Joseph Murphy

Joseph Denis Murphy was born in County Cork, Ireland in 1898 and was educated for the Catholic priesthood before leaving both the seminary and the country for the United States, where he trained as a pharmacist and worked in New York.

He encountered New Thought in the 1930s, studied with Divine Science teachers, was ordained in that tradition, and became minister of the Church of Divine Science in Los Angeles, where he preached to large congregations for nearly three decades and broadcast a daily radio program. He also studied comparative religion and traveled in India.

The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, published in 1963, is his best-known work and remains continuously in print more than sixty years later, selling in the millions. Its frame is that the mind has two components: a conscious one that reasons and selects, and a subconscious one that accepts instruction without judgment and works to produce whatever is impressed upon it. Prayer, affirmation, and visualisation are all in his account methods of impressing it, and he recommends doing so at the boundary of sleep when the conscious mind interferes least.

The defensible portion concerns expectation. A person who believes an interview will go badly arrives differently, prepares differently, and reads neutral signals as disapproval, and the belief participates in producing the result. That is well documented under other names and Murphy reached it decades before it was popular.

The healing claims are not defensible. The assertion that the subconscious cures organic disease is presented flatly, supported by unverifiable case stories, and the proposed mechanism restates the claim instead of describing a process.

He wrote more than thirty books and died in 1981. Almost everything in the modern manifestation genre descends from this material.