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Offices of the American Psychiatric Association are located in the seventeen hundred block of Eighteenth Street Northwest, Washington, D.C. The Founding Church of Scientology is at 1812 Nineteenth Street, one block farther out. Figuratively speaking, the world's largest mental-health organization is considerably farther out than that.Even its members will concede that it is far out. After a hurried interview with Miss Anne Ursprung, top executive of the Founding Church, I managed an extension of time by driving her and fellow staff member Esther Mangold to the airport to pick up a couple of Scientologists, Leon and Mitch, who were arriving from New York. As we returned to the city, I asked if it were true that many hippies are interested in Scientology. Leon explained that hippies, having been turned off by the churches, are drawn to Scientology because it represents a radical departure from tradition. Magazine articles denouncing Scientology have elicited an enthusiastic reaction from the hippie community. "If the establishment is against it, it must be good," they reason."Do hippies forsake drugs when they embrace Scientology?" I asked. "Yes, they do," replied Anne. "When Scientology turns them on, they no longer need drugs. In fact, you might call Scientology the 'turned-on religion.'"But the Scientology bandwagon had started to roll long before the press denunciations began. A year ago Life estimated world membership at between two and three million, several hundred thousand of them in the United States. Not bad for an infant organization less than two decades old! There are twenty-five Scientology centers throughout the world: one in England, one in Scotland, one in Denmark, one in Rhodesia, four in South Africa, three in Australia, one in New Zealand, one in Canada, and eleven in the United States (Washington, New York, Miami, Detroit, Minneapolis, Austin, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Honolulu).The charismatic figure who began this mushrooming cult is Lafayette Ronald (L. Ron) Hubbard, millionaire science-fiction writer, explorer, and retired naval officer who claims to be the real life "Mr. Roberts" from the movie of that name. Hubbard was born in Nebraska in 1911, the son of a career officer in the U. S. Navy and the grandson of a wealthy Montana cattle-rancher. While the family lived in Washington, "Elron" became "the youngest Eagle Scout in America" and a fast friend of then-President Coolidge's son Calvin, Jr. It is thought that Calvin's premature death may have sparked Hubbard's quest for the secrets of mental and physical health.During the late twenties Navy duty took the Hubbard family to the Far East, where L. Ron traveled widely and was exposed to a number of the influences that helped to shape his emerging philosophy. He returned to the States in 1930 to enter college. Until a few years ago, when the facts were openly challenged, Scientology literature listed Hubbard as a 1934 graduate of George Washington University with a B.S. in civil engineering, and the recipient of a Ph.D. degree from Sequoia University in 1950. However, George Washington denies ever having granted Hubbard a degree, affirming only that he matriculated as a freshman in 1930, flunked physics, was placed on probation, and dropped out at the end of his second year. As for the alleged Ph.D. degree, if an institution bearing the name of Sequoia University even exists, the burden of proof rests upon Hubbard and the Scientologists.After college, Hubbard led several scientific expeditions into the primitive jungles of Central America, and in 1936, at the age of twenty-five, he joined the exclusive Explorer's Club in New York City. During this period he flowered as a prolific writer of both fact and fiction, and was called to Hollywood to write the first of several scenarios.After five years of naval service during World War II, Hubbard became critically ill. Crippled, blind, and twice declared dead by doctors, he rebounded to perfect health, he says, by applying the principles later described in his book Dianetics: The Modern Science Of Mental Health. This 435-page volume, the culmination of years of research, was written in the space of sixty days and sold 100,000 copies within three months of its publication in 1950. Its eclectic sources include, says Hubbard in the book, "the medicine man of the Goldi people of Manchuria, the shamans of North Borneo, Sioux medicine men, the cults of Los Angeles … modern psychology (Jung, Adler, Freud, Pavlov), a magician whose ancestors served in the court of Kublai Khan and a Hindu who could hypnotize cats" (p. 128). Buddhism seems to have played a prominent role; Hubbard describes it as "the only organization which has had the goal of Total Freedom." Dianetics, he says, revived that search after a silence of nearly 2,500 years. Nuclear philosophy also was tapped. As Time describes it (August 23, 1968), the philosophy of Scientology "is billed as a sort of religion of religions, combining parts of Hindu Veda and Dharma, Taoism, Old Testament wisdom, Buddhist principles of brotherly love and compassion, the early Greeks, Lucretius, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Spencer, and Freud."But the end is not yet. Hubbard's pursuit of a therapy capable of curing all human ills led him along the route of hypnotism, narco-synthesis ("the practice of inducing sleep with drugs and then talking to the patient to draw out buried thoughts"), amnesia sleep, automatic writing, clairvoyance, and exorcism. All were rejected. Then at last came the great enlightenment. The brain is the "electronic calculator"--a flawless computer that functions perfectly except when fouled up by "engross" (traumatic memories that trigger pain). Get rid of these survival-threatening engrams and you have an optimum brain." Anxieties and illnesses promptly disappear.The splash created by this do-it-yourself method of psychotherapy was enormous (approximately 500,000 followers) but short-lived. Overhead organization and professionally administered techniques were lacking. A new strategy was called for. Thus Scientology arose from the ashes of Dianetics in the Year of Our Lord 1952.To replace the self-therapy of Dianetics, Hubbard devised the E-meter (Hubbard Electrometer) or "truth detectors battery-operated device consisting of two tin cans hooked up to a dial. The Scientology counterpart of Mark Hopkins and a student at opposite ends of a log is an "auditor" (Scientology expert) and a " preclear" (novice, seeker) on opposite sides of an E-meter. The auditor watches the dial as the preclear, holding the cans, replies to questions designed to bring to the surface hidden engrams. When the subject is able to identify and confront without fear all these malevolent gremlins (that is, when the E-meter needle ceases to fluctuate reflexively as the engrams are trotted out one by one), he is said to be a "clear."Some engrams, according to Scientologists, are prenatal, even harking back to previous existences. Hubbard goes so far as to insist "that individuals cannot be rehabilitated unless the prenatal engrams are accepted" (Dianetics, p. 102). In an article entitled "Scientology: Menace to Mental Health," Ralph Lee Smith cites a preclear who, upon ransacking his subconscious, allegedly discovered that:

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September (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44