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fromSeattle through the Panama Canal to Washington, DC, where his father was being posted. One of his fellow passengers was CommanderJoseph C. “Snake” Thompsonof the US Navy Medical Corps. A neurosurgeon, a naturalist, and a former spy, Thompson made a vivid impression on the boy. “He was a very careless man,” Hubbard later recalled. “He used to go to sleep reading a book and when he woke up, why, he got up and never bothered to pressand change his uniform, you know. And he was usually in very bad odor with the Navy Department.… But he was a personal friend of Sigmund Freud’s.… When he saw me—a defenseless character—and there was nothing to do on a big transport on a very long cruise, he started to work me over.”
    No doubt Thompson entertained the young Hubbard with tales of his adventures as a spy in the Far East. Raised in Japan by his father, a missionary, Thompson spoke fluent Japanese. He had spent much of his early military career roaming through Asia posing as a herpetologist looking for rare snakes while covertly gathering intelligence and charting possible routes of invasion.
    “What impressed me,” Hubbard later remarked, “he had a cat by the name of Psycho. This cat had a crooked tail, which is enough to impress any young man. And the cat would do tricks. And the first thing he did was teach me how to train cats. But it takes so long, and it requires such tremendous patience, that to this day I have never trained a cat. You have to wait, evidently, for the cat to do something, then you applaud it. But waiting for a cat to do something whose name is Psycho …”
    One of Thompson’s maxims was “If it’s not true for you, it’s not true.” He told young Hubbard that the statement had come from Gautama Siddhartha, the Buddha. It made an impression on Hubbard. “If there’s anybody in the world that’s calculated to believe what he wants to believe and to reject what he doesn’t want to believe, it is I.”
    Thompson had just returned from Vienna, where he had been sent by the Navy to study under Freud. “I was just a kidand Commander Thompson didn’t have any boy of his own and he and I just got along fine,” Hubbard recalls in one of his lectures. “Why he took it into his head to start beating Freud into my head, I don’t know, but he did. And I wanted very much to follow out this work—wanted very much to. I didn’t get a chance. My father … said, ‘Son, you’re going to be an engineer.’ ”
    THOMPSON WAS ABOUT to publish a review of psychoanalytic literature in the
United States Naval Medical Bulletin
; indeed, he may have been working on it as he traveled to Washington, and no doubt he drew upon the thinking reflected in his article when he tutoredHubbard in the basics of Freudian theory. “Man has two fundamentalinstincts—one for self-preservation and the other for race propagation,” Thompson writes in his review. “The most important emotion of the self-preservation urge is hunger. The sole emotion of the race-propagation urge is libido.”Psychoanalysis, Thompson explains, is the “technic” of discovering unconscious motivations that harm the health or happiness of the individual. Once the patient understands the motives behind his neurotic behavior, his symptoms automatically disappear. “This uncovering of the hidden motive does not consist in the mere explaining to the patient the mechanism of his plight. The understanding alone comes from the analytic technic of free association and subsequent rational synthesis.” Many of these thoughts are deeply embedded in the principles ofDianetics, the foundation of Hubbard’sphilosophy of human nature, which predated the establishment of Scientology.
    In 1927, Hubbard’s father was posted toGuam, andLedora went along, abandoning Ron to the care of her parents. For a man as garrulous as L. Ron Hubbard turned out to be, reflections on his parents are rare, almost to the point of writing them out of his