Why I ❤️ Psycho-Cybernetics
The surprising sophistication in the self-help classic by Maxwell Maltz
I have a confession. I love self-help books.
Let me qualify that. I love certain specimens in the self-help genre.
Why do I feel the need to qualify that? You know why.
The self-help world is a speed-dating meetup where gullible rubes hook up with their favorite charlatan of the hour.
There is no doubt that a certain naivete hangs over the crowds of hopefuls lining up to see the Favored One. As there is much doubt about the teachings pandered to the faithful, which alternate between wish-fulfillment fantasies and the telephone game of sketchy "metaphysical" ideas barely changed since the days of the first President Roosevelt.
I sure don't want to be associated with that kind of thing.
Still. Nobody wants to be taken for a ride by a con-artist. But consider the magnitude of the alternative. Life really is awful, void of meaning, value, and purpose. We each exist for a little while before returning to cold eternity.
I sympathize with the search for something more.
One of my favorites in the self-help section is Psycho-Cybernetics by one Dr. Maxwell Maltz.
Many would lump this book in with what I will generously call specious metaphysics. It goes like this:
If you wish really hard and want it really bad, a sack of gold with a dollar sign on the side 💰 will fall into your lap and you will wake up in a Dubai penthouse with your Ferrari waiting out front with the valet.
No doubt that this sort of greedy self-interest motivates a good deal of the "prosperity" sub-genre. Fortunately that's not at all what Maltz is up to. Allow me to use my high-flying philosophical training to make a distinction not noticed by such critics.
There is a difference between the belief that your intentions can alter non-mental reality, and the belief that your intentions can bring about transformations within your own being.
The first thing requires some heavy-duty metaphysical beliefs. Some even go as far as to deny that there is any non-mental reality. Nothing is non-mental because everything is idea. That's a tough path to row for us secularized folks, so let's look at the more digestible option.
Believing that you can change your own mind through deliberate effort is far more plausible to anyone who has ever spent any time meditating, or for that matter, doing any sort of concentrated activity that demands mental discipline.
In an interesting fact for our present purposes, such techniques are the basis of serious magical practice. Occult writer Dion Fortune once defined magic as "the art and science of causing changes in consciousness in accordance with will."
Wild fields await us beyond the narrow limits of Acceptable Opinion. But let's rein that in for now and return to matters more mundane.
When I mention that I'm a fan of the book, I sometimes get flak about whether Psycho-Cybernetics is scientific.
The answer depends on which sub-question you're really asking.
Are the ideas in the book consistent with science?
Do we need or want a scientific theory about such matters?
Let me start with the second thing.
I once got myself interested in an older and now-obscure tradition in the history of ideas.
Outside of some art history fans and pot-shots by authors in the "fictional history of everything" genre, such as Yuval Harari and Steven Pinker, nobody thinks too much about them.
The tradition is called Romanticism. It has nothing to do with lusty couples in the heat of passion. The movement was originally kicked off by poets and artists who saw the growing dominance of industrialization, mechanical science, and sterile rationality as a threat to the good parts of life. They weren’t wrong.
I came to believe that Romanticism was both a missed opportunity and a lucky near-miss.
It's not for nothing that even today the Romantics catch the blame, with some justification, for the various strains of totalitarianism and our own decadent decline into a cult of narcissistic self-love. It's hard to read some of Rousseau's quotes and miss these connections.
Romanticism may have sputtered its last gasps long ago, but its legacy remains with us even today. When you hear someone going on about living "their authentic true self", you've found yourself a modern-day echo of Romantic thought.
My main interest in the Romantics concerns how they understood the self.
The self is that being that you are, which is neither your body, your mind, nor anything in your mind. It doesn't seem to be anything, which creates a difficult problem for us. The Science doesn't want anything to do with ghostly non-things that it can't measure and throw bricks at in a lab experiment.
Whereas you and I, we walk around all day long with this sense that we are a thinking, feeling, willing, acting being with a continuous identity over time.
I've laid my cards out in these pages before. If the choice is between my own most basic experiences of existing and what some big-talking nerd in a labcoat says... good luck nerds.
This is more than my own pig-headed stubbornness, you understand. I was once a committed believer in the "there is no self" camp, lined up with all the atheists and science-lovers who won't believe anything that isn’t approved by peer review.
I just can't buy it anymore. You don't get to the science without the scientists, who all happen to be human beings relying on their own thoughts and experiences in order to do the science they do.
More on that here:
Whatever its failings Romanticism at least made a healthy space for the reality of the inner world and its freedom. Whether those ideas collapsed into an irrationalist cult of feeling set against reason is a different matter. There’s a good side and a bad side to that argument.
My point is that while hokum and charlatanry abound in the self-help world, that isn't license to throw out all of it on the grounds that it "isn't scientific".
Many valuable and important things in your life aren't scientific and shouldn't be. And that’s when speaking of science at its best. The reality of the university-industrial complex today is far from that standard.
If you were familiar with the voodoo passing itself off as science these days, where many experimental findings can’t be reproduced and statistical trickery bordering on fraud runs amok, "trust" is not what it would inspire.
For those dissatisfied with empty materialism and blind science-worship, there is a healthy tradition of good thinking if you know where to look, and if you can bring good judgment and discriminating taste.
Which brings us to the other question, is Psycho-Cybernetics scientific?
There's a whole story to tell about the arc of psychology and the human sciences through the 20th century. In its first half, two forces dominated. One was called behaviorism. Its advocates denied that there is anything more to the mind than behavioral responses to stimulus. The other was Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory, which explained the mind as a vast, seething cauldron of unconscious instinctive drives capped off by a fragile, self-absorbed ego.
Neither of these have any time for a self.
The two doctrines offered themselves as objective sciences able to explain human behaviors from an external point of view. Psychologists didn't have to ask you what you think, feel, believe, desire, or value in order to explain why you do what you do. The most we can say is that "you" are the psychic equivalent of the 8-ball after the break.
You are the product of your environment and your history.
You don't do anything. Things are done to you.
Not everyone was satisfied with this, shockingly, which led to the appearance of a third force in psychology.
Third force psychology is itself mostly-forgotten today, as our psychology became infected by cognitive science and neuroscience and other forms of computer obsession. But in the second half of the 20th century the third force — known also as humanistic or existential psychology — made a tremendous impact through the work of figures like Carl Rogers, Rollo May, and Abraham Maslow.
Here’s the major problem for self-psychology. If the self is real, then why can't you observe it under lab conditions?
If we're going to talk about magic and such things, then why does it seem like these miraculous events have almost vanished with the spread of the smart phone?
The questions reminded me of a remark from MP favorite, the arch-druid John Michael Greer:
I’ve wondered more than once, in fact, if the regularities of nature central to the scientific revolution were at least partly an artifact of the decision by scientists to treat nature entirely as an object, never as a subject. By refusing to consider the personhood of nonhuman things, they got the lowest common denominator of nature’s behavior, the sullen passivity of those who know they have nothing to gain by giving anything more than they have to.
Treat nature like a dead lump and you find a dead lump. Treat people like dumb flesh and you find dumb flesh. If you approach the miraculous by the rules of the materialist's game, you'll find exactly the dirt that you expect.
We don’t find the self in the lab because the lab can only discover what it can poke and prod. The self lies behind all pokes. The unaided eye cannot look at itself.
The point to remember is that the self has a history as a part of serious science. That today’s psychology and neuroscience geeks willfully refuse to see that is not my problem or yours.
Maxwell Maltz borrows heavily from third force psychology in Psycho-Cybernetics.
One of his influences was the now little-known scientist Prescott Lecky, who authored a fascinating little book called Self-Consistency in the 1940s. He authored the fragmented essays later collected several of his students, more precisely.
Lecky’s interesting as he was one of few hold-outs during the dark days of behaviorism and psychoanalysis.
He argued that each person is defined by a unique structure of self-referring ideas, a little vortex of thoughts that is our self-concept. Human beings come with a powerful motivation to maintain the unity of our self-concept.
The self is an active being motivated to constantly maintain itself.
That motive is so powerful that it stands above even our desires for sex, food, and water. It isn't the facts alone that determine our behavior, but the meaning the facts have for us. Lecky put it like so: "Continuous pleasure the demands continuous solution of new problems."
If that sound implausible to you, I invite you to consider how many people readily die for their nation and faith.
How we see ourselves from the inside determines how we respond to external facts and events. In turn, our self-concept pulls us towards certain goals and purposes like iron filings in a magnetic field.
That won’t show up in a brain scan.
Understanding ourselves from the inside is essential to who we are and everything we care about.
Self-psychology isn't nearly so popular today with the current fad for the brain and the computer metaphor in psychology. But it is still alive and well in some quarters. Cognitive behavioral therapy is one descendant, as is the self-determination theory of Deci and Ryan, among other examples.
Whatever you may think of such extravagant ideas as the "Law of Attraction", you can't nail Maltz for that kind of speculation. While I'm personally more open-minded about the LOA, manifestation, and such matters — for reasons I've hinted at but have yet to dig deep into here — you don't have to be.
Even if you still find your footing in the conventional material world and can't make that leap yet, Maltz is not walking any superstitious ground. As I remind the nay-sayer, Psycho-Cybernetics concerns the self-image and a program for causing directed changes in it.
This has real power to it, which I touched on the other week.
The fundamental principles in the book stand up today. If you care about whether your ideas are scientific, then Psycho-Cybernetics meets the mark as well as any book written for a mass readership. If you can take Homo Deus and Atomic Habits seriously, this is easy stuff.
Though the more interesting questions appear when you stop linking your fate to peer-reviewed research articles written by people who believe that you don't exist.
Thanks for reading.
-Matt
p.s. If you found this valuable, interesting, funny, or it made you upset that you had to use your mind for activities that don't involve infinite scrolling, I ask that you do me a favor and share it with just one person.
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What you think or say after the phrase "I am..." is perhaps about as important as anything to the trajectory of your life. I don't think that's a far fetched idea and it's sad that it's chalked up there as unrealistic today.