Émile Coué

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.

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'', continuously and spontaneously suggest things to us; and, from this, significantly influence one's overall health and wellbeing.

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 at 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 efficiency 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. 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, Coué treated many patients in groups and free of charge.

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. 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." 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 nd has its effectwith an intensity proportional to the keenness of urattention". 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).

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; itheach capable, under certain conditions, of independent action".

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 ossessed ofcertain attributes and powers under some conditions, and certain other attributes and powers under other conditions".

The Coué Method: Development and origins

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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.