Refund and Reparation

Fellow by the name of Freud, he had the idea that all you had to do was clear up somebody's libido and he would begin living. Freud in a rather heartbroken little memorial written about 1920 said, "Psychoanalysis, Terminable or Interminable?" And in that little monograph he stated that his hopes were dead; it had not worked.

He needn't have felt so badly about it. Naturally he had been up against the American Medical Association, probably the American Psychiatric Association, the Association for the Rehabilitation of Cockeyed Alienists, the Association for the Suppression of Associations Which Try to Advance Something to Associate About. And he had, in short, been pushing an awful lot of opposition in front of him and he didn't have any tool with which to clean this up so he could keep his own enthusiasm, so by about 1920 he was dead on the subject.

But he had contributed something—something enormously important. Working with Breuer, he had found out that if you can get a fellow to remember back to his earliest times and get him to remember certain things, he got better. Freud didn't know and he eventually admitted he didn't know why he got better. But he got better sometimes.

And a fellow by the name of Charcot, 1832, was experimenting with hypnotism. He found out there were some strange conditions of the mind by which you looked at somebody fixedly and they went unconscious. Little things like this back along the track. Well, assembled, those things become Dianetics.