Language: English

Title: Psychology.

Sub Title: Health! Happiness! Success! / Monthly Magazine of Applied Psychology / Important Illustrated Monthly Review of Practical and Applied Psychology.

Other titles: Self-Help Psychology: The Personal Magazine (name change, February 1939)

Publication Date: 1923—Publication Ended: 1940 Periodicity: Monthly, bimonthly

Location: New York, NY.

Editor: Henry Knight Miller; Dr. William A. McKeever and Wilfrid Lay, associate editors; Arthur Frank Payne, associate editor; Walter Whitley Hubbard; Eldorato Field.

Publisher: Psychology Publishing Company.

Succeeds: New Progress Magazine; Human Progress (both absorbed, December 1923)

Succeeded by: Sex Magazine/Sex (1926-1928); Dawn: Psychology of Eugenics, Art Love (1926-1928); The Square Deal (1926-1929); Psychology (UK) (1937-1970s)

Description: 1/1, April 1923-March 1940. $3.00-$4.00 a year, 25 cents a copy; 48-96 pp.

Henry Knight Miller (1891-1950) was a hellfire and damnation Brooklyn Methodist preacher who was notable for his unrelenting and vocal opposition to liquor, theater, dancing, card playing, and immorality generally. He resigned his pulpit in 1922 (supposedly because he found that his uplift/self-help nostrums were better received by his congregation than his doctrinal sermons), took to automobile sales and then in 1923 started this journal, the first of a series of self-help journals that taught “practical psychology,” the title of a 14-part series of structured mail-order lessons he published in 1924: Practical Psychology: A Course of Lessons Disclosing the Secret of Health, Efficiency, Happiness and Achievement.

Practical Psychology in all of its numerous New Thought permutations (applied psychology, mental culture, suggestive therapeutics, etc.) rested on two principles. First, that it is possible for the individual if properly instructed (usually by following the lessons offered by the applied psychologist) to modify the conscious mind and bring man's “butterfly mind” under control of the will and focus it on achieving carefully visualized goals. By itself, this first principle w as expounded in William Joseph Pelman's “Pelmanism,” Bernarr Macfadden's “physical and mental culture,” and the like. Second, that the conscious mind, once properly understood and under the individual' s control can through suggestion, creative visualization, repetitive affirmations, etc., access and impress its desires and goals on the underlying, subconscious Mind to affect external reality directly (“Thoughts are things” ) or to conform the individual's mind to be receptive to the benevolent universe's impulse to fulfill desires (“Like attracts Like” and “Dollars Want Me”). This was part of the “Outbreak of Psychology,” the belief in some version of psychology to address and remedy all the ills mankind was prey to, that swept the United States and to a lesser extent Great Britain and Europe in the 1920s the United States, producing a flood of New Thought Practical Psychology journals: Practical Psychology (William Abner Barnes, 1900); Price's Magazine o f Psychology (W.R. Price, 1900); Psychic Power through Practical Psychology (Barnes, 1902); Hill's Golden Rule (Napoleon Hill, 1921); Napoleon Hill' s Magazine (Hill, 1921); Modern Psychology (Christian Daa Larson, 1921); Brain-Power Magazine (Bernarr Macf adden, 1921); Applied Psychology (Albert Osborne Eaves, 1924); Practical Psychology (A. Myddleton, 1924); Super-Psychology (Will J. Erwood, 1927); Magnetic Leader (William D. Jones, 1901); Forces Mentales (René d'Héry, 1907); Psycho-Occult Di gest (Robert Sheerin, 1909); Live Forever (James Carden, 1922); Practical Psychologist (Anna Maud Hallam, 1925); Whisperer (Joseph Alexander Sadony,1932); Your Personality (Wilfred J. Funk, 1938), etc., etc.

Miller's transformation from Methodist minister to practical psychologist was due in part to his encounter with the teachings of Professor Emile Coué, who toured the United States in 1923. Coué's motto was: “ Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better.” Knight' s version of this was: "By faithful reiteration, build into your mind those qualities you desire to express in your life; thoughts of love, health, happiness, success and power. These thoughts are the raw material with which mind, the master builder, the God power within, constructs or reconstructs your life. Give the Builder evil material and the house he builds will be on sand. It will fall. Give the Builder good material and house not made with hands will withstand all the storms and ravages of time; f irm, strong, and unyielding as the Rock of Gibraltar." Miller published a series of lessons on his discoveries: Practical Psychology: A Course of Fourteen Lessons on Health, Efficiency, Happiness and Achievement (1924), the first of many such that he described collectively as “Life Triumphant.”

By late 1932 Miller's name disappeared from the masthead although the journal continued until about 1940, but he had already effectively moved on to other things. In September 1926 he started Sex Magazine/Sex (q.v.), a “tasteful and demure” selection of “art photos” that ran for several years and supplemented the coy photographs of frolicking damsels (and the occasional male) with motivational advice by, among others, a pioneering feminist who answered the question “ Why Do Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” With the same publisher (Dawn Publishing) he also started the next month Dawn: Psychology of Eugenics, Art Love, which mirrored this journal and carried Miller's article on “The Alchemy of Love.” He then started the Square Deal to oppose Prohibition, which he had once been noted for advocating, and then transformed it into the organ for his Square Deal political party before closi ng its doors in 1929. His final venture was a journal with the same name as this one, Psychology, published in Manchester, Britain, starting in 1937, which again mirrored this journal, with the substitution advertisements tailored to an English audience.

The journal carried regular articles by Miller himself on aspects of his psychological methods, interviews with Henry Ford and other examples men who had achieved success, articles by and excerpts from Ralph Waldo Trine, Orison Swett Marden, Edwin Markham , Frank Crane, Harry Gaze, C. Franklin Leavitt, and other figures advocating the benefits of suggestion and applied psychology, and articles on events like “The International Convention of Anna Maud Hallam Clubs of Practical Psychology.” Hallam published the Practical Psychologist in London and started her applied psychology clubs worldwide. The journal, like many other journals pursuing the same aims, carried innumerable advertisements for a breathtaking array of courses, devices, pil ls, gurus, secret societies mail-order diplomas, etc., all designed to cure all human lacks: the Pelman Institute; Judge Simmons' “Realization” lessons; Charles Atlas's body-building (”You Cannot Be a Weakling and Win”); “ The Brinkler School of Eating”; “The Ostrander School” (earn $10,000 a year); “Subconscious mind produces instant chemical changes in the human Organism” (offered by J.A. Eichwaldt of Oakland, California); “The Psycho-Phone” (” enables you to use your vast unconscious powers”); “Gain New Vigor with Ultra-Violet Rays”; “Master-Pathic Science Institute” (”Indorsed by our best citizens”); “Degnen's Radio-Active Solar Pad Appliance Company” of Los Angeles (“red blood corpuscles have increased by 250,000 within 48 hours”); “The Psychograph” (”X-ray Your Mind”); “The Fraternity of the Mystics of Hermes of Calgary, Canada; and, of course, AMORC. Oddly, it also carried “Develop Power at Home to Initiate, Persevere, Achieve,” which advertised the 450 correspondence courses offered by the University of Chicago.

In the early 1930s Miller was indicted in fraud indictments returned against Universal Oil and Gas Company in Oklahoma on allegati ons that he had touted the bogus stock-swindle by an article in Psychology (100,000 copies of which were printed and mailed to the gullible) in return for five percent of the proceeds. After those charges were dismissed, he was indicted again in Texas fo r another, similar scam, and again managed to get the charges dismissed. His last years before his death in 1950 seem to have been occupied with mail-order distribution of his lessons.

University of Akron; NYPL.