Psycho-Cybernetics

Maltz argues that a person behaves in line with a self-image, and that changing the image changes the behaviour. He came to the question as a plastic surgeon whose patients often remained unsatisfied after successful operations, which suggested to him that the disfigurement they minded was an inner one. The book joins two sources. From Prescott Lecky it takes self-consistency, the claim that anything inconsistent with a person's existing system of ideas about themselves will be rejected, so a goal becomes reachable only once the self-image can accommodate it. From Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann it takes cybernetics, and it reads the nervous system as a goal-seeking mechanism that accepts a target, senses the gap, corrects course and stores what worked. On that reading the conscious mind is the operator who supplies the target and the rest is machinery, which responds to whatever image it is given, unhelpful ones included. Maltz treats worry as the supplying of negative images and recommends supplying positive ones instead, through visualisation, deliberate recall of past success and the relaxed acceptance of new beliefs. He also insists that people act on their mental representation of a thing rather than on the thing itself.

Written from the encyclopaedia article on Psycho-Cybernetics at Wikipedia.

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People

• Maxwell Maltz
• Prescott Lecky