A Civilisation Without Insanity? Psychiatry, Dianetics and the Birth of Scientology

Abstract

With his development of Dianetics, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard was presenting the first criticism of the profession of psychiatry as a whole, in many ways pre-empting by a decade the later emergence in the 1960s of what has come to be referred to as the anti-psychiatric movement. Previous critics had either sought to bring about reform of the profession or objected to specific practices. Rather than adopting this approach, Hubbard drew inspiration from these separate criticisms and brought them all together within a single work. Hubbard’s 1950 book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, presented a summary of the full range of criticism that had been levelled at American psychiatric practice over the preceding half century. This study locates the emergence of Dianetics and Scientology against a backdrop of professional and popular criticism of psychiatry. It also explores how American society contributed in significant ways to the fundamental ideas behind Dianetics, how Hubbard sought to validate his new ‘science of the mind’ in both professional practice and popular culture, and how this validation was rejected professionally but nevertheless found an accommodating niche with the American public. Exploring how and why this was the case form the core of this study. After establishing the methodological framework within which this exploration takes place, the opening chapter presents a summary of modern Scientology’s criticisms of psychiatry approximately sixty years after the tradition was founded. The discussion then turns to a broad survey of the state of American psychiatric practice in the decades immediately preceding Hubbard’s writing, presenting a picture of a profession undergoing both external challenges and internal shifts in emphasis, with the rise of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis as talk-based alternatives to physical treatment. Following this, the work moves to an examination of the popular alternatives to traditional psychiatric practice such as New Thought and self-help, as well as locating the emergence of these alternatives from previous psychiatric explorations. From here, attention shifts to a discussion of Hubbard’s life and the development of his ideas, primarily using official Scientology sources for the insights they provide into the arguably hagiographical elements of religious biography in seeking to establish his assertion of superior authority. The process by which Hubbard claimed to develop his ideas and the foundation of the early organisation which supported their dissemination are also examined. The contents of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health are then presented and analysed, and finally, the study presents a discussion of the reception afforded Dianetics on its publication in May 1950. This study demonstrates that Hubbard’s ideas emerged in part from a culture of criticism of psychiatry in a fluid professional landscape. In his criticism, however, Hubbard was at pains to present his own alternative as a more effective, more scientific, and ultimately more ‘workable’ alternative to previous forms of mental health treatment. That some found his promises of ubbard’s ideas emerged from as culturegreater functionality to be fulfilled in their exploration of Dianetics is demonstrated by the survival of its ideas in the modern practice of Scientology over sixty years later. Likewise, the marginalisation of Dianetics and Scientology throughout their history suggests that Hubbard’s ideas failed to find a wide constituency, or, alternately, confirms Hubbard’s hypothesis that the mainstream mental health professions have conspired to suppress what he held to be the most effective form of mental health treatment ever discovered.