Yes, that's abreactive therapy, and it was used quite a bit by the military to treat "war neuroses" during World War II.

Here's a little more history on it.

The technique was first developed in the U.K. during World War I. It was first done under hypnosis, but since very few MDs were trained hypnotists, its use was quite limited. Because of this, they came up with the idea of using anesthetic drugs to induce the hypnotic state. From the outset, however, the literature stated emphatically that neither hypnosis nor drugs were required to produce the required state of "reverie."

The purpose of the therapy was to get soldiers back to the field as quickly as possible. It was never intended as a long- term therapy, only as a quick fix. It was a treatment that could be learned quickly by relatively unskilled and untrained physicians to empty out the wards and fill up the fighting ranks.

A great deal has been written about abreactive therapy, and yes, this is the secret behind Dianetics. The similarities between abreactive therapy and auditing are not coincidental; auditing was correctly described as abreactive therapy by mental health practitioners when DMSMH was published.

Why was it ignored by shrinks after the war? Because it was obvious to all that it did not treat underlying psychiatric problems.

It was only intended to 'clear' hysterical reactions to traumatic events. But if you read the psychiatric literature of the time, it is quite apparent that that's where Hubbard came up with his 'discovery.' BTW, the film "Let There Be Light" is in the public domain and can be purchased on video. You'll see copies of the video come up on E-bay quite often, although there's also a vendor who sells copies from his own website.

I've collected a very large pile of books and journal articles from the 1940s medical literature dealing with abreactive therapy. There's absolutely no question this is where Hubbard came up with his 'discovery' of Dianetics.
Diane Richardson
referen@bway.net
On Sat, 11 Nov 2000 18:22:54 GMT, not@for.mail (Nick S) wrote:

>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

Here's a snip from http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/6/cteq/light.html "Huston and a team of cameramen lead by DOP Stanley Cortez (the master of black light carving responsible for The Magnificent Ambersons [1942] and The Night the Hunter [1955]) spent three months in 1946 at New York's Mason Hospital, documenting an intensive eight week, mass production program of therapeutic treatment for what was then described as 'psychoneurotic' illness: a baggage of anxieties and psychosomatic symptoms emerging in soldiers in combat or through alienation from Home. All the scenes in the film are ‘found’. Undoubted, these social actors were in some of the Group Therapy sequences 'rehearsed' for the film. As such, and in keeping with the ethical protocols of Griersonian documentary in those pre-verite days, they were pre-interviewed and asked what they would say and then prompted to repeat their expression to camera – conduct which was more about giving dignity to the participant's self-representation and economy to the shooting ratio than to any editorial immorality."

If the U.S. military was using abreactive therapy during and after WW ll,Hubbard could have encountered it at any number of hospitals.

For that matter,being a pulp writer with aspirations to a Hollywood career,he could have known somebody who got him into a private screening of Huston's unreleased movie sometime before he "discovered" Dianetic therapy in 1950.

You can bet that the fact that the Pentagon "banned" the movie didn't keep Huston from screening it for friends and industry people.

Hubbard was mainly in either Los Angeles or the New York City area in the years after the war.We'll probably never know for sure,but there is something very fitting in the idea that he got the idea for Dianetics from a movie.

From "Bare-Faced Messiah",Chapter 8:

"Within a couple of years it would become imperative for L. Ron Hubbard to play down his career as a pulp writer and establish for himself a rather more sober reputation as a scientist, philosopher and guru. Lesser men might have hesitated to undertake such a radical metamorphosis, but not Ron Hubbard, who effortlessly contrived to make it appear as if his whole life had been dedicated to unravelling the mysteries of the psyche.

(snip) During the 'year' he had spent in Oak Knoll Naval Hospital, Ron would claim he had had the run of the medical library and access to the medical records of former prisoners of war. He began experimental psycho-analysis on ex POWs, 'using a park bench as a consulting room', and his research continued ever more intensively through the post-war years. In Savannah, he said, he worked as a volunteer lay practitioner in a psychiatric clinic, helping charity patients no one else would treat.

There was, perhaps, no reason why anyone should question the veracity of Hubbard's research, but his friends must have been puzzled that they knew nothing of it. Mac Ford, for example, who had spent so much time with Ron in the late '30s, sailing on Puget Sound and often talking through the night over a bottle of whisky, had never realized that his friend was engaged in research of any kind.In the heated and wide-ranging discussions that took place in the kitchen of Jack Parsons's house in Pasadena, the ideal forum for Hubbard to talk about his theories, he had said not a word about them. Alva Rogers had frequently heard him tapping away at a typewriter in his room, but there was nothing to indicate he was writing anything but fiction. Not even the amiable Forrest Ackerman had any idea that Ron was about to abandon science fiction in favour of philosophy, although in January 1949 he received an amusing letter from his client hinting at the possibility."

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