The key ideas

Psycho-Cybernetics

Maxwell Maltz, 1960

A surgeon gives a patient a new face, yet the patient still feels unattractive. Maxwell Maltz set out to understand why and arrived at the idea of self-image. A 1960 classic about mental rehearsal and habits, with an honest examination of where the “twenty-one days to form a habit” myth really came from.

Who it is for

For anyone whose outward success somehow fails to change their inner sense of themselves, and who wants to understand that gap.

Self-image sets the limits of what a person can achieve. It determines what you can and cannot do. Expand your self-image and you expand the “area of the possible.”

What the book is about

A plastic surgeon removes someone’s scar or changes their nose. The operation succeeds, and the face looks as the patient dreamed. A few weeks later, however, the patient returns saying nothing has changed: they still feel unattractive.

Maxwell Maltz observed such cases for years in his practice. This puzzle led to Psycho-Cybernetics, published in 1960. Its central question: why is changing a face sometimes easier than changing how someone sees themselves?

An important qualification first. This book was written by a practicing surgeon more than sixty years ago. It draws on his observations, the language of cybernetics, then a fashionable science of controlling machines, and individual experiments. It is the author’s model rather than a tested scientific theory and deserves to be read through a modern lens.

Idea 1. A new face, the same person

In Maltz’s account, many patients changed in more than appearance after surgery. Someone ashamed of their looks for years became more confident and sociable.

This did not happen to everyone. Some continued seeing a former “defect” in the mirror after it was gone. Others lived with a visible scar without attaching importance to it.

Maltz suggested that how people experience their appearance may matter too. His image for this is an inner scar: old hurt or humiliation that remains even when the skin is smooth.

Someone loses fifteen kilograms but still heads for the loosest styles in a clothing shop and avoids the mirror.

In Maltz’s model, an outward change may fail to reach the inner image. Someone then continues living by the old image even after its original basis has disappeared.

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About the author

Maxwell Maltz was an American plastic surgeon. Observations of patients led him to ideas he presented in Psycho-Cybernetics (1960). It became one of the best-known self-help books and influenced many later authors.

All books by this author: Maxwell Maltz

Terms from the book

  • Self-image
  • Psycho-Cybernetics: The name of Maltz’s approach and book: applying ideas from cybernetics to human behavior. The author’s term rather than a scientific discipline.
  • Success mechanism: The author’s metaphor for an inner “guidance system” that, he believes, moves toward a clear goal and corrects its course through mistakes. An image from the book rather than a description of the brain.
  • Inner scar: An image from the book: old hurt or humiliation that Maltz observed could affect people even after the outward cause was removed.
  • Theater of the mind: Maltz’s exercise: regularly rehearsing yourself in a particular situation in detailed imagination. The author’s method rather than a tested therapy.

All terms

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