Psycho-Cybernetics

 

According to the non-profit Psycho-Cybernetics Foundation, worldwide sales of this book, including the editions of five US publishers and the many foreign translations issued since 1960, exceed 25 million copies.

This huge readership alone would make the book worth investigating, but it becomes an enigma when you appreciate that Dr. Maltz never became famous in the way that Dale Carnegie or Norman Vincent Peale did. What was it that drew people to this unremarkable looking paperback?

 

The word comes from the Greek for “steersman,” and in the modern sense usually refers to systems of control and communication in machines and animals; how, for instance, a computer or a mouse organizes itself to achieve a task. Maltz applied the science to humans to form psycho-cybernetics. However, while inspired by the development of sophisticated machines, his book denounced the idea that man can be reduced to a machine. Psycho-cybernetics bridges the gap between our mechanistic models of the brain’s functioning (clichés like “Your brain is a wonderful computer”) and the knowledge of ourselves as being a lot more than machines.

Maltz said that human beings have an “essence” or life force that cannot be reduced to a mere brain and physical body. Jung called it the “libido,” Bergson the “elan vital.” A person cannot be defined by their physical body or brain, just as electricity cannot be defined by the wire through which it travels. We are, rather, systems in constant flux.

Some readers will be uncomfortable with this distinction between the brain and the mind, but it does make sense in relation to Maltz’s key statement: “Man is not a machine, but has and uses a machine.” This distinction is crucial to understanding the larger subject of the book: setting and achieving goals.

 

The founder of cybernetics was American mathematician Norbert Wiener, who spent the Second World War refining guided missile technology. Stressing the similarities between machines, animals, human brains, and societies, Wiener was way ahead of his time in predicting that there was nothing to prevent machines “thinking” in the way that humans do. He saw both computers and the human brain as systems that take in low-energy data and create new connections to be used in interactions with the external world. Feedback from the external environment is used to enhance subsequent communications with it.

This virtuous loop of control, communication, and feedback is the key feature of a “servo-mechanism” that needs to arrive at a preset goal. Once it knows where it is going, a guided missile hits its target via constant feedback and communication with itself.

Maltz thought: Why couldn’t this technology be applied to human achievement? He realized that the key point about the loop is that it gains an automaticity when the target or goal is very clearly fixed. When you first learn to drive, you have to worry about every car and process every sign ahead of you on the road—the result is that you move slowly and are liable to get lost. In time, however, driving becomes easy because you know your destination when you sit behind the wheel, and body and mind automatically do what is necessary to reach it.

Cybernetics appeared such a breakthrough to Maltz because its implication was that achievement was a matter of choice. Most important to the dynamic of achieving was the “what” (the target),rather than the “how” (the path). The frontal lobes or conscious thinking part of the brain could devise the goal, or create the image of the person you wanted to be, and the subconscious mind would deliver its attainment. The “set and forget” mechanism of guided missiles would also work for our deepest desires.

 

Maltz was a plastic surgeon. Distinguished as he was in his field, he was at a loss to explain why a minority of patients were no happier after their operations than before, even if disfiguring scars or other malformations had been removed. He found himself drawn into the new self-image psychology, which held that we generally conform in action and thought to a deep image of ourselves. Without a change to this inner image, patients would still feel themselves to be ugly, however excellent the cosmetic work.

He came to believe that self-image was the “golden key” to a better life. Without an understanding of it, we might forever be fiddling around the “circumference of the self,” instead of at its center. Positive thinking, for instance, could be of no use if it simply related to particular external circumstances. Saying “I will get this job” will not do anything if the idea of being in the job is not consistent with how you see yourself deep down.

 

We acquire our self-image through our beliefs about ourselves, which grow out of past experience of success and failure and of how others see us. Maltz argued that both are unworthy of the privilege of determining our basic psychological template. The crucial and fascinating point about the self-image is that it is value neutral, that is, it doesn’t care if it is empowering or destructive, but will form itself simply according to what psychological food it is fed. We can either create an image of the self that can accommodate prosperity, peace, and greatness, or we can stick with a defective one that can’t even get us out of bed in the morning. The point is that a positive self-image that can see you fulfill your dreams does not happen by accident—it must be thought about and manufactured.

Nevertheless, how is the self-image actually changed? What of the person who has experienced little but failure? This was a disturbing question for Maltz, since the evidence was that the self-image was changed by experiencing, not by intellectual means. However, this was not the case in reality because—and this is one of the book’s most significant points—experimental and clinical psychologists had established beyond doubt that the brain is not great at telling the difference between an actual experience and one imagined in full and vivid detail. (Such results had been understood years before by William James.) This meant that winning images of the self could replace negative ones, denying any authority to past events. The beauty of self-image was that while it was the supreme factor in determining success or failure, it was also extremely malleable.

 

The brain thinks in terms of images, therefore if you can consciously create the desired image of yourself the brain and nervous system will automatically provide continual feedback to ensure that it “lives up to” the preordained image. In a well-known clinical experiment, one group of basketball players was physically trained to throw more balls through the hoop, while another was taught merely to visualize throwing goals. Despite the absence of any physical practice, the second group far outscored the first.

The brain, nervous system, and muscles are obedient servants of pictures placed in your head. But the ability of your body and brain to manifest the desired self-image depends on its indelibility. It must be tattooed on the brain. With such a strong image of ourselves, it is difficult not to live out and manifest all that is associated with the self-image. Instead of just “having goals,” we become them.

 

Much of self-help writing is about goals, but how does goal setting work? Why does it work? Maltz was the first to explore its actual machinery, and in doing this he has been a key influence to a generation of success writers. The emphasis on positive self-image paved the way for hundreds of books on the power of affirmation and visualization techniques. Psycho-Cybernetics has sold in its millions because it provides a scientific rationale for dream fulfillment.

Notwithstanding its Reader’s Digest style of writing, this is, in fact, a textbook. The science and computing references are now outdated, but the principles of cybernetics have only grown in influence. Complexity theory, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science all grew out of the cybernetic understanding of how the non-physical, the “ghost in the machine,” guides matter. This makes Psycho-Cybernetics the perfect self-help book for a technological culture.

It is admirable because it was written at a time when behaviorism and time-and-motion studies, which tended to reduce people to the mechanical, were at their zenith. Maltz’s genius was in saying that while we were “machines,” and while the dynamics of goal setting and self-image might best be described in mechanistic terms, the fantastic variety of our desires and our ability to create new worlds were uniquely human. What could never be reduced to machine analogies were the fires of imagination, ambition, and will.

 

Born and educated in Europe, Maltz spent most of his adult life in New York where he established a reconstructive cosmetic surgery practice. His New Faces, New Futures was a collection of case histories of patients whose lives had been transformed by facial surgery. Maltz’s subsequent research into the few patients whose lives did not radically improve led him to the psychologist Prescott Lecky’s work on “selfconsistency.” He was in his 60s by the time Psycho-Cybernetics was published.

With its success, Maltz became a popular motivational speaker throughout the 1y60s and the early 1y70s. The wide audience for the book included Salvador Dali, who painted a “psycho-cybernetics” work as a gift to the author. Maltz died in 1y71, aged 76.

Though rather overshadowed, other Maltz titles include The Magic Powers of the Self-Image, Live and Be Free through PsychoCybernetics, three novels and an autobiography, Dr. Pygmalion. PsychoCybernetics 2000, edited by Bobbe Summer and Anna Maltz, is an updated version of the book. The Psycho-Cybernetics Foundation (www.psycho-cybernetics.com) now promotes his work.