Wayne Dyer

Wayne Walter Dyer (Detroit, 1940 – Maui County, Hawaii, 2015) was an American psychologist and self-help author, best known for Your Erroneous Zones (1976), one of the most successful books of its genre. His career moved from academic psychology in the 1970s to the spiritual thinking that dominated his work from the 1990s onward.

He grew up in a poor neighbourhood of Detroit and spent much of his childhood in an orphanage before being adopted by a loving but strict couple. He served in the United States Navy from 1958 to 1962 and earned his doctorate in counseling at Wayne State University. He worked as a high school guidance counselor and as a professor at St. John's University in New York, where his lectures on positive thinking drew many students. It was a literary agent who persuaded him to turn his ideas into a book. Your Erroneous Zones sold very widely, and Dyer left teaching to write, lecture and make programmes for the public broadcaster PBS.

His early books, shaped by Abraham Maslow and Albert Ellis, dealt with motivation, self-actualization and assertiveness in plain language that introduced many readers to ideas from cognitive psychology. From the 1990s his focus shifted towards spirituality, inspired by Swami Muktananda and the New Thought movement, and themes such as the "power of intention". Critics, Ellis among them, accused him of borrowing ideas without credit and of distorting some concepts from psychotherapy. From 2006 there were also complaints that his PBS programmes promoted a specific religious worldview.

His influence lives on mainly in self-help writing and in the popularisation of positive thinking. He died in 2015, aged 75, of chronic lymphocytic leukaemia, a disease diagnosed in 2009.