The power of positive thinking (3).

One of the most remarkable proponents of this theory was Emile Coué, a Frenchman who developed the practice of induced-autosuggestion in the treatment of disease. Over the course of 30 years, he cured thousands of people through autosuggestion.

We recently came across a book by C. Harry Brooks entitled The Practice Of Autosuggestion: By The Method Of Emile Coué. The book was published in 1922 and is dedicated to “all in conflict with their own imperfections”.

Coué’s most famous advice was to repeat the following phrase multiple times every morning and every night: “Day by day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.”

Brooks visited Coué’s clinic in Nancy, France in 1921 and reported extensively on the healing that occurred there:

The next patient was an excitable, overworked woman of the artisan class. When Coué inquired the nature of her trouble, she broke into a flood of complaints, describing each symptom with a voluble minuteness.

“Madame”, he interrupted, “you think too much about your ailments and in thinking of them you create fresh ones.”

Then came the turn of a businessman who complained of nervousness, fears and lack of confidence.

“I work terribly hard to get rid of them,” the patient answered.

“You fatigue yourself. The greater the efforts you make, the more the ideas return. You’ll change all that easily, simply, and above all, without effort.”

“I want to,” the man interjected.

“That’s just what you’re doing wrong,” Coué told him. “If you say ‘I want to do something,’ your imagination replies ‘Oh, but you can’t.’ You must say, ‘I’m going to do it,’ and if it is in the region of the possible you will succeed.’”

Coué told another patient that, “you must put your trust in the imagination, not in the will. Think you are better and you’ll become so.”

Coué believed that every idea that exclusively occupies the mind is transformed into an actual, physical or mental state.

Coué’s basic law of autosuggestion: “Every idea which enters the conscious mind, if it is accepted by the unconscious, is transformed by it into a reality and forms henceforth a permanent element in our life.”

Autosuggestion consists of two steps: the acceptance of an idea and its transformation into a reality. Both are performed by the unconscious.

A tennis player is engaged to play an important match. He wishes, of course, to win, but fears that he will lose. Even before the day of the game, his fears begin to realize themselves…In fact, the unconscious is creating the conditions best suited to realize the thought in his mind—failure.

Another belief of Coué’s was that we are incapable of exercising the will unless the imagination has first furnished it with a goal. “We cannot simply will, we must will something.”

Negative energy is to be avoided. Gloomy and despondent people are centers of mental contagion, “damaging all with whom they come in contact”.

Coué had a highly original idea about hereditary disease. He believed it was transmitted from parent to child, not physically, but mentally. “Thus, if one of the parents has a tendency to tuberculosis, the child often lives in an atmosphere laden with tuberculosis thoughts.”

Brooks sums up the power of autosuggestion as follows: “It teaches the doctrine of the inner life which saints and sages have proclaimed through all ages. It asserts that within are the sources of calm, of power and of courage, and that the man who has once attained mastery of his inner sphere is secure in the face of all that may befall him.”