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Yeah this is Dianetics i.e. Scientology! I'm not supporting them at all, they are a cult, but the the original basis for Scientology was Dianetics and it's related to this.


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I think it's more that Dianetics and this class of methods both derive from classical psychoanalysis. The broad concepts are similar, but the specific methods seem to be very different.

That's a good point.

But not only is the rough observation of 'previous episodes of trauma causing seemingly irrelevant malaise and illness' interesting ... the methods is similar in some case as well.

For example, for soldiers with PTSD, one of the more beneficial therapies seems to be having a health professional help the soldier 'revisit' the experience. They do this over and over until there's less PTSD associated with the event.

This is remarkably similar to the process of 'auditing' in Scientology - at least in terms of discovering and revisiting points of trauma. They call it 'processing'.

As far as I am concerned they are the same thing, point blank.

But I also agree that Dianetics probably did not entirely originate this, rather making the point that this has been popularized already for some time.


I also was reminded of Scientology and what they call "Engrams". It's popular to criticize Scientology and thus its ideas are often dismissed without evaluation. Perhaps Scientology and other controversial ideologies contain valuable elements or methods which are absent from more reputable institutions. They would not gain such a devoted following if they offered 0 value.

And the website.. global and mail... seriously, this is not HN worthy.

It's the biggest newspaper in Canada. What is the problem?

I got it confused with Daily Mail. Downvotes warranted.

"it's related to this". It sounds similar, maybe, but that doesn't mean that it's the same thing. To glibly conflate this with Scientology is very sloppy thinking.

Scientific progress calls for ideas and evidence to be evaluated on their merits. Accusations of "guilt by association" when a particular idea happens to vaguely resemble something else that has been debunked aren't part of that.


Except there was no accusation of guilt by association. An association was made, yes. What is the accusation?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy#Guilt_by_a...

The comment effectively accused the doctors of charlatanism.


Read it again. You are equating scientology and dianetics to charlatanism, not the author of the inital reply. He/She simply stated "x is like y". Why did you flag my other responses, which correctly pointed out that you are the one making the fallacy of guilt by association, not the author?

No, I did not accuse the doctors of charlatanism.

I said there was an obvious relationship between some of the underpinnings of Dianetics and what is described in this article.

This is patently obvious to anyone who's read Dianetics, and the article.

I don't support Dianetics overall as anything reasonable because it's mostly rubbish, but again, some of the ideas expressed in there are nary identical to what is described in the article, which is just a fact.

Not everything is black and white: a lot of current psychology is scientifically rubbish, and a lot of ideas postulated in the past by not-so-straight people are at least interesting, and may have shades of validity.


Unless looked at Dianetics at all, and it's historical weirdness, I'm going to refer to your response as 'glib' if anything.

If you did, you'd see there are glaringly obvious relationship between what is discussed in the article, and the basis of Dianetics; not just 'similar' they are effectively describing the same thing.

" resemble something else that has been debunked aren't part of that."

'Dianetics' has not been debunked so much as it hasn't been studied because it's full of all sorts of things that don't make sense (it would be pointless). But - there are some interesting and possibly valid points in there, for example - the idea described in this article. And consider that everything in psychology seems to be 'debunked' as we still don't have a good framework for understanding the human mind. To boot - most psychological 'science' can't even be reproduced in 2018. And I literally mean most [1].

Dianetics is mostly nutbars, but the similarity between what is described in the article, and what was popularized by Dianetics long ago is not superficial, it's quite strong. It doesn't matter that L Ron Hubbard was a hustler.

[1] https://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-...


So you've done research into this form of psychotherapy to confirm if it is the same as Dianetics? Or is this article the extent of your research?

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