Émile Coué

Émile Coué (1857 to 1926) was a French psychologist, pharmacist and hypnotist who introduced a popular method of psychotherapy and self-improvement based on optimistic autosuggestion. From a Brittany family of modest means, he qualified as a pharmacist in 1876 and worked as an apothecary in Troyes from 1882 to 1910, where he noticed what later came to be called the placebo effect. In 1886 and 1887 he studied hypnotism in Nancy with Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault and Hippolyte Bernheim. In 1910 he sold his business and opened a clinic in Nancy, and in 1913 he and his wife founded the Lorraine Society of Applied Psychology. His method rested on the view that ideas operating below conscious awareness shape health, and it centred on repeating the formula Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better. His book Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion appeared in English in 1920.