English: Stott, W.R.S. (1922), "The Apostle of Auto-Suggestion at Work in his Garden 'Clinic' at Nancy",
The Illustrated London News, Vol.160, No.4326, (Saturday, 18 March 1922), pp. 394-395: Detail of an illustration accompanying
'An Englishwoman at Nancy', "Coué: The Apostle of Auto-Suggestion", The Illustrated London News, Vol.160, No.4326, (Saturday, 18 March 1922), p. 393. The illustration is labelled as follows:
Besieged by Sufferers: M. Coué Teaching Patients to Cure Themselves by the Healing Power of Imagination Exercised by the Unconscious Self.
M. Emile Coué, of Nancy, has achieved the most remarkable results, and has aroused world-wide interest by his method of auto-suggestion, as described by one who has had experience of his treatment, in an article given elsewhere in this number. Hundreds of people, of all sorts and conditions, flock to his little villa at Nancy, where he gives his services without payment. He himself would be the last person to claim miraculous powers. The whole point of his teaching, as expressed in the word "auto-suggestion"’ (which means, of course, self-suggestion by the patient to himself) is that the sufferer can bring about his own cure by the power of imagination. M. Coué insists, emphatically, on the distinction between imagination and will. Imagination, he says, is the force of the unconscious self, which is always stronger than the will. "The patient", he says in his famous lecture, "carries within him the instrument by which he can cure himself. … Every morning before rising, and every night before getting into bed, he must . . . repeat twenty times consecutively in a monotonous voice, counting by means of a string with twenty knots in it, this little phrase: 'Every day, in every respect, I am getting better and better.' . . . The giver of the suggestions is not a master who gives orders, but a friend, a guide, who leads the patient step by step on the road to health." M. Coué, it will be remembered, lectured in London last December, and hopes to return [to the UK] this month or early in April.