Joseph Murphy

Introduction

Joseph Murphy (20 May 1898 – 16 December 1981) was an Irish-born American New Thought minister and author whose book The Power of Your Subconscious Mind (1963) became one of the best-selling and most durable works in modern self-help literature. He taught that the conscious mind chooses and judges while the subconscious mind accepts whatever is impressed upon it with feeling and repetition, and that deliberately impressing a desired end on the subconscious will change health, relationships and material circumstances.

It should be stated plainly at the outset that Murphy was not a psychologist. He held no recognised qualification in psychology, no academic appointment and no licence to practise, and he published nothing in the psychological research literature. His documented training was in chemistry and in New Thought ministry. Biographies circulated by his publishers and audio distributors credit him with a doctorate in psychology from the University of Southern California and, in other versions, with degrees from Andhra Research University in India, a religious institution; neither claim is corroborated by institutional records. Murphy's significance for the history of psychology therefore lies outside the discipline, in the enormous popular audience his ideas reached and in the lineage of manifestation teaching that descends from him.

Early Life and Education

Murphy was born in Ballydehob, County Cork, into a Catholic family, and was educated in Ireland and England. He was accepted as a Jesuit seminarian as a young man, but he began to question the orthodoxy of the order and left, a decision that biographies treat as the first of several turns away from institutional religion toward the more eclectic metaphysics he would later preach.

He trained as a chemist, and in 1922 he emigrated to the United States, travelling in steerage aboard the steamship Cedric and being inspected at Ellis Island in April of that year. He settled in New York, worked as a pharmacist, and began the comparative study of the world's religions that became the other pillar of his teaching. Accounts of this period describe his involvement with New Thought churches in New York, including the Church of the Healing Christ, and a period of study in India that left a lasting mark on his vocabulary.

What Murphy took from this reading was a conviction that he later summarised in a sentence: that there is an untapped power within every person, and that it is accessed not by argument or effort but by a settled inner conviction.

Academic and Professional Career

Murphy moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1940s. He was ordained in Religious Science by the movement's founder Ernest Holmes, and later in Divine Science, and he became minister of the Church of Divine Science in Los Angeles, a post he held for roughly twenty-eight years. His Sunday services drew audiences that contemporary accounts put at more than a thousand, and he also broadcast a daily radio programme, lectured widely, and ran a substantial correspondence counselling practice.

The publication of The Power of Your Subconscious Mind in 1963 changed the scale of his audience. The book has never gone out of print, has been translated into many languages, and turned him into a fixture of the human potential movement at the height of its influence. He went on to write more than thirty books, most of which restate the same model with different case material. In his later years he moved his ministry to Laguna Hills, California, where he died on 16 December 1981; his second wife, Jean Murphy, continued the ministry for some years afterwards.

Throughout this career Murphy presented himself as "Dr. Murphy," and his readership understood him as an authority on the mind. He was not, however, a scientist of the mind: he conducted no experiments, published no data, and held no position in a university or research institute. His authority was that of a preacher and teacher working in a religious tradition.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Murphy contributed nothing to psychology as a research discipline. What he produced was a popular psychology of the mind, and its elements can be described precisely.

The conscious mind and the subconscious mind

The core distinction is between a conscious mind that reasons, chooses and evaluates, and a subconscious mind that does neither but simply accepts and reproduces whatever is impressed upon it. Because the subconscious does not argue back, Murphy held that a conviction held with feeling, especially in the drowsy state before sleep, will be accepted and then expressed as outward circumstance. This is why his method depends on repetition, imagery and low-effort suggestion rather than on reasoning oneself into a new belief.

Scientific prayer and the techniques of impression

Murphy called his method scientific prayer, a phrase meant to distinguish it from petitionary prayer. The book sets out a small repertoire of techniques: the passing-over technique, in which an idea is handed to the subconscious in the drowsy state; the mental movie method, in which a finished scene is rehearsed in imagination; the Baudouin technique, which condenses a wish into a short phrase repeated quietly; the sleeping technique, which repeats a single phrase as one falls asleep; and the thank-you technique, which holds gratitude for an outcome not yet visible. He also warned against straining, advising readers to soften any affirmation that provokes internal resistance.

Health, prosperity and the healing claim

Murphy extended the model to physical illness and to money. He claimed to have healed himself of a skin condition by these means, and his books are filled with accounts of readers and congregants who recovered health, found work or received money after applying his method. These stories are unnamed, uncorroborated and unaccompanied by any follow-up, and they bear the whole evidential weight of his system.

Place in the New Thought lineage

Murphy belongs to the New Thought tradition that includes Phineas Quimby, Emma Curtis Hopkins, Ernest Holmes and Florence Scovel Shinn, and his work is frequently cited as a source for later law-of-attraction writing, including Rhonda Byrne's The Secret. His distinctive contribution was to place the subconscious mind at the centre of that tradition, giving a psychological-sounding mechanism to claims that earlier authors had framed as spiritual law.

Major Publications

Riches Is Your Right (1952)
The Miracles of Your Mind (1953)
Believe in Yourself (1955)
How to Attract Money (1955)
Prayer Is the Answer (1956)
The Power of Your Subconscious Mind (1963)
The Miracle of Mind Dynamics (1964)
Your Infinite Power to Be Rich (1966)
Secrets of the I Ching (1970)
The Amazing Laws of Cosmic Mind Power (1973)

Impact and Legacy

Murphy's influence on popular culture is out of all proportion to his standing in psychology. His book remains in print more than six decades after publication, his techniques were absorbed into the prosperity and manifestation literature of the late twentieth century, and phrases he popularised are now ordinary currency. Teachers in the motivational tradition have drawn on him for the idea that inner belief precedes and produces outward result.

The criticisms are equally plain. The first concerns credentials: Murphy's doctorate claims are unsupported, and the honourific "Dr." has led many readers to assume scientific training he did not have. The second concerns evidence. Every claim in his books rests on anecdote, and the cases are anonymous, self-selected and reported by the author, which means there is no way to distinguish his method from coincidence, spontaneous remission, or the ordinary fluctuation of circumstances. The third concerns mechanism. Psychology does recognise non-conscious and automatic processing, but nothing in that literature supports an intelligent subconscious that dispenses jobs, money or cures on request, and Murphy's use of scientific vocabulary to describe a metaphysical claim has been criticised as borrowing the authority of science without its methods.

There is also a documented possibility of harm. Joanne Wood, W. Q. Elaine Perunovic and John Lee reported in Psychological Science in 2009 that repeating positive self-statements made participants with low self-esteem feel worse, not better, which cuts directly against the central instruction of Murphy's method. More generally, a framework in which failure to recover is a failure of belief can add guilt to illness and may discourage people from seeking medical care.

Two responses deserve to be stated. The first is that Murphy's practices overlap with techniques that do have some support: mental rehearsal aids motor skill and performance, and self-affirmation research, in which people reflect on personal values rather than repeat a desired outcome, shows effects on stress and defensiveness. Supporters argue that readers who use his affirmations are effectively doing something in that family. Critics reply that the overlap is superficial, since Murphy's mechanism and his promises go far beyond anything those findings license. The second response is that Murphy understood himself as a religious teacher, framed his method as prayer rather than as a laboratory finding, and was therefore not answerable to the standards of empirical psychology. On that reading the fair question is not whether his claims are scientifically supported, since he did not present them as such, but whether readers who take "scientific prayer" to be science are being misled. The answer to that question is where the dispute now sits.

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References

Murphy, J. (1963). The Power of Your Subconscious Mind. Prentice Hall.