Émile Coué de la Châtaigneraie (; 26 February 1857 – 2 July 1926) was a French psychologist, pharmacist, and hypnotist who introduced a popular method of psychotherapy and self-improvement based on optimistic autosuggestion.R. Gregory, The Oxford Companion to the Mind (1987) p. 169See Yeates (2016a), (2016b), and (2016c).
Coué's method was based upon the view that, operating deep below our conscious awareness, a complex arrangement of 'ideas' (especially when those ideas are dominant),A view that is consistent with the views of the philosopher, Thomas Brown, M.D. and the hypnotism pioneer, surgeon James Braid. continuously and spontaneously suggest things to us and significantly influence one's overall health and wellbeing.Yeates, 2016, p. 4.
Life and career Coué's family, from the Brittany region of France and with origins in French nobility, had only modest means. A brilliant pupil in school, he initially intended to become an analytical chemist; however, because his father, who worked for the Eastern Railway Company, was in a precarious financial state, he eventually abandoned these studies. Coué then decided to become a pharmacist and graduated with a degree in pharmacology in 1876.
Working as an apothecary in Troyes from 1882 to 1910, Coué quickly discovered what later came to be known as the placebo effect. He became known for reassuring his clients by praising each remedy's efficacy and leaving a small positive notice with each given medication. In 1886 and 1887, he studied with Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault and Hippolyte Bernheim, two leading exponents of hypnotism, in Nancy.
In 1910, Coué sold his business and retired to Nancy, where he opened a clinic that continuously delivered some 40,000 treatment-units per annum (Baudouin, 1920, p. 14) to local, regional, and overseas patients over the next sixteen years.Baudouin, 1920; Brooks, 1922; Duckworth, 1922; Macnaghten, 1922; Kirk, 1922; Aram, 1923; Baird, 1923, Baudouin, 1923, Brooks & Charles, 1923; Orton, 1935, etc. In 1913, Coué and his wife founded The Lorraine Society of Applied Psychology (). His book Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion was published in England (1920), and in the United States (1922). Although Coué's teachings were, during his lifetime, more popular in Europe than in the United States, many Americans who adopted his ideas and methods, such as Elsie Lincoln Benedict, Maxwell Maltz, Napoleon Hill, Norman Vincent Peale, Robert H. Schuller, and W. Clement Stone, became famous in their own right by spreading his words.
Considered by Charles Baudouin to represent a second Nancy School,Baudouin continuously spoke of a "New Nancy School": e.g., Baudouin (1920), p.13.It is significant that Coué never adopted Baudouin's designation "New Nancy School"; and, moreover, according to Glueck (1923, p.112), who visited Coué at Nancy in 1922, Coué was "rather annoyed" with Baudouin's unauthorized characterization of his enterprise. Coué treated many patients in groups and free of charge.Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970) p. 842Whiteside, T., "Better and Better", The New Yorker, (Saturday, 16 May 1953), pp.91-115.
The Coué Method: General The Coué Method
The application of his mantra-like conscious autosuggestion, "Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better" () is called Couéism or the Coué method. Some American newspapers quoted it differently, "Day by day, in every way, I'm getting better and better." The Coué method centered on a routine repetition of this particular expression according to a specified ritual—preferably as many as twenty times a day, and especially at the beginning and at the end of each day.Marguerite Marshall. "Applied Auto-Suggestion of Famous French Healer Explained." Boston Post, January 4, 1923, p. 13. When asked whether or not he thought of himself as a healer, Coué often stated that "I have never cured anyone in my life. All I do is show people how they can cure themselves."quoted by Frederick L. Collins, "Three Minutes With a Headliner." (Kingston Jamaica) The Gleaner, February 9, 1923, p.6. Unlike a commonly held belief that a strong conscious will constitutes the best path to success, Coué maintained that curing some of our troubles requires a change in our unconscious thought, which can be achieved only by using our imagination.
Although stressing that he was not primarily a healer but one who taught others to heal themselves, Coué claimed to have effected organic changes through autosuggestion.
Self-suggestion Coué identified two types of self-suggestion: (i) the intentional, "reflective suggestion" made by deliberate and conscious effort, and (ii) the involuntary "spontaneous suggestion", that is a "natural phenomenon of our mental life … which takes place without conscious effort [and has its effect] with an intensity proportional to the keenness of [our] attention".Baudouin, 1920, pp. 33–34 Baudouin identified three different sources of spontaneous suggestion: A. Instances belonging to the representative domain (sensations, mental images, dreams, visions, memories, opinions, and all intellectual phenomena); B. Instances belonging to the affective domain (joy or sorrow, emotions, sentiments, tendencies, passions); C. Instances belonging to the active or motor domain (actions, volitions, desires, gestures, movements at the periphery or in the interior of the body, functional or organic modifications).Baudouin, 1920, p. 41
Two minds According to Yeates, Coué shared the theoretical position that Thomson Jay Hudson had expressed in his Law of Psychic Phenomena (1893): namely, that our "mental organization" was such that it seemed as if we had "two minds, each endowed with separate and distinct attributes and powers; [with] each capable, under certain conditions, of independent action".Yeates, 2016b, p. 42; Hudson, 1893, p. 25
Further, argued Hudson, it was entirely irrelevant, for explanatory purposes, whether we actually had "two distinct minds", whether we only seemed to be "endowed with a dual mental organization", or whether we actually had "one mind [possessed of] certain attributes and powers under some conditions, and certain other attributes and powers under other conditions".Hudson, 1893, pp. 25–26
The Coué Method: Development and origins
Coué noticed that in certain cases he could improve the efficacy of a given medicine by praising its effectiveness to the patient. He realized that those patients to whom he praised the medicine had a noticeable improvement when compared to patients to whom he said nothing. This began Coué's exploration of the use of hypnosis and the power of the imagination.
Coué's initial method for treating patients relied on hypnosis. He discovered that subjects could not be hypnotized against their will and, more importantly, that the effects of hypnosis waned when the subjects regained consciousness. He thus eventually turned to autosuggestion, which he describes as
Coué believed in the effects of medication. But he also believed that our mental state is able to affect and even amplify the action of these medications. Coué recommended that patients take medicines with the confidence that they would be completely cured very soon, and healing would be optimal. Conversely, he contended, patients who are skeptical of a medicine would find it least effective. By consciously using autosuggestion, he observed that his patients could cure themselves more efficiently by replacing their "thought of illness" with a new "thought of cure". According to Coué, repeating words or images enough times causes the subconscious to absorb them. The cures were the result of using imagination or "positive autosuggestion" to the exclusion of one's own willpower.
The Coué Method: Underlying principles Coué thus developed a method which relied on the principle that any idea exclusively occupying the mind turns into reality,"Everyone of our thoughts, good or bad, becomes concrete, materializes, and becomes in short a reality." (Coué, 1922b, p.37). although only to the extent that the idea is within the realm of possibility."If you persuade yourself that you can do a certain thing, provided this thing be possible, you will do it however difficult it may be. If on the contrary you imagine that you cannot do the simplest thing in the world, it is impossible for you to do it, and molehills become for you unscalable mountains." (Coué, 1922b, p.12). For instance, a person without hands will not be able to make them grow back. However, if a person firmly believes that his or her asthma is disappearing, then this may actually happen, as far as the body is actually able physically to overcome or control the illness. On the other hand, thinking negatively about the illness (e.g., "I am not feeling well") will encourage both mind and body to accept this thought. Likewise, when someone cannot remember a name, they probably will be unable to recall it as long as they hold onto this idea (e.g., "I can't remember") in their mind. Coué realised that it is better to focus on and imagine the desired, positive results (e.g., "I feel healthy and energetic," and "I can remember clearly").
Willpower Coué observed that the main obstacle to autosuggestion was willpower.For more on the history and various positions (including Coué's) on the concept of "willpower" see Kugelman (2013). For the method to work, the patient must refrain from making any independent judgment, meaning that he must not let his will impose its own views on positive ideas. Everything must thus be done to ensure that the positive "autosuggestive" idea is consciously accepted by the patient; otherwise, one may end up getting the opposite effect of what is desired.Brooks, C. H., "The practice of autosuggestion" (1922) p. 62
For example, when a student has forgotten an answer to a question in an exam, he likely will think something such as, "I have forgotten the answer". The more he tries to think of it, the more the answer becomes blurred and obscured. However, if this negative thought is replaced with a positive one ("No need to worry - it will come back to me"), the chances that the student will remember the answer will increase.
Coué noted that young children always applied his method perfectly, as they lacked the willpower that remained present among adults. When he instructed a child by saying, "Clasp your hands, and you can't open them," the child thus would immediately follow.
Self-conflict A patient's problems are likely to increase when his willpower and imagination (or mental ideas) are opposing each other, something Coué would refer to as "self-conflict". In the student's case, the will to succeed clearly is incompatible with his thought of being incapable of remembering his answers. As the conflict intensifies, so does the problem: the more the patient tries to sleep, the more he becomes awake. The more a patient tries to stop smoking, the more he smokes. The patient must thus abandon his willpower and instead put more focus on his imaginative power in order to succeed fully with his cure.
The Coué Method: Efficacy