Emile Coué, deceptively naive

A small provincial French town of Nancy, 1890. The friendly, sympathetic 32-year-old pharmacist communicates daily with dozens of citizens who come to his pharmacy for help. Emile Coué knows each client, their life history and the course of their illness. This helps him understand why the same drug affects people so differently. The positive effect is somehow connected with the power of imagination of patients, Coue understands and begins to study the method of treatment with the help of suggestion, developed in the middle of the XNUMXth century by French doctors Ambroise-Auguste Liebault and Hippolyte Bernheim (Ambroise-Auguste Liebault, Ippolit Bernheim). Later, while practicing hypnotherapy, he notices that hypnosis does not have a therapeutic effect even on an easily suggestible person if the patient remains indifferent to what is happening to him (that is, does not involve self-hypnosis). Coue suggested that suggestion directed at oneself is a universal and very effective way of influencing the psyche, the unconscious of a person.

He confirmed his brilliant guess in an unexpected way. Émile Coué began to offer customers a new pain reliever, which was made only in his pharmacy. But, taking it, it was necessary to pronounce (without hesitation, easily) a simple phrase: “Every day it becomes easier for me …” The effect of the treatment with “Kue pills” was amazing – the patients stopped feeling pain, although they actually took glucose pills. So the pharmacist accidentally discovered what was later called the “placebo effect.” He was able to prove the real power of self-hypnosis: a person was healed by the confidence that he would definitely get better.

For almost 15 years, Emile Coué developed a method that he called “conscious autosuggestion.” Thanks to him, thousands of people were able to change the quality of their lives: self-hypnosis did not replace medical treatment, but significantly reduced suffering. “Every day I am getting better in every way” – this phrase should be pronounced easily, childishly, without the slightest effort, wrote Coué. – It is better to repeat it in an even tone, without expression. Gradually, this suggestion will become part of your unconscious and will begin to influence you, your actions, deeds, feelings ”(see“ About This ”). It is necessary to repeat this phrase (or any other positive attitude) at the moment when we are in a dream state of consciousness (between reality and sleep – in the evening, falling asleep, or in the morning, waking up), then our unconscious is most receptive to information, we tune in to a positive fret.

Coue’s discovery was so stunningly simple and effective that it was recognized and still used by doctors and psychotherapists from different countries. In Russia, the idea of ​​self-hypnosis therapy was developed by the neurologist and psychiatrist Vladimir Bekhterev.

And Emile Coue, until his death in 1926, lectured all over the world, repeating: “I am not a miracle worker and not a healer, I only show people that it is in their power to help themselves.”