The main criticisms of Joseph Murphy, and a fair answer to each

What we looked for, and what we found

We looked for a peer-reviewed article, a book chapter or a major press piece that examines Joseph Murphy specifically. We found none. His English Wikipedia entry has no reception or criticism section, and it carries warnings about relying on primary sources. The historians of the movement he belonged to, such as Donald Meyer (The Positive Thinkers, 1965), Beryl Satter (Each Mind a Kingdom, 1999) and Catherine Albanese (A Republic of Mind and Spirit, 2007), study New Thought as a whole. Mitch Horowitz, who has edited and introduced Murphy’s book, writes as a sympathetic historian, not a critic.

So the honest method is the one below: take the published criticisms of positive thinking and of The Secret, check whether each one fits what Murphy wrote, and say so when it does not.

Criticism 1: a method that cannot fail

Murphy presents his approach as science. His preface defines it: “Scientific prayer is the harmonious interaction of the conscious and subconscious levels of mind scientifically directed for a specific purpose.” A scientific claim, though, has to say what result would count against it.

Chapter 8 shows the difficulty. Under a heading on the “law of reversed effort” and why people sometimes get the opposite of what they pray for, Murphy explains that strain and too much effort block the answer, and sums it up as “Easy does it.” If the result comes, the method worked. If it does not, the person tried too hard, doubted, or held a contrary belief. No outcome can count against the method, which is what philosophers of science call an unfalsifiable claim.

The fair answer: Murphy was a minister of Divine Science writing practical theology for a general public, not a laboratory scientist, and religious practices are not usually judged by falsifiability. The problem is that he chose the vocabulary of science and of laws, which invites exactly this test.

Criticism 2: when it does not work, it is your fault

Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-sided (2009; Smile or Die in the UK) is the best-known attack on American positive thinking. She traces it from New Thought onward and describes the pink-ribbon culture around serious illness, where people who did not recover could be made to feel they had not been positive enough. Brian Dunning’s Skeptoid episode on The Secret (2008) calls victim-blaming its most common criticism, and psychologist Peter Strelan (2024) adds that glowing testimonials reflect an illusory correlation: we remember the hits, not the misses.

Does this fit Murphy? Largely. His book traces people’s circumstances back to their own thoughts, and the summary of his forgiveness chapter says it outright: illness, accidents and suffering are not sent by God or Life, we bring them on ourselves by our own negative thinking. Taken literally, that logic turns any misfortune into a personal failure of belief.

The fair answer: Murphy’s aim in that chapter is to lift guilt, not to add it. He insists that God, or Life, never punishes or condemns, and his tone is consoling, not accusing. But a reader in a hard place can draw the harshest conclusion from his premise, and the critics are right that this is the main risk of the whole tradition.

Criticism 3: claims about the body

Three of Murphy’s twenty chapters (4 to 6) are built around recovery from illness through belief and prayer, with stories from ancient shrines to his own era, and summaries of later chapters promise faster recovery to those who apply the method. Critics of The Secret object to this kind of claim: Dunning’s episode reports that doctors fault the book for presenting positive thinking as an adequate substitute for professional care in serious illness. That is an argument, not a measurement; we found no measurement of how often it leads to harm.

There is no fair answer that rescues these chapters. Murphy’s stories are anecdotes, without controls or follow-up, and the research on mental techniques discussed in this series measured things like motivation, mood or performance on a task, not recovery from illness.

Our line in this series is simple: none of these guides, and nothing in the app, claims to act on physical health. For any health concern, see a qualified professional.

Criticism 4: titles and biography

Title pages of the 1963 era present him as “D.R.S., D.D., Ph.D., LL.D.” and a fellow of the “Andhra Research University of India”. We found no record of where these degrees were earned; the Andhra body could not be identified as an accredited university, and the often-repeated doctorate in psychology from the University of Southern California rests on uncited sources. Other popular details, such as years spent with sages in India or ordination as a Jesuit priest, are also unverified.

The fair answer: book-jacket titles of this kind were common in the self-help and New Thought world of his time, and what is better documented, his ordination as a Divine Science minister and his decades leading the Divine Science church in Los Angeles, is enough to understand his authority. It was religious, not academic.

Criticism 5: picturing the goal can sap the energy to reach it

Murphy’s chapter 8 advises: “Imagine the fulfillment of your desire over and over again prior to sleep.” Gabriele Oettingen’s research suggests caution. In four prospective studies (2002), among them graduates looking for a job and students facing an exam, positive expectations predicted effort and success weeks, months or, for the job seekers, two years later, but positive fantasies about the outcome predicted the reverse. Those studies measured associations, not causes; the experiments came next. In four later experiments led by Heather Kappes (2011), positive fantasies produced less energy, measured by self-report and blood pressure, than questioning, negative or neutral ones.

The best-studied alternative is mental contrasting with implementation intentions (MCII): picture the outcome, then the obstacle, then an if-then plan for meeting it. A 2021 meta-analysis of 24 effects from 21 articles (15,907 participants) found a small-to-moderate effect on goal attainment compared with control conditions, g = 0.336, which the authors adjust to 0.242 for publication bias.

The fair answer: Murphy is not only a dreamer. His fear chapter quotes Emerson on doing the thing you fear, and he recommends rehearsing feared situations in the mind. The critique applies to the outcome-only parts of his method, not to all of it.

Criticism 6: the psychology has moved on

Murphy describes the subconscious as a single, obedient agent that accepts whatever the conscious mind decrees. Psychology today agrees that much of mental life runs without conscious control: John Bargh and Tanya Chartrand called it “the unbearable automaticity of being” (1999). But that is a set of many processes, not one servant awaiting orders.

Some of the research once offered as evidence of a powerful unconscious has also had a rough decade. A famous 1996 finding that reading words about old age made people walk more slowly did not replicate with infrared timing in 120 participants (Doyen et al., 2012). When 100 psychology studies were repeated in 2015, 36% of the replications found a significant result, against 97% of the originals. And in two experiments published in 2009 (Wood, Perunovic and Lee), people with low self-esteem who repeated “I’m a lovable person”, or dwelt on how it was true, felt worse than those who did not.

The fair answer: Murphy wrote in 1963 and cannot be blamed for not knowing 2015. The issue is for readers today, who should not treat his model of the mind as current science.

The criticisms, scored

Each criticism, how well it applies to Murphy’s own text, and what we do about it in this series.

What survives the criticism

Strip away the promises and some of Murphy’s practices sit close to things research has measured. Mental practice, rehearsing a skill in the mind, improves performance a little: a 2020 follow-up meta-analysis of 37 studies found a small positive effect (r = 0.131). In a 2021 lab study of 103 people, those who spent at least 15 seconds in the lightest stage of sleep (N1) during a short break were about three times as likely to find a hidden rule in a task afterwards (83% against 31% for those who stayed awake); who dozed off was observed, not assigned. In three experiments in 2003, people who listed what they were grateful for reported higher well-being on several, though not all, measures, most clearly positive mood. Deciding in advance when and where you will act, an if-then plan called an implementation intention, has a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals (d = 0.65 across 94 independent tests, 2006).

That is the version this series keeps: a short scene of something you do, pictured as you fall asleep, one feeling, then let go. In Dream Architect it is the quick flow (The moment, The feeling, Sleep on it), followed by the dark screen; the full flow adds a cue for tomorrow (Tomorrow’s sign). It promises no outcome, and nothing in it claims to act on anyone but you.

Questions people ask next