Maxwell Maltz 2 - ‘Change your self-image and you change your life’

Ken Winston Caine notes:

To my thinking, Maxwell Maltz was a vastly under-appreciated contributor to the Human Potential Movement. His work was widely borrowed from — without credit — in the “creation” of Neuro Linguistic Programming by Bandler and Grinder and in Anthony Robbins’s work and in the evolution of hypnotherapy in the ’80s and ’90s and in Thomas Leonard’s development of a system and profession of “coaching.”

And his work was a progenitor of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and nearly contemporary with Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotive Therapy. Ellis unveiled Rational Emotive Therapy in 1955, and the first real book he wrote on it came out in 1959, just as Maltz’s Psycho Cybernetics was going to press. Aaron Beck provided his twist, “Cognitive Therapy” in the mid-’60s. These are the currently accepted “state of the art” in psychotherapy. Ellis and Beck conducted much formal scientific/social research to firmly establish their forms of “self-image psychology” as science. I’ve read extensively the works of both Beck and Ellis and may be wrong about this, but don’t recall that either cited Maltz as an influence or a respected contemporary, or even as a popularizer of the “cognitive therapy” concept. Maltz, himself, credited pychologist Prescott Lecky’s 1945 work Self-Consistency: A Theory of Personality as an influence.

Maltz, who died in 1975, in addition, may have been the father of modern mind-body medicine. He occasionally is credited with that, but rarely from within Mind-Body-Medicine academia. It’s not like Maltz wasn’t recognized — one of his books, alone, sold 30 million copies. But it wasn’t an academic work. Maltz wrote self-improvement textbooks for the masses and in an engaging, easy-reading Reader’s Digest style, rather than publishing rigorous studies in a language and format intended for the intellectual elite in his field. And, since he was a plastic surgeon, his pioneering psychological theories were not openly embraced by the psychology cognoscenti of his times, but were indeed extensively borrowed both in the years before and after his death. His ideas have been repeated so many times by psychologists, self-help authors, motivational speakers, coaches and so on that they hardly seem “original” any more. But they remain powerful and the stuff of breakthroughs and amazing accomplishment and creative expressiveness.

A pretty 7th grade reading teacher that I like a lot, Carolyn Clark, brought me a copy of Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life. She suggested that I would find it fascinating. I did.

She had taken a special interest in this curious kid who was enrolled in the school’s “genius program” and who had a prominent “chief’s” nose that was suddenly outgrowing the rest of his body and with a distinctly non-California accent — both of which some of the other kids were ridiculing. She recognized that I was not mixing well with the kids at this school in the new neighborhood to which my family had just moved. She recognized that I was developing a potentially crippling inferiority complex and she thought that Maltz’s ideas might help me.

Of course, she didn’t say any of that. She just told me that she’d come across a book about “the power of mind,” which she knew was a subject I found fascinating, and she thought I might like it. I did.

I ended up reading and studying and practicing the exercises in most of the rest of Maltz’s books before the ’60s were out. And have revisited them many times and have suggested them to others — and not just people suffering from apparent inferiority handicaps, but to nearly anyone seeking to get more out of life, to really achieve their potential, to cast aside self-imposed limits.

My favorite and most-recommended of Maltz’s books for many years was The Magic Power of Self-Image Psychology.

Psycho-Cybernetics was issued in an updated, completely revised edition in the late ’90s– almost two decades after Maltz’s death. That edition is called Psycho-Cybernetics 2000. It, unfortunately, lacks the late Dr. Maltz’s deft and inspiring narrative style — which keeps you plowing straight through his works with excitement. The new version is filled with sidebars and new exercises to play with — and they’re useful and good for reference — but the book is not nearly the inspiring and compelling read of the original. I don’t recommend it.

A different, fascinating revision can be found in an audio program developed by Dan Kennedy — who is just as compelling as Maltz was, and who is a much better public speaker. This seven DVD set from Nightingale Conant is called The New PsychoCybernetics.

More:

Cool highlights of a joint-appearance/dialogue between Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck.