Who was Joseph Murphy? A fact-checked biography

Joseph Murphy in one paragraph

Murphy was born on 20 May 1898 in the south of Ireland, raised Catholic, and studied with the Jesuits before leaving that path. He worked as a pharmacist in New York, joined the New Thought churches, was ordained in Religious Science and then in Divine Science, and became minister-director of the Church of Divine Science in Los Angeles. He wrote many books on what he calls the subconscious mind, prayer and belief, among them Believe in Yourself (1955) and Within You Is the Power (1977). He died in Laguna Hills, California, in December 1981.

His best-known book is still in print 63 years after its first edition. His publisher today, Penguin Random House, says it has been “selling millions in various editions since its original publication in 1963”. That is a publisher’s claim; no audited sales figure exists.

Ireland, the Jesuits and a pharmacy in New York

Most biographies place his birth in Ballydehob, County Cork. The German National Library records “Derrynard” instead, and no birth or baptism register has been found online. The safe statement is “the south of Ireland”, which is what the Divine Science ministers’ own memorial page says.

He grew up in a Catholic family; his father is described as an educator. He studied with the Jesuits. One denominational page says he was ordained a Catholic priest and later left the priesthood, but it gives no date and no ordaining body, and other biographies say only that he was a seminarian. We treat the ordination as unverified.

He trained in chemistry and pharmacy and worked as a pharmacist in New York after emigrating in 1922. That background matters for reading him: Murphy writes like a practitioner who wants a method that works, not like a theologian.

From pharmacist to New Thought minister

In New York he attended the church where Emmet Fox, a Divine Science minister, became minister in 1931. The Divine Science ministers’ page says he was “greatly influenced by his friend Emmet Fox”. No source we found says Fox taught or ordained him.

Sources say Ernest Holmes, founder of Religious Science, ordained him in 1946, and that he was later ordained again in Divine Science. The 1946 date appears only in uncited biographies. What is consistent across sources is the outcome: from about 1949–50 he led the Church of Divine Science in Los Angeles, and the denomination’s memorial page says that “thousands of people would crowd into the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles to hear his message”. He spent his last years in Laguna Hills, where he died.

What is Divine Science, and where do his ideas come from?

New Thought is a 19th-century American movement holding that mind and belief shape experience. Divine Science is one of its churches: Malinda Cramer first taught it in San Francisco in 1888, and Nona Brooks and her sisters built its Denver branch. Brooks summed it up as “the practice of the Presence of God”.

Murphy names his sources in the 1963 book itself. He cites Phineas Quimby, a 19th-century mesmerist who held that illness came from mistaken belief and is often called the founder of New Thought; Émile Coué, the French pharmacist known for “Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better”; the judge Thomas Troward; Mesmer, and “Dr. Braid of Manchester”. He calls Coué a psychologist, which he was not: Coué was a pharmacist in Troyes before opening his practice in Nancy.

Murphy turns this tradition into techniques. His one-line definition, from chapter 6 of the 1963 book: “Your desire is your prayer.” Prayer, for him, is a mental method addressed to what he calls the subconscious mind, inside a religious frame he calls Infinite Intelligence.

The Ph.D. question: which claims about him hold up?

Title pages of some editions list “D.R.S., D.D., Ph.D., LL.D.” and a fellowship of an “Andhra Research University of India”. We found no record of a university by that name, and no thesis or record for the doctorate in psychology from the University of Southern California that online biographies mention. His denomination’s memorial page speaks only of a degree earned “in the Divine Science movement”. The French national library’s authority note lists doctorates in theology, philosophy and law, but names no institution. The titles are real in the sense that he used them; whether they were earned degrees cannot be shown.

We sorted twelve common claims by the evidence behind them. “Confirmed” means two independent records agree; “likely” means consistent secondary sources without a primary record; “disputed” means sources contradict each other; “unverified” means we found only uncited sources.

Why does The Power of Your Subconscious Mind still sell?

The book has never needed a single publisher. After Prentice-Hall’s 1963 edition came a revision by Ian McMahan (Reward Books, 2000), a Bantam paperback (2001), an edition revised by Arthur R. Pell (2011) and a Tarcher edition presented as the complete 1963 text. In French, the earliest edition we found is Montréal, Éditions du Jour, 1973, translated by Mary Sterling. The oldest copy in the French national library is a 1974 Geneva edition (R.F. Keller) of the same translation.

Our reading of its staying power, not a measured fact: the chapters are short, each ends with a numbered summary, and each one hands the reader a technique to try that night. It asks for no community, no fee and no belief in a particular church. And since The Secret (2006) brought New Thought ideas back to a mass audience, readers looking for the source keep arriving at Murphy.

What his core idea looks like next to research

Psychology agrees with Murphy on one point: a large share of mental life runs without conscious control. In a 1999 review, Bargh and Chartrand argued that nonconscious processes carry most of everyday self-regulation. But the processes they describe are automatic links from perception to action, goals pursued outside awareness and constant evaluation, not an inner power that carries out whatever it is told. And one of the best-known priming studies in that line, in which people exposed to words about old age walked more slowly, did not replicate in 2012, when Doyen and colleagues retested it with 120 students and infrared timing; in a second experiment, the slower walk appeared only when the experimenters expected it.

On picturing the outcome, the evidence cuts against the simplest reading of Murphy. Oettingen and Mayer (2002) ran four prospective studies, among them graduates looking for a job and students before an exam, and measured effort and performance weeks to two years later. Positive expectations predicted more effort and better results; positive fantasies, pleasant thoughts and images of the desired future, predicted the reverse. The fantasies were measured, not assigned, so this shows an association, not a cause. What holds up better in experiments is picturing the steps rather than the outcome. In Pham and Taylor’s 1999 study, first-year students who spent 5 to 7 days before a midterm exam mentally simulating how they would study (process simulation) studied more and got better grades than a self-monitoring control group. Pairing the wish with an if-then plan, called an implementation intention, also holds up: a 2006 meta-analysis of 94 independent tests by Gollwitzer and Sheeran found a medium-to-large average effect on goal attainment (d = 0.65), and a larger 2025 meta-analysis of 642 tests, by Sheeran, Listrom and Gollwitzer, reports d = 0.27 to 0.66 depending on the type of outcome. One limit: Gollwitzer, who introduced the technique, co-wrote both reviews.

Reading Murphy today, without his promises

Murphy is worth reading as a historical figure and as a source of practical rituals: a calm mind before sleep, a scene pictured in detail, thanks given in advance, a short phrase repeated. His explanations, and his promises about money and the body, are another matter; the rest of this series tests them one by one.

The version we offer in Dream Architect keeps the ritual and drops the promise. At night, in the Quick path (the default), you picture one ordinary moment of your dream in the present tense, name the first emotion, then close your eyes while the screen goes dark. The Full path adds the body sensation, a small sign for tomorrow and one small step. The next morning, the morning check-in asks whether anything reminded you of it. Nothing in the app claims the scene will cause anything.

How we checked these facts

Every date and place above was read on 20 October 2026 in the Library of Congress name authority file, the German National Library and French national library records, the Divine Science ministers’ memorial page and the publishers’ pages. Wikipedia served only as a pointer to sources. Of the twelve claims in the table, 3 are confirmed, 4 likely, 2 disputed and 3 unverified. Quotations from Murphy come from the 1963 text and are kept short because the book is still under copyright.

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