L. Ron Hubbard:
Founder of Dianetics and Scientology

At war's end, Mr. Hubbard embarked upon an intensive testing program, and continually refined Dianetics techniques. In essence, those techniques addressed what he defined as the sole source of all psychosomatic ills and mental aberration, or what he termed the reactive mind. Described as “an obsessive strata” of the mind, this reactive mind had been previously unknown, unseen and even unsuspected.

The first summary of these findings was informally presented to friends and colleagues in a manuscript entitled Dianetics: The Original Thesis (later to be published as The Dynamics of Life). Response was immediate and considerable, the manuscript copied and passed from hand to hand. Two bodies, however, were utterly uninterested in the subject — the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association. Although not so precisely stated, their objections were twofold. First, L. Ron Hubbard was not a name in this field, he had not emerged from sanctioned academia, and was otherwise regarded as an unwelcome stranger. Second, and even more to the point, in addressing psychosomatic ills, Mr. Hubbard was seen to be encroaching upon medical-psychiatric ground. Neither field had ever offered a viable solution to psychosomatic ills beyond a pharmaceutical treatment of symptoms, but given that some 70 percent of what ails us is said to be psychosomatic, the threat to their assumed authority was severe.

In either case, Dianetics: The Original Thesis gained much popular support and Mr. Hubbard was persuaded to draft two more papers on the subject. The first, appearing in the Winter 1949/1950 Explorers Club Journal, was aptly entitled “Terra Incognita: The Mind.” The second, largely written as a favor for longtime friend and editor John Campbell, appeared in Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction magazine as “Evolution of a Science.” Yet, in that neither of these papers offered a definitive explanation of how Dianetics was employed, Mr. Hubbard was further persuaded to write a full-length handbook. That work was, of course, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.