The subject of valence is a very interesting subject. An understanding of valence solves a number of problems. Valence all by itself can be interesting in such illnesses as arthritis and cancer. It is fascinating that this one mechanism can account for so many upsets of the human mind. In Dianetics we get people out of other people’s valences when they are stuck in them and get them back into being themselves.

A valence is a mechanism which can at once make the person very able or very sick. Perhaps one of the things that has been the ambition of man is to be himself. Shakespeare wrote about being oneself. Certainly one in the past could not cease being somebody else sometimes. The problem of how one gets to be himself is also the problem of one’s being someone else.

One learns by being in other people’s valences. There is, automatically, a mechanism in his mind which permits him to pretend he is someone else and learn tasks. This is a learning mechanism.

In the final analysis, though, any mechanism of the mind is susceptible of aberration. Aberration is a simple thing basically. It is the inability to do something one should do or to not do something one should not do. For instance, sometimes a person who wants to own cats will be suffering from an aberration that says he has to have cats around, or somebody who thinks someone is mad at him would be suffering from an aberration or be in somebody else’s valence.

We have a technique in Dianetics known as straight memory. It is a very easy technique. You can use straight memory to start a case. The rest is done in reverie and sends people down the time track. Just as people did not know too much about how someone can return to his past, they didn’t know about valence.

Let’s take up one case of someone stuck in a valence. This person was stuck in somebody’s valence for a great many years. He had a bad case of dermatitis which nobody could do anything for. They had given him allergy medicines, tried to burn off this area, and so on, but he still had a bad hand condition. He was given straight memory and this hand condition then improved. This person had had an accident with his hands, but he was also in someone else’s valence. By straight memory we asked him if people used to tell him he was like someone in his family. Yes, his father.

“Did your father have anything wrong? Sickness?” “No, he was the healthiest man I know.”

“What did he die of?” “Still living.”

It must have been someone else. We asked him about various other family members, and way down the list we discovered that his grandmother had died of a malignant cancer of the arms and hands. We were just trying to make him remember what was in his mind. He remembered this. It was then a possibility that he was in his grandmother’s valence. So he was asked, “Who used to tell you you were like your grandmother?”

It was his grandmother. She had said, “You are just like me; you are my own boy.” She hadtold him this when he fell down, when he was sick with scarlet fever and when he had broken his arm. He had gotten just like his grandmother: he had a querulous voice, he was very pettish with children (but very sweet), he did not do well at men’s games, but he was fond of cooking and would bake cookies. At his grandmother’s death he had shifted permanently into her valence.

When he remembered this his dermatitis was decreased by half. Then the engrams were erased by Dianetics. He then lost all his grandmother’s characteristics. He became himself.

Becoming oneself is very necessary in the business of survival. When aberration turns a person into being someone else his survival is not nearly as good.

There is nothing tricky about the mechanism of being able to see or hear what has happened in the past, of being able to appreciate all one has felt or heard at that time. If a person is in somebody else’s valence he is not able to return to his past. He is sort of looking at the world through eyes that are not his. He is badly occluded.

We have looked at people in an insane asylum. We find they are uniformly in somebody else’s valence. I was in a sanitarium one day and there was a girl running around on all fours, barking. There was a young boy hobbling around like a very old man; he had a cane, and nobody could convince him that he was a young man. He could not return to his own valence for one moment. That would be the ultimate of being in someone else’s valence. He would not remember, feel or think as himself. This is the most serious part of valences.