William S. Burroughs, Scientologist

You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.                    —William S. Burroughs

For a flickering moment, in the 1960s, the unlikely orbits of the writer William S. Burroughs and the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, intersected. Two more incompatible points of view cannot be imagined, yet, for a short time, there was common ground. What attracted the fiercely independent writer to such an organised—some would say controlling—philosophy of self-development?

To understand what they shared in common, we have to look briefly at Burroughs’s experiments with writing, traceable back to the Dadaists and Freudian dream analysis, and Hubbard’s ideas about the unconscious mind, also with a taproot in Freud. Ironically, both creative writers (Hubbard first made his name as a science-fiction novelist) also came to view the profession of psychiatry in a very negative light.

In 1959, Burroughs wrote to the poet Allen Ginsberg:

The method of directed recall is the method of Scientology. You will recall I wrote urging you to contact a local chapter and find an auditor. They do the job without hypnosis or drugs, simply run the tape back and forth until the trauma is wiped off. It works. I have used the method—partially responsible for recent changes … I have a new method of writing and do not want to publish anything that has not been inspected and processed. I cannot explain this method to you until you have necessary training.

Although Burroughs attributed his newly-minted writing method to Scientology, he was actually more influenced by the core technique of its prototype, Dianetics.

Hubbard published Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health in 1950. Based on the theory that the human mind had three basic parts—the Analytical mind, the Reactive mind and the Somatic mind—one of the objectives of Dianetics, through intimate conversation and counselling with “auditors”, was to remove the Reactive mind: the recorder that operated when a person was unconscious; the repository of trauma, pain and harmful memories. These memories—Hubbard labelled them “engrams”—were often repressed during near-death experiences and could be triggered by stray words, moods—even fragrances—decades later, resulting in unpredictable and often destructive behaviour. Once this reactive mind was cleared, through extensive counselling or auditing, a person—called a Clear—could be free from these unconscious trauma triggers and take control of their life.

As a writer, Burroughs saw a different use for repressed memories. He wasn’t so interested in removing anything—only accessing them, in his writing, through spontaneous and accidental word associations: “Words recorded during a period of unconsciousness … store pain and … this pain store can be lugged in with key words,” he wrote.

Burroughs’s personal interpretation apparently didn’t set well with R. Sorrell, a spokesperson for the Church of Scientology, who said: “The aim of Scientology is not to discover fresh writing material but to gain spiritual awareness and freedom.”

Burroughs responded: “Here we have the official pronouncement on the arts. Fresh writing material is incompatible with spiritual awareness and freedom.”

The Burroughs scissor-fetish technique of writing is simple: jot down some text, chop it up, and jigsaw-puzzle the pieces back together to form new sentences—and new free associative meanings. (On a good day.) For instance, had Burroughs run across Banjo Paterson’s “The Man from Snowy River” while he was in paper-doll cutting mode, the famous opening lines might have ended up like this:

There was movement        at the homestead overnight, For

riders from the        stations near and far. All the tried and noted

bush horses        Had mustered        at the station

And had joined the wild        the bushmen love           hard riding

So all the cracks had        gathered to the fray.

For where the wild bush horses are, And the stockhorse snuffs

the battle with delight.        for the word had passed around

he was worth a thousand pound,        That the colt

from old Regret had got away.

Almost worthy of Ern Malley.

But this “cut-up technique” did not originate with Burroughs. It goes back to the Dada movement of the 1920s. During a gathering of Dadaists, Tristan Tzara wrote a poem by selecting words blindfolded from a hat.

There have been many variations of the hit-or-miss approach in the history of art. Surrealist Automatism, or Surautomatism, where the pen hand moves randomly on the paper, relied on accident and chance to free it from rational control. This differed from Automatic Writing, which was one of the mainstays of spiritualists, who attributed the control of the writing to ghosts or departed spirits.

Bulletism involved shooting ink at a blank page. Guillaume Apollinaire developed the Calligramme: the words or letters making a shape on the page. The Collage combined newspaper articles, photographs and words to create effect. Coulage was involuntary sculpture made by pouring molten liquid into cold water. The Romanian Surrealist Luca used Cubomania—the cutting up of photographs or pictures into squares and reassembling them. Indecipherable Writing was formed by the movement of liquids down a board. A Dream Résumé recast one’s personal CV into a dream state combining bits of the real and the make-believe. Étrécissement cut away parts of an existing image to create a new image. In Exquisite Corpse, a writer wrote something on a piece of paper, folded it and handed it to another writer who added something to it. Miro used Grattage, where paint was scraped off a canvas, revealing what was beneath. Latent News was the art of cutting up newspapers and reassembling them. Beat Poet Ted Joans invented Outagraphy, where the object of a photograph was cut out, leaving what remained as the final work.

But Salvador Dali came up with my favourite, the Paranoiac-Critical Method, where the artist entered into a self-induced paranoid state to deconstruct the concept of identity. (This is the default setting of many of my artistic friends. And, truth be told, a few family members.)

In 1952, L. Ron Hubbard changed the name of Dianetics to Church of Scientology, declaring it a religion.

William S. Burroughs took a two-month Scientology course in 1968, including extensive use of the E-meter, which he explained as a kind of primitive lie-detector device. He was even declared a Clear. But he later claimed he had trouble repressing many negative feelings towards Hubbard during his auditing sessions.

Burroughs suddenly, and loudly, parted ways with the organisation later in 1968, due to what he referred to as “the fascist policies of Hubbard” and “Orwellian security measures”. He said the methodology had indeed turned into a religion that had nothing to do with scientific research on the subjects that interested him. He wrote this disclaimer:

In view of the fact that my articles and statements on Scientology may have influenced young people to associate themselves with the so-called Church of Scientology, I feel an obligation to make my present views on the subject quite clear.

In a slightly tongue-in-cheek article for the Los Angeles Free Press, titled “I, William Burroughs, Challenge You, L. Ron Hubbard”, he wrote:

Some of the techniques [of Scientology] are highly valuable and warrant further study and experimentation. The E Meter is a useful device … On the other hand I am in flat disagreement with the organizational policy. No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy. Organizational policy can only impede the advancement of knowledge. There is a basic incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought.

After the article was published, Burroughs became person non grata with the organisation, or in what Scientologists called “the Condition of Treason”.

The idea of repressed traumatic memories, or engrams, did not originate with Dianetics. Aside from the Catholic confessional, Sigmund Freud first introduced the notion of the talking cure, although some claim William Shakespeare did Freud-before-Freud with his “aside-to-the-audience” self-talk monologues. Freud also stressed the key importance of dreams. In a work published in 1899, The Interpretation of Dreams, he stated that the motivation of all dream content was wish-fulfilment:

I shall demonstrate that there exists a psychological technique by which dreams may be interpreted and that upon the application of this method every dream will show itself to be a senseful psychological structure which may be introduced into an assignable place in the psychic activity of the waking state.

Freud called dreams the “Royal Road to the Unconscious”. Carl Jung agreed with Freud on the importance of dreams but dismissed the simplistic notion of dreams only as wish-fulfilment. Jung, in a more holistic view, shared by many artists and First Nation peoples, believed dreams reflected a much greater complexity of the entire personal and collective unconscious.

L. Ron Hubbard disagreed outright with the value Freud placed on dreams. He had no used for dream analysis in Dianetics:

Dreams are puns on words and situations in the engram bank.

Dreams are not much help, being puns.

Dreams are not much used in Dianetics.

You will hear dreams from patients. Patients are hard to shut off when they start telling dreams. If you want to waste your time, you will listen.

Both Hubbard and Burroughs were fundamentally opposed to psychiatry. Burroughs said: “Nine out of every ten psychiatrists should be broken down to veterinarians and shave off that goatee if [they] want to be popular with folks hereabouts.” Hubbard referred to psychiatrists as “psychs”. After Dianetics was published, the American Psychological Associ­ation advised members not to use Hubbard’s methods.

In a policy letter, written in 1971, Hubbard declared:

Psychiatry and psychiatrist are easily redefined to mean “an antisocial enemy of the people”. This takes the kill-crazy psychiatrist off the preferred list of professions. This is a good use of the technique [of redefining words] as for a century the psychiatrist has been setting an all-time record for inhumanity to Man.

Although against the “poisonous certainties” in the practice of psychiatry, Burroughs agreed with Freud and Jung on the value of dreams and their influence on creativity. But he also wanted to use Scientology’s techniques of triggering reactive engrams as a method of reaching the traumatic materials of his unconscious dream state when he was fully awake. He believed that there couldn’t exist a society of people who didn’t dream, as they’d be “dead in two weeks”. He also claimed that often he could direct a dream by doing certain things before he went to bed.

In a lecture on public discourse at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, in 1980, he said:

Dream logic seems to proceed on associations, that is one thing is associated with another. I made quite a collection of dream phrases—words that occur in dream or words that occur between sleeping and walking and you get a very peculiar kind of grammar …

However, Hubbard saw reactive engrams not as a creative wellspring, but as the cause of all human woes. He wrote in Dianetics: “The single source of inorganic mental illness and organic psychosomatic illness is the reactive engram bank.”

The American journalist and scholar H.L. Mencken once said, “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple—and wrong.”

I have observed the obsession to find a single source, and a single solution, for all the ills of humanity, so frequently that it makes me wobbly. I refer to it as the search for an Absolute. The trouble is, there are as many single solutions as there are hairs on a pig.

In ancient times, the Miasma Theory attributed all illness to pollution, poison gas or bad air. That was displaced in the nineteenth century by the discovery of germs. The Navajo believed in single-source mental and physical illness, with the support of family as the primary cure. Chiropractors say if your spine is in perfect alignment, you can’t get sick. Arnold Erhet, the founder of the Mucusless Diet Healing System, said that the single cause of all illness was Constipation. Acupuncturists attribute good health to the flow of Qi through “body meridians”. Many alternative health-care practitioners believe the single most significant cause of all illness to be an acidic system. “Alkalise, and be ye healed!”

And of course, there is good old demonic possession—foul spirits that attach themselves to people and can only be dislodged by Faith—the latter view eerily reflecting Scientology’s alleged goals to rid the person being audited of an array of unwanted spiritual entities, called BTs, or Body Thetans, that have attached themselves to the soul. If any one aspect could distinguish Scientology as a religion, in comparison with its forerunner, Dianetics, which might be said to be closer to a therapy, it is this idea of demonic possession.

The most definitive single-source discovery of all illness was humorously made by Harriet Hall, retired Air Force physician and flight surgeon: “I’ve discovered the One Cause of all the one-cause theories: a deficiency of critical-thinking skills combined with an overactive imagination.”

William S. Burroughs certainly had an overactive imagination, but he was attracted to the dynamics of Scientology because he was also a true literary seeker. Remember, it was the late 1950s, when no one really knew much about it. Progressive creative people always tend to give challenging new ideas the benefit of the doubt. It’s hip.

I find Burroughs’s own hindsight comments the most amusing:

In the words of Celine … “All this time I felt my self-respect slipping away from me and finally completely gone. As it were, officially removed …” Like an anthropologist who has, after unspeakable indignities, penetrated a savage tribe, I was determined to hang on and get the big medicine if I had to f*** the sacred crocodile.