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This article or section refers to elements from Original Dune |
Imperial Conditioning was a psychotherapeutic technique developed by the renowned Suk Medical School. The highest known conditioning against taking human life or even harboring such intentions, Suk doctors were trusted enough to minister the most powerful individuals in the Imperium - even the Emperor himself.
Initiates of this program were marked by a diamond tattoo on their forehead and permitted to wear their hair long within a school-issued silver ring.
This conditioning against murder had remained a stalwart of the Suk school for millennia by instilling extreme levels of pacifist inhibition - known as pyretic conscience or "conscience of fire" - which presumably punished any thoughts of violence with intense pain. What's more, such constraints were always considered impossible to remove without killing the subject.
However, House Harkonnen Mentat Piter de Vries discovered that this pyretic conscience could be overridden if the Suk initiate was driven to an extreme enough level of murderous hatred that it would burn out their inhibitors. This particular lever was accomplished by abducting Dr. Wellington Yueh's wife, Wanna Marcus, and forcing him to witness her torture in Piter's pain amplifiers. Exacerbated by Wanna's Bene Gesserit influence and sexual conditioning, Yueh's grief and hatred intensified to the point that he now harbored actual murderous intent toward her tormenters, and he was willing to kill anyone who prevented that goal. Despite Baron Vladimir Harkonnen's success in coercing the compromised doctor into betraying his Atreides Duke on the false promise of freeing his already-deceased wife, Yueh managed to turn the situation to his advantage by boobytrapping Duke Leto's peg tooth with an airborne poison that took Piter's life and nearly killed the Baron.
After this catastrophic failure in their program - which included the direct slaying of multiple house guards and an elderly housekeeper - the institution of Suk doctors remained largely untarnished for thousands of years thanks to the Baron's cover story that Yueh was actually an imposter who never underwent their conditioning.
Quotes[]
- "I'm sorry, my dear Duke, but there are things which will make greater demands than this. I find it very strange, myself - an override on my pyretic conscience - but I wish to kill a man. Yes, I actually wish it. I will stop at nothing to do it."
- ―Wellington Yueh[src]