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A couple in their 30s, Arthur and Elena Tracy, were auditing each other. Says Elena: "I'd had a great deal of illness all my life—every psychosomatic illness you can think of. I was in bed all through my last pregnancy and for three months after it. Now I believe I'll have no more trouble. I believe it with all my heart. My husband took me back to what I believe was the prenatal period of my life. I began to feel as if I were drowning. I brought up phlegm . . . and my eyes were running. I almost choked and began gasping for breath. Apparently my head was twisted to one side in my mother's womb. The pain was intense."
Some professional psychologists have taken up dianetics. Says Dr. Jean Bordeaux, psychotherapist (Ph.D., no M.D.): "I'm using dianetics every day and using it on dozens of patients. If works. Hubbard made a contribution—make no mistake about that."* However, Hubbard insists that the treatment, even at the hands of an untrained layman, can do no harm. "On this," says Dr. Bordeaux, "we part company."
More specific is the concern of Dr. Pauline K. Pumphrey (an osteopath with an M.D.), in whose ultramodern Santa Monica home twoscore dianetics fans met last week to pool their resources (some hoped to audit each other—somewhat in the fashion of a Buchmanite meeting). There is danger, Dr. Pumphrey holds, if Hubbard's cellular theory is right, that an inept auditor "contacting" the engram recorded at the time of a severe hemorrhage, for example, might cause the hemorrhage to be repeated.
But most dianetics fans are laymen, and some accept every Hubbard word as revealed truth. Said one: "I have trouble only when I have any doubts. The main thing is for the auditor to subject himself to a thorough indoctrination which amounts to a sublime faith."
* Hubbard's own opinion of his contribution: "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."