A French pharmacist who at his clinic at Nancy in 1920 introduced a method of psychotherapy based on autosuggestion (self-induced suggestion). His method, which ran counter to his two great contemporaries, Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, was to encourage each patient to set his or her personal goal and then to repeat frequently: “Every day, and in every way, 1 am becoming better and better.”
Coue always stressed that he was not primarily a healer but a teacher who taught others to heal themselves. His lectures in England and the United States attracted a large following, but his ideas were eventually overshadowed by psychoanalysis, developed by Sigmund Freud. Later, psychoanalysis was found to encourage dependency because it relied on the psychoanalyst to interpret or analyze what the patient was saying. Coue’s patients, on the other hand, were self-reliant.