The So-called Liberation of Psychoanalytic and Dianetic Therapy
The Infinite is a wonderful machine which remembers, compares, and recalls experience. It does this in words or pictures.
But it holds so many recordings of the past that matter of its present living is unconsciously a response of memory stirring up the past.
Psychoanalytic and dianetic therapies try to eradicate these past patterns by using the reaction to impulse or the recall of the subconscious with particular reference to childhood. But to say, as psychoanalysis says, that the mind which is successful in retreat is free, or, as dianetics says, clear, is to make an unwarrantable claim and to overlook the tremendous size of its task. For all that such therapy has really done is to liberate the patient from a few of his known compulsions. But what about the enormous number of the unknown ones? What about the most terrifying compulsion of all--the ego itself? How can an analyst who is still governed by so many complexes himself, of which he is not even aware, completely liberate other persons? He himself is the victim of an illusion-making mechanism that is incredibly ingenious.
In every mind there is an unconscious conflict which he is ordinarily powerless to deal with--the conflict between the line of evolution which the Overself has marked out for the person, and the line of blind desire which the ego is trying to pursue.
Again, what is the use of taking a few small sections of the past, such as childhood or adolescence, and attempting to deal with them only, when the true past of the ego contains innumerable subconscious memories of former lives on earth and numerous tendencies which arise from episodes belonging to that vanished history? The only thorough and complete way to deal with the ego is not only to deal with its surface manifestation, but to get at its own hidden existence on the one hand, and to work by aspiration, meditation, and reflection upon the Overself on the other hand.
-- Notebooks Category 8: The Ego > Chapter 3 : Psyche > # 34
