I made this post on Tony O today, if anybody hasn't read HAyakawa review, it's worth reading.
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Gib chuckbeattyx75to03 • 4 minutes ago
yep, SI Hayakawa reviewed Dianetics back in 1951. FYI, in the Campbell/Heinlein letters, Campbell mentions to Heinlein that Hayakawa went to a Dianetics center and met Hubbard.
Hayakawa nails it:
"I have long felt that there are dangers to the writer as well as to the reader in pulp fiction. It did not occur to me until I read Dianetics to try to analyze the special dangers entailed in the profession of science-fiction writing. The art consists in concealing from the reader, for novelistic purposes, the distinctions between established scientific facts, almost-established scientific hypotheses, scientific conjectures, and imaginative extrapolations far beyond what has even been conjectured. The danger of this technique lies in the fact that, if the writer of science-fiction writes too much of it too fast and too glibly and is not endowed from the beginning with a high degree of semantic self-insight (consciousness of abstracting), he may eventually succeed in concealing the distinction between his facts and his imaginings from himself. In other words, the space-ships and the men of Mars and the atomic disintegrator pistols acquire so vivid a verbal existence that they may begin to have, in the writer's evaluations, 'actual' existence. Like Willy Loman in The Death of a Salesman, he may eventually fall for his own, pitch."
Note he says the writer and the reader. Bingo
http://www.lisamcpherson.or...
https://www.jstor.org/stabl...
The rest of the review is quite a great read, some excerpts:
"BUT in the book Dianetics, Hubbard does not write as a novelist. He is, he says, a scientist. He has discovered - nay, created - a new science of the human mind which, in one swell foop, renders obsolete the psychological gropings of Wundt, James, Pavlov, Kraepelin, Charcot, Janet, Freud, Jung," ------------LOL
"The expository technique of Dianetics is straight out of science-fiction. First, there is the elementary device of taking for granted the existence of things which do not exist, and then making assertions about them ('As we approached the planet Venus, Captain Wolf throttled down his space-ship to a leisurely 8,000 m.p.h.'): 'The reactive mind is the entire source of aberration. It can be proved and has been repeatedly proven that there is no other, for when that engram bank is discharged, all undesirable symptoms vanish and a man begins to operate on his optimum pattern' (p. 52). There are innumerable references to 'research' and 'tests' which 'have been' performed: 'A series of severely controlled dianetic experiments over a much longer period demonstrated that the law of affinity, as applicable to psychosomatic illness, was more powerful than fear and antagonism by a very wide margin. So great is this margin that it could be compared as the strength of a steel girder to a straw' (p. 106). There are, of course, the vivid narratives (i.e., the 'case-histories') by means of which that which is assumed to be so is transmuted - and that is the function of the art of fiction - into that which is felt to be so. (Of these 'case-histories,' more later.) In addition, Hubbard has practically all the other science-fiction devices- references to unspecified 'laboratories' and 'clinics,' where zealous (and unnamed) teams of 'dianeticists' are busy refining the 'techniques' and the 'basic postulates.' Occasionally, he goes through the motions of distinguishing between 'fact' and 'theory' and abstemiously denying himself, as a scientist, the self-indulgence of proceeding on mere theories: 'It may well have been - and elsewhere some dianetic computations have been made about this - that the brain is the absorber for overcharges of power resulting from injury, the power itself being generated by the injured cells in the area of injury. "
" But all this computing-machine mumbo-jumbo is only a small part of the incredible nonsense to be found in dianetics" -----------------LOL
"HUBBARD'S Book, especially his 'case-histories,' is so rich in absurdity, so preposterously and awkwardly obscene (especially in the accounts of engrams acquired during parental coition), that one is tempted to quote on and on"
"The fact that language can be used to adumbrate two (or more) areas of meaning at once is not in itself dangerous; indeed, it is this fact which gives language its richness and its power of creative suggestion. In Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics, the simultaneously electrical and psychological connotations of terms is peculiarly stimulating to the imagination. (It will be remembered that this book, too, enjoyed sales far beyond initial expectations.) But in Cybernetics the double-edged vocabulary is used with full consciousness of abstracting; in other words, Wiener never forgets - nor lets the reader forget - that the analogy is an analogy and that the genera to which mark III and Mark Antony belong are distinct and separate."
"BUT EVEN the limited good that dianetics may do by introducing a single, narrowly-defined role-playing technique into interpersonal relations is probably more than offset by the damage it can do with its accompanying pretentious and nonsensical doctrines. I am not thinking here of the standard medical argument, that it may keep people away from better and more legitimate therapies, although this is no doubt true. (So many things keep people away from legitimate therapies anyway that I am not sure that one more patent medicine can matter much.) I am thinking rather of the fact that those who are helped by dianetics will necessarily be kept at a low level of intellectual and emotional maturity by the nonsense they have absorbed in order to be helped. The lure of the pseudoscientific vocabulary and promises of dianetics cannot but condemn thousands who are beginning to emerge from scientific illiteracy to a continuation of their susceptibility to word-magic and semantic hash."
I wish I would have read Hayakawa review after I first read Dianetics, it may have put me straight.