If you actually compare Dianetics with midcentury Freudianism, its original rival, as a theory and praxis of mind, they’re not that far different. Dianetics is a little better, or at least more modern really. It dropped the genital fixation in favor of a foundation in metaprogramming and modular self stuff that rings of the early psychedelic revolution (remember the intellectual 1950s-early 60s part, where it was especially big among the Los Angeles literati?). And its practice isn’t that far off from the modern CBT stuff I’ve heard has largely displaced Freudian approaches.

Yeah, the form their institutions and legacies took is a bit different, but that’s just path-bound rubbage. (Both of them got both the prophet and institutionalizer role in the same person, which is interesting.) Is it any surprise that the WWII-era Navy officer turned SF author built a church on mythological world-building, naval discipline, and the WWII military model of organization that was really the basis for everything in the first two decades postwar? Is it any surprise the turn-of-the-century Viennese Jew founded a priesthood split between the rabbinic model of freelance elder-scholars and academy-credentialed bourgeois professionalization?

Write what you know.