COUE
Method
BIOGRAPHY
ABOUT EMILE COUE
Emile Coué of Châtaigneraye was born in TROYES on February 26, 1857. His father was a railroad worker of the East.
His situation has been modest, but not his origins, which go up with the Breton minor nobility.
With two baccalaureats (philosophy and sciences) out of pocket, Coué young person, who dreamed to become chemist,
takes the advice of his father and directs himself towards a surer career: pharmacy. During three years, he will carry
out a training course of pupil pharmacist in a dispensary of TROYES, then goes to PARIS, for his theoretical studies
with the college Sainte Beard initially, at the school of Pharmacy then. After its boarding school at the Necker hospital,
he obtains in 1882 his diploma for the occupation of pharmacist of first class.
With the head of a pharmacy in his birthplace, with the daily contact of patients, Coué discovers by the direct observation
the action of moral on the physique, its immense influence in the process of the cure. Consequently, the daily exercise of
his profession traces the way of his future, the experimental method will lead Emile Coué to seek the mechanism of this process
while remaining anchored in reality, foreigner with the speculations of the theorists of psychology.
At the end of 1885, his young wife Lucie Lemoine pushes it to meet in NANCY her birthplace, Dr. Liébeault, simple but
brilliant doctor from countryside, which has the first released the phenomenon of suggestion and about which one speaks much.
Coué observes Liébeault and, with the reflexion, concludes from it that his practice misses method and that it is based
mainly on the role of the suggestioner. To TROYES, he is back an original practice and a method of authentic autosuggestion
which Coué builds little by little while obeying its gift of observation.
"the capricious action of the remedies, the import of a word placed well joined to the bottle, the cure of a rebellious evil by
a compound strong pain-killer, all these facts, of a rather banal order, had taken for this large observer a new direction;
they are recorded in him during his youth, and in this "unconscious" of which it was to sing the praises later, they prepared
the development of its future thesis: that of the autosuggestion "will write Charles Baudouin the large theorist of the Coué's method.
While breaking with hypnosis and semi-hypnosis, Emile Coué explains the unexpected action of the remedies by "the imagination"
of the patient.
"wouldn't this be the same imagination which, methodically directed in the graduated experiments, develops the most singular
suggestions with hypnosis itself? And then, this passivity, this incapacity of resistance which expresses the suggestion or
hypnotized subject, wouldn't this be quite simply the sign that, the will and imagination being in conflict, it is the imagination
which carries it? However, this situation is not special with the systematic cases of suggestions and hypnosis. In the everyday life,
we at every moment see the same conflict and the same failure, and they is all the times that we are in the state of thought,
"I cannot be prevented..." or "It is stronger than me".(Charles BAUDOIN)
Having recognized in imagination the large lever, Coué is brought to learn on the subject with suggestionner itself; the results
of the suggestion thus included/understood are completely convincing.
In 1910, the system forms a coherent whole, Coué then sells his pharmacy with TROYES and settles in NANCy: the development of
what one will name the new School of NANCY east in good way.
First conferences in Lorraine, then in the remainder of France. In the house of NANCY, the collective meetings give soon surprising
results.
Coué distributes health and hope and of the thousands of beings comes to him as to a saver. But Coué is not a miracle-worker.
It does not make miracles: its method of "control of oneself by the conscious autosuggestion" is now at the point.
It is a simple method, activates, strictly scientific. Many disciples doctors French, Swiss, who reproach him for not being their
find it "simplistic" and appear unable to seize the originality of it.
The fame of Emile Coué crosses the borders. Here it is unceasingly on the roads of Europe, in Switzerland, in Belgium, in Italy,
in Germany, in England. Then, in two years, 1923 and 1924, it conquers the United States which it furrows in all the directions.
It is the dedication. But it is also the beginning of the end? Emile Coué becomes exhausted with the task. From 1924, after his
second voyage in addition to-Atlantic, all these voyages and conferences, without counting the collective meetings of NANCY,
start to leave traces on him, tired organization and his resistance weakens gradually.
May 21, 1926, it is the ultimate conference in STRASBOURG. Of return to him, it is confined to bed little afterwards:
pneumonia found a ground favourable and progresses unrelentingly. Coué dies out on 21 July, surrounded by his family and his friends.
He was 69 years old.
Emile Coué left us two fundamental ideas on which all modern psychotherapy will be based, no matter what its detractors say some.
Firstly: any suggestion is in last analysis an autosuggestion and this one is not other than the action of imagination, more powerful
than it at one time was believed, and acting according to laws'.
Secondly: an essential idea and fertilizes, namely that in the suggestion, it is not the suggestioner who acts, but only
the imagination
of the subject; it results from it that "the violent one conflict, very real, that all the experts recognized in the suggestion
and hypnosis,
is not the conflict of two wills, but it is the conflict, in the person from the subject, between imagination and the will.
"the will is médusée by imagination" (Ch. Baudouin)
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Emile Coue in New York (Video footage)
Coue in his office (Video footage)