And then there was Émile Coué, the so-called Miracle Man from Nancy, France, whose “autosuggestion” craze was briefly the biggest thing in America.
For a period in the early 20s, millions of Americans grabbed their string of rosary-like “Coué beads” every day, stood in front of the mirror and repeated the French apothecary’s phrase of self-affirmation: “Day by day in every way, I am getting better and better.”
“In the early months of 1923,” wrote Frederick Allen in “Only Yesterday,” a 1931 history of the 20s, “the little dried-up Frenchman from Nancy was suddenly the most-talked-of person in the country.”
It was an unlikely turn for a man in his mid-60s operating a clinic in a northeastern French city with a population — then and now — of just over 100,000. Coué had embraced the so-called Nancy School of Therapeutics, whose practitioners employed hypnotism in treating physical and mental maladies.
Coué’s enthusiasm for mesmerism waned when he found he was able to induce hypnosis in only a small number of his patients. Instead, he decided to cure his patients by inducing them to hypnotize themselves. Combining a druggist’s familiarity with placebos, a rudimentary understanding of psychology, a set of autosuggestive exercises from an American correspondence school and a bit of Catholic ritual — rosaries — Coué hit upon his own simple routine for improved mental and physical health.
“Every morning before getting up and every evening as soon as you are in bed,” he instructed in his 1922 bestseller “Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion,” “shut your eyes and repeat twenty times in succession, [while] counting mechanically on a long string with twenty knots, the following phrase, ‘Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better.’”
He called it Self-Induced Conscious Autosuggestion. By the end of the 1910s, a kind of cult had developed around him.
The reception for the self-styled “mental healer” was more mixed when he crossed the English Channel in 1922. The Times of London reported that every one of his scheduled collective demonstrations sold out far in advance. But the British intelligentsia was more skeptical. The New Statesman saw Coué’s bedlam-like reception as evidence of the resurgence of superstition, drolly remarking that “it was pleasant to see miracles coming back.”
When Coué visited a ward of “shell shock” victims from the Great War at Tooting Special Neurological Hospital, he passed his hands over a bedridden man’s quivering legs, chanting, “Ca passe ... ca passe” (“It is passing, it is passing”). Almost immediately, the patient emitted a shriek and threw a fit on the floor. The delirium quickly became general, the other patients laughing, crying and running around hysterically.