From: http://www.users.wineasy.se/noname/harlan.htm
Excerpt from Wings Interview: The Real Harlan Ellison (page 32).

Harlan Ellison is the author of over nine hundred stories. A third of them are science fiction, a third are fantasy. The rest are mainstream.

"What I'm trying to do," he told fans at a recent science fiction convention, "is to create a body of work that spans all genre." He has won eight Hugo awards for his work in science fiction short stories and films, two Nebula awards from the Science Fiction Writers of America, an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America, and three times received the Writers Guild of America award for Most Outstanding Teleplay.

Among his award winning short stories are "Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman", "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream", "The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World", and "Jefty is Five". He won Hugos for his novelettes "The Deathbird" and "Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langehans". His award-winning dramatic presentations include "The City on the Edge of Forever" (A Star Trek episode) and the motion picture "A Boy and His Dog".

[Snipped -- More biographical information ] [Snipped -- earlier parts of the interview] On Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard:

Ellison: Scientology is bullshit! Man, I was there the night L. Ron Hubbard invented it, for Christ Sakes!

I was sitting in a room with L. Ron Hubbard and a bunch of other science fiction writers. L. Ron Hubbard was famous among science fiction writers because he was the first one to have an electric typewriter.

Wings: He claimed to have written Dianetics in a weekend, and nobody can deny it.

Ellison: That's true. He wrote Dianetics in one weekend, and you know how he used to write? He used to take a roll of white paper, like paper you wrap fish in. He had it on the wall, and he would roll it into the typewriter and he would begin typing. When he was done, he would tear it off and leave it as one whole long novel.

We were sitting around one night... who else was there? Alfred Bester, and Cyril Kornbluth, and Lester Del Rey, and Ron Hubbard, who was making a penny a word, and had been for years. And he said "This bullshit's got to stop!" He says, "I gotta get money." He says, "I want to get rich".

Wings: He is also supposed to have said on that same night: "The question is not how to make a million dollars, but how to keep it."

Ellison: Right. And somebody said, "why don't you invent a new religion?

They're always big." We were clowning! You know, "Become Elmer Gantry!

You'll make a fortune!" He says, "I'm going to do it." Sat down, stole a little bit from Freud, stole a little bit from Jung, a little bit from Alder, a little bit of encounter therapy, pre-Janov Primal Screaming, took all that bullshit, threw it all together, invented a few new words, because he was a science fiction writer, you know, "engrams" and "regression", all that bullshit. And then he conned John Campbell, who was crazy as a thousand battlefields. I mean, he believed any goddamned thing. He really believed blacks were inferior. I mean he really believed that. He was also very nervous when I was in his office because I was a Jew. You know, he was afraid maybe I would spring horns or something.

Anyhow, the way he conned John was that he had J. A. Winter, who was a doctor, who was a close friend of John's, and he got him to run this article on Dianetics, the new science of mental health.

Wings: Dianometry was the first article, I believe.

Ellison: Right. And science fiction fans will go for any goddamm thing.

They'll believe anything, man, they will believe in the abominable snowman and the Bermuda Triangle, in Pyramid Power, in EST, in Scientology, in the Second Coming, they'll believe in any goddamm thing, they don't give a shit. They go to see Star Wars; they think it is for real!

So science fiction fans picked it up, they began proselytizing, he started making money, when he had made enough money he was able to spread out a little more, then he got more cuckoos, you know, pre-Charlie Manson assholes that had no place else to go, and he began talking to these loons as if Dianetics really meant something. Then he wanted to get tax-exempt status, so he called it "The Church of Scientology".

Now, they've gotten so big that they own property all over the country, and it is impossible to stop it. They infiltrated the FBI, they infiltrated the tax department... , the funny thing is, Ron Hubbard and I still occasionally communicate with each other. Every once in a while, a couple or three times a year, we exchange letters. And I write to him, you know, and I say, "Hey Ron, when is this bullshit going to cease?

These cuckoos are really driving me crazy! They come around the house with pamphlets!" And he writes me back, and he says, "It's the good work, it's the good work."

It's all very funny stuff. He was going to write a new story for me for the last Dangerous Visions, but I guess he got too busy counting his money. I don't know.

-==="Dianetics" - For Seekers of Prefabricated Happiness===- -=by *Erich Fromm* (1950b)=- Never have people been more interested in psychology and the art of living than today. The appeal which books dealing with these subjects have is a symptom of a serious concern with the human rather than with the material aspects of living. But among these books are some which satisfy the need for rational guidance and others appealing to readers who look for prefabricated happiness and miracle cures. Dianetics1 is the latest in this series of books and the author uses all ingredients of the success formula with a remarkable lack of embarrassment. "The creation of Dianetics is a milestone for Man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his inventions of the wheel and the arch." The author claims to have discovered not only the "single source for every kind of neurosis, psychosis, criminality and psychosomatic illness" but also a therapy which cures all these ills. "Dianetics cures and cures without failure."

The author presents first a general theory of the structure of the mind, then builds upon these premises a theory of mental disturbances and a technique for their cure. "Man is motivated only by survival." He is surviving for self, sex, group and mankind and each of these "purpose divisions of the entire dynamic principle" is called a "dynamic." He distinguishes between the "analytical mind," "which perceives and retains experience data to compose and revolve problems and direct the organism along the four dynamics," and the "reactive mind," "which files and retains physical pain and painful emotion and seeks to direct the organism solely on a stimulus response basis."

While the analytical mind which is compared to an exceptionally magnificent calculating machine thinks in differences and similarities, the reactive mind thinks only in identities.

The concept of the reactive mind is the basis of the author's theory of mental illness and its cure. During moments of intense physical or emotional pain the analytical mind is suspended and the words spoken in the presence of the "unconscious" person are stored as "engrams." These engrams are not accessible to the normal process of recall. Without being aware of it the person is determined by the contents of these engrams similar to a person whose behavior, posthypnotically is motivated by suggestions given during the hypnosis. "If there ever was a devil, he designed the reactive mind. ... It does anything and everything that can be found in any list of mental ills: psychoses, neuroses, compulsions, repressions. ... It can give a man arthritis, bursitis, asthma ... and so on down the whole catalogue of psychosomatic ills. ... The engram is the single and sole source of aberration and psychosomatic illness."

Dianetic therapy follows from these premises. The patient ("preclear") is ill because the engrams make him so. When all important engrams, particularly those of the prenatal period are recalled ("returned"), the patient is free forever ("cleared") from all "aberrations" and superior in intelligence to the average person. The therapist ("auditor") brings about this "return" of the engram by putting the patient in a state of "reverie." "When I count from one to seven your eyes will close. You will remain aware of everything that goes on."

Then the auditor counts "slowly, soothingly" until the patient closes his eyes. During the following period of reverie the patient is told to "return" to earlier periods of his life as far back as conception and at the end of the session he is brought back to the present. The engram must be recounted many times until they are completely "erased."

In spite of the authors fantastic claims there is hardly anything original in his theories except new words for a mixture of misunderstood and undigested Freudianism and hypnotic age regression experiments. Some notions which are truly "original" are startling indeed. Thus we hear the patient report the words spoken by the doctor to his pregnant mother, or by the father to his wife shortly after conception. This reviewer when reading these case histories was tempted to wonder whether the author had intended to write a witty parody on certain psychiatric theories and the credulity of the public.

Hubbard's book can hardly be taken seriously as a scientific contribution to the science of Man but it must be taken seriously as a symptom of a dangerous trend. Were it only an oversimplified popularization of early Freudian theories it would be harmless. But Dianetics1 is expressive of a spirit which is exactly the opposite of Freud's teachings. Freud's aim was to help the patient to understand the complexity of his mind, and his therapy was based on the concept that by understanding one's self one can free one's self from the bondage to irrational forces which cause unhappiness and mental illness. This notion is part of the great Eastern and Western tradition from Buddha and Socrates to Spinoza and Freud. Dianetics1 has no respect for and no understanding of the complexities of personality.

Man is a machine and rationality, value judgements, mental health, happiness are achieved by an engineering job. "In an engineering science like Dianetics we can work on a push-button basis." There is nothing man has to know or to understand except to apply Hubbard's engram theory. If he does not accept this theory he must have ulterior motives or be possessed by a "denyer" which is "any engram command which makes the patient believe that the engram does not exist."

Everything is exceedingly simple. If you have read Hubbard's book you know all there is to know about man and society because you know which buttons to push.

Problems of values and conscience do not exist. If the engrams are erased you have no conflicts. All great philosophical and religious teachers wasted their efforts. There is no problem which does not result from engram command and there is no point to their thinking since they did not know Hubbard's discovery. Although the author says that "the ancient Hindu" writings, the work of the "early Greeks and Romans" including Lucretius, the labors of Francis Bacon, the researches of Darwin and some of the thoughts of Herbert Spencer compose the bulk of "the philosophical background" of his work it is hard to believe: certainly Dianetics1 does not show the fruits of such concern. The discovery "that survival is the single and sole purpose of life" is certainly not the expression of the spirit of the "ancient Hindus" or the "early Greeks" but that of a crude biologism for which ethical values are subordinated to the urge for survival - if there is any place for them at all.

But perhaps the most unfortunate element in Dianetics1 is the way it is written. The mixture of some oversimplified truths, half truths and plain absurdities, the propagandistic technique of impressing the reader with the greatness, infallibility and newness of the author's system, the promise of unheard of results attained by the simple means of following Dianetics1 is a technique which has had most unfortunate results in the fields of patent medicines and politics; applied to psychology and psychiatry it will not be less harmfull.

This negative view on Dianetics1 does not result from this reviewer's belief that present-day methods of psychiatry are satisfactory; they are in need of new ideas and experiments indeed. Fortunately, many psychiatrists and psychologists are aware of this need and in search for more effective methods of approaching the unconscious level (like, for instance, the Slesinger "Looking-in" test). But the premise must be the strengthening of the patient's responsibility, critical ability and insight.

------------------------------------------------------------------------ -=References:=- 1) This is a review of L. Ron Hubbard's *Dianetics *with which Hubbard founded his Scientology-Church. The review originally was published in *The New York Herald Tribune Book Review* of September 3, 1950, p. 7.

Copyright 1998 by The Literary Estate of Erich Fromm, Ursrainer Ring 24, D-72076 Tübingen, Fax: +49-7071-600049; e-mail:

fromm@germanymail.com [fromm@germanymail.com] . __

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