Conversations with Dr Maxwell Maltz Conversations with Dr Maxwell Maltz Overview of Creative Psycho-Cybernetics (Texts from video clips of the interview) M: I remember the story of Helen. She was 6 years of age. She was playing the piano. And unbeknown to her parents, she overheard them saying: "Oh, she was clumsy. She'll never play the piano well." So, thereafter, whenever Helen played the piano she played clumsily, to prove that what her parents said about her was true. When she grew up, when she was 13 or 14, she always played clumsily to prove to the world that what her parents said was true. Not only that, when she used her fingers to sew or to cook, she was clumsy, to prove to the world that what her parents said about her was true. I said to her: "My dear child, you can't be held responsible for the actions of other people, even if they be your parents. Your parents probably meant that you are clumsy at that time. You weren't thinking of your piano playing. They didn't meant to say that you are clumsy forever." She got the message. So she removed that little scar within her because a year later she played better. Q: Why is self-image so important? M: The self-image sets the boundaries of human a ccomplishment. It is the key to your personality, to your behaviour, to your character. It enlarges the scope of your self-image through confidence and you enlarge the scope of what you can do in this world to reach self-fulfilment. Most people have an idea that they are either born to succeed or born to fail, that they are happiness-prone or unhappiness-prone. That is not true!! Many years ago a beautiful young girl of 18 Anna Pining came to my office. She was in an auto accident and her left cheek was disfigured. I gave her back her beauty. She looked in the mirror and said, “I don’t see any difference.”I showed her the picture taken immediately after the accident, showing her scars. She looked at the pictures, leant into the mirror and finally said, “Well, I see the difference but I don’t feel any difference.”I probed into her background, into her past and ascertained that 2 years before the accident she was engaged to a young man who suddenly ran off and married someone else. That left her with hurt feeling, with feeling of depression and resentment that she was nobody. In other words, she had an inner scar l ong before she had a scar on her face. I said to her, “My dear child, you can’t be held responsible for the actions of someone else.”She got the message. A year la ter she married another man. It suddenly dawned on me then that as a plastic-surgeon it might be a wonderful idea if I can write a book for the 90 per cent of the people all the world over who have normal faces but some inner emotional scars. Write a book for them, to show them that they can be their own plastic surgeons and remove the scars within them that t hey put there. Remove it like …… And so I wrote the book, Psycho-Cybernetics. Q: What does psycho-cybern etics mean?
