مقدمه دوم

PREFACE

The Secret of Using This Book to Change Your Life

Discovery of the “self-image” represents a breakthrough in psychology and the field of creative personality.

The significance of the self-image has been recognized since the early 1950s. Yet there had been little written about it before Psycho-Cybernetics. Curiously enough, this is not because “self-image psychology” has not worked, but because it has worked so amazingly well. As one of my colleagues expressed it, “I am reluctant to publish my findings, especially for the lay public, because if I presented some of the case histories and described the rather amazing and spectacular improvements in personality, I would be accused of exaggerating, or trying to start a cult, or both.” I, too, felt the same sort of reluctance. Any book I might write on the subject would be sure to be regarded as somewhat unorthodox by some of my colleagues for several reasons. In the first place, it is somewhat unorthodox for a plastic surgeon to write a book on psychology. In the second place, it will probably be regarded in some quarters as even more unorthodox to go outside the tight little dogma—the “closed system” of the “science of psychology”—and seek answers concerning human behavior in the fields of physics, anatomy, and the new science of cybernetics.

My answer is that any good plastic surgeon is and must be a psychologist, whether he would have it so or not. When you change a man’s face you almost invariably change his future. Change his physical image and nearly always you change the man—his personality, his behavior—and sometimes even his basic talents and abilities.

Beauty Is More Than Skin Deep

A plastic surgeon does not simply alter a man’s face. He alters the man’s inner self. The incisions he makes are more than skin deep. They frequently cut deep into the psyche as well. I decided a long time ago that this is an awesome responsibility and that I owe it to my patients and to myself to know something about what I am doing. No responsible MD would attempt to perform extensive plastic surgery without specialized knowledge and training. Just so, I feel that if changing a man’s face is going to change the inner man as well, I have a responsibility to acquire specialized knowledge in that field, also.

Failures That Led to Success

In a previous book, written some 20 years ago (New Faces, New Futures), I published more or less a collection of case histories where plastic surgery, and particularly facial plastic surgery, had opened the door to a new life for many people. That book told of the amazing changes that often occur quite suddenly and dramatically in a person’s personality when you change his face. I was elated at my successes in this respect. But, like Sir Humphry Davy, I learned more from my failures than from my successes.

Some patients showed no change in personality after surgery. In most cases a person who had a conspicuously ugly face, or some “freakish” feature, corrected by surgery, experienced an almost immediate (usually within 21 days) rise in self-esteem, self-confidence. But in some cases, the patient continued to feel inadequate and experienced feelings of inferiority. In short, these “failures” continued to feel, act, and behave just as if they still had an ugly face.

This indicated to me that reconstruction of the physical image itself was not “the” real key to changes in personality. There was something else, which was usually influenced by facial surgery, but sometimes not. When this “something else” was reconstructed, the person himself changed. When this “something else” was not reconstructed, the person himself remained the same, although his physical features might be radically different.

The Face of Personality

It was as if personality itself had a “face.” This nonphysical “face of personality” seemed to be the real key to personality change. If it remained scarred, distorted, “ugly,” or inferior, the person himself acted out this role in his behavior regardless of the changes in physical appearance. If this “face of personality” could be reconstructed, if old emotional scars could be removed, then the person himself changed, even without facial plastic surgery. Once I began to explore this area, I found more and more phenomena that confirmed the fact that the “self-image,” the individual’s mental and spiritual concept or “picture” of himself, was the real key to personality and behavior. More about this in the first chapter.

Truth Is Where You Find It

I have always believed in going wherever it may be necessary to find truth, even if international boundaries must be crossed. When I decided to become a plastic surgeon years ago, German doctors were far ahead of the rest of the world in this field. So I went to Germany.

In my search for the “self-image,” I also had to cross boundaries, although invisible ones. Although the science of psychology acknowledged the self-image and its role in human behavior, psychology’s answer to the questions of how the self-image exerts its influence, how it creates a new personality, what happens inside the human nervous system when the self-image is changed, was “somehow.” I found most of my answers in the new science of cybernetics, which restored teleology as a respectable concept in science. It is rather strange that the new science of cybernetics grew out of the work of physicists and mathematicians rather than that of psychologists, especially when it is understood that cybernetics has to do with teleology—the goal-striving, goal-oriented behavior of mechanical systems. Cybernetics explains “what happens” and “what is necessary” in the purposeful behavior of machines. Psychology, with all its vaunted knowledge of the human psyche, had no satisfactory answer for such a simple, goal-oriented, purposeful situation as, for example, how it is possible for a human being to pick up a pen from a desk. But a physicist had an answer. The proponents of many psychological theories were somewhat comparable to men who speculated as to what was in outer space and on other planets, but could not tell what was in their own backyards.

The new science of cybernetics made possible an important breakthrough in psychology. I myself take no credit for the breakthrough, other than the recognition of it.

The fact that this breakthrough came from the work of physicists and mathematicians should not surprise us. Any breakthrough in science is likely to come from outside the system. “Experts” are the most thoroughly familiar with the developed knowledge inside the prescribed boundaries of a given science. Any new knowledge must usually come from the outside—not from “experts,” but from what someone has defined as an “inpert.” Pasteur was not an MD. The Wright brothers were not aeronautical engineers but bicycle mechanics. Einstein, properly speaking, was not a physicist but a mathematician. Yet his findings in mathematics completely turned upside down all the pet theories in physics. Madame Curie was not an MD but a physicist, yet she made important contributions to medical science.

How You Can Use This New Knowledge

In this book I have attempted not only to inform you of this new knowledge from the field of cybernetics but also to demonstrate how you can use it in your own life to achieve goals that are important to you.

General Principles

The self-image is the key to human personality and human behavior. Change the self-image and you change the personality and the behavior.

But more than this: The self-image sets the boundaries of individual accomplishment. It defines what you can and cannot do. Expand the self-image and you expand the “area of the possible.” The development of an adequate, realistic self-image will seem to imbue the individual with new capabilities, new talents, and literally turn failure into success.

Self-image psychology has not only been proven on its own merits, but it explains many phenomena that have long been known but not properly understood in the past. For example, there is today irrefutable clinical evidence in the fields of individual psychology, psychosomatic medicine, and industrial psychology that there are “success-type personalities” and “failure-type personalities,” “happiness-prone personalities” and “unhappiness-prone personalities,” “health-prone personalities” and “disease-prone personalities.” Self-image psychology throws new light on these, and many other observable facts of life. It throws new light on “the power of positive thinking” and, more importantly, explains why it “works” with some individuals and not with others. (“Positive thinking” does indeed “work” when it is consistent with the individual’s self-image. It literally cannot “work” when it is inconsistent with the self-image—until the self-image itself has been changed.) In order to understand self-image psychology, and use it in your own life, you need to know something of the mechanism it employs to accomplish its goal. There is an abundance of scientific evidence that shows that the human brain and nervous system operate purposefully in accordance with the known principles of cybernetics to accomplish goals of the individual. Insofar as function is concerned, the brain and nervous system constitute a marvelous and complex “goal-striving mechanism,” a sort of built-in automatic guidance system that works for you as a “success mechanism,” or against you as a “failure mechanism,” depending on how “YOU,” the operator, operate it and the goals you set for it.

It is also rather ironic that cybernetics, which began as a study of machines and mechanical principles, goes far to restore the dignity of man as a unique, creative being. Psychology, which began with the study of man’s psyche, or soul, almost ended by depriving man of his soul. The behaviorist, who understood neither the man nor his machine, and thereby confused the one with the other, told us that thought is merely the movement of electrons and consciousness merely a chemical action. “Will” and “purpose” were myths. Cybernetics, which began with the study of physical machines, makes no such mistake. The science of cybernetics does not tell us that man is a machine but that man has and uses a machine. Moreover, it tells us how that machine functions and how it can be used.

Experiencing Is the Secret

The self-image is changed, for better or worse, not by intellect alone, or by intellectual knowledge alone, but by “experiencing.” Wittingly or unwittingly you developed your self-image by your creative experiencing in the past. You can change it by the same method.

It is not the child who is taught about love but the child who has experienced love that grows into a healthy, happy, well-adjusted adult. Our present state of self-confidence and poise is the result of what we have experienced rather than what we have learned intellectually.

Self-image psychology also bridges the gap and resolves apparent conflicts between the various therapeutic methods used today. It furnishes a common denominator for direct and indirect counseling, clinical psychology, psychoanalysis, and even auto-suggestion. All in one way or another use creative experiencing to build a better self-image. Regardless of theories, this is what really happens, for example, in the “therapeutic situation” employed by the psychoanalytical school. The analyst never criticizes, disapproves, or moralizes, is never shocked, as the patient pours out his fears, his shames, his guilt-feelings, and his “bad thoughts.” For perhaps the first time in his life the patient experiences acceptance as a human being; he “feels” that his self has some worth and dignity, and he comes to accept himself, and to conceive of his “self” in new terms.

Science Discovers “Synthetic” Experience

Another discovery, this time in the field of experimental and clinical psychology, enables us to use “experiencing” as a direct and controlled method of changing the self-image. Actual, real-life experiences can be a hard and ruthless teacher. Throw a man in water over his head and the experience may teach him to swim. The same experience may cause another man to drown. The Army “makes a man” out of many young boys. But there is no doubting that Army experience also makes many psycho-neurotics. For centuries it has been recognized that “Nothing succeeds like success.” We learn to function successfully by experiencing success. Memories of past successes act as built-in “stored information,” which gives us self-confidence for the present task. But how can a person draw upon memories of past successful experiences when he has experienced only failure? His plight is somewhat comparable to the young man who cannot secure a job because he has no experience, and cannot acquire experience because he cannot get a job.

This dilemma was solved by another important discovery that, for all practical purposes, allows us to synthesize experience, to literally create experience and control it, in the laboratory of our minds. Both experimental and clinical psychology have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the human nervous system cannot tell the difference between an actual experience and an experience imagined vividly and in detail.

Although this may appear to be a rather extravagant statement, in this book we will examine some controlled laboratory experiments where this type of “synthetic” experience has been used in very practical ways to improve skill in dart throwing and shooting basketball goals. We will see it at work in the lives of individuals who have used it to improve their skill in public speaking, overcome fear of the dentist, develop social poise, develop self-confidence, sell more goods, become more proficient in chess—and in practically every other conceivable type of situation where “experience” is recognized to bring success. We will take a look at an amazing experiment in which two prominent psychologists arranged things so that neurotics could experience “normally,” and thereby cured them!

Perhaps most important of all, we will learn how chronically unhappy people have learned to enjoy life by “experiencing” happiness!

The Secret of Using This Book to Change Your Life

This book has been designed not merely to be read but to be experienced.

You can acquire information from reading a book. But to “experience” you must creatively respond to information. Acquiring information itself is passive. Experiencing is active. When you “experience,” something happens inside your nervous system and your midbrain. New “engrams” and “neural” patterns are recorded in the gray matter of your brain.

This book has been designed to force you literally to “experience.” Tailor-made, prefabricated case histories have been kept intentionally to a minimum. Instead, you are asked to furnish your own “case histories” by exercising imagination and memory.

I have not supplied summaries at the end of each chapter. Instead, you are asked to jot down the most important points that appeal to you as key points that should be remembered. You will digest the information in this book better if you do your own analysis and summaries of the chapters.

Finally, you will find throughout the book certain things to do and certain practice exercises that you are asked to perform. These exercises are simple and easy to perform, but they must be done regularly if you are to derive maximum benefit from them.

Reserve Judgment for 21 Days

Do not allow yourself to become discouraged if nothing seems to happen when you set about practicing the various techniques outlined in this book for changing your self-image. Instead, reserve judgment—and go on practicing—for a minimum period of 21 days.

It usually requires a minimum of about 21 days to effect any perceptible change in a mental image. Following plastic surgery it takes about 21 days for the average patient to get used to his new face. When an arm or leg is amputated, the “phantom limb” persists for about 21 days. People must live in a new house for about three weeks before it begins to “seem like home.” These and many other commonly observed phenomena tend to show that it requires a minimum of about 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to jell.

Therefore you will derive more benefit from this book if you will secure your own consent to reserve critical judgment for at least three weeks. During this time, do not be continually looking over your shoulder, so to speak, or trying to measure your progress. During these 21 days do not argue intellectually with the ideas presented, do not debate with yourself as to whether they will work or not. Perform the exercises, even if they seem impractical to you. Persist in playing your new role, in thinking of yourself in new terms, even if you seem to yourself to be somewhat hypocritical in doing so, and even if the new self-image feels a little uncomfortable or “unnatural.” You can neither prove nor disprove the ideas and concepts described in this book with intellectual argument, or simply by talking about them. You can prove them to yourself by doing them and judging results for yourself. I am only asking that you reserve critical judgment and analytical argument for 21 days so that you will give yourself a fair chance to prove or disprove their validity in your own life.

The building of an adequate self-image is something that should continue throughout a lifetime. Admittedly we cannot accomplish a lifetime of growth in three weeks’ time. But you can experience improvement within three weeks’ time—and sometimes the improvement is quite dramatic.

What Is Success?

Since I use the words “success” and “successful” throughout this book, I think it is important at the outset to define those terms.

As I use these terms, “success” has nothing to do with prestige symbols, but with creative accomplishment. Rightly speaking, no man should attempt to be a “success,” but every man can and should attempt to be “successful.” Trying to be a “success” in terms of acquiring prestige symbols and wearing certain badges leads to neuroticism, and frustration and unhappiness. Striving to be “successful” brings not only material success, but satisfaction, fulfillment, and happiness.

Noah Webster defined success as “the satisfactory accomplishment of a goal sought for.” Creative striving for a goal that is important to you as a result of your own deep-felt needs, aspirations, and talents (and not the symbols which the “Joneses” expect you to display) brings happiness as well as success because you will be functioning as you were meant to function. Man is by nature a goal-striving being. And because man is “built that way,” he is not happy unless he is functioning as he was made to function—as a goal striver. Thus true success and true happiness not only go together but each enhances the other.