Dianetics : The Modern Science of Mental Health by L. Ron Hubbard 14 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

Dianetics did not change my life, it made it worse...

January 8, 2000 Reviewer: A reader from Providence, Rhode Island Everything in my life was fine until I read this book "Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health". Then I went in for dianetic auditing at my local Dianetics center. Now I have become depressed and have terrible lapses in memory, along with having to take medication. I believe the people who administer this "science" are practicing medicine without a license. Can someone tell me why they let L. Ron Hubbard out of the mental hospital to promote this stuff in 1950? This should be removed from Amazon.com and off the shelves of every major bookstore, or at the very least come with a big warning sticker on the front: "Warning: Quackery Found Here".

Based on the concept that what ails us humans stems from a run-in with the evil-doing ghosts of aliens ostracized from their home galaxy and vaporized by their leader Xemu some 75 million years ago, "Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health" is a treasury of self-help humor, replete with screwball explanations for such things as constipation (which, by the way, "can be caused or cured by positive suggestion with remarkable speed and facility"), gays and lesbians ("The sexual pervert ... is actually quite ill physically") and even the common douche bag (not a recommended tool for abortion).

This book could be more accurately titled "Dianetics: one crackpot's collection of abortion fantasies." As I was reading this book, I could not help but also think about such crackpots as Velikovsky, Erich Von Daniken, Flat Earthers, and Young Earth Creationists. This book can sit comfortably along side such intellectual giants as "Chariots of the Gods, "Worlds in Collision," and "Flood Geology."

When the author does not have women aborting their pregnancies by the hundreds every year, he is having women being beat up and tortured by men. It seems unlikely to me that any woman can read this book and not be insulted by the authors seemingly insane hatred of women.

As the author's son, Ron DeWolf said in a magazine interview:

"All the examples in the book --- some 200 'real-life experiences' --- were just the result of his obsessions with abortions and unconscious states... In fact, the vast majority of those incidents were invented off the top of his head." And this shows up very well in the book: I found the "examples" are so absurd and inane that one can only wonder at why the publisher was willing to inflict this nonsense on its readership.

The book's poor grasp of reality also shows just how much effort the author put into both "researching" and writing it:

roughly one month from concept to finished product.

Though the author claims "12 years of research," his family members reported a different story. "Dianetics" was first thought of by the author in May of 1950: it was a science fiction short story published in the pulp science fiction magazine "Astounding Science Fiction" (now called "Analog").

The editor, John Campbell, Jr., was so impressed by the letters the science fiction story generated, that he asked the author to write more on the subject. The author accepted the task and few weeks later he had expanded the science fiction story into the book "Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health,"

which was very soon published by Hermitage House.

The late Theodore Sturgeon, a distinguished science- fiction writer knew Hubbard fairly well, and told people that at a sci-fi convention the previous year Hubbard had told him and several other writers something like this: "You guys just wait.

I've thought up a racket that's going to make me very rich.

You'll hear about it in a few months." The book "Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health" was the result.

A few hours ago I finished reading this book, and it has occured to me that the mild popularity this book has experienced is an excellent example of what happens when people have no knowledge of what science is and how science works.

If Dianetics is "the modern science," God help us all!

By the way, the author didn't start by using the term "engram,"

which of course he borrowed from biochemistry. In the Astounding science fiction story that introduced Dianetics, he called them "Norns," after the witches of Norse mythology. When the book was published, his Norns had been transmogrified into engrams.

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