A Teacher
Genevieve Behrend
Practical visualization of the end
The transmission
Genevieve Behrend (1881–1960) holds a distinctive place in the New Thought lineage as the only personal student Thomas Troward is known to have formally accepted.
According to her own account she came into an inheritance and spent it to travel from North America to England and study directly under Troward, the movement’s most rigorous philosophical architect, for roughly two years in the early 1910s.
After his training she returned to establish her own schools of “Mental Science” in New York and Los Angeles and to teach, lecture, and write throughout the 1920s and beyond. Behrend’s specific contribution was as the great translator and practicalizer of Troward.
Troward’s Edinburgh and Dore lectures were philosophically dense and abstract; Behrend’s Your Invisible Power (1921) distilled his metaphysics into a clear, step-by-step visualization protocol that an ordinary reader could actually perform.
She established the working procedure—form a sharp mental picture of the desired end, dwell on it with feeling and gratitude, and act in expectation—that converted Troward’s “spiritual prototype” theory into a repeatable daily exercise.
In doing so she helped fix “visualization of the end result” as a core operational technique of the entire reality-creation tradition.
What they gave
Practicalizing Troward: Renders Troward’s abstract mental science into a concrete, performable visualization method for ordinary readers.
- Visualizing the end: Establishes the protocol of holding a sharp mental image of the completed desire, prefiguring “live in the end” manifestation practice.
- Image as organizer of matter: Codifies the claim that a clear, sustained mental picture physically organizes conditions toward its realization.
- Gratitude and expectancy: Integrates feeling-tone and confident expectation as activating components of the visualization.
In their words
The power within you which enables you to form a thought picture is the starting point of all there is.
Everything in the whole world has its beginning in mind and comes into existence in exactly the same manner from the hat on your head to the boots on your feet. All are projected thoughts, solidified.
Your mental picture is the force of attraction that evolves and combines the originating substance into specific shape.
The line they stand in
Taught by / Influenced by: Thomas Troward (her direct and only formal teacher); the broader New Thought / Mental Science tradition.
- Taught / Influenced: the practical visualization and “mental movie” technique; modern manifestation coaching’s emphasis on detailed end-state imagery.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- Your Invisible Power1921
- Attaining Your Heart's Desiren.d.