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In May 1950 a book comes out that speaks of permanent traces, of charge, of chains of incidents and of a method for reducing them. It cites almost no one. Yet every piece of it has a documented history, half a century long, in disciplines that did not talk to each other.
The diagram reads from left to right. Each colour is a thread, and you will find it again in the headings below.
The trace
The word “engram” is coined by a German zoologist, Richard Semon, in 1904. His thesis is that every stimulus leaves in living matter a modification that remains:
“In very many cases it can be shown that the irritable substance of the organism, after the action and cessation of a stimulus, is permanently altered. I call this action of stimuli their engraphic action, because it digs or inscribes itself, so to speak, into the organic substance. The alteration of the organic substance thus produced I call the engram of the stimulus in question.”
“…nach Einwirkung und Wiederaufhören eines Reizes […] dauernd verändert ist. Ich bezeichne diese Wirkung der Reize als ihre engraphische Wirkung, weil sie sich in die organische Substanz sozusagen eingräbt oder einschreibt. Die so bewirkte Veränderung der organischen Substanz bezeichne ich als das Engramm des betreffenden Reizes.” — Semon, Die Mneme, 1904.
Semon adds two things that matter. The engram records everything that was present at that moment, not only the main stimulus. And it is enough for a fragment of that situation to return for the whole to be reactivated.
In 1916 Eugen Bleuler, the most authoritative German-speaking psychiatrist, brings the term into his textbook. He uses it dozens of times, as an ordinary word, and takes the step that Semon lacked:
“Forgetting, then, as a rule does not rest on a disappearance of the engrams, but on an impossibility of reviving them as memories.”
“Das Vergessen beruht also in der Regel nicht auf einem Verschwinden der Engramme, sondern auf einer Unmöglichkeit, diese als Erinnerungen zu beleben.” — Bleuler, Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie, 1916.
The cause of the block, he writes, lies “above all in affective obstacles”. Trace intact, recall prevented, and the impediment is emotional. In 1921 Bertrand Russell sets all this out in English, in a widely read book. In 1950, therefore, “engram” is a word that an educated English-speaking reader could know.
The charge and the chain
In 1895 Breuer and Freud publish the Studies on Hysteria. The central idea: an emotional incident whose charge has not been discharged remains active and produces symptoms in the body; if the person recalls it with all its emotion, the symptom gives way. Freud also describes how the incidents are linked to one another: by similarity, around a nucleus.
“The grouping of similar reminiscences in a multiplicity of linear stratifications, as represented in a bundle of documents […] I have designated as the formation of a theme.”
— Freud, 1895, in the English translation of the period.
And he notes that the incident with which the series really began emerges last. Three years later Pierre Janet, in Paris, describes the same thing along the axis of time:
“When one has removed a fixed idea, one is quite astonished to see another arise. It is an old idea, earlier than the one just treated, that reappears. This one removed in its turn, one finds oneself in the presence of a third obsession that had existed earlier, and one is obliged to go back in reverse order over the principal fixed ideas that have tormented the patient’s life.”
“Quand on a enlevé une idée fixe, on est tout étonné d’en voir surgir une autre… C’est une idée ancienne, antérieure à celle que l’on vient de traiter et qui réapparaît. Celle-ci enlevée à son tour, on se trouve en présence d’une troisième obsession qui avait existé antérieurement et on est obligé de repasser en ordre inverse, les principales idées fixes qui ont tourmenté la vie du malade.” — Janet, Névroses et idées fixes, 1898.
Janet adds that the oldest are the most tenacious. In 1927 Pavlov’s book on conditioned reflexes arrives in English, giving two of these ideas a form measured in the laboratory. A stimulus similar to the original one produces the same response. And when the stimulus is presented again without consequences the response falls, trial after trial, to zero: it is the principle of repeating until there is no more reaction, with a stopping point counted in drops of saliva.
The procedure
The closest to a method is again Janet. In 1904 he publishes the case of Irène, a young woman who has lost the memory of her mother’s death and relives it in crises without knowing it. He describes the technique, the order in which to go back, the signal at which to stop, and he measures the patient before and after. In 1919 he formulates the criterion of success:
“A situation is well liquidated, well assimilated, only when we have reacted not only outwardly by our movements, but also inwardly by the words we address to ourselves, by the organization of the account of the event to others and to ourselves, and by the putting of this account in its place as a chapter of our own history.”
“Une situation n’est bien liquidée, bien assimilée que lorsque nous avons réagi non seulement extérieurement par nos mouvements, mais encore intérieurement par les paroles que nous nous adressons à nous-mêmes, par l’organisation du récit de l’événement aux autres et à nous-mêmes et par la mise en place de ce récit comme un chapitre de notre propre histoire.” — Janet, Les médications psychologiques, II, 1919, p. 273.
That is: the outburst is not enough, the person must be able to tell the incident while awake and put it in its place. In the same book Janet admits the limit: in cases that seemed identical to him he did the same things and obtained nothing. He has a method that works in his hands, not one that can be taught.
War medicine
The Second World War produces thousands of soldiers with paralysis, mutism and amnesia without injury. The American army doctors go back to the incident: they inject a barbiturate, take the soldier back to the battlefield and have him relive it. The army films it to train other doctors. In a 1944 film one hears:
“You’re back on the battlefield now. What are you doing?”
— War Department training film, 1944.
Return to the incident, telling in the present tense, repetition: the moves of the session are all there. Grinker and Spiegel, who write the reference manual in 1945, warn however that the outburst under the drug is not the cure:
“…the patient should be able to remember […] his emotional abreaction. Otherwise the episode has been only an eruption or explosion of tension, which is certain to rebuild.”
— Grinker and Spiegel, Men Under Stress, 1945, p. 392.
It is Janet’s criterion. In 1949 the army’s official assessment uses it against the method: the drug technique “does not furnish insight to the patient, since there is an almost complete amnesia for the session”, and the course of the disease “is rarely influenced significantly”.
At that point psychiatry leaves the road of trauma. It does so before the modern psychiatric drugs arrive, and for a technical reason: the method it had did not stand up to the test. In the following years what survives is what can be patented or reduced to a manual.
The indicator
How does one find the charged incident in a person who does not know they have it? In 1900 the psychologist Theodor Ziehen notes that when a word touches something emotional the answer comes late. Jung, in Zurich, makes a method of it: a hundred words, the time of each answer, and a threshold calculated for each subject. Where the answer is slow, or the person repeats the word, or misunderstands, there is something underneath. From 1907 he sets beside it a galvanometer, which marks the reaction of the skin even when the person shows nothing.
In the following thirty years that instrument becomes a bridge with a knob that brings the needle back to zero, then a box with a valve. In 1951 Volney Mathison patents a version of it; Hubbard adopts it. This part has a story of its own, with the diagrams.
The knot of 1950
A direct link with this history is set down in black and white by the author. In the article of May 1950 Hubbard tells of having reviewed the existing methods, and of one he says:
“Narco-synthesis seemed a good lead, until some cases were discovered which had been ‘cured’ by narco-synthesis. They were reworked with the technique just to discover what had occurred. […] It seemed to do something beyond what it was supposed to do and that something beyond was bad.”
— Astounding Science Fiction, May 1950.
So he knew the technique of the army doctors, had considered it and discarded it, together with hypnosis (“you can’t hypnotize everybody”). It is the same conclusion the army had reached a year earlier, for the same reason: the drug takes away from the person the memory of what they have done.
Lined up, the pieces are these.
| In the 1950 book | Already existed | Where |
|---|---|---|
| A permanent trace that records the whole moment and is reactivated by a fragment | yes | Semon 1904, Bleuler 1916 |
| A charge that remains and gives physical symptoms | yes | Breuer and Freud 1895 |
| Incidents linked in a chain, to be traced back to the first | yes | Freud 1895, Janet 1898 |
| Repeating until the reaction dies out | yes, in the laboratory | Pavlov 1927 |
| Returning to the incident and telling it in the present tense | yes | army films 1944–46 |
| The person must stay conscious and remember | yes, as a criterion | Janet 1919, Grinker and Spiegel 1945 |
| Physical pain with loss of consciousness as the basis of everything, before the emotional incident | no | not found in any source |
| Recording before birth | no | not found |
| A method without drugs and without hypnosis, declared applicable to anyone | no | Janet says he does not have one; the army doctors use the drug |
What follows from it
The first thing is that the structure is not built on air. Trace, charge, chain, return to the incident, the need for conscious recall: these are ideas of Semon, Bleuler, Freud, Janet, Pavlov and the doctors of the American army, published in academic venues. Whoever dismisses them as a writer’s fantasy must first dismiss them.
The second is that none of them had put them together. Semon was a zoologist and treated no one. Bleuler had the trace but no procedure. Freud had the chain and worked with hypnosis and pressure on the forehead. Janet had the procedure and could not pass it on. Pavlov worked on dogs. The army doctors had the session but depended on the barbiturate. Each held one thread.
The third is the paradox of timing. Just when psychiatry abandons this line, because its method failed the assessment of 1949, someone from outside gathers the threads, removes the drug, adds a criterion of his own and declares he has made a procedure of it. The doctors’ reaction in 1950 strikes at that declaration, not at the starting ideas, which were their own.
What is demonstrated and what is not
Demonstrated from the texts: that each element existed before 1950, in the author and year given; that Hubbard knew narcosynthesis and discarded it; that three elements appear in none of the sources examined.
Not demonstrated: that Hubbard read Semon, Bleuler, Janet or Freud. The 1950 book does not cite them (Pavlov appears once). This article says that the ideas were available, not from whom he took them.
Out of scope: whether the theory is true and whether the procedure gives the results claimed. That is a matter of measured cases, not of history.
Limits of the sources: Freud is quoted from the English translation of the period, not from the German; “not found” means not found in the sources examined, which are many but not all.