Many readers will have seen Sarah Vine’s account yesterday of submitting herself to a six-week diet and exercise regime. Poor, deluded Sarah: if only she had read The Secret — or even easier, watched the DVD — she wouldn’t have had to bother with all that huffing and puffing and self-denial. No! All she needed to do was think herself into slimness and never, ever look at fat people.

“If you see people who are overweight,” instructs Rhonda Byrne, author of The Secret, “do not observe them, but immediately switch your mind to the picture of you in your perfect body and feel it.” Byrne herself — once porky, miserable and broke — is now very slim and very rich, thanks to following her own precepts and persuading several million Americans to follow them by buying her book. She, too, once thought that eating made her fat but realised: “Food is not responsible for putting on weight. It is your thought that food is responsible . . . that has food put on weight.” Of course! Silly, silly us: it’s not wine and pizza that piles on the pounds but wrong thinking.

The Secret has swept America — 3.75 million copies of the book are in print and 2 million have been sold. It is in its fourth week at the top of every major bestseller list in the US, is number 2 on Amazon.com and is even number 9 on Amazon.co.uk. It has sold 1.5 million DVDs and been given a ringing endorsement from Oprah Winfrey — “It’s making its way around the world and the buzz keeps building. This is life changing”. And now it’s coming to a bookstore near you. Very soon we Brits will learn the importance of the laws of attraction: whatever is going on in your mind is an invitation for it to happen. Worry that you’ll get a parking ticket and, sure enough, that pesky little slip will be tucked under your windscreen wiper. Wish you had a trophy girlfriend? Visualise her hard enough and, hey, there she is beside you, a vision of babeness, hanging on your every word.

Mind you, you have to act as if you really, really believe. One woman in Byrne’s book wanted to find a husband, visualised him like mad, but weeks went by and he didn’t turn up. Then it struck her that she’d been parking her car in the middle of her garage, leaving no room for his car. Dur! She began parking to one side and within days Mr Right strolled into her life.

The Secret revealed itself to Byrne, an Australian TV producer and divorced mother in her fifties, at a low point in her business and personal life. Her daughter gave her a book, The Science of Getting Rich, which preached the practice of allowing your feelings to get you what you wanted. Very, very excited, Byrne began further reading: “I couldn’t believe all the people who knew The Secret,” she writes. “Plato, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Einstein.”

Then she consulted “living masters”, gurus of transformational thinking, most of them American, many living in California. Then she made a film tracing the evolution of the secret from ancient times — medieval manuscripts, dungeons, auks and sages combined with Byrne’s Melbourne-accented voiceover to produce a kind of Da Vinci Code meets Neighbours vibe — and on to motivational mantras: “Ask, believe, receive”, “Visualise a parking space”, “Expect a cheque”, “When you focus on the things you want with all of your intention, then the law of attraction will give you exactly what you want, every time”.

Byrne’s attempts to sell her film to Australian TV networks failed, but she found a web company to distribute the video on the internet where it was picked up by a New Age publisher, Beyond Words. The book — tiny, printed on parchment-style paper, sprinkled with blobby red seals and medieval iconography — hit the shops last November and was featured first by Ellen DeGeneres on her TV show and then by Oprah who said that she had lived her whole life according to the laws of attraction “without even knowing it!”

This goes to the nub of the matter. The Secret, as Newsweek notes, is no secret at all but a repackaged hybrid of the messages that motivational writers have been selling for years, presented with a stroke of marketing genius. “It was an incredibly savvy move to call it The Secret,” said Donavin Bennes, a buyer for Borders Books. “We all want to be in on a secret, but to present it as the secret, that was brilliant.” In fact, there is something very Russian doll about tracts like this one: man decides to make $100,000 and visualises it every day using a technique taught to him by a motivational mentor; man makes his $100,000 and then $1 million by writing books imparting his secret to others so that they, too, can visualise their way to success. Such is the hunger for his inspirational stories that before he knows it, he has become a corporation, the Chicken Soup for the Soul Corporation.

The creator of the Chicken Soup series, Jack Canfield, is probably the best known of the contributors to Byrne’s book. Didn’t he think that her propositions were, well, just a bit facile — ask and thou shalt receive without any apparent input beyond positive thinking? “Well now,” he said easily. “Some things take longer than others. You can visualise yourself becoming a doctor but, sure, you have to go to medical school, do the work. Other things, like getting a parking space, well that’s quicker.” And what about the notion that you can prevent cancer by thinking yourself well? Thinking was part of it, he said, but you also had to take responsibility for lifestyle choices like reducing your protein and acid intake.

Moving swiftly on, I wondered what he thought of Byrne’s theory that people get caught up in catastrophes because they are on the same frequency as the event. Surely he couldn’t go along with the frankly obscene idea that victims of Rwandan genocide or workers in the World Trade Center on 9/11 were there because of faulty thinking? Canfield conceded that while individuals might not be directly blamed for their fate on 9/11, there was a cultural attitude — about war in Iraq, poverty in the Middle East, insensitivity to Muslim beliefs — which could be seen as collectively responsible for what happened. On an individual level, he went on, if a person is tuned in to himself and the world then he will avoid disaster. “I’m at a point now that I believe if there’s an earthquake in California then I will be speaking at a conference in Illinois; I’m totally convinced that I’m never going to be mugged. Humans put out a frequency: that is incontrovertible.”

Did Canfield and the other contributors to The Secret get a share of the profits? “None of the teachers got paid anything,” he said. “We all did it out of love. But Rhonda has been extremely generous. She donated $155,000 to the Transformational Leadership Council which I founded, and has given away over a million DVDs to correctional centres, schools in Africa and so on.” Rhonda, he said, was like a blissful child — “just wanting to bring light and love to the world.”

Byrne has been oddly reticent about publicity, doing little beyond an appearance on the first of two Oprah shows about the phenomenon of The Secret. Her family in Australia has been told not to talk to reporters, though her mother did say: “Rhonda just wants to bring happiness to everybody.”

Fair enough, but the emphasis in The Secret is, as Newsweek pointed out, almost entirely on the getting of things: “Money, houses, cars, vacations, followed by health and relationships, with the rest of humanity a very distant sixth.” There is no room in la-la land for duty or resilience or sadness, not even a nod to the virtues of stoicism. Will The Secret wash in Britain where a belief in the individual’s inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is perhaps not quite so entrenched as in the US? “Nobody ever went broke overestimating the desperate unhappiness of the American public,” observed Sara Nelson, the editor of Publishers Weekly. Is that also true here, and anyway are we, a more sceptical nation, quite as ready to be gulled by this piece of prettily packaged psychobabble?

Possibly, says Phillip Hodson, a therapist; we will have to see. “The problem is that in Britain we are a secular society and the price of secularism is that we are not able to contemplate disintegration with equanimity. We are now ready to address the question of our alienation but we don’t really want the answers to hurt. This is human and yet to find a real sense of meaning requires us to meet the hidden self of whom we are ashamed, not to perfect our defences or go on repeating worldly mistakes.”

So we reach out for a painless quick fix, one we can embrace with passionate intensity rather than own up to “a lack of all conviction”, as Yeats said the best of us could? “Yes,” says Hodson. “People are hungry for the illusion of control in a world which seems out of control, plagued with threats of bird flu and terrorism and stockmarket crashes. But self-help omnipotence is a false god: if you think everything is an act of will then you are in the firing line — there are very few opt-outs.”

Rhonda Byrne says that stories of “miracles” have flooded in from people who have seen her film: healing from pain and depression, cheating death, accounts of The Secret being used “to bring about large sums of money and unexpected cheques in the mail. People have used it to manifest their perfect homes, life partners, cars, jobs and pro-motions . . . I have shared all of the easy paths, tips and short cuts that I have learnt so that you can live the life of your dreams.”

Phillip Hodson smiles: “Happiness in books like this is a kind of exaltation, bordering on ecstasy, but real happiness is a more quotidian, more sustainable mix of things. I am happy because you rang me and I like talking to you; I’m in reasonable health, nobody is trying to kill me, I enjoy my work. Sure, my attitude helps, but that’s no secret.”

The Secret is published by Simon & Schuster, £12

The psychologist’s verdict: a self-help guide for the simple-minded or deluded

The Secret is a toxic stew of psychobabble leftovers served up with lavish quotations from 29 “gurus” from psychology, religion, mysticism and marketing. There is a heavy reliance on quick-fix, already simplistic methods from self-help manuals, made even easier for the simple-minded or deluded. Wisdom vies with cleverness, banal truth runs alongside barefaced delusion; a pottage of self-contradictory homilies for the credulous and childish.

As a book and marketing exercise, The Secret is self-reflexive: write a book quoting other people who have written books about how, if you write a book or advise others about becoming rich, you will do so. It’s like pyramid selling, hocuspocus.

Marie Diamond, a “feng shui consultant, teacher and speaker”, tells of her advice to a film producer who painted. For his walls he had daubed beautiful naked women turning away from him. On Diamond’s advice, he hung up paintings of himself with three women; then, when it was time to settle down, of him with a life partner. In painting his wishes, lo and behold, they came about.

The psychological process on which this draws is called “magical thinking”. You have only to wish for something for it to come about. This may be accompanied by rituals (eg, painting), acts which could not possibly achieve the desired goals according to the laws of physics, chemistry or biology, but which are instrumental as part of the wish-fulfilment. Such thinking or rituals are normal in small children, in peoples of preindustrial societies and among the mad. The only interesting question is why this book has been taken seriously by so many adult Americans and now Britons?

The answer is that all of us started life as magical thinkers and still retain elements of it. When my daughter was 3, we spent hours flying around the country in an imaginary car. Now 5, she believes that mince pies for the reindeer and a glass of port for Santa by the fireplace will ensure a full stocking the next morning. In preindustrial societies, magical thinking was institutionalised. Among the Azande of the Sudan, for example, there is a belief that the weather can be controlled by carving lines in the sand, cutting the throat of a chicken and observing in which direction the blood flows. In essence, there is nothing to distinguish my daughter connecting gifts for Santa with her full stocking from the Azande’s notions that the bloodflow and the weather are related.

The same can be true in mad thinking. A student in a house where I was living sat for hours in the bath cleaning his hands in the belief that it would protect him from thought-controlling radiowaves that were being transmitted from the university.

Magical thinking is part of everyone’s adult psyche, albeit largely unconscious. Before a job interview, even the most rational may tap their shoe or ear three times for luck. That magical thinking is ubiquitous and has profound roots, which helps to explain how The Secret works. However, it is surely a sign of our times that so many have been taken in.

It seems improbable that it would have been successful in the 1950s. In the chapter on money the reader is exhorted not to worry about debt. In the 1950s, the culture was strongly against spending more than you earned. The best way to learn the secret of The Secret is to remember that you are no longer a child and recognise it as the exercise in credulity that it is.

OLIVER JAMES

Oliver James is the author of Affluenza: How to Be Successful and Stay Sane. His updated book They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life is now on sale.

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