Here's a fun one I discovered recently. Fun might be an overstatement, it is wildly badly written but this did get me through my class about Freud and was kinda an early application of trying to learn more about a belief system that is, frankly, baffling, but trying to find some sense there (And I do intend to reuse the title, as bloated as it is and as much as I'm lukewarm on Kipling).
There is a Scientology Center not too far from me (I've walked my dogs past it a time or two): I really don't want to be on any of your guys' lists, whether it's mailing or being an SP: let's keep our peace.) The entire, ah, "religion" is described very thoroughly in Wright's Going Clear. David Miscavige's (suspiciously missing) wife is another lingering curiosity, but I digress...
Anyway, the citations are tied to one of the earliest, cheapest editions of Freud's collected writings with Peter Gay's commentary, I believe. And don't give any credit to LRH: he's just a rather talented conman who decided to take the valuable idea of talk therapy, then abuse it by recording the people for blackmail. Not that tough to do.
The Man Who Would Be God
Without a doubt, Scientology is one of the most enigmatic and controversial organizations of the twenty-first century, given special attention by significant celebrities, who are forced to identify themselves as Scientologists to the public in hopes of attracting new recruits—Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and Hyde from That ’70’s Show are just a few examples. Scientology is especially interesting from a Freudian perspective because one of its central tenants is the rejection of psychology as a quack profession in spite of the fact that founder L. Ron Hubbard allegedly was a voracious reader of Freud from a young age. It’s no surprise that Scientology, and many of its quirks, can be seen as derived from the convoluted life of its founder, L. (Lafayette) Ron Hubbard, especially understood through the framework of a creative writer put forward in Freud’s Creative Writers and Day Dreaming. While Hubbard displays almost all of the characteristics Freud describes in a creative writer, there is a distinct difference: unlike the daydreamer who creates a fantasy that is separated “distinctly from reality,” Hubbard began to buy into the fantasy world he created and, in doing so, began to bridge the gap and change from the science fiction writer with delusions of grandeur who wrote Dianetics to a madman who would be God (Freud, 437).
In Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming, Freud likens the play of children to the work of creative writers. Children treat their play very seriously, as do creative writers; “the opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real” (Freud, 437). Like many creative writers, the child also tries to “link his imagined objects and situations to the tangible and visible things of the real world” (Freud, 437). For children, this is simple: when little girls have tea parties, when boys pretend sticks are swords, or when children play with toys and create a fictive world, they are linking the objects of reality to their fantasies. Freud proposes that creative writers do the same in creating a world “which he invests with large amounts of emotion—while separating it sharply from reality” (Freud, 437). Lawrence Wright voices a similar sentiment about Hubbard in Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief: it is one thing to craft a believable universe, but another to believe it, which “is the difference between art and religion” (Wright, 32).
When Freud discusses the idea of the creative writer as an adult, he more or less takes it for granted that while the fantasy world might intersect with that of reality, but the two are nevertheless sharply distinguished. This is the reason that “things which, if they were real, could give no enjoyment, can do so,” and also why “many excitements which, in themselves, are actually distressing, can become a source of pleasure” (437). The HBO series Game of Thrones is an excellent example of this: many of the incidents portrayed would be horrifying if real; put on television, acted out, however, it can develop a rabid fan base. At no point does Freud mention the possibility of a creative writer who fully subscribes to his fantasies, but then, such an individual would likely be beyond Freud’s, or anyone’s, capability to help. Subscribing to these fantasies changes a person from a neurotic into a psychotic. But how does someone reach this point?
L. Ron Hubbard was born in 1911 and spent a considerable portion of his childhood in Helena, Montana, the capital of the state. It “was famous all over the West for its millionaires and its prostitutes” and Hubbard grew up around this, as well as being an avid consumer of vaudeville acts (Wright, 23). His formative years were spent here, before moving at the age of six due to his father enlisting in the military for the First World War; it is not difficult to see how a child such as Hubbard would grow up and find it easy to separate himself from reality. Vaudeville acts are a carnival of everything from magicians to freak shows, and surely Hubbard saw plenty of both and others besides. Moving around throughout the rest of his adolescence—from state to state, city to city—would have fostered a sense of unreality and a lack of consequences. This no doubt fostered and nurtured sociopathic traits that society naturally removes in others; there was no one around to discourage him from telling the tall tales he would concoct and which became characteristic of him in later life.
His father’s decision to enlist in the military meant that Hubbard also spent most of his childhood with an absentee father who he saw little of. In Totem and Taboo, Freud discusses the idea of God as an extension of the patriarchal figure in the child’s archetypical home. Hubbard’s father, being absent, would have left him with a vague emptiness and longing for a father figure, but frequent moves prevented him from ever bonding with an older male figure, worsened by his being an only child: he did not have an older sibling to look to or a younger one to commiserate with. Though his early childhood fantasies were indistinguishable from those of any other children, at about age six, they took a distinct change. As observed later, “[e]ach detail Hubbard offers…testifies to his need for grandeur and heroism” (Lawrence, 37).
This thirst for grandeur is not all that much different from regular fantasies boys go through as a child of acting the role of the hero, but Hubbard had several factors working for him other children didn’t: an overactive imagination, a stockpile of well-read books to further sow the seeds of fantasy, and an absent father who might otherwise have instilled some sense of reality and reeled him in. Indeed, Scientology’s founding myth, when read from a Freudian perspective, transforms itself from a mad amalgamation of plot elements into a much more cohesive glimpse of a young man desperate for some attention from an absent father.
As recounted on pages 104-105 of Wright’s book, Scientology’s equivalent of a ‘creation story’ is not as easy to access as Christianity’s Garden of Eden in Genesis. Disciples must have already paid at least, in 2006 numbers, over $30,000 before being allowed access to this information, not to account for the time invested into the church (Wright, 113). Members of the church are not exposed to this story at an early stage for fear they will leave; at least one convert, upon reading he material quit the church because “This is madness” (Wright, 21).
Scientologists believe that 75,000,000 years ago, an alien named Xenu led something called the “Galactic Federation” that suffered from massive overpopulation (Wright, 104). Ever the crafty thinker, Xenu decided the brightest idea would be to kill massive amounts of his citizens, freeze their souls, “thetans” in Scientology terms, and then dump these souls around volcanoes on earth, which were destroyed by nuclear explosions (Wright, 104-105). It’s easy to understand why converts would be scared off by such a daunting story; at least Star Wars offered something a little easier to digest, a recognizable hero, and a neatly tied-up ending. Dissected, however, “Xenu” can immediately be seen as a metaphorical father figure, and a militaristic, despotic one at that.
The idea of the “Galactic Federation” is also far-fetched, but Hubbard grew up in the golden age of science fiction writers and became a science fiction writer himself; in a metaphorical sense, what is it but a stand-in for the United States, the country his father served as a naval officer? He would go on to serve as an officer himself but found himself frequently embroiled in conflict with superiors and unfit for the job, certainly leaving him with a negative impression of a dispassionate government that could very well transform itself, in his mind, into a “Galactic Federation” (Wright, 47, 105). It likely served as an unfortunate reminder of what Hubbard had come to expect from his father as a young child: a dispassionate, distant figure. He came to resent the United States because he has merely sublimated it into the idea of the “Galactic Federation.” This is what would lead to his running Operation Snow White, the largest domestic espionage ring in United States history, as well as fleeing to sea rather than facing the prison sentence resulting from this (Wright, 81).
His grapping with authority in the military can be seen even today in the fact that the Church of Scientology has doctored discharge documents on file that present Hubbard as the dashing, heroic figure he always strove to presented himself; actual government documents provide a sub-par officer who frequently, as a lower-ranked officer, found himself embroiled in battles with superiors (Wright, 281). The fact that his father had been a successful military officer before him likely only furthered the perceived rift between them when L. Ron found himself unsuited for the same line of work and deepened his dislike of, and view of the United States as, a despotic government system, which is why it was so easy for him to adopt the paranoid idea later in life that he was being intentionally singled-out and persecuted, leading to Operation Snow White.
So we are left with a story about a despotic father figure who rules with iron-fist from a distance. Stories of the son frequently attest to his penchant for telling a good, but false, story (Wright, 73). In 1938, while receiving gas at the dentist, he went under and became convinced that “the secrets of existence were accidentally revealed to him” (29). Likely, he just had a very peculiar dream not unlike a hallucinogenic experience at the most extreme. While in the military, he claimed to another officer that he had to wear sunglasses due to being blinded by standing close to large-caliber gunfire; in reality, it had likely been for conjunctivitis (35). In another incident, he claimed to have gotten into a twelve-hour battle with a submarine around Cape Lookout, Oregon during World War II; while he ordered an attack on something for twelve hours, postwar records confirm there was never an enemy submarine in this area (Wright, 37-38).
Each one of these stories again revealed Hubbard’s need for “grandeur and heroism” (Wright, 39). In light of them, it isn’t hard to imagine that his story of the dentist and his experience there was overblown as well; something that would have registered to most people as a peculiar, unpleasant experience became an avenue to boast of secret, forbidden knowledge, fuelling Hubbard’s need for attention and, in doing so, also aiding the image he had built up of himself as an important person. Freud dealt with plenty of early cases that left him with confused origins for neuroses, which ultimately was what led him away from the seduction theory, which subscribed to the belief of a child having experienced literal, objective abuse. Instead, he came to develop the Oedipal idea of growth, which allowed for a more metaphorical, mythological interpretation of childhood experiences and fit them into the framework of a young boy that grows up wishing to replace his father and sleep with his mother subconsciously. Due to the fear of castration, the boy internalizes and, ideally, learns to ultimately accept his father’s ideals as a key component of his superego in order to continue developing.
Like all children, Freud would likely propose that Hubbard had to develop through the Oedipal phase of development, where he would learn to repress his love for his mother for fear of castration by the father. Absent as his father was, it isn’t unlikely to imagine his mother saying something as simple as, “If your father finds out,” as a threat. His impressions of his father were likely of a severe military man. Compounded with no positive impressions of his father, Hubbard likely grew up with a father figure who he had to fear in spite of his absence; in the Scientology myth, this is seen by how distant and ambiguous Xenu is: alive, but imprisoned on an unknown planet, somewhere, waiting to return. It is only natural that, in order to combat such a despotic overlord, Hubbard should begin to cultivate a self-image that would reflect him as a heroic figure, one capable of handling the seemingly omnipotent threat of Xenu. And that was just what he tried to do: one of his sons said of him, “It was his goal to be the most powerful being in the universe” (Wright, 45).
As Freud states, “we can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another” (438). Hubbard certainly plays into this: the United States turned into the Galactic Federation, his father turned into Xenu, and the role of the hero is left to him. Even the act of acquiring the information he had was arduous; he claimed to be confident he was “the first person to survive” learning of it and members of Scientology who do not have access to it are told this is because it could cause irreparable harm to them if not prepared (Wright, 37). (My apologies for the summary if I caused you irreparable harm.) All of this resulted in Hubbard attempting to create a world of fantasy that might have had anchors in the real world, but which rapidly spun out of control once he began to subscribe and ceased to separate it from reality.
Hubbard’s relationships with women later in life also make one wonder what connection there might have been with his mother. There is no mention of a prominent female figure mentioned in Scientology doctrine anywhere. Hubbard was married three times, abusive toward his first wife, Polly, and polyamorous regardless of spouse; at one point, his indiscretions even resulted in him contracting gonorrhea (36). Hubbard, born in 1911, would have grown up in a climate where warmth or affection from the mother toward the child was considered detrimental and so children were left to cry themselves to comfort (O’Brien, 34). Promiscuity would have further been accepted by a young Hubbard, likely, as he grew up in a town known for its prostitutes (Wright, 23).
Likely, Hubbard grew up in this same coldness, leading to a deep-seated, unconscious desire for warmth from women that could not be satisfied with a single partner. This is likely why his infidelity is reported to have increased when he was away from his wife and children: the lack of female companionship was too much a reminder of the coldness of his mother in childhood. The interesting counterpart to this is that in his secret memoir, Hubbard admitted to “bouts of impotence” as well as to taking testosterone supplements and fearing his masturbation habits (Wright, 36, 51). The entirety of his secret memoirs alludes to a mysterious, unseen force that one can see as the primitive idea of the father, lurking through everything Hubbard does; undoubtedly, Freud would see in Hubbard’s inability to perform and other sexual difficulties a fear of castration by an absent father that never went away and who he spent his life seeing himself as being in constant conflict with.
“The wish makes use of an occasion in the present to construct, on the pattern of the past, a picture of the future,” Freud says in Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming (440). As a writer and a storyteller, L. Ron Hubbard learned how to pull people into the spider web of his stories; his ultimate success was in creating the “intricately detailed epistemology” of Scientology from his diffuse experiences (Wright, 23). It was a fantasy grand enough to delude the man who spent his lifetime learning how to conjure up illusions in the minds of his readers. It is also a startling demonstration of what can happen to an unchecked writer who never fully learns to distinguish reality from fantasy: delusions of apotheosis.
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