Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion: Part Seven

For the next week or so, the Successful Living blog will post the complete book, "Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion" by Emile Coue. Coue, a french doctor, was one of the pioneers in the field of autosuggestion - now known as affirmations or self talk. This is his seminal work.)

Chapter 7
The Superiority of This Method

This method gives absolutely marvellous results, and it is easy to understand
why. Indeed, by following out my advice, it is impossible to fail, except with the
two classes of persons mentioned above, who fortunately represent barely 3 per
cent of the whole. If, however, you try to put your subjects to sleep right away,
without the explanations and preliminary experiments necessary to bring them
to accept the suggestions and to transform them into autosuggestions you cannot
and will not succeed except with peculiarly sensitive subjects, and these are rare.

Everybody may become so by training, but very few are so sufficiently without the
preliminary instruction that I recommend, which can be done in a few minutes.
Formerly, imagining that suggestions could only be given during sleep, I always
tried to put my patient to sleep; but on discovering that it was not indispensable,
I left off doing it in order to spare him the dread and uneasiness he almost always
experiences when he is told that he is going to be sent to sleep, and which often
makes him offer, in spite of himself, an involuntary resistance.

If, on the contrary, you tell him that you are not going to put him to sleep as there is no need to do so, you gain his confidence. He listens to you without fear or any ulterior thought, and it often happens -- if not the first time, anyhow very soon -- that, soothed by the monotonous sound of your voice, he falls into a deep sleep from which he awakes astonished at having slept at all.

If there are sceptics among you -- as I am quite sure there are -- all I have to say
to them is: "Come to my house and see what is being done, and you will be convinced
by fact.

"You must not however run away with the idea that autosuggestion can only be
brought about in the way I have described. It is possible to make suggestions to
people without their knowledge and without any preparation. For instance, if a
doctor who by his title alone has a suggestive influence on his patient, tells him
that he can do nothing for him, and that his illness is incurable, he provokes in
the mind of the latter an autosuggestion which may have the most disastrous consequences; if however he tells him that his illness is a serious one, it is true, but that with care, time, and patience, he can be cured, he sometimes and even often
obtains results which will surprise him.

Here is another example: if a doctor after examining his patient, writes a prescription and gives it to him without any comment, the remedies prescribed will
not have much chance of succeeding; if, on the other hand, he explains to his
patient that such and such medicines must be taken in such and such conditions and that they will produce certain results, those results are practically certain to
be brought about.

If in this hall there are medical men or brother chemists, I hope they will not
think me their enemy. I am on the contrary their best friend. On the one hand
I should like to see the theoretical and practical study of suggestion on the syllabus of the medical schools for the great benefit of the sick and of the doctors
themselves; and on the other hand, in my opinion, every time that a patient goes
to see his doctor, the latter should order him one or even several medicines, even
if they are not necessary. As a matter of fact, when a patient visits his doctor, it is in order to be told what medicine will cure him. He does not realize that it is the hygiene and regimen which do this, and he attaches little importance to them. It
is a medicine that he wants.

In my opinion, if the doctor only prescribes a regimen without any medicine, his
patient will be dissatisfied; he will say that he took the trouble to consult him for
nothing, and often goes to another doctor. It seems to me then that the doctor
should always prescribe medicines to his patient, and, as much as possible, medicines
made up by himself rather than the standard remedies so much advertised and which owe their only value to the advertisement. The doctor's own prescriptions will inspire infinitely more confidence than So and So's pills which anyone can procure easily at the nearest drug store without any need of a prescription.


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