most notable therapy Reich developed was his “orgone accumulators” (Figure 35), metal boxes in which a patient would sit, allowing orgone energy—in the body and in the environment—to “accumulate.” As Reich explains, “Concentrated in accumulators, this energy is capable of stopping anorgonotic processes in the sick organism and reversing them. Anorgonia of the blood in cancer patients can be cured by orgone therapy. The organism feels strengthened, it develops stronger impulses, gains weight, etc.”¹⁰⁴ In the 1950s, some estimates suggest that there were at least four thousand people passing as doctors, claiming that their therapies could cure cancer—bilking those who had or were afraid of cancer out of about $50 million per year.¹⁰⁵ Reich was, in the eyes of the FDA, one of these quacks. His books, along with his orgone accumulators, were investigated, seized, and destroyed by the FDA beginning in the late 1940s, leading to Reich’s eventual trial and imprisonment in 1956, along with his death in jail the following year.¹⁰⁶ A major distinction between Reich and Hubbard was in the former’s refusal to change his arguments given legal definitions of what constitutes medicine. Reich appealed multiple times to scientific authorities (including Albert Einstein), the FDA, and the FBI in defending his work. Hubbard, on the other hand, turned to religion to avoid the federal persecution that Reich suffered.

The importance of the FDA and the state in producing “crackpots” to be prosecuted should not be underemphasized. Chiropractic medicine, for instance, was founded in 1896 by Daniel David Palmer, an enthusiast of magnetic healing who vehemently opposed any “mainstream” form of medicine, such as vaccination. Palmer believed that he discovered chiropractic medicine from the spirit of a deceased physician, and that chiropractic therapy healed because it corrected the flow of nervous energy. He also believed that there was a religious duty in performing chiropractic therapy and legitimated his science through reference to religion rather than medicine.¹⁰⁷ Some of these beliefs are still debated today by chiropractors—including the validity of vaccination¹⁰⁸—and those within chiropractic medicine vehemently reject arguments of its status as an “alternative” or pseudoscientific form of medicine, instead stressing its popularity and internal credentialing, even though there is little evidence that chiropractic therapy should be considered a valid form of medicine.¹⁰⁹ This suggests, then, the decisions that governmental agencies take in deciding what “is” or “is not” medicine—which, in the case of chiropractic medicine, can be associated with its popularization and governmental recognition before the passing of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act—Kansas was the first state to recognize chiropractic as a form of medicine, California recognized it in 1922 (after a massive attempt to jail chiropractors for practicing medicine without a license), and Louisiana was the last state to recognize it as medicine, in 1974.¹¹⁰

While there’s a range of contextual factors that contributed to the remaking of Dianetics into Scientology—the fear of prosecution by the FDA, Hubbard’s desire to control his intellectual property—this cannot explain the radical break between the two, a total reversal that moves from a materialism to a cosmic idealism. And Westbrook’s claim—that this change signifies a genuine evolution in Hubbard’s beliefs—requires accepting that Hubbard, like Reich, genuinely believed what he said. My point is that the ontologies presumed by Dianetics and Scientology, while often conflated, presume radically different understandings of the body and mind. Both assume a centrality of trauma in daily life, a theme Hubbard poached from psychoanalysis. Dianetics frames trauma as a physical aberration in the body that results from lived experience. Scientology turns this lived, experienced, physical trauma into an intergalactic conflict between ancient souls called thetans. I claim this shift happened because of the turn to a technology to measure the body, which Hubbard interpreted through themes derived from esoteric and occult communities with which he was familiar.

A Machine to See Cosmic Trauma

The electropsychometer, or E-Meter, as it would come to be known, was invented and patented by chiropractor, psychoanalyst, and science fiction writer Volney G. Mathison in the early 1950s, developed by Hubbard after 1957.¹¹¹ Rather than a device that allows psychologists to see the truth of the emotions, the E-Meter positions emotion—identified through electrodermal response—as evidence for a metaphysical system that relies on, but far exceeds, the physical materiality of the body. The development of the E-Meter and Scientology represents a point in American history in which a regime of veridiction¹¹²—the space in which “truth” and “falsity” can be determined, differentiated, and judged—fell into crisis. One of the legacies of experimental psychology, descending from Titchener and his many students, is its absolute insistence that a science requires technological measurement. The “truth” of the emotions can only be judged through a machine to register the emotions. This was one of the main themes differentiating experimental psychology from the arguments of William James, and it is one of the reasons that psychoanalysis has long been disparaged as unscientific. Despite his debt to psychoanalysis, in turning to the E-Meter Hubbard embraces this understanding of science. Scientology can only be “scientific” if its claims can be expressed and registered technologically. At the same time, the E-Meter represents the end of this regime of veridiction. If, around 1950, technical measurement, in and of itself, was good enough to legitimate an inscription as objective, as uncontaminated by human belief, then the existence of a religion that claimed to be both science and theology became a significant problem.¹¹³ Letting the machine speak for itself—assuming its “objectivity” emerges from the separation of the machine from empirical, conscious knowledge—led not only to scientific truth but to claims of past lives and transcendental trauma. If the objectivity of the machine was no longer “scientific,” if a machine—a machine that, at a basic technical level, directly paralleled those employed in experimental psychology—could be used to legitimate beliefs that many people find bizarre and suspicious, then what does a device measure? How can a measurement be judged true or false?

The E-Meter, as Mathison described it in his initial patent application (Figure 36), “is a novel bio-electronic instrument which registers human dynamic emotion in a more accurate and sensitive manner than has been possible with any previous device of comparable simplicity.”¹¹⁴ The E-Meter was patented as a device for measuring electrodermal response, a device much cheaper to produce than others available at the time. Mathison framed the E-Meter as a technology for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, predating advances of people like Grey Walter in linking various measurements of the body with cognitive, psychological responses.¹¹⁵ One phrase Mathison uses signals his alliance with Hubbard from the outset. In measuring the body’s electrical conductivity, the E-Meter “reflects in some degree the immediately prevailing nervous and emotional tone-level of the subject.”¹¹⁶ The E-Meter was designed with a particular understanding of how emotional, mental states correspond to the body’s electricity—a measurement called “tone,” which can be measured and quantified through technical means.

“Tone” is a term central for the reinvention of Dianetics into Scientology. In Dianetics, Hubbard proposes a scale of 0 to 4, which he terms the Tone Scale. These numerical tones correspond to broad affective states “by which a state of mind can be graded.”¹¹⁷ A tone of 0 is death. Tones 0 to 1 are apathy. Tone 1 refers to a state “where the body is fighting physical pain or illness or where the being is fighting in anger,” including gradations of rage, resentment, hostility, and argumentativeness. Tones 2 and 3 include a range of emotions extending from “bearable existence” to “general happiness.” One is “cleared” when they reach tone 4.¹¹⁸ Even though these tones suggest a quantification of emotional states, they are correlated—and identified—through qualitative means, through the judgment of the auditor when questioning the preclear. While they do suggest forward movement—one progresses to a higher tone the further one advances through Dianetic auditing—there’s little in Dianetics to suggest these numbers genuinely correspond to anything beyond qualitative judgments. This is also the case with the second Dianetics book, Science of Survival, which provides a lengthy elaboration of the Tone Scale. Science of Survival details correlations between the Tone Scale and emotional state, sensory acuity, ability to experience pleasure, relation to sex and children, courage, responsibility, and psychiatric diagnosis (which was nonetheless limited to psychotic and neurotic), among a vast range of other categories.

In its elaboration of tone, Science of Survival makes some notable changes to Hubbard’s theories, signaling a turn away from the materialism of Dianetics. Instead of the reactive mind and analytic mind, both of which can be framed as materially grounded in the human body, Hubbard distinguishes between “theta,” a kind of immortal life energy that exceeds the body, and what he names the MEST body, the body in “Matter, Energy, Space and Time.”¹¹⁹ No longer are we dealing with an analog to the Freudian unconscious, no longer is trauma in the material abrasions of the physical body stored in cells. Trauma emerges out of conflict between theta and MEST. Theta is immaterial. It is privileged as the “real” self, while the physical body is secondary. Auditing becomes a task to get beyond physical matter to the immaterial “theta” energy beneath. In Science of Survival, the Tone Scale, while Hubbard still focuses on the range between 0 and 4, now begins at -3, a complete separation of theta and MEST resulting in death, and goes all the way to 40. A 4, previously the point in which one is “cleared,” becomes a “MEST Clear,” meaning one’s physical body is free of the engrams described in Dianetics. Tones 4 through 36 become a “Theta-MEST Clear,” which is, at the time of Science of Survival ’s publication, an unknown liberation of human capacity exceeding the physical body. A 40 is an absolute state of perfection.¹²⁰ Science of Survival still employs the techniques initially proposed in Dianetics, relying on auditor questioning and preclear response, and provides the reader tips and directives for questioning in auditing sessions. But in the turn away from the materiality of the body and mind toward energy —a “theta” energy similar to Reich’s orgone—Hubbard’s arguments now move beyond the capacities of human sensation and empirical knowledge. In psychoanalysis, the unconscious is accessible only through techniques that reveal true desires and obscured trauma, techniques that cannot, then, defer to empirical experience and never truly conclude in a “cure.” Dianetics was built on the belief that one can access and “clear” these otherwise hidden traumas through relatively simple means. Because traumas are about one’s own present existence, then one needs a technique for remembering and recalling that which the mind conceals. In turning to theta as a transcendent energy divorced from yet intertwined with human experience, Hubbard undermines his own arguments for besting Freud. Something would need to measure “tones” without deferring to direct sensory experience. Hence, the significance of the E-Meter. The E-Meter begins to function as a machine that measures what is beyond human experience, quantifying this “beyond” through the numbers of the Tone Scale.

In a footnote in Dianetics, Hubbard writes that technologies like the electroencephalograph can serve as a “mechanical aid to Dianetics. They are primarily used in research.”¹²¹ But these technologies aren’t used in practical auditing for a simple reason—they’re too expensive. In the future, Hubbard speculates, “some engineer, I trust, will make something to measure nerve impulses cheap enough to be used in general practice.”¹²² Mathison, in his patent applications, emphasized the simplicity and affordability of his technology. And by 1952, when Hubbard published Scientology: A History of Man, the E-Meter had become central to how Hubbard envisioned his therapy. “Occasionally people have told me that I should not release the data contained in this volume,” Hubbard says near the beginning of this book, “because there would be a repercussion throughout the country which would ruin Dianetics forever.”¹²³ It’s possible that this was, in fact, Hubbard’s goal—to ruin those who had the control over the Dianetics name.¹²⁴ This potential ruination was a reference to the new mission for auditing only implied in Science of Survival. “Theta” was now the true essence of the individual, the true self. And theta bodies, or “thetans,” have existed for over trillions of years. Our physical bodies are only temporary houses for these thetans. We have multiple lives, but really, lives are recurrences of the temporary embodiments of ancient thetans. The only way to sort out the relationship between our present existence and our relation to these thetans—who are often deeply traumatized for a range of reasons—is to use the E-Meter to access this beyond.

In contemporary publications of Scientology, we are now told that “there is no known way to clear anyone without using a meter,” and that “the only way to learn to use an E-Meter is use one, handle one, practice with one. Skill in meter use depends on familiarizing oneself with the actual meter.”¹²⁵ The E-Meter “tells you what the pc’s [preclear’s] mind is doing when the pc is made to think of something,” and the “meter registers before the pc becomes conscious” of their response to a question, it “is therefore a ‘preconscious’ meter.”¹²⁶ Knowing the mind of another “without a meter or without knowing a meter well is, of course, beyond the observational ability of Homo sapiens.”¹²⁷ And, above all, “A properly set up meter . . . is ALWAYS CORRECT.”¹²⁸ The publication of Scientology thoroughly reinvents Hubbard’s writings, arguing that his therapy is now capable of realizing cosmic knowledge. Its techniques now require a piece of technical equipment regulated by a religious organization. And it is only through this piece of equipment, access to it, knowledge of its use, that one can approach the secret knowledge that grounds existence. If the instrument is assumed to reveal—rather than invent—the truth of the body and the emotions, then it becomes a privileged portal, an oracle, access to which must be guarded and obscured.

The E-Meter and the Occultic

Scientology: A History of Man, in explaining how to use the E-Meter, also signifies a reinvention of Hubbard’s reliance on jargon. While his earlier publications also employ a complex and often strange language, his instructions in Scientology are incomprehensible to those who do not already possess an extensive knowledge of Hubbard’s writings. Scientology is supposedly a manual for performing “Technique 88,” an extension of the previously developed “Technique 80,” only available in audio recordings. (At the beginning of Scientology the reader is told that these recordings are “in the hands of your local organization.”)¹²⁹ Technique 88 begins with the following:

Symbological Processing on current life until preclear is well in present time.

Return preclear to incidents where the thetan can be located as outside and in good control of the body and run such incidents to orient preclear.

In absence of an outside thetan, audit preclear through failures to control self. Use an E-Meter to locate youngest entity (newest bank in the body) and audit its effort to control body. Then audit any Transfer you can find. Then audit Blanketings until preclear finds thetan is without a body.

Where thetan is outside where he belongs, audit preclear in current life through any and all DEDs and DEDEXes and degraders.

Audit all present life Transfers of the thetan, all Switch and Control Transfers that can be found.

Run off all incidents in present life where thetan and body create boil- off. (Don’t be surprised at thetan visios. You’re auditing theta, not MEST perception.) In-scan and Out-scan thetan through present life. This makes MEST clear.¹³⁰

The specific meaning of this process is not my point. Rather, in employing this excessive jargon, Scientology follows what rhetorician Joshua Gunn describes as “the occultic,” which is “strange or difficult language designed to better apprehend or understand something that is, at base, incommunicable,” but, in so doing, “discriminates among groups or kinds of people with strange or difficult language.”¹³¹ If the occult promises access to otherwise inaccessible, gnostic truth, the occultic obscures and prevents access beyond those properly initiated into specific communities of discourse. In Scientology, this occultic strategy is linked directly with the circulation of commodities and payment—though this is a common means of gatekeeping in occult communities. Scientology publications cultivate a broader public but eventually require additional purchases to understand or put into practice the varied methods and theories described. While Dianetics is relatively comprehensible—given how it is ultimately a popularization of psychoanalysis, was intended to be read widely, and described methods one could perform in small groups at home—this is not the case for Hubbard’s books after Scientology, which assume deep familiarity with all other Hubbard publications.

This rhetorical tactic, Gunn notes, is a variant on Platonic teachings and characterizes a vast range of modern discourse. The occultic is a strategy used not just by the properly occult, such as Scientology, which promises the revelation of gnostic truth, but also by critical theory and contemporary science, which gatekeep through the knowledge of and restricted access to specific terms, processes, methods, and—I’ll add—technologies. But Gunn’s focus is on language, since the writings of modern esoteric thought regularly follow a similar pattern, in which enlightenment, truth, gnosis—these emerge through an ability to master the language of a specific group:

Human language, precisely because it is human, is incapable of “cutting through the grooves” to the Source, the One, the Infinite, or for Plato, the sphere of the Eternal Forms. . . . The best [one] can do is dialectic, the method of using language against itself in order to transcend it. But not just any dialectic—certainly not Plato’s—will do for modern occultists. Rather, the secrets that each occult or New Age group reveals (at $200 a workshop, of course) concern their privileged vocabularies, their better allegories, for that which cannot be expressed in human representation.¹³²

Scientology certainly relies on this model. It, like most other occult or esoteric groups, relies on difficult-to-understand publications disseminated through paid workshops (or, auditing sessions and training), all with the point of achieving some higher enlightenment through time, money, and study. Scientology relies on the massive amount of documentation Hubbard was able to produce. These texts are to be read in a specific order, producing a specific, hermetic space of self-reference. This is, again, a strategy that characterizes most contemporary occult and New Age groups, which are almost always organized around shared texts, many of which are excessively long. Famed esoteric figures such as H. P. Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley also employed this strategy, deferring to a lengthy, and difficult to understand, corpus to identify those who are properly enlightened and those who must remain excluded from access to knowledge.

Another widely known (and widely disparaged) source of Hubbard’s is the Western esoteric group the Ordo Templi Orientis, or OTO, a secret society of which Crowley was the most well-known and most significant member. In 1945, Hubbard lived in Pasadena, California, in the house of Jet Propulsion Laboratory founder, rocket scientist Jack Parsons, the leader of the Pasadena OTO. Parsons invited Hubbard to participate in several OTO rituals he held at his house. Hubbard would later discuss Crowley’s writings in a series of lectures named the Philadelphia Doctorate Course, held between 1952 and 1953, alongside other notable figures in Western thought (including Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer, Freud, and Louis Pasteur, among others). The influence of the OTO and Crowley on Hubbard is heavily debated, and it’s difficult to suggest a direct influence of Crowley on Scientology.¹³³ The turn away from the popular psychoanalytic themes of Dianetics toward the costly and hierarchical structures of authority that characterize Scientology are reflective of the experiences Hubbard had with the OTO, however.

While Dianetics, at least to some degree, promised a more democratic orientation toward psychoanalysis—a democratic orientation that often characterizes self-help¹³⁴—the occultic institutes a hierarchy of access maintained through ritual, through obfuscatory jargon, through training. The OTO devised a two-tier hierarchy, divided into a bottom tier and a top tier. In the first seven “grades” or “degrees,” initiates to the OTO would study “basic magic,” comprising mostly Crowley’s writings. In the next three grades one’s study turns to sex magick, and in the ninth grade one is allowed to participate in the governance of the OTO. As Gunn notes, however, the ascent through these different grades is less about the accomplishment of specific tasks required to move from one grade to another than “intended as catalyst for an experience of the sublime—an aesthetic accomplishment.”¹³⁵ In Scientology, Hubbard would come to institute grades or degrees to be obtained after the state of clear is obtained—grades that correspond to various points on the Tone Scale between 4 and 40, grades called “Operating Thetans.” As with the OTO, these higher grades involve confidential, copyrighted materials, and auditing becomes not a relationship between an auditor and preclear, but between an Operating Thetan and their E-Meter.¹³⁶ Occultic authority, rather than adhering to an aesthetic ideal of transcendence, unites these occult and gnostic themes by adhering to the authority of technical measurement—with the ability to understand and use a technology.

How to Use Your E-Meter

How does one use an E-Meter, though? In a typical auditing session, the E-Meter’s display is obscured to the preclear—it includes a shield for the auditor behind which they adjust the meter, take notes, keeping these things out of sight of the preclear. Immediately, a relation of knowledge and power is produced—the one using the instrument is assumed to “know” through their ability to see and interact with the machine. The activities of the machine must remain hidden to the one under examination. The preclear sits while holding the electrodes or “cans” of the E-Meter, and the auditor begins by adjusting the E-Meter’s “tone arm,” the main dial on the E-Meter, to correspond to the preclear’s tone, which would usually be around a 2.5 or 3 (Figure 37). The tone arm is adjusted throughout auditing, as the needle must stay relatively still at “set” on the device’s display. The session begins with the assumption that one has identified a generally stable level of electrodermal activity, and that any and all changes will signify something. The auditor then interprets the movement of the needle while the preclear responds to the auditor’s statements or questions. The Book of E-Meter Drills, for instance, includes pages upon pages of lists, including vegetables, musical instruments, and varieties of flowers, which are used in initial “intake” auditing sessions. These lists are intended to see if particular words generate needle movements, which may guide questioning in a future auditing session. Sessions may eventually include auditors repeatedly requesting the same information (e.g., “Recall a communication,” “Recall a place from which you have communicated to another,” or “Recall a secret”).¹³⁷

In a polygraph examination—or even in an experiment with a Dynograph—the specific movements of the instrument’s needles are not particularly important. Rather, the waveform inscribed by the needle takes precedent. The actual physicality of the device writing is secondary to the writing the device generates. In auditing, however, the E-Meter needle is the focus, and its possible movements all have a set interpretation and a set name. These motions include the following, as defined in Introducing the E-Meter and E-Meter Essentials:

Null needle: The needle slowly drifts.¹³⁸

Stuck needle: No needle movement whatsoever.¹³⁹

Fall: The needle moves to the right.¹⁴⁰ This can be either a fast or slow movement.¹⁴¹ A fall “denotes that a disagreement with life on which the pc has greater or lesser reality has met the question asked,” “It is the click of the light switch illuminating where we are going.”¹⁴²

Long fall blowdown: The needle moves so far to the right that the device needs to be reset.¹⁴³

Rise: The needle moves to the left.¹⁴⁴ A rise indicates the “pc has struck an area or something he isn’t confronting. One never calls his attention to this. But one knows what it is.”¹⁴⁵

Theta bop: The needle moves back and forth rapidly and consistently (five to 10 times per second), and always the same distance.¹⁴⁶ A theta bop “means ‘death,’ ‘leaving,’ ‘don’t want to be here.’ It is caused by a yo-yo of the pc as a thetan vibrating out and into the body or a position in the body. It’s like the needle is jumping between two peaks across a narrow valley.”¹⁴⁷ “Mention death to anyone (or make them think about it) while they’re on a meter and you’ll see a theta bop.”¹⁴⁸ These signs, even though death would seem significant, “are not very important in diagnosis. They’re more interesting than vital.”¹⁴⁹

Rock slam (or R/S): The needle moves back and forth widely and irregularly.¹⁵⁰ A rock slam is probably one of the most important movements given by the E-Meter. “A Rock Slam means a hidden evil intention on the subject or question under auditing or discussion.”¹⁵¹ Notoriously, rock slams were used to legitimate significant abuse within Scientology,¹⁵² especially when some models of the E-Meter did not function properly according to the assumptions of Hubbard.¹⁵³

Stage four: The needle moves an inch or two consistently, sticks then falls regularly.¹⁵⁴

Floating needle (F/N): rhythmic sweep of a slow, even pace.¹⁵⁵ An F/N signifies a satisfactory conclusion of an auditing session.¹⁵⁶

Floating tone arm: The needle moves back and forth through the entire dial, requiring changes in the tone arm.¹⁵⁷

When compared to the methods of a lie detector, the readings of an E-Meter require an extreme level of scrutiny. “Calibration” of the E-Meter is intended to make sure the needle stays at a generally stable position, at “set,” until otherwise prompted. And then, the very specific movements of the needle become signs to be interpreted by the auditor. Technically, Scientology does have a method for achieving a baseline of sorts with the E-Meter, which it does through the asking of “nonmeaningful questions.” As with a polygraph examination, the subject is asked a range of obvious questions that are either insignificant or have answers known in advance. But while in a polygraph examination these questions generate a baseline from which a lie then deviates, this is not the case in auditing sessions. We can see this in a specific kind of auditing process termed “Security Checking,” which is probably the closest Scientology gets to using an E-Meter like a polygraph. Security Checking is designed to reveal something the preclear “withholds.”¹⁵⁸ But the point in asking these insignificant, nonmeaningful questions at the start of a Security Check is not to generate a baseline, which is there to determine if the technology itself is functioning properly. Rather, these questions are designed to ensure the auditor does not “mistake a real fall when it comes.” After several nonmeaningful questions, the auditor asks a question they do believe is meaningful, with the goal of getting a “fall” response, a movement of the needle to the right of the E-Meter. Once they get a fall response, the auditor is told to keep asking this question until they get a floating needle.¹⁵⁹ With a polygraph, the goal is to know how to judge the signs of the device. With Security Checking, the focus is not on the accuracy of the device, but on the ability of the auditor to interpret the device’s signs correctly. And yet the different movements of the E-Meter needle are not evidence of physiological changes. Rather, these movements parallel what Hubbard terms “Theta Traps,” which “use electronic force to knock the thetan into forgetting, into unknowingness.”¹⁶⁰ These “traps” correspond to forms of ancient electronic torture. A thetan called a “whirler,” for instance, “was placed on a platform which whirled eccentrically, jerkily, to the left and right until he would turn as the post turned,” and another called a “bouncer” “was bounced up and down eccentrically.”¹⁶¹ Changes in electrical resistance become literal movements supposedly experienced in the past.

I detail all of this to emphasize how a technology that registers the body through methods almost identical to that of the polygraph and the Dynograph, a technical measurement of electrodermal response—a measurement still employed in countless psychological studies—can be made into a system that identifies something completely opposed to that of a lie detector or Dynograph. And yet this metaphysics is still determined by the centrality of an instrument to measure the unseen interiority of the body. The deferral to the objectivity of a device, Scientology demonstrates, is not sufficient to legitimate “truth.” Rather, these means of measurement and their interpretation—reading the signs and motions of a needle, reading the movements of electrically trapped thetans who reveal themselves through changes in the body’s electrical conductivity—become a physical, material technique for metaphysical belief. In the hands of Scientology, the measurement of an electrodermal response provides the means for determining just what cosmic trauma one has suffered that continues to exert influence. In changing the device’s ability to write, the materiality of the inscription comes to mean something radically different, and radically opposed to the mission of psychology.

Rationality and Gnosis

In Hubbard’s Book of E-Meter Drills one finds countless exercises to familiarize one with their E-Meter. One of the earliest has a “coach,” the teacher, instruct a “student,” the one learning how to use the E-Meter to eventually become an auditor, to do little more than respond to the commands “Touch the meter” and “Let go of the meter.”¹⁶² Other drills involve having the student use the readings of an E-Meter to determine a random date the coach has in their mind (a birthday or a known anniversary), and another has the student determine dates that may include trillions of years, down to the second. (“The coach writes down a full date, like 56,276,345,829,100 years, 3 months, 4 days, 6 hours, 15 minutes and 10 seconds ago.”)¹⁶³ If, for Crowley’s OTO, training develops a particular aesthetic sensibility, these exercises demonstrate something quite different. In Scientology, training develops technical adeptness with an instrument, in reading it, in manipulating it, in using it to pull off tricks that would otherwise be feats of mentalism. This training presumes an extreme limitation on access. For Crowley and other esoteric groups, the obscurity of their rituals and readings produced shared knowledges designed to foster an elite sense of exclusivity opposed to the mass of mass culture.¹⁶⁴ For Scientology, this access is about the ability to use and interpret a technology. For psychology, we might add, this access comes from university credentials, through grant funding, through the ability to know and judge the difference between scientific knowledge and the unscientific.¹⁶⁵ But really, this process for all three of these groups is a variation on the same theme.

My point in this chapter was to demonstrate how deferral to a technology to “reveal” the otherwise unseen, deferring to technical expertise, cannot exclude the spiritual and the occult. Hubbard’s Scientology is a particularly notable example of the conjunction of scientific rationality and spiritual, esoteric thought. Since the 1950s, there have been many examples linking these two trends that experimental psychologists have long worked to keep separate. The most obvious, and influential, has been the emergence of the “Californian Ideology,” the “bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley.”¹⁶⁶ This specific conjuncture, which continues to guide the tech industries today, links political liberation, a faith in digital computers as a utopian technology, and new methods of achieving personal and spiritual fulfillment.¹⁶⁷ Rather than alienation from the assembly line and the bomb, the Californian Ideology preaches of digital, networked communication restoring a humanity lost through the alienation of mass production and industrial life—a restoration achieved not through, say, collective struggle or direct action, as a Marxist or an anarchist would argue, or through governmental reform, as an advocate of liberal democracy might claim, but through individualistic means of cultivating mental and spiritual well-being through personal technologies and “freedom” from institutional attachments.¹⁶⁸ This neoliberal, libertarian ideology would then assume that community could return through the social connections engendered by (capitalist) informational networks.¹⁶⁹ The desire for a community produced through the mediation of relation—a desire foundational for Lessing’s dramaturgy, a desire central to the beginnings of Einfühlung as a theory of art and spectatorship—again recurs with the Californian Ideology.

While this technical libertarianism was imagined as leading to new, idealist possibilities for experience, reading this conjunction of spirituality and technology through Hubbard—and not Silicon Valley counterculture —shows how psychology and the measurement of the emotions are also part of this formation. Emotional life today follows in the wake of a technical psychology, in which the body can be known and predicted through instruments that abstract and write emotional life and interiority. Eva Illouz has demonstrated how the arguments of psychology and psychoanalysis have profoundly shaped contemporary capitalism since the 1950s, rationalizing emotional bonds in the name of optimizing economic productivity,¹⁷⁰ something essential when capital requires the sustaining of flexible and tentative social relations in the generation of value.¹⁷¹ But this chapter argues that the influence of psychology on daily life in postwar America happened not only through its institutional acceptance but through a movement that was, explicitly, intended as the negation of psychological claims about the objective materiality of the emotions. The measurement of emotion was linked not merely with a rationalization of the body, but with the emotional fulfillment produced through a new form of spirituality. The embrace of affect as an ontological ground of life occurred not only through the technical authority of psychology but also by way of a movement designed to undermine the authority of psychology.

Hubbard’s use of the E-Meter presents a contradiction essential for understanding the operationalizing of emotion in our present—the technical measurement of emotion can be understood as both an outcome of extreme psychological rationalization and a technical liberation of the body’s otherwise untapped potentials, both a product of modern culture and an excess “residuum” that exceeds science and rationality. What remains, then, is the continued deferral to a machine to measure and inscribe the affects, an emotional machine at the end of history, extended outward in both material and metaphysical directions, drifting between the two at will—an all-encompassing definition of emotion, materiality, and ideality. This drift, however, requires the fundamental error that this entire book has worked to challenge. Techniques of measurement do not identify interiority, affects, emotions. They produce these things, and these “objects” change, radically, depending on the materialities of the media that produce them.