Joseph Murphy and New Thought: where his ideas come from

What is New Thought?

The best early description comes from an outsider. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), the psychologist William James described a current that had “recently poured over America”. He used a label of his own for it, noting that “New Thought” was “another of the names by which it calls itself”, and called it “a deliberately optimistic scheme of life, with both a speculative and a practical side.”

James listed its sources: the four Gospels, Emerson and New England transcendentalism, Berkeley’s idealism, spiritualism, the popular science of evolution, and a strain of Hinduism. Its most characteristic feature, he wrote, was “an inspiration much more direct”: its leaders’ “intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes”, with “a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry”.

Historians have since added who carried it. The publisher’s description of Beryl Satter’s study of the years 1875–1920 calls New Thought “an enormously popular late nineteenth-century spiritual movement led largely by and for women.” Murphy, born in 1898, arrived in the second or third generation of that movement.

The family tree, from Quimby to Murphy

Each link below rests on the sources listed at the end. Where sources disagree, the table says so; several claims about Murphy’s own training come from a single source and are marked as such.

Who Murphy cites, and who he never names

We searched the 1963 text of The Power of Your Subconscious Mind (a transcription of about 69,000 words) for names on 20 October 2026. The counts are approximate, since the transcription comes from scanned pages, but the pattern is clear. The result is a portrait of Murphy’s self-presentation: the mesmerists, hypnotists and psychologists of the 19th century recur throughout; his own church and the founders of his movement are absent. The movement shows only at the edges, never under its name: he mentions his own “science of mind lectures” in New York in 1962, cites a 1917 article from Nautilus, a New Thought magazine, names a minister of the Unity School of Christianity, a movement founded by two of Hopkins’s students, and once lists a “religious science practitioner”, a title used in Holmes’s church, alongside psychologists.

Three small details are worth knowing when you read the book. Murphy calls Quimby “the first psychoanalyst”, and dates his use of the argumentative method “from 1849 to 1869”, though Quimby died in January 1866. He calls Coué a psychologist; Coué (1857–1926) was a pharmacist in Troyes before he opened his practice in Nancy in 1910. And he has Charles Baudouin teaching in 1910 at a “Rousseau Institute in France”; Baudouin (1893–1963) taught at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute in Geneva, and 1910 is the year his own book gives for the start of the New Nancy School.

What Murphy took from New Thought, and what he added

From New Thought he took the core: one divine Mind (he calls it Infinite Intelligence), the idea that belief shapes experience, prayer as a mental technique rather than a request, and a firm optimism. Chapter 5 even calls prayer “scientific prayer”, a phrase that sits easily with the vocabulary of Holmes’s Science of Mind.

From suggestion and hypnotism he took the mechanism. In chapter 2, his definitions of the “objective” and “subjective” mind, his other names for the conscious and subconscious mind, closely paraphrase the definitions in Thomson Jay Hudson’s The Law of Psychic Phenomena (1893), with several sentences nearly verbatim. One change is telling: where Hudson places the subjective mind at its best in a hypnotised subject in the state of somnambulism, Murphy places it in a “sleepy, drowsy state”. Hudson is not named in that passage; Murphy cites him once elsewhere, on stigmata produced by suggestion. From Coué and Baudouin he took the repeated phrase and the drowsy state.

His own contribution was the packaging: plain chapters, numbered summaries, one technique per heading, and stories from his ministry, published in 1963 by a mainstream house, Prentice-Hall, for readers who would never enter a Divine Science church. The Secret (2006) later drew on the same New Thought stream, with different claims; our guide Joseph Murphy vs The Secret compares the two.

Why the roots matter for a reader today

Read as psychology, Murphy’s “laws of mind” look like testable claims. Tested, his explanations fare worst and his practices best: our guide Joseph Murphy’s ideas vs the research finds no support for an inner mind that carries out orders, while three of his practices have research behind them: sleeping on a problem you have already worked on (one study), building a habit by repetition, and gratitude, with a small effect. Read as the work of a New Thought minister, they are statements of faith dressed in the scientific vocabulary of his day: what the subtitle of Donald Meyer’s The Positive Thinkers calls “popular religious psychology”, part of the “metaphysical religion” whose American history Catherine Albanese has written.

Seeing that does not mean dismissing him. It lets you separate the faith, which is his and yours to accept or not, from the practices, which can be tested on their own: picturing a scene, repeating a line, giving thanks, going to sleep on a question.

Dream Architect keeps only the practices. Its night ritual, “Picture your dream”, asks for a moment in the present tense and the feeling it brings and, in the Full flow, a body sensation, a sign for tomorrow and one small step; the next morning it asks whether anything reminded you of the moment. It makes no claim about Infinite Intelligence or about what the scene will bring. These steps come from the app’s content on 20 October 2026.

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