Just watched a TV show featuring a bunch of war (WWII) documentaries made by John Huston which were mostly banned at the time, or 'lost'.

http://abc.net.au/tvpub/highlite/h0045john.htm The last one ("Let There Be Light") was most interesting.

It was filmed at a hospital where war trauma victims were being treated. If it wasn't Oak Knoll it was an identical set-up. It featured the actual doctors/psychiatrists and soldiers in therapy.

The patient was put into a light trance, typically using sodium pentathol (sp ?) and then 'taken back' to the traumatic incident and asked things like "What do you see ?

Who's there ? What's happening ?". The theory was that by recounting the 'hidden incident' it would be 'erased' and so wouldn't impact on the guy anymore. The 'session' always ended with bring the guy back to the present time by asking him who he was, where he was now, etc, etc.

Sound familiar ? Duh !

I had read previously about how the old fraud had probably ripped off his Dianetics procedure from his period at Oak Knoll, but to actually see these 'sessions' from the 1940's at the army hospital run by these dreaded psyches, TR's fully in and all really knocked me back.

Fiendishly clever those evil SP psyches - they had managed to squirrel Dianetics before it was even created !

NS

> Just watched a TV show featuring a bunch of war (WWII)
> documentaries made by John Huston which were mostly banned
> at the time, or 'lost'.
>
> http://abc.net.au/tvpub/highlite/h0045john.htm
It goes back even further than that. Here's a paper from 1920, showing that even then the theory was around that it was not healthy to avoid traumatic incidents (as was thought previously) and that instead they need to be confronted. See:

http://www.yorku.ca/dept/psych/classics/Rivers/ Lots of other interesting articles at this website.

-- Monica Pignotti

"Hubbard was a patient at Oak Knoll Naval Hospital for three months after the war, although the doctors were undecided as to what was wrong with him. He was certainly neither blind nor crippled, but seemed to be suffering from endless minor aches and pains. His medical records show that he was examined exhaustively, almost every week, complaining of headaches, rheumatism, conjunctivitis, pains in his side, stomach aches, pains in his shoulder, arthritis, hemorrhoids.. . there seemed to be no end to his suffering. Sometimes the doctors could find symptoms, sometimes they could not. In September, for example, he was declared 'unfit for service' because of an ulcer, but in November his ailments were described as 'minimal'."

---from Russell Miller, Barefaced Messiah, Chapt 7., p. 112 So it seems that he was at Oak Knoll and not being seriously ill, he would have had opportunity to wander around and talk to people and perhaps pick up some ideas about abreactive therapy that he could later rip off.

-- Monica Pignotti

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