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What do you think of Wayne Dyer?

ExMinister

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What do you guys think of Wayne Dyer? I am having a hard time finding anything skeptical on him. In fact, the only material I found led me back to this forum, where I read a few of the older threads on him (some of the posts written by me!).

He's rich, has a fan base to surpass Sylvia Browne's, and has over the years gone from self-help to teaching material along the lines of The Secret.

What I'm trying to figure out is: Is Wayne Dyer in the category of deluded but sincere, or insincere and in it for the money? Any thoughts?

The reason I'm asking here is because not only do I want to know, but I have a few family members who are big fans of his.

I read Mercutio's cool description of muscle testing and why it would require double-blind testing. That was a great debunking.

Has James Randi ever written about him? I noticed a few people here had known him personally? If anyone has known him personally, what was he like?

I discovered two things that made me question his sincerity. First, he has told a story for years about being in grade school where he comes home to tell his mother (or whoever) that his teacher had called him a "scurvy elephant." The mother then calls and discovers the teacher had said "disturbing element." This always gets a big laugh. Here's the thing - A few years ago I bought a book by Dr. Bernie Siegel (apparently a friend of Dyer's) on raising children. About 2/3 of the way through Dr. Siegel's book I suddenly come across Dr. Siegel telling the exact same "scurvy elephant" story only claiming it had happened to him as a child. Yeah right. What are the odds that these two popular authors/speakers both had childhood experiences involving being called "scurvy elephants," etc. But, to be fair, it might not have been Dyer who stole the story.

Second, in Dyer's book "Wisdom of the Ages" he tells a story about how he, Wayne Dyer, was walking along the beach one day, picking up starfish (I think it was) that had washed ashore and throwing them back into the sea, and someone comes along and says you can't help all of them so what's the point, and Dyer claims to have said, "Well it mattered to that one." Well, having studied a bit of Eastern philosophy, I recognized that as a classic story that has been around long before Dyer. Perhaps it is creative license. But it seemed somewhat dishonest to me.

But that's it. I've otherwise come up blank.
 
He doesn't really seem to say anything, for all the talking he does. Some hackneyed stories from the vedas and the Tao te ching, a little chicken soup, etc. Yeah, I'd put him and Suze Ormann in the "mostly harmless" category.
 
I suppose that's true enough. I guess it could be worse than Dyer, though he also claims to be a fan of Esther and Jerry Hicks who "trance channel" Abraham, of Secret fame. So unfortunately one thing sort of leads to another... Then again, the more harmful of this group would have to be the Hicks.

Perhaps that he is "mostly harmless" is the reason there's so little skeptical material out there on him. Thanks for the input!
 
Psychotherapy is not exclusively part of medicine. It is taught in clinical psychology Ph.D. and Psy.D. programs. His degree is in Education and was trained to be, and worked as, a high school guidance counselor.
 
ExMinister said:
What do you guys think of Wayne Dyer? I am having a hard time finding anything skeptical on him. In fact, the only material I found led me back to this forum, where I read a few of the older threads on him (some of the posts written by me!).
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Yes, to leave a crumb trail for others, here are some of those threads:

Dr? Wayne Dyer, woo woo extraordinaire (June 7-12, 2004)

Wayne Dyer (March 21-23, 2007)

Has James Randi ever written about him?
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Yes. Randi has talked about him in SWIFT several times, mostly in reference to him appearing on PBS: on April 20, 2001 where he called him a "feel-good flack" (with a minor follow up on May 4, 2001), March 19, 2004 and July 2, 2004 where he called him a "huckster"

Robert M. Price talked about him on this Point of Inquiry podcast episode.

Those were the main references I found on the skeptic web. Most skeptics seem to hold Dyer in such disdain they don't bother to do any detailed debunking of his claims.
 
ExMinister said:
First, he has told a story for years about being in grade school where he comes home to tell his mother (or whoever) that his teacher had called him a "scurvy elephant." The mother then calls and discovers the teacher had said "disturbing element."
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For what it's worth, I have a rather vivid memory of my mother going to a PTA meeting and taking me with her since she did not have a baby-sitter that evening. This was ca. 1970 when I was in elementary school. A teacher addressed the group and at one point in her talk she told the "scurvy elephant\disturbing element" anecdote. She said that it was one of her students that had thought that she had called him a scurvy elephant.

I am not sure why that stuck with me but I have told the story to various people over the years. I would guess, based on my own experience, that the incident probably did not happen to either Wayne Dyer or Bernie Siegel or the teacher at the PTA meeting. My guess it that it is more likely an urban legend.

P.S. ExMinister, when I read the above quote it brought back a fond memory of my late mother. Thanks!
 
I think he's a "woo"... I used to read him in my woo days.... he's a "human potential guru" with strong woo (new age type) leanings.
 
krelnik said:
Those were the main references I found on the skeptic web. Most skeptics seem to hold Dyer in such disdain they don't bother to do any detailed debunking of his claims.
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Thanks for the links. Interesting.

Floyd312 said:
For what it's worth, I have a rather vivid memory of my mother going to a PTA meeting and taking me with her since she did not have a baby-sitter that evening. This was ca. 1970 when I was in elementary school. A teacher addressed the group and at one point in her talk she told the "scurvy elephant\disturbing element" anecdote. She said that it was one of her students that had thought that she had called him a scurvy elephant.

I am not sure why that stuck with me but I have told the story to various people over the years. I would guess, based on my own experience, that the incident probably did not happen to either Wayne Dyer or Bernie Siegel or the teacher at the PTA meeting. My guess it that it is more likely an urban legend.

P.S. ExMinister, when I read the above quote it brought back a fond memory of my late mother. Thanks!
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Oh, that's even funnier. Thanks for telling me that. You know, I just really think that type of thing is revealing, kind of like Sylvia Browne's history of telling us she has a Master's in English (she apparently doesn't) and doesn't smoke (she does) is revealing. If you're going to tell an urban legend/story to be funny then say it's just a story, sheesh. Anyone with any common sense should then be asking themselves if he is willing to mis-lead about one thing, why should anyone trust that the rest of what he says isn't just more of the same?

BTW - I'm sad to hear about your mother but glad it brought back a happy memory :)
 
Jeff Corey said:
No, not at all.

From your link, "Dyer holds a doctorate in educational counseling from Wayne State University ." That is not a Ph.D., rather an Ed. D., as I originally posted. Big difference in terms of science and research training.
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Also from this link (in the first sentence even)
About Dr. Wayne Dyer


Wayne W. Dyer, Ph.D., is an internationally renowned author and speaker in the field of self-development.
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:D

I think we are in agreement. He does not have a PhD.

However, he seems to promote himself as having one. ;)
 
Jeff Corey said:
From your link, "Dyer holds a doctorate in educational counseling from Wayne State University ." That is not a Ph.D., rather an Ed. D., as I originally posted. Big difference in terms of science and research training.
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From the back of one of his more recent books: "Wayne W. Dyer, Ph.D., is an internationally renowned author and speaker in the field of self-development.... Dyer holds a doctorate in educational counseling from Wayne State University and was an associate professor at St. John's University in New York."

On a book published in 1989 the back cover reads simply that he has a "doctorate in counseling psychology and is a psychotherapist."

Many of his previous books just claim he has a "doctorate in counseling psychology."
 
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I may have been misled by Wikipedia (Damn YOU, Wikipedia!) because more research shows that Wayne State's Education Department offers " Counseling (PhD, EdD, MA, MEd, Education Specialist Certificate).
So, not a Ph.D. as usually defined (research dissertation, etc.), perhaps.
Not a lot of Ph.D.s take jobs as high school guidance councelors.
 
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Jeff Corey said:
I may have been misled by Wikipedia (Damn YOU, Wikipedia!) because more research shows that Wayne State's Education Department offers " Counseling (PhD, EdD, MA, MEd, Education Specialist Certificate).
So, not a Ph.D. as usually defined (research dissertation, etc.), perhaps.
Not a lot of Ph.D.s take jobs as high school guidance councelors.
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No. I think we are correct about this. After a bid of Googling I cannot find a simple statement that he has a PhD in Educational Counseling. Since Wayne State offers both a PhD and an EdD, if I had a PhD, I would not be mentioning my EdD all the time -- most people would assume that an EdD is a lesser degree than a PhD. :D

IMHO & etc.
 
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Whatever. I think we can agree that he is a P.H.D. as in Piled Higher and Deeper. He might have a B.S. and M.S., too.
 
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Correction

ExMinister said:
What do you guys think of Wayne Dyer?

I discovered two things that made me question his sincerity. First, he has told a story for years about being in grade school where he comes home to tell his mother (or whoever) that his teacher had called him a "scurvy elephant." The mother then calls and discovers the teacher had said "disturbing element." This always gets a big laugh. Here's the thing - A few years ago I bought a book by Dr. Bernie Siegel (apparently a friend of Dyer's) on raising children. About 2/3 of the way through Dr. Siegel's book I suddenly come across Dr. Siegel telling the exact same "scurvy elephant" story only claiming it had happened to him as a child. Yeah right. What are the odds that these two popular authors/speakers both had childhood experiences involving being called "scurvy elephants," etc. But, to be fair, it might not have been Dyer who stole the story.
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I have the book that is referenced above and Wayne does not refer to the story as himself. His book reads "Tommy" comes home from school.
 
OJMo said:
I have the book that is referenced above and Wayne does not refer to the story as himself. His book reads "Tommy" comes home from school.
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Thanks, OJMo. That's interesting, too. I wasn't actually referencing a book. I'd heard him tell this story many times over the years on tapes and at lectures and could swear on my fallible-human-memory that the times I've heard it he has told it about himself - but since I can't at the moment point to a tape or specific lecture, I'll concede that I might be wrong. I don't have time to go back and listen to those tapes.

Thanks for pointing this out, though. It does make me curious now about whether or not he has always told the story in the third person. If I do have time to go back and check at some point, I'll post here for completeness' sake.
 
He is a big supporter of Sai Baba (the pedophile), Esther and Jerry Hicks (the Amway distributors turned charlatans), and Louise Hay (the woman who claims that you can heal your body of any ailment through her mental work). I consider him dangerous in his support of these people. He's kind of like a gateway drug into deeper, more deluded materials--especially since he actively supports many of them (esp Hay and Baba). Though I like to think he is just one of the deluded, in recent years he was diagnosed with leukemia. I suppose all his fine affirmations didn't do the tHe is a big supporter of Sai Baba (the guru pedophile), Esther and Jerry Hicks (the Amway distributors turned charlatans), and Louise Hay (the woman who claims that you can heal your body of any ailment through her mental work). I consider him dangerous in his support of these people. He's kind of like a gateway drug into deeper, more deluded materials--especially since he actively supports many of them (esp Hay and Baba). In recent years he was diagnosed with leukemia. I wonder what he thinks of having done all this spiritual work now. I suppose all his fine affirmations and positive thinking, particularly under the "You Can Heal Your Life" banner, didn't do the trick. I actually hope that he is a wake up call for many who are involved in New Age woo. Of course, most likely not, because they have rhetoric and mumbo jumbo to safeguard against such occurrences.
 
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Yes, he has changed his tune a little since the leukemia diagnosis, it seems.

I remember him saying things like, "I don't do Alzheimers. Alzheimers isn't part of my consciousness so I won't get Alzheimers."

Instead of saying, "I don't do leukemia," he's saying, "I am going to accept it and not fight it to give my body the best chance of healing." It has a nice sound to it, except that it is very benign compared to what he's said before.
 
I first learned of him when his book "Your Erroneous Zones" came out. I didn't read it because it seemed like just the latest pop psychology offering as well as using a cheap marketing ploy that sought to captialize on the popularity of the contemporary book titled "Your Erogenous Zones".

I know him now mostly from his appearances on US public TV broadcasing (PBS) fundraisers. What I see is that he is constantly repackaging himself to promote, I assume, his latest book. One time, he's dressed conventionally, spewing quantum pseudoscience similar to that of Deepak Chopra. The next time he's barefoot and dressed in black cotton, spewing the same platitudes but couching them in Buddhist buzzwords. They always include shots of his auditorium audience members, nodding in agreement at his banalities or gazing at him in slack-jawed adoration.

I see him as a mostly harmless self-promoter except when he ventures into medicine and science.

ferd
 
http://bolstablog.wordpress.com/2009/02/13/dyer-interview/

My 2002 Interview with Wayne Dyer
By Phil Bolsta

DYER: Well, when you walk into the presence of people who calibrate at the very highest energy levels, just being in their energy field, everything that is diseased or in disharmony is healed. When you bring a higher and a more loving energy to the presence of disorder or disharmony or disease, you are really bringing a healing energy. And that’s what healing is involved with: it’s no longer allowing yourself to wallow around in a process in which you tell yourself that you don’t have the capacity to be able to transcend whatever it is that’s bothering you or hurting you or killing you. And that you take total responsibility for what you have without any guilt, whether it’s cancer or arthritis or whatever it might be. You can say, ‘I take responsibility for it and I’m going to bring as much higher energy to it as I possibly can; I’m going to dissociate myself from identifying myself as this body that might have some things going on that are incompatible with perfect health.’ And as you detach from it and get outside of it, you have much more of an opportunity to bring love to it and divine energy and even miracles. And miracles can occur when you are in that state of detachment.
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I could say something nasty but I can't bring myself to do it. :(
 
It makes me wonder how many cancer patients died feeling guilty for not having raised their energy high enough to transcend their disease. :(

Dyer has leukemia now himself, and that's very sad. But he also got very rich saying things like the above, however well intentioned he might have been.
 
ExMinister said:
Yes, he has changed his tune a little since the leukemia diagnosis, it seems.

I remember him saying things like, "I don't do Alzheimers. Alzheimers isn't part of my consciousness so I won't get Alzheimers."

Instead of saying, "I don't do leukemia," he's saying, "I am going to accept it and not fight it to give my body the best chance of healing." It has a nice sound to it, except that it is very benign compared to what he's said before.
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Everyone knows he was diagnosed with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, yes?

link 1

link 2

CLL Treatment

Watch and Wait
Drug Treatment
Supportive Care
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I heard Dr. Christiane Northrup interviewing him after his diagnosis, talking about how the more enlightened you are, the more likely you are to get the really really bad diseases (paraphrasing, of course). That's the kind of mentality that gets passed around circles like these to justify disease in top gurus. Jane Roberts (Seth Materials) died of an auto-immune disease, Mary Baker Eddy (founder of Christian Science) had a major kidney stone problem, Lynn Grabhorn (author of Excuse Me Your Life is Waiting) killed herself, Helen Schucman (of A Course in Miracles) lived in a psychotic depression for the two years before her death. All sorts of interesting stories have been concocted about them to justify these peculiarities. For instance, Mary Baker Eddy blamed her problems on her enemies "mentally" attacking her. Seth followers acknowledge childhood beliefs that Roberts didn't clean up that led to her ultimate demise.

No matter what happens to gurus, there is always a mystical explanation that will let them off the hook.
 
Dyer and flakes of his ilk, really annoy me,especially when PBS dotes on types like him,instead of airing REALLY worthwhile programming.Or have they just run out of quality material?
 
Newbeak said:
Dyer and flakes of his ilk, really annoy me,especially when PBS dotes on types like him,instead of airing REALLY worthwhile programming.Or have they just run out of quality material?
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I'm with you on PBS. Seems like every time they go into pledge drive mode...they play the hell out of his self-help BS. I haven't watch much of it, but he uses alot of words to say a whole lot of nuthin'. Give me Nova, American Experience, and Antiques Roadshow instead.
 
Yes,Nova is my idea of quality programming.The problem is,there are a finite number of shows like that.What do you do when you have seen them all?
 
pakeha said:
It seems the good doctor has been healed of his leukemia by John of God.
http://spiritube.com/wayne-dyer/leukemia-john-of-gods-healings-on-wayne-video_02d6fa6cf.html
http://www.sugarshockblog.com/2012/...john-of-god-healing-and-wishes-fulfilled.html
http://www.skepdic.com/johnofgod.html
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Randi's view of John of God sums it up completely.I will keep an eye out for CNN announcing the passing of Dyer. The faith healing woo brings to mind a sad story I heard a few years ago.A woman working in my company,very nice person,was diagnosed with ovarian cancer,and rather than taking conventional treatment,opted for alternative medical treatment.She subsequently died from the cancer.
 
Thanks for the link.My library has it,and nobody is ahead of me in the request queue.
 
What is with PBS and their fascination with woo-peddlers of any stripe?

Andrew Weil, the guy who advised eating no fat of any kind (I've forgotten his name), Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, and the list goes on.

How can they have some of the greatest shows (Nova, Frontline, The American Experience, N.D.G. Tyson's show (National Geographic something or other) and then balance it out with Dr. Feelgood's Medicine Show? Oh, and don't get me started on the English sitcoms (as if speaking with an accent somehow elevates the material - hint: It doesn't).

I think it's all a moot point anyway, as our local affiliates are broadcasting "Alone in the Wilderness" on a continuous loop now it seems...
 
Bluto said:
What is with PBS and their fascination with woo-peddlers of any stripe?

Andrew Weil, the guy who advised eating no fat of any kind (I've forgotten his name), Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, and the list goes on.

How can they have some of the greatest shows (Nova, Frontline, The American Experience, N.D.G. Tyson's show (National Geographic something or other) and then balance it out with Dr. Feelgood's Medicine Show? Oh, and don't get me started on the English sitcoms (as if speaking with an accent somehow elevates the material - hint: It doesn't).

I think it's all a moot point anyway, as our local affiliates are broadcasting "Alone in the Wilderness" on a continuous loop now it seems...
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Are you thinking of low fat guy Dean Ornish? He has published articles in JAMA and The Lancet to back up claims of slowing and even reversing coronary disease,so he is legit.
Another one of the self-help guys who used to get a lot of exposure on PBS was Anthony Robbins,god,that guy really bugged me.
My theory,and correct me if I am wrong, is they have excellent nature/science shows and then populate the rest of their time slots with self help types because as a public tv broadcaster,they are big on political correctness,which is partly about pumping up everybody's "self-esteem",which in turn seems to go hand in glove with self help "experts",who are more than willing to get plenty of free publicity on PBS.
I don't follow sitcoms,at least not since Married With Children was on.Maybe PBS gets a special rate on Brit sitcoms.I have watched the odd episode of Faulty Towers,which isn't half bad.
 
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