Refund and Reparation

POSTPARTUM PSYCHOSIS, mental upset due to delivery of a baby. (HCOB 15 Jan 70)

Dianetic Auditing particularly lends itself to specific situations. For instance, a pregnant woman should be audited on emotions and somatics relating to birth or babies before delivery. We used to simply audit the girl’s own birth and any past births (R3R).¹ Then immediately after delivery the engram is run out. Handling pregnancy in this fashion has the woman up and about in 3 days and in fine condition. This prevents utterly the extreme of “postpartum psychosis”, as mental upset due to delivery is called. It prevents any upset with the husband or child. It prevents physical aftereffects. In short, it should be done.

Since estimation and auditor-sensitivity are subject to variety and error one cannot cleanly estimate the length of time required to clear anyone. Only approximations are possible and these are varied by possible environmental difficulties of the preclear during auditing: i.e., daily present time problems of crushing magnitude. We are not today in the area of thousands of hours, however. We are in the area of hundreds of hours in any case, sane or insane. I cite an example: a woman suffering from a postpartum psychosis was audited 600 hours on CCH 1, 2, 3, 4¹ before she turned sane long enough for the auditor to snap off the case the valence of her dying brother, at which moment she turned stably sane.

 The auditor makes the person comply over and over to simple commands such as: " a) Look at that wall. b) Walk over to that wall. c) Touch that wall. d) Turn around." CCH stands for "Control Communication and Havingness."

The basic use of Dianetics is to make a well body and to augment physical treatment.

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A woman has a child. The engram of delivery should be run out soon after. The result of doing so is very spectacular. There is no "postpartum psychosis" or dislike of the child and no permanent injury to the mother. It is in fact best to audit the mother both before and after the delivery, which gives one fast relatively painless childbirth and quick recovery.

The next thing that you will run into in birth is that it is an engram in common with the child. Mother and child have the same engram. Postpartum psychosis may be rare, but postpartum neurosis is the standard thing in America. This is the child that gave her all the pain. This is the mama that I heard screaming. Between the two of them it is a setup that the devil himself would not have countenanced.

If the child is to have an easy birth you must take some of the tension off the woman’s own birth and her having given birth before. This will ease any possibility of a postpartum psychosis. But, if by any means whatsoever you can persuade the woman to go on through with it, and calm her down about the whole situation, and get her on through to the end of term and get the child delivered in silence, very soothingly and very quietly, then you can start to work on the woman before she has a chance to mess up the child’s life. That is very desirable. But I would not make a practice of treating pregnant women.

You could, however, keep her flying level and advise her to keep her mouth shut when she gets into morning sickness, and when she’s on the toilet, and to stop arguing with her husband, and just give her a general idea of what will happen if she doesn’t.

Mamie Schultz has a postpartum psychosis. What’s the first thing that Mr. Schultz thinks of? He thinks, "Quick, where is an auditor?" He can’t do anything about it himself probably. He’s too close to her, so he has got to have an auditor, and the auditor gets a postpartum psychosis to handle that could have been broken by psychoanalysis it is so simple. It’s one of those easy ones where all one has to do is say to the patient, "You’ll feel all right," and they feel all right.

Then everybody says, "Oh, Dianetics is wonderful because look at what it did for Mamie Shultz."