Coué, Emile (1857-1926)

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Coué, Emile (1857-1926)

A French provincial pharmacist, Emile Coué was responsible for a therapeutic mind-over-matter system of "autosuggestion" known as Couéism that influenced the popular culture of the United States when, as in England, it became something of a national craze during the early 1920s. By daily repetition of its still familiar mantra, "Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better," Couéism's adherents hoped to achieve health and success by positive thinking and the expectation of beneficial results. The most succinct definition of Couéism was perhaps Coué's own: "Couéism is an especial technique … for the teaching and application of auto-and other methodical suggestion. It is more: it is an attitude of mind directed toward progressive improvement."

Coué was born of old noble Breton stock in Troyes, France, and attended pharmacy school in Paris before establishing an apothecary in his home town. Observing that he could effect positive results in his clients by encouragement as well as medication, he developed an informal counseling service that became the foundation of his later work. Moving to Nancy in 1896, he came across an advertisement touting hypnotism as a tool for business success. His investigations in this field led him to develop his own system, though he always insisted that positive thinking—not hypnotic trance—was the basis of Couéism, and that he was merely harnessing imagination in the service of will. In 1913 he founded the Lorraine Society of Applied Psychology and, in 1922, the Coué Institute for Psychical Education at Paris. During World War I, he lectured in Paris and Switzerland, with proceeds used for the relief of war victims.

His book Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion caused a sensation when it was published in England and the United States, in 1920 and 1922, respectively. A steady stream of British pilgrims to Nancy turned Coué's facilities into a kind of secular Lourdes, especially after such luminaries as Julian Huxley and Sir Alfred Downing Fripp, the King's physician, endorsed the method. Emile Coué: The Man and His Work, a 1935 book by J. Louis Orton, a disaffected ex-associate, quotes Huxley: "He [Coué] goes further than any of the orthodox medical men in his claims for the power of mind over body; he effects remarkable cures, and finally he sums up his ideas in one or two simple generalizations."

Coué was invited to lecture in England regularly after 1921, where his reputed cure of Lord Curzon's insomnia only added to his reputation. On January 4, 1923 he arrived in the United States for a tumultuous lecture tour that was given substantial coverage in the popular press, especially by the New York World. Over the next several weeks, he gave 81 "séances" in major eastern cities, where his treatment of prominent socialites such as Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt further served to advance his cause. His appeal to American optimism and efficiency was undoubtedly the source of much of his popularity; industrialist Henry Ford was reported to have said, "I have read Coué's philosophy: he has the right idea. " And Coué himself was described as the "Henry Ford of psychology" by Gertrude Mayo in her 1923 book, Coué for Children. She wrote, "Just as M. Coué had first started the engine of the subconscious mind with hypnotic hetero-suggestion and later had substituted the self-starter of conscious auto-suggestion … thanks to him people … who had never known before they possessed unconscious minds, were finding not only that they had but that they could command them to their great personal advantage and convenience."

A National Coué Institute was founded in New York to train instructors to teach the method, and the American Library Service began publishing his books from New York. Despite Coué's decidedly secular point of view, his lectures evoked comparisons with the faith-healing revivals that were popular at the time, attracting, in the words of J. Louis Orton, "paralytics, asthmatics, and stammerers" seeking respite from their ills. Couéism came under fire from orthodox religious leaders and even Christian Science—which it somewhat resembled—for its secular viewpoint and its purported Freudianism, which it resembled not at all. Coué returned to the United States in 1924 for an extensive lecture tour of the western states, but took ill in England the following year after complaining his nose had been improperly cauterized to cure his recurring nosebleeds during a British lecture tour. He died in his homeland on July 2, 1926, and a huge crowd attended his funeral at a Roman Catholic church. Although his Institutes continued his work in Europe and the United States, the movement quickly declined and was soon all but forgotten.

Thus the Coué craze, especially in America, ended almost as soon as it had begun, leaving the Freudians and fundamentalists to battle it out for the ownership of the "mind-over-matter" question. The popularity of Couéism can be seen as representing a response by mass consumer culture to the spiritual devastation of World War I, which had spawned nihilism, Dada, socialism, and fascism in other contexts. Its pseudoscientific, quasi-religious trappings appealed to a disillusioned public hungry for non-material fulfillment during the 1920s, a decade that embodied the triumph of a modernistic, mechanistic culture. And as an early example of how publicity, hype, and celebrity endorsement were enlisted on behalf of non-material fulfillment, Couéism presaged the work of other self-help gurus and systems during the twentieth century, with voices as diverse as Norman Vincent Peale, L. Ron Hubbard, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and Werner Erhard perpetuating their own versions of Coué's self-help message.

—Edward Moran