TL;DR
5/10. A New Thought classic from 1963, still selling, and one of the sources everything from The Secret onward is drawing on. There’s a defensible idea at the center about suggestion and expectation. Around it’s a great deal that’s not supportable and is presented with total confidence.
Murphy’s frame is that the mind has two parts. A conscious one that reasons, selects, and rejects, and a subconscious one that accepts instruction without judgment and works to produce whatever is impressed upon it.
Prayer, affirmation, and visualization are all in his account methods of impressing the subconscious, and the practical instruction is to do it at the boundary of sleep, when the conscious mind is least able to interfere. This book makes me uneasy. There’s a real insight buried in it, wrapped in promises that can hurt people. I can’t dismiss it, because too much of the modern self-help shelf descends from it, and I can’t recommend it without a warning label.
He was a minister in the Divine Science tradition, part of the New Thought movement that also produced Ernest Holmes and connects back to Phineas Quimby in the nineteenth century. The book is theology written in the vocabulary of psychology, and knowing that changes how you read it.
What still holds up in The Power of Your Subconscious Mind?
Expectation shapes behavior, and behavior shapes outcomes.
A person who believes an interview will go badly arrives differently. They prepare less, or they prepare anxiously. They read neutral expressions as disapproval. They give shorter answers. The belief participates in producing the result, and afterward it looks like confirmation. That’s real, it’s well studied under other names including expectancy effects and self-fulfilling prophecy, and Murphy gets to it decades before it was popular. He doesn’t have the mechanism right, and the observation is sound.
I’ll give Murphy credit here. He spotted this decades before the research caught up, and it’s a shame he buried it under so much else. The material on sleep is also better than its surroundings. Handing a problem to your mind before sleeping and finding it clearer in the morning is something most writers have experienced, and there’s respectable research on sleep and problem consolidation. His description of the practice is practical and matches what a great many working people do without a theory attached.
Watch: The Power of Your Subconscious Mind (1963) by Joseph Murphy, Master Key Society
What in The Power of Your Subconscious Mind does not hold up?
The healing claims, and they take up a major portion of the book.
Murphy presents the assertion that the subconscious can cure organic disease flatly and repeatedly. The case stories arrive with no verification, no names that can be checked, no follow-up, and enormous confidence. A man is told he’s weeks to live, changes his thinking, and is well.
I think the book turns ugly here. A promise that the right thoughts will cure a sick person is cruel the moment it doesn’t work, and Murphy offers these stories with a confidence nothing in them has earned.
The mechanism proposed isn’t a mechanism. Saying the subconscious controls all bodily functions and will restore health if properly instructed doesn’t describe a process, it restates the claim in different words.
The same objection I raised about Louise Hay applies here and it originates here. If mind produces outcome, then a bad outcome is a failure of mind, and that logic reaches people at their most vulnerable and tells them the fault is theirs.
Why does The Power of Your Subconscious Mind still matter?
Because almost everything in the modern manifestation genre is downstream of it, and reading the source explains the descendants.
The Secret, the law of attraction industry, a large part of the visualization material in sports and business coaching, and much of what Hay House publishes all trace back through this book to New Thought. The vocabulary changed and the structure didn’t.
Reading Murphy directly is more useful than reading the modern versions, because he’s clearer about what he’s claiming. Later writers wrapped the same argument in quantum language and neuroscience vocabulary to make it sound contemporary, and Murphy simply asserts it, which at least lets you see the assertion.
I prefer the original for that reason. A plain assertion is easier to argue with than one dressed in borrowed science, and the modern versions have gotten slicker without getting any more true.
How should you read The Power of Your Subconscious Mind?
As a historical document with a usable core, and with the healing chapters treated as what they are.
Take the expectation material. That’s sound. Take the sleep practice. That’s harmless and frequently works for reasons Murphy didn’t have. Notice the structure of the argument, because you’ll meet it again in a hundred other books.
And treat the healing material as a religious claim in psychological clothing. That’s what it is. Murphy was a minister making a claim about the divine mind, and translating it into the language of psychology doesn’t turn it into psychology.
Verdict
Historically important and largely superseded. Read it to understand where this whole genre comes from, since almost everything since is downstream of it.
Take the expectation material, which is sound, and treat the healing material as what it is. That’s a religious claim in psychological clothing. I’d read it for the history and for the sleep habit, and I’d keep it far away from anyone facing a serious diagnosis. That warning matters more to me than anything else in this review.
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