The Secret of Perfect Living

James T Mangan sets out a psychological method rather than an argument about the world. The reader is asked to engage the subconscious mind and to bring on a chosen mental state by fixing attention on single words, mantra-like one-word affirmations that Mangan named switchwords. Each switchword is matched to the condition the reader wants to reach, and the encyclopaedia account gives his own example, the word giggle, offered as the one to hold in mind in order to get in the mood for writing. The practice is described as slightly resembling transcendental meditation, in that the repeated word does the work while deliberate reasoning is asked to stand aside, which makes the book an early piece of popular writing on priming oneself by language alone. The library record places it with Prentice-Hall of Englewood Cliffs in 1963, two hundred and twenty-three pages, and classifies it simply under success, which locates it on the mid-century American self-improvement shelf rather than in clinical psychology. Beyond that outline the publicly reachable material does not describe Mangan's reasoning or his evidence, and this summary goes no further than it.

Written from the encyclopaedia article on James T Mangan at Wikipedia alongside the library catalogue record for the Prentice-Hall edition at the Internet Archive.

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