The Claims of Emile Coué

A Discussion of the Recent Recrudescence of the Idea of Cure by Incantation

PATRICK KEARNEY

AN explorer of my acquaintance returned from Africa a year ago and lectured on behalf of certain progressive tribes who were in a bad condition through lack of medical, surgical and hygienic material and knowledge. He was able to collect funds to send them medicines and instructors, for the poor black fellows had no way of treating diseases except by incantations. When the explorer, in his lectures, told how a man with fever would say to himself, over and over, "Go away fever; the fever is going away", many people in the hall wept, and wrote out large checks with which to send the savages quinine.

It is not improbable that many of those who contributed to that fund are now among the people who flock around Emile Coue, whose incantation method of curing diseases is now taking the world by storm. My explorer is now on the way back to his African tribes; they are known to be a grateful people, and if properly approached, they might be induced to repay their benefactors in kind.

In his illuminating book The Mind in the Making, James Harvey Robinson presents the thesis that most of our ideas are still those of the savage; he can find ample confirmation for this point of view in the alacrity with which people are accepting the teachings of Coue. For Coue's doctrine is essentially savage magic, not merely in principle but in method as well. Its implicit principle is that the wish is omnipotent; its explicit method is the use of incantations.

M. Coué, after great triumphs in France, recently arrived in America, and thousands of people have attended his clinics and lectures. He is on everyone's tongue, he is on the front page of newspapers, his books and the books about him are selling by the tens of thousands.

The Popularity of Magic

ALL this is not difficult to understand. It is not recorded that any philosophy which affirmed pleasant untruths, and denied unpleasant facts, has ever failed to win adherents. The specific unpleasant facts which oppress most of us are disease and death; the most pleasant he, therefore, is that they can be done away with by magical means. Hence the popularity of anyone who invents a system of healing which is universal in application, which is simple, and which is unscientific. This last, necessarily, because the slow, laborious, careful methods of science seem merely inefficient to the impatient sufferer. Man's dearest desire since the beginning of time has been to control the universe by his own omnipotent wish, which is what we mean by magic, and science has been engaged since its beginning in showing man that his wish cannot possibly change the facts.

Coue's method admirably fulfils these requirements. First, it is the simplest of all possible healing methods. Nothing is needed, for the cure of disease, but to repeat the incantation: "Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better". This is substantially the form of incantation which is used by all savage tribes to cure diseases. Second, it is universal in its application. It is well to be definite on this point, for M. Coue seems to have lost some of his courage since he came to America. In his book Self-Mastery through Conscious Auto-Suggestion, he definitely states that his methods are applicable to physical as well as mental diseases, and to conditions where an organic lesion is present, as well as to the purely functional disorders. In some of his American clinics, however, he is reported as having refused to treat organic disorders, referring the applicants to doctors. If this has to be his real attitude, it is well; but in his book he tells of treating consumption, heart diseases, chronic bronchitis; prolapse of the uterus, gout, eczema and almost everything else in the catalogue.

His Ignorance of Science

THE third qualification for popularity which this method fulfils is that it is unscientific. M. Coue is frankly ignorant of the sciences; he boasts of having no education, admits he has read few books. Recently he conducted a clinic before the members of the Neurological Society, and one of the officials stated to the newspapers that "one of the principal impressions gained by the doctors was the astounding ignorance of the man of all scientific research and knowledge, even in his own field".

One of Coue's most striking claims, which he reiterates and which all his disciples insist on, is that autosuggestion can control the sex of an unborn child as well as its characteristics, mental and physical. Statements which we might expect to find in the Witch's Dream Book are soberly presented in a book which pretends seriously to discuss the science of therapy. Charles Baudouin, Coue's chief theoretic exponent and disciple, in his book Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion, tells the case of a pregnant woman who, having had a visitor with a malformed finger-nail, brought forth a child with the same malformation. If there is anything that can be stated with absolute scientific certainty, it is that prenatal influence of this sort is pure superstition, on a par with mental telepathy, mind reading and table-lifting. Furthermore, expert scientific opinion now holds that sex is determined at the moment of conception, by causes that come so near to being pure chance that they cannot, and never can be, controlled.

According to Baudouin, Coue has been working on his theories since 1885, but did not succeed in perfecting his method until 1900. Since then he has practised continually, but only in the past year has he been generally known outside of France. He is now considered the leader of the New Nancy School, supported by many prominent French neurqlogists, and something of the character of the whole movement, and of psychiatric knowledge in France, may be gathered from the fact that Baudouin, in his book, quotes continually from Orison Swett Marden, the American magic-monger, whose popularity is one of the deplorable facts of our national life.

So much for the scientific validity of Coue's claims. The question now arises as to whether any results may be expected from a method which is total nonsense. It seems to produce results, just as every other system of magic healing seems to produce results. But an analysis of those results might display causes operating of which M. Coué as well as the patient is totally ignorant.

Frazer in The Golden Bough tells of a savage who believed that if he lighted a candle every night the stars would come out. When a European expostulated with him, and tried to convince him that this was all superstition, he replied, in effect, that he was a practical man, not interested in theories: he got one hundred percent results, that was enough for him. This author, in commenting on similar loose thinking, points out that "the fatal flaw of magic lies not in its general assumption of a sequence of events, but in its total misconception of the nature of the particular laws which govern that sequence." If we will examine Coué and the other magic healers in the light of this definition, we will see that the few results they obtain do not in the least influence our judgment that the method is nonsense. If we admit the claims of Cou6 because they produce occasional results, we must also admit the claims of Vitamon, Nervo, Omin, the Electric Belt, Ooom the Omnipotent, the candles of St. Blazius, Fletcherism, Peruna and the innumerable specifics for " the restoration of manly vigor" which are advertised in the Police Gazette.

Some years ago there was produced in the Middle West a patent medicine which guaranteed to cure all ills. It was largely alcohol, with a little liquorice and other flavoring in it. The medicine obtained little success until the manufacturers published testimonials and pictures of those who had been cured* Immediately a flood of cures were reported. Testimonials and photographs poured in by the thousands. People had been cured of every known disease, in the very last stages, by one dose. Until the Federal authorities interfered, this medicine was the most popular remedy in all the West for everything from baldness to dementia praecox. Of course it never really cured anything. The story merely illustrates the general law that we can convince ourselves of anything if we have sufficient incentive. Nothing supplies such an incentive to the average man as to have his picture in the paper. Under the stimulus of this desire many a poor sufferer was able to convince himself that he was cured, and perhaps to persist in this delusion until it was interrupted by sudden death. Indeed, in the investigation of this medicine it was shown that the manufacturers were still using testimonials from people who had been dead of the disease in question for fifteen years.

Making the Lame to Walk

IN the recorded cures by the Coue method we are given no case histories, no statistics, and no more of a diagnosis than a label. It is manifestly impossible to have any faith in a cure until we know the conditions of the disease, and these are never given. The testimonials of the Coue patients read very much like the testimonials issued by the fake patent medicine companies, and are of equal scientific validity.

It is further remarkable that though Coué worked marvels in France, his clinics in America have, to the time of writing, been bitterly disappointing. But this fact is not played up by the newspapers. In this morning's paper I see a headline "Cripples Walk at Coue Clinic". On reading the story, however, I discover that one man with a limp hobbled about the room crying out that he was cured, and then left the clinic in exactly the same condition as he came into it; while a woman who had been paralyzed stood up and walked a step or two, holding Cou6's hands. Her brother, on being questioned by reporters, said that she had often done as well as that, before.

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All doctors are familiar with the type of person, usually diagnosed as hysteric, who convinces himself that he is sick for the pleasure of being cured. Hundreds of these individuals flock around any new therapeutic discovery, achieve marvelous results, and then promptly relapse until a new fad appears. It is this type of individual upon whom, I am sure, most of the really startling "cures" are affected. These persons can be "cured" by Cou6 or by any other method which is spectacular enough to take their fancy. Needless to say, no real cure is accomplished. The man with any imaginary disease needs to be cured, not from the symptoms which he invents, but from the habit or desire of imagining himself sick. That is his real disease, and to cure that it would be necessary to effect such a complete change in the individual that he would no longer behave in this extraordinary way. And Cou6 cannot carry him to that extent.

When hypnotism first obtained scientific consideration, some forty or fifty years ago, such surprising results were obtained with hysteria that many physicians believed they had discovered the cure for this disease which had mystified humanity since the beginning of time. However it soon became apparent that the hypnotic method did nothing but conceal or change the form of the symptom, and most of its cures were followed, soon or late, by either a return of the symptoms or the appearance of new ones. Hypnotism and other methods of suggestion cannot, and do not claim to, remove the cause of the disease, whether that disease be mental or physical, and for this reason they have been largely displaced, in scientific therapy, by more fundamental methods of treatment.

Suggestion is still, of course, used by doctors, in many cases. If used by a trained medical man, who knows exactly what it can do and what it can not, it may be a valuable auxiliary. In cases where a cure cannot be hoped for, a patient highly susceptible to suggestion may be kept tractable and happy; in other cases it can be used to make the patient obedient and amenable to genuine curative measures. Faith in the doctor is an element in all healing, for the simple reason that if you have no faith you will not follow his instructions. And this faith amounts to little more than a liking for the doctor, and a desire to please him. Under the stimulus of such a desire many hysteric patients can actually make their symptoms temporarily disappear. But the symptom is not the disease, and the wise doctor, whenever he finds a patient progressing too rapidly, will suspect some such mechanism and be all the more on the lookout for it. A Coue patient, for any of a hundred reasons, may imagine himself cured, and actually conceal his symptoms from himself. But the sympton is nature's warning of the presence of disease, and the individual in this condition is like the famous ostrich, and equally in danger of dying from something that he has persuaded himself does not exist.

Finally, let us remember that if a conviction that improvement will come actually had any effect on organic diseases, nobody would ever die of consumption, for one of the symptoms of the end in that and in certain other diseases (some cases of locomotor ataxia, for instance) is complete cheerfulness and a firm belief on the part of the patient that he is not sick at all. This faith, like faith in Cou6, may be one of Nature's mechanisms to protect the organism from the unpleasant knowledge that death is imminent.

Suggestibility in itself is a morbid condition, and it can only be augmented by the Cou6 treatment. Indeed, the world is full of people who need badly some kind of treatment for their susceptibility to being cured by nonsense. Voltaire remarked that you could kill your neighbor's sheep by incantations, if you gave them a good dose of arsenic as 'well; you can be cured by Cou6, providing you have a good doctor.