After psychiatrist Eric Berne was rejected by the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, he introduced a technique he called “transactional analysis” to a lay audience in Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships (1964). Suddenly, ordinary people were analyzing their everyday exchanges according to whether they were “transacting” from an adult state (rational, objective), parent state (authoritative, supportive, judgmental), or child state (needy, emotional, creative. Like psychoanalysis, TA was insight therapy, but grounded in the here and now, not in early toilet training.
At a time when medical science had severed the mind from the body, psychotherapist Alexander Lowen wrote such books as The Betrayal of the Body (1967), in which he claimed that physical symptoms were often the manifestation of psychological problems, which could be cured through body manipulations designed to produce emotional release. He called his therapy “bioenergetics,” based on the work of Wilhelm Reich, who had been expelled by Freud from the International Psychoanalytic Association three decades earlier. Psychotherapist Arthur Janov also believed neuroses, along with their physical manifestations, were caused by emotional repression. In The Primal Scream (1970), he advocated release through the reliving in therapy of those traumatic childhood scenes that caused the emotional shutdown.
To understand the dynamism of these self-help books, it’s necessary to examine the times they addressed. North America, post–World War II, was an ultraconservative, authority-based culture in which middle-class males were expected to struggle up the corporate ladder while their stay-at-home wives tended their children in their suburban ranch houses. Just as William H. Whyte, author of The Organization Man (1956), and Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique (1963), exposed the collective frustrations hidden under the smiling surface of North American life, Berne, Lowen, and Janov challenged individuals to look inward for empowerment, rather than upward or outward, spearheading what became known as the Human Potential Movement.
The 1972 surprise bestseller Roots of Coincidence, in which Arthur Koestler explored one of Carl Jung’s more intriguing theories, opened the window to a type of “magical” thinking quite out of keeping with the times. A quirky and original thinker, Jung had broken with Freud when his mentor’s views proved too restrictive for his own protean mind. Though Jung didn’t teach the law of attraction, he came close with his theory of synchronicity. This he defined as meaningful coincidences that cluster around emotionally charged events, often becoming predictors of the future, as if a person’s consciousness were able to influence the material world in defiance of the physics of cause and effect.
For example, in the spring of 1978 I was being driven to a party in Mississauga by a filmmaker and his wife, whom I had just met. Also present in the car was a healer from New Delhi, whom they’d imported to minister to a friend who was dying of cancer. The very next day, I received a Bell Canada bill charging me for a phone call to New Delhi, which I most certainly hadn’t made. An absurd thought struck me: I’ll bet this is the call the filmmaker made to invite the healer! When I looked up the filmmaker’s phone number, I found it was the same as mine except for the last digit — a zero instead of a nine. Further investigation confirmed that the call on my bill was the one the filmmaker had made to arrange the healer’s visit. Given the populations of New Delhi and Toronto, what were the odds that computerized equipment would reconnect four people who’d shared a car the night before? Even more intriguing, if this were an example of synchronicity, what did it mean?
Though I barely knew the dying woman, I was a close friend of her husband’s first wife. Again by coincidence, the summoning call had been made to the Canadian ambassador’s New Delhi residence, where the first wife was a guest, and she was the one who answered the phone and delivered the message to the healer. As the result of an explosive love triangle twenty years previous, the husband and his two wives were still locked in acrimony. Though I wasn’t yet aware of it, for a brief period before the second wife’s death I would function as a go-between for the three feuding parties. Metaphorically, I would become their switchboard; therefore, according to a Jungian interpretation, the short-circuiting of the bill through me by Bell Canada was an “acausal” event that brought into consciousness a connection already present in the unconscious and that would be played out in the future. The synchronicities were generated by the members of the triangle who were undergoing a dynamic psychological shift because of the fatal illness of one of them, drawing me in as an incidental player. In Jung’s view, to ascribe such a happening to mere chance would violate its most striking feature — its meaning.
During the 1980s and ’90s, “self-help” morphed into something more aptly described as “help-yourself-to.” Instead of self-improvement through inner quest, the new theme was entitlement, with books by money men as the hot sellers. Not surprisingly, this was when some Secret contributors, such as Lee Brower, founder of the consulting firm Empowered Wealth, and Bob Proctor, author of You Were Born Rich, laid the foundations of empire. A high school dropout from northern Ontario, Proctor considered himself a loser until age twenty-six, when he took an office cleaning business from startup to international in one year.
About that same time, heavenly assistance came back into vogue — not Norman Vincent Peale’s one-God-fits-all, but designer angels offering specialized services. According to Publishers Weekly, at one time during 1993 five of the ten bestselling paperbacks were about angels, and in a Time magazine poll, 69 percent of American adults said they believed in them. In a return to basics, spiritualist Neale Donald Walsch, a contributor to The Secret, began his Conversations with God series in 1996, breaking previous bestseller records. Another contributor, Jack Canfield, proved himself capable of gripping both sides of the literary wishbone when he followed up his success primer, The Aladdin Factor: How to Ask For and Get Everything You Want, with the 1993 launch of his soul food franchise. Each of the hundred-odd titles dishes up feel-good anecdotes to ever more specific audiences: Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover’s Soul, Chicken Soup for the Golfer’s Soul, Chicken Soup for the Prisoner’s Soul.
In The Secret, Rhonda Byrne condenses a half-century of self-help promises into one slim volume. Packaged like a sacred text, in faux parchment with a simulated wax seal, it hints at the wisdom of the ages while sounding more like a late-night infomercial: A winning lottery number? A cure for cancer? A zero dress size? A date with George Clooney? Instead of FedEx angels to do the packing and shipping, Byrne and her cronies employ a platoon of genies. As wealth coach James Ray explains, “The Genie always says one thing: ‘Your wish is my command!’” Confirms Byrne: “You are the Master of the Universe and the Genie is there to serve you.” Joe Vitale, a hypnotherapist, ordained minister, and qigong healer, adds, “It’s like having the Universe as your catalogue.” But Lisa Nichols, ceo of Motivating the Masses, cautions, “You must have complete and utter faith.”
If you do, Byrne promises: “The Universe must deliver.” As for product endorsement, Oprah’s trademark ebullience was just the start. Byrne also cites Pythagoras, Plato, Bacon, da Vinci, Newton, Hugo, Beethoven, Lincoln, Emerson, Einstein. As she confidently explains: “Poets such as William Shakespeare, Robert Browning and William Blake delivered it in their poetry.” Proctor confirms: “Wise people have always known this. You can go right back to the Babylonians.” Byrne again: “Through their understanding and application of the laws of the Universe they became one of the wealthiest races in history.” And now Proctor closes the deal: “Why do you think that 1 percent of the population earns around 96 percent of all the money that’s being earned? . . . They understand The Secret.”
