Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded

The Surgeon Who Found the Real Scar

Maxwell Maltz was a successful plastic surgeon, and his book began with a professional puzzle he could not let go of. He corrected disfigurements and watched most patients transform. But some did not. The face in the mirror changed and the person behind it did not, insisting they still looked exactly as before. Maltz concluded that he had been operating on the wrong thing. The disfigurement that mattered was not on the face; it was the internal picture the patient carried of himself.

The Argument

Published in 1960, Psycho-Cybernetics takes its title and its central metaphor from Norbert Wiener's new science of cybernetics: the study of goal-seeking, self-correcting systems. Maltz proposed that the human nervous system operates as exactly such a servo-mechanism. Give it a target and it will steer toward it, correcting through negative feedback the way a torpedo corrects toward a ship. Errors are not failures but course data.

The constraint is self-image. The mechanism will not steer toward a goal the operator does not believe belongs to him; it will manufacture the outcome consistent with the internal picture instead. So the work is not effort, it is revising the picture, and Maltz argued this could be done deliberately through vivid mental rehearsal. The brain, he claimed, does not sharply distinguish an intensely imagined experience from a real one. He prescribed thirty minutes a day in what he called the Theater of the Mind.

Its Long Shadow

The book has sold well over thirty million copies and is the substrate under most of what came after it. Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, and generations of athletic visualization coaching draw on Maltz, often without attribution. The now-ubiquitous idea that a habit takes twenty-one days originates here, in Maltz's clinical observation about how long amputees took to stop feeling a phantom limb, a nuance that vanished as the number was repeated.

This Tarcher edition restores the original 1960 text with a new introduction and chapter commentary by Matt Furey of the Psycho-Cybernetics Foundation.

Paperback. Updated and expanded edition.