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AND HIS LIFE WORK

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EMILE COUEAND

HIS LIFE-WORK

By The Same AuthorSUGGESTION AND AUTOSUGGESTIONSTUDIES IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

Emile Coue

EMILE COUE\ AND

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HIS L I F E-W O R K

BY

CHARLES BAUDOUIN

NEW YORK

AMERICAN LIBRARY SERVICE1923

Copyright, 1923American Library Service

All Rights Reserved

ILLUSTRATIONS

Emile Coue Frontispiece

Coue conducting a clinic . . Page 19

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EMILE COUEAND HIS LIFE-WORK

Thick-set; somewhat short. Quiet,compact strength. A remarkably highforehead; hair brushed back, a littlethinned out and perfectly white for anumber of years already, as also theshort pointed beard. And set off bythis white frame, a sturdy and youth-ful face, ruddy-cheeked, full of thelove of life—a face that is almostjovial when the man is laughing, al-most sly when he smiles. The eyeswith their straight look reflect firmkindliness — small, searching eyeswhich gaze fixedly, penetratingly, andsuddenly become smaller still in a mis-chievous pucker, or almost close upunder concentration when the fore-head tightens, and seems loftier still.His speech is simple, lively, encour-aging; he indulges in familiar parableand anecdote. His whole appearanceis as far removed as possible fromaffectation; you feel that he is readyat any moment to remove his coat and

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EMILE COUE

give a helping hand. Such is the im-pression made on those w*ho haveseen Mr. Emil Coue, and Heavenknows they are legion, for no manunder the sun is more approachable. . . and approached.

He is the type of what is knownin England and especially in Americaas the self-made man. He never de-nies his lowly origin, and you feelthat he loves the masses with asympathy that may be called organic.Born at Troyes in 1857, on the 26thof February—he has the same birthdate as Victor Hugo— he grew up inno more than modest surroundings,his father being a railroad employee.But the young man was gifted and hewas able to pursue his studies, atNogent-sur-Seine, until he took hisB.A. degree. Then, having a lean-ing for science, he began to prepareunaided for his degree of Bachelor ofScience—in itself a fine proof of per-severance. His first failure did notdiscourage him; he tried again, andwon out. We next find him at Mont-

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AND HIS LIFE-WORK

medy, where his father had been sentby the railroad. It is easy to imaginethe boy’s childhood, tossed aboutfrom small town to small town of thesame country, in the environmentthat is characteristic of railroad em-ployees in Eastern France, amongmodest and kindly people, obliging,humble, without ambition, laborious,conscientious, of sterling honesty—-in a word, good likable folk. Andnow that the master has earned areputation that borders on fame, itit a fine thing to find unaltered in himthose same traits, the solid and sobervirtues of the lower middle class.“Mr. Coue is first and foremost thetype of the worthy fellow” were Mr.Fulliquet’s words the other nightwhen he was welcoming him at the“Vers l’Unite” Club. And whenlater he described his work as “ad-mirable,” Mr. Coue could not under-stand, he could not for the life of himunderstand—and no sincerer modestycan be found than was his at thatmoment.

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EMILE COUE

While still a growing boy, Mr.Coue had decided to take up chemis-try, but life’s necessities preventedthis. He had to earn his living, hisfather reminded him, and we sensethe struggle between a scientific voca-tion and material needs, a strugglethat ended by a somewhat unexpectedcompromise: the father persuadedhis son to study pharmacy, which inits way is utilitarian chemistry. Butthat side of chemistry could not fullysatisfy the seeker. Here we comeupon an instance of “transference”or “compensation” such as to delightthe soul of a psycho-analyst. We canpicture the young man in the labora-tory of his store at Troyes, a would-be chemist but a druggist in reality,knowing that he lacks everythingto become a real chemist — specialstudies, experimental material and soon—instinctively turning to anotherchemistry that does not require costlyequipment, the laboratory for whichwe all carry within us: the chemistryof thought and of human action. In

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AND HIS LIFE-WORK

Mr. Coue there is a “repressed”chemist, who has “expressed” as apsychologist. It is well to rememberthis in order to understand one of thecharacteristic aspects of his psy-chology: it is atomic, in the old way;it represents mental realities as ma-terial, solid things, in juxtapositionor opposition or superposition in thesame manner as substance or atoms.When he speaks of an “idea” or of“imagination” or of “will-power,” hespeaks of them as if they were ele-ments or combinations or reactions.He remains alien to an entire psycho-logical current of his time, to thatnotion of continuity introduced byJames and Bergson. His psychology,from a theoretical point of view, re-mains voluntarily simple, and intel-lectual snobs are apt to turn theirnoses up at it.

But he certainly returns the com-pliment: he has a severe contempt—a surgeon’s contempt —for theory.The splitting of intellectual hairsdoes not suit him—rather would he

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EMILE COUE

pull it out by handfuls! His strongplebian nature is the nature of a manof action who does not care for pureintellectualism. That chemistry at-tracted him is due to the fact that itis a science that calls for actual han-dling. And here I am led to think ofIngres’ violin: in his leisure Mr.Coue is something of a sculptor andhe has modeled several heads; in himthere is the need of handling matter.And it may be said that he handlespsychic matter in just the same wayas modeling clay: in thought he seesabove all a force capable of modelingthe human body. So his “Ingres’violin” did not to any extent turn himaside from his line, which is rigor-ously simple: his psychology is ideo-plastic, and that is its great origi-nality.

Now Bergson himself has said:If mind is continuity and fluidity, itmust nevertheless, every time it wishesto act upon matter model itself onmatter, adopt its solidity, its crudediscontinuity, and think of itself as

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AND HIS LIFE-WORK

if it were space and matter. It wasnatural therefore that an essentiallypractical psychology should be thisbrief psychology I have spoken of.Thus, Mr. Coue’s great predecessor,Bernheim, gave of “idea” and of“suggestion” somewhat crude andcontrovertible definitions (“Sugges-tion is an idea that changes into ac-tion”). With Mr. Coue, this aspectis even more marked. But while wepoint out here his limitations, wemust not deplore them too much.They are the very limitations thatthought imposes upon itself in orderto become more powerful action.

It was in 1885, when he wastwenty-eight, that the small druggistof Troyes met Liebeault for the firsttime. And that meeting decided hisentire life.

Between the two men there wereremarkable affinities. Liebault wasmerely a country doctor, unpreten-

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EMILE COUE

tious and without ambition, who hap-pened to be also a genius. He wasthe first to show clearly the phenome-non of suggestion, and he almostperformed miracles. He finally es-tablished himself at Nancy, where hewas to find in Bernheim the discipleand theoretician through whom hisideas were to be made known to theworld. Now, Emile Coue’s historywas to be somewhat similar. He hasconducted himself with the samemodesty; he has never sought outmen but allowed men to seek him out,at first a few neighbors, until now,every week, several Englishmen crossthe Channel for the sole purpose ofvisiting him at Nancy. With thatnative simplicity of honest and greatmen, he is always surprised at this,surprised to see that his idea is con-quering Europe.

After assisting at some of Lie-beault’s experiments, he began tostudy and practice hypnotic sugges-tion. Instantly he perceived its pos-sibilities, but as practiced by Lie-

EmileCoue

conductinga

clinicinhishomeat

Nancy,France

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AND HIS LIFE-WORK

beault he found in it a vaguenessthat hindered his work: “it lackedmethod,” he would say. His positiveand concrete temperament, his needof “touching” and “handling” wereill at ease confronted by a realitythat was still elusive and capricious.While he was waiting for an experi-mental and practical method, he gavefree vent to his gift for observation,which is of the highest order (it willbe realized how great when it is re-membered that one fine day this mandiscovered in himself a talent formodeling heads without any previousplastic training). He is as observantas he is practical. He found themost novel, the most pregnant partof his doctrine in simple every-dayobservation. And this should be alesson to us; this should remind usthat the gift, artistic in a certainsense of every-day observation, is forscience a rich field that should not beunder-estimated; other processes mustbe added, but cannot take its place.Too often, far oftener than is sup-

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EMILE COUE

posed, official scientific training re-mains scholastic: it teaches how toreason and makes one forget how toobserve. We may mention, too, whatthe instigators of the “new schools,”from Rousseau down, have perceived,to wit, the bond between manual ac-tivity and observation. A trainingthat develops the intellectual side ofman to the exclusion of the practicalside, runs the risk of jeopardizing thegift of observation, which is the verybasis of intellect.

So once again perhaps we have tothank fate for its hard knocks: it isthose very knocks that make it educa-tional. We have possibly cause torejoice, not to deplore, that Mr.Emile Coue’s studies were cut shortat an age when they should normallyhave continued—to rejoice that inthose years of full vigor of the mind,he learned more through playingtruant than by covering the customaryuniversity programme. At every stephis science plunges into the very heartof life, and it is a very real pleasure

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AND HIS LIFE-WORK

to follow him into that wholesome,invigorating nature bath—a pleasure,truth to tell, which people boastingof too barren an intellectualism nolonger appreciate.

And so Mr. Coue went on observ-ing with that penetrating, mischievousand kindly eye of his. Making thebest of things, he found in his workan unlimited opportunity for observa-tion. The capricious action of reme-dies, the effect of a well-placed wordwith the bottle of medicine, the cureof some obstinate disease by meansof an innocuous compound, all thesethings, ordinary as they are, heldmeaning for this great observer; theyregistered on his mind during all hisyouth and within that subconsciouswhose praise he was to sing later,they were preparing the elaborationof his future thesis: auto-suggestion.

Meanwhile, the ideas of the Nancyschool had spread. In America theywere being exploited and popularized

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with all the claptrap and noise thataccompanies bluff. In that mass ofvery uninteresting literature, Mr.Coue thought there was perhapssomething to be found, and his meritlies in having been able to extractthe strong, vital principle from allthat trash. In one of those Americanpamphlets which he describes as “veryindigestible,” he at least found indi-cations of experiments which he hadthe patience to try out, and in whichhe believed he saw the necessary basisfor the “method” he had been seek-ing ever since his meeting with Lie-beault. This brings us to 1901. The“method” he started to apply at thattime leads the subject to hypnosis bymeans of a series of graduated ex-periments in suggestion in the wakingstate. Mr. Coue was then usinghypnotism.

But little by little the ideas whichwere to be his own personal contri-bution crystallized. They are the re-sult of the encounter between hismethodical experiments and those

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AND HIS LIFE-WORK

simple, every-day observations he hadbeen storing up for years. What ex-plained the capricious and unexpectedaction of remedies was of course thepatient’s “imagination.” Possibly itmight be that same imagination,methodically directed in the graduatedexperiments, that develops the strang-est suggestions and hypnosis itself?And might not the passiveness, theincapacity to resist shown by thepatient subjected to suggestion or hyp-nosis simply be the sign that whenwill and imagination are in conflict,imagination has the upper hand?Now this is not merely seen in casesof systematic suggestion and hypnosis.In every-day life we constantly notethe same conflict and the same fail-ure; and this happens every time wethink “I cannot refrain from” or “Icannot help it.”

Here we have the germ of the twofundamental ideas of Coueism. Thefirst is that in the last analysis all sug-gestion is auto-suggestion, and auto-suggestion is nothing else but the

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well-known action of “imagination”or of the “mental,” but acting in ac-cordance with certain laws and im-measurably more powerful than wasformerly believed.

The other idea is corollary to thefirst: Since, in suggestion, it is notthe one who suggests who is actingbut solely the imagination of the sub-ject, it follows that the violent andvery real conflict that all practitionershave noted in suggestion and hypnosisis not the conflict of two wills but theconflict within the subject himself ofimagination and will. Will is over-come by imagination.

This second idea, it would seem, isthe essential idea of Mr. Coue andhis most fruitful one. He has studiedit thoroughly, with singular acuteness,and has formulated this law, whichI have called the law of convertedeffort, according to which will is notonly powerless against suggestion butonly serves to strengthen the sugges-tion it seeks to destroy. Such is thecase of the embryo bicycle rider who

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AND HIS LIFE-WORK

sees a stone, is afraid of falling on it,makes a desperate effort to avoid it,and only succeeds in landing on itwith masterly precision. The samemay be said of stage fright, or gig-gling, which increases with every ef-fort to check it.

Undoubtedly this law could be ex-pressed more broadly still by sayingthat in the conflict between the sub-conscious and conscious will, it is al-ways the former that carries the day:Will can only triumph over the sub-conscious by borrowing its own wea-pons; and that is exactly what takesplace in methodical auto-suggestion.

Having recognized in the imagina-tion of the subject the great lever,Mr. Coue was led to give up hypno-tism, and then to teach the subjecthow to use suggestion on himself.While doing this he proved that hewas on the right track, for the re-sults of suggestion so understood ex-ceeded the usual limits. Thus heascertained the action of suggestionin organic cases, which was also noted

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EMILE COUE

in independent research by Dr. Bon-jour of Lausanne (falling off ofmoles through suggestion).

In 1910, the system formed a com-pact whole, and from that date startedwhat is now known as the “new”Nancy school. At collective sittingswhich constantly increased in size(even the war only showed a slightslowing down) Mr. Coue obtainedsurprising results, and today one re-fers to the “miracles of Nancy.”More remarkable still, this man,whose life has been a hard andlaborious one, gratuitously distributeshealth and joy to the thousands ofhuman beings who flock to him as toa savior.

More and more, in this great workof charity, Mr. Coue has adaptedhimself to the people, the simple-minded ones of the earth whom heloves and feels akin to. It is bothhis glory and his limitation. He letsothers adapt the expression of hisideas to the needs of the more deli-cate-minded. If, year by year, he has

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AND HIS LIFE-WORK

simplified that expression, if he hasgiven it that childish and common-place appearance that disappointed somany in the course of his recent lec-tures, it should be understood to whatpraiseworthy tendency in him thisfault is due.

Mr. Coue has also been reproachedwith constantly repeating the samething. Well, he does. I doubtwhether he may be expected to changenow; I am not even sure that it wouldbe desirable. He has an idea, twoif you like; I do not believe he hasthree, but then he would not knowwhat to do with a third. The twoideas he has, he really possesses; heholds on to them and he attachesgreat importance to them. He knowshow weighty they are. He alsoknows—none better—the value ofthat concentration, that singleness ofidea, which alone allows an idea tobecome a suggestion, a force. Healso knows the value of that monoton-ous and obstinate repetition that herecommends for practice in sugges-

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EMILE COUE

tion. One is reminded of old Cato:by dint of repeating each day in thetribune: “Carthage must be des-troyed.” he destroyed Carthage.That obstinacy, too, is a limitation,but it is also a force.

It is quite true that Mr. Coue’smanner cannot appeal to everybody.In Geneva, especially, where every-body is so “refined,” this French easy,good-nature, carried to an extremerather shocked them, it would seem.The very tumult of success, the sortof popular wave that follows Mr.Coue wherever he goes, frightenedaway the mannerly and prudent.They saw in it display, quackeryalmost. What a misconception, andhow disheartening to those who areaware of the modesty and self-denialof this great and good man! Onemight as well claim that the magnetmakes a noise in order to attractsteel, and I am sure that if Jesus him-self were to return among us, trail-ing through the humbler streets ofthe town with his retinue of poor,

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AND HIS LIFE-WORK

the “well-bred” would cover theirfaces and exclaim “Quackery!” ButMr. Coue quietly goes on his way,knowing that he cannot please theworld and his wife.

One might wish of course for moresuppleness, a greater faculty of adapt-ing himself to his various audiences.But it is best to take him as he is: arough diamond, a kind of naturalforce.

If he confines himself, by tempera-ment and choice, to action on themasses, he knows that he can do sowithout harm. His disciples arethere, particularly his disciples thedoctors, and their action can reachwhere his does not. Let us mentionDr. Vachet and Dr. Prost of Paris,and Monier-Williams, who after com-ing to study auto-suggestion at Nancy,opened a clinic in London for theapplication of the method. It is inEngland that physicians and intellec-tuals have best understood the power-ful originality of “Coueism” (theycoined the word). In France, and

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elsewhere too, most people refuse tounderstand. First the whole thingwas called absurd; now that the ideahas made itself felt and can no longerbe ignored, we are told: “This is allvery well, but we have known aboutit a long time; under another nameit is our old friend suggestion.”These are the first two stages throughwhich according to Mr. James everytruly novel idea passes: first, it isextravagant, then it is true but com-monplace. Shall we soon be ripe forthe third stage, that of understand-ing? Generally, official science’schief reproach is that Mr. Coue isnot a physician, and official sciencetries to ignore the nucleus of doctorswho are daily increasing the numbersof the Nancy school. But it shouldbe remembered that the ideas of thatschool are called upon to spread else-where besides medicine. To thefields of education, ethics psychologyand sociology they offer new pointsof view. No one who is interestedin the human mind can remain indif-

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AND HIS LIFE-WORK

ferent where they are concerned. Afew churchmen have understood thisremarkably well. Not to mentionthe sermon preached at St. Paul’sCathedral in London on June io,1921, by Canon E. W. Barnes, wehave numerous instances among theGeneva clergy of a fine open-minded-ness which scientific men would dowell to emulate.

This attitude is not surprising.Although Mr. Coue’s doctrine re-mains absolutely neutral in meta-physical matters, it does meet oncommon ground with religion in itsaffirmation of the power of mind overthe body. As for the life of themaster, there is none that more close-ly conforms to the true Christian idea.To give of one’s self as he does ismore than rare; it is exceptional, andif there were at Nancy no other“miracle” than that one, it would beenough and more than enough tomake us bow our heads in respect.That miracle is the mainspring of allthe rest.