Catching up with The New Yorker — Scientology, Google & Scrap

Dana Goodyear has found a novel way in to Scientology –-through architectural preservation. Her piece uses the Celebrity Center its; restoration, even its restaurant as well as their acquisition and restoration of many other Hollywood properties as a way to discuss the history of Scientology and the importance it places on their relationships with celebrities. Goodyear takes a fairly disinterested and benign view of Scientology as if she was a visitor to a cultural site of a foreign land.

People are always asking what Scientology is, and although Goodyear does not get to what the spiritual element is, or what makes it a religion, she does do a good job of giving a sense of what goes on — and what “auditing” is.

“Auditing” is, in Goodyear’s explanation, “a talking cure” in which one talks about certain traumatic or negative incidents while holding on to a device called an “E – meter” which, the claims is, measures your emotional response to this incident — repeated uses of which “cleans” one of the negative feelings and allows you to be clear, happy, etc….

Now a confession: I’ve used an e-meter.
For a while, a few years back, I was seeing someone who was a business coach but was also a therapist. It turned out that she was a former Scientolgist and had risen high enough in the ranks to be a teacher. She had her own e-meter and for a few sessions she brought it out. Did it work? I suppose the Jewish answer is: It didn’t hurt.

My personal feeling was that the e-meter itself was ridiculous. But that there was value in repeating the details of negative events until they no longer were taboo.

This seems not unlike a form of Albert Ellis‘  Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT). Ellis was the father of behavioral psychology — famous for saying that he got over his shyness with women when he forced himself to speak to 100 women at the Bronx botanical Garden — after which he was no longer so shy. Ellis was no fan of Freud — he thought the past was bunk — you just needed to reprogram yourself with new behavioral patterns.  Hmmmm…. Ellis was probably conceiving of his theories around the time L. Ron Hubbard was coming up with his. I wonder if they ever read each other’s works?