The key ideas

The Power of Your Subconscious Mind

Joseph Murphy, 1963

A Los Angeles minister insisted everyone has a subconscious that fulfills what we believe, especially if we tell it before going to sleep. The book became one of the best-known books in self-help. We examine his techniques and stories, honestly showing where science agrees and disagrees.

Who it is for

For anyone interested in self-help classics about affirmations and visualization who wants to understand where they align with research and where they remain the author’s beliefs.

Change your thoughts and you will change your destiny.

What the book is about

The author says he was diagnosed with a malignant skin tumor in his youth and treatment was not helping. For several months, he repeated a short prayer several times daily, saying the power that created his body could heal it too. He says his skin was clear after three months. He builds the entire book on this story, which we will revisit.

Joseph Murphy was a New Thought minister in Los Angeles. In 1963, he published a book arguing everyone has a subconscious, a power fulfilling what a person truly believes.

Important from the beginning: these are the author’s beliefs and method rather than science. Ahead are his techniques, best-known stories, and where researchers today agree or disagree.

Idea 1. Captain and crew

Murphy describes two minds. The conscious mind thinks, compares, and chooses. In his model, the subconscious accepts what it receives without argument and turns it into reality.

He illustrates this with a ship. Consciousness is the captain on the bridge. The subconscious is the crew following orders, even mistaken ones, without seeing where the vessel sails. A second image is a garden: thoughts, like seeds, grow in the soil where planted.

Hence the book’s central formula: every thought is a cause, and every circumstance an effect.

Before a presentation, you spend the evening thinking “I’ll humiliate myself.” In Murphy’s logic, this is an order to the crew.

This is the author’s scheme rather than the brain’s structure. But it invites closer attention to what you tell yourself for years.

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About the author

Joseph Murphy (1898–1981) was born in Ireland and worked as a pharmacist in New York in his youth. From 1949, he was a minister of the Divine Science church in Los Angeles, part of the New Thought movement. He wrote more than thirty books.

All books by this author: Joseph Murphy

Terms from the book

  • Subconscious
  • Suggestion
  • Law of reversed effort: Émile Coué’s observation that excessive effort may interfere when will conflicts with imagination. His formulation rather than a scientific law.
  • Baudouin technique: A practice Murphy describes: condense a wish into a short phrase and repeat it while drowsy.
  • Placebo effect: Feeling better because of an expectation of treatment rather than an active ingredient. It affects subjective experience most strongly and cannot replace treatment.
  • Mental contrasting: Psychologist Gabriele Oettingen’s technique: imagine a desired future, then an obstacle on the way to it.

All terms

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