Louise Hay

Louise Lynn Hay was born in Los Angeles in 1926 into poverty and reported an abusive childhood, leaving home at fifteen and working as a waitress before moving to New York, changing her name, and working as a fashion model.

She encountered the Church of Religious Science in the 1970s, trained as a practitioner, and began counselling. Her first book, Heal Your Body, appeared in 1976 as a small pamphlet listing physical ailments alongside proposed emotional causes and corrective affirmations.

You Can Heal Your Life, published in 1984, expanded that material into a full book and became one of the best-selling self-help titles ever published, with tens of millions of copies sold. Its argument is that thought patterns create physical reality, that resentment, criticism, guilt, and fear underlie most problems including disease, and that affirmations correct them. Hay's own account of curing cervical cancer through these methods is the credential the book rests on and is not independently verifiable.

She founded Hay House in 1984 to publish the book, and it grew into one of the largest self-help publishers in the world, carrying Wayne Dyer, Doreen Virtue, and a substantial catalog of related authors.

The material on self-criticism is the part of her work with genuine value. Her observation that people address themselves in a register they would never use with another person was correct and was not widely said in 1984, and the mirror exercise functions as a diagnostic regardless of what a reader makes of the metaphysics.

The illness claims are unsupported and, applied to somebody who is ill, place responsibility for the outcome on the patient. She also ran support groups for men dying of AIDS in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s, at a time when very few people would go near them. She died in 2017 at ninety.