Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (58 page)

I have described Coué as a student of hypnotism, and so he was, but he was very clear that the method he taught, which he called autosuggestion, was not hypnotism – and in fact was infinitely superior to hypnotism. He was born in humble circumstances in Troyes and after studying pharmacy in Paris returned there and opened a drugstore. His in-laws came from Nancy, and on a visit there in 1885 Coué heard a lecture by Liébeault on hypnosis. He was very impressed, and he assisted Liébeault in some of his work. Back in Troyes he held hypnotic clinics, but came to the conclusion that any benefits his patients gained from hypnosis, and indeed from the drugs he dispensed in his shop, were due to what we would now call the placebo effect. Hence he came to develop the idea of ‘conscious autosuggestion': it was autosuggestion that was doing the business, in both hypnotism and drug-taking. And so by the end of the century he gave up trying to hypnotize his patients and introducing suggestions from the outside, and instead taught them to give themselves suggestions while fully awake. He was not the first to practise or recommend autosuggestion, but he was a tireless crusader and popularizer. His work was spread above all by his books and his lecture tours, until he had achieved worldwide fame, with centres in London, Paris and New York during his own lifetime. The craze for ‘Couéism' had died out by the 1930s, however. He writes in a breathless, crusading style:

From our birth to our death we are all the slaves of suggestion. Our destinies are decided by suggestion. It is an all-powerful tyrant of which, unless we take heed, we are the blind instruments. Now, it is in our power to turn the tables and to discipline suggestion, and direct it in the way we ourselves wish; then it becomes auto-suggestion: we have taken the reins into our own hands, and have become masters of the most marvellous instrument conceivable. Nothing is impossible to us, except, of course, that which is contrary to the laws of Nature and the Universe.

He claims that even organic disorders can be cured, or certainly
helped, by autosuggestion, let alone functional ones. We now know this to be true, thanks to the insights of psychosomatic medicine and psychoneuroimmunology. This was not a scientific study, but one woman in a long-term workshop run by George Leonard and Michael Murphy, co-founder of the famous California institute Esalen, cleared her eyes of incipient cataracts as a result of affirmations. It took two years, but it is a remarkable result.

But some of Coué's claims border on the extravagant – for instance, that a pregnant woman can determine the gender and characteristics of her unborn child by autosuggestion. And it has to be said that in his treatment of patients he displays an alarming rapidity and superficiality.

Coué had two great insights, which he expressed as follows: ‘Firstly, that every idea that we put into the mind becomes a reality (within the limit of possibility, be it understood). Secondly, that contrary to what is generally believed, it is not the will which is the first faculty of man, but the imagination.'

The first insight he often expressed, in the context of health and healing, by showing that the mind and body are inextricably linked: imagine sucking a lemon and your mouth reacts. But the mind rules the body, so we actually cause our own health or illness by factors at work in the subconscious. As for the second, he said that whenever imagination and will come into conflict, imagination always wins. One of his stock examples was the old game of how easy it is to walk along a 6-inch plank which is lying on the ground, as opposed to how difficult it would be were the plank lying 1,000 feet over a gorge. The only difference between the two cases is that in the latter the imagination plays a decisive part, as you imagine yourself plummeting to your death. Or again, what came to be called the ‘law of reversed effort' is the principle that an effort of conscious will has the opposite result to what it wants, as long as the imagination does not agree. For instance, you cannot force yourself, by mere exercise of will, to go to sleep. Therefore, he said, just be quiet and let your imagination go about its business unhindered. In order to get something done, seed it in your subconscious and let it grow by itself: the ‘law of subconscious teleology' is the principle that when the end has been suggested, the subconscious finds means for its realization. The subconscious is a marvellous instrument that we
have at our command. And the way to seed things in the subconscious is to use affirmations.

This is how he introduces the affirmation for which he is most famous:

Every night, when you have comfortably settled yourself in bed and are on the point of dropping off to sleep, murmur in a low but clear voice, just loud enough to be heard by yourself, this little formula: ‘Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.' Recite the phrase like a litany, twenty times or more: and in order to avoid distracting your attention by the effort of counting, it is an excellent idea to tick the number off on a piece of string tied in twenty knots.

The affirmation is deliberately vague, so that it encompasses all ills, physical or mental. But he recommended using affirmations tailored for specific ailments as well.

Although he gave up hypnosis in favour of teaching people autosuggestion, there is something hypnotic about the way he treated people in his free clinics in Nancy. After explaining to them the general principles of autosuggestion, he got them to close their eyes and went through each of their worries and ailments, offering advice and encouragement. There is no doubt that his patients went into a light trance, and that Coué recognized it, because at the end of the talk he would say: ‘I am going to count to three, and when I say “three” you will come out of the state in which you are, you will come out of it very quietly, you will be perfectly wide awake, not dazed at all, nor tired, but will feel full of life and health.'

Coué called his work, or allowed his follower, Professor Charles Baudouin, to call his work, the ‘New Nancy School', after Liébeault and Bernheim. They, and especially Bernheim, had taught the importance of suggestion, even in the waking state; Coué taught the importance of autosuggestion in the waking state. Coué was not a sophisticated psychologist, but a pioneer and a lecturer who travelled around the world explaining his two insights. It was left to Baudouin to put his work on a more psychological basis, in
Suggestion and Autosuggestion
, which was hailed on its publication in 1920 as the most exciting book since
The Origin of the Species
.

Baudouin's theories are no more than an extended justification
of the ideas of Coué we have already looked at. He spells out, at length, how many aspects of life are naturally governed by autosuggestion, and deduces four laws (two of which have just been mentioned) which guarantee that such suggestions will be realized in the external world. At times he gets close to the mind-curists we looked at in
Chapter 5
: if autosuggestion produces an illness in the first place, then of course autosuggestion can remove it. His book provided, and still provides more thoroughly than any other, the psychological justification for the use of affirmations. He stresses the role of attention and emotion (as in faith healing) in effecting cures, and the importance of relaxation in releasing the subconscious to do its own work. Though the comparison with Darwin seems excessive, the importance of the book was that it emphasized, exhaustively, the importance of the subconscious in life. It rode on the wave of Freudian thought which was sweeping the Western world, especially America, and helped to disseminate and popularize the existence and nature of the subconscious.

As with self-hypnosis, so the practice of affirmations has been taken up and watered down by New Agers. A common form of affirmation practice today is known as ‘prosperity consciousness', the idea being that the universe is a generous place, and so if you open yourself up to its generosity, a lot of money and material wealth will come your way. The kinds of affirmations you make, then, are: ‘I am a good, healthy person, and I am open to whatever gifts the universe chooses to give me.' The Japanese Buddhist sect Nichiren Shoshu teaches its members a mantra which is also supposed to have the same effect. Although the mantra is supposed to be one's vehicle to take one to enlightenment, the sect encourages its use to gain prosperity for oneself and one's family along the way to enlightenment. The mantra, by the way, is ‘
Nam-myoho-renge-kyo
', which roughly means ‘Fusion with the ineffable source of all phenomena'.

Affirmations work by reframing. A bad self-image is self-fulfilling: it gives out bad vibes to others, making them dislike you, which increases your negative self-image and so on and on. This produces stress, and hence ill health. But affirmations can be criticized as too bland and Pollyanna-ish. They ignore all the difficulties of life, when it is arguably precisely these difficulties that put us on a learning curve. I stumble and fall, pick myself up, and learn to watch where
I'm going in the future. Sitting in on a session of New Age affirmations is somewhat like having warm marshmallow poured over your mind and body.

The difference between affirmations and self-hypnosis is often slight. But in hypnosis (including self-hypnosis) a suggestion should be seeded once or twice, and then left alone: the subconscious mind will do the rest. Affirmations, however, are to be repeated over and over again. Affirmations should always be spoken in the present tense, not the future, as if whatever is being affirmed was already present to you. Keep them short, keep them positive (e.g. not ‘I will no longer oversleep in the morning', but ‘I awaken at seven every morning').

After Emile Coué, the most famous prophet of affirmations is surely Norman Vincent Peale, whose book
The Power of Positive Thinking
has sold over 15 million copies since its publication in 1953. It is a wholesome, all-American book; every chapter would fit well in
Reader's Digest
. Describing the book as ‘applied Christianity', Peale recommends a variety of practices for improving your life, gaining energy, dissolving anxieties and so on. One of these practices is the making of affirmations. As a Christian, Peale tends to use lines from the Bible as his affirmations, and recommends accompanying them with peaceful pictures formulated in the mind. One of the main affirmations is ‘I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me', and this sums up the quality of the book: it is a combination of self-reliance and self-responsibility (‘Who decides whether you shall be happy or unhappy? The answer – you do!'), and submission to God.

Affirmations require the kind of focused attention that you get in the hypnotic state, but otherwise there is little similarity between the two practices. Hence affirmations are often used along with hypnosis or self-hypnosis, as a route towards whatever goal you want the hypnosis to achieve.

There was a saying in the Middle Ages: ‘A strong imagination begets the event itself.' As we have seen, Coué made the same claim for autosuggestion, while sensibly adding that there are natural limits to what kinds of events can be realized. I doubt, for instance, that through imagery or affirmation one could demolish a mountain or mend a broken leg (though one might accelerate the healing). Imagery is often used alongside hypnosis (and/or affirmations, and/ or biofeedback) in therapeutic or New Age contexts.

Visualizations can be put to all sorts of uses. Shakti Gawain's rather glib bestselling book
Creative Visualization
teaches a method of achieving what you want by means of the imagination: you imagine that you have it, you invest that image with power, and you get it. This is also the kind of goal for which affirmations are commonly used, and indeed Gawain recommends using affirmations in conjunction with visualizations, literally to ‘firm up' whatever it is that you are imagining. It is obvious that if you have a cheerful outlook, better things happen to you than if you are gloomy. So the idea behind visualization is that if you imagine good things, good things will happen to you. You picture something good happening to you, but the picturing alone is not enough. You have to want the event to happen and believe that it can happen.

The use of the imagination to accelerate or bring about healing has been known in the West since medieval times. In a psychotherapeutic context, it was revived in the modern era by Janet and others, but especially by Jung, the Swiss psychologist and philosopher. As he tells in his autobiography,
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
, Jung found visualizations extraordinarily revealing in his own life, and so he developed the technique of ‘active imagination' as an intrinsic part of his therapy. In active imagination a patient allows her mind to float, without putting any preconceptions on what images may arise. When images do arise, she watches them without interfering with them, although she is allowed to interact with them: if she sees
a person, for instance, she might offer him something or have him offer her something. Afterwards, the whole daydream is discussed with the therapist.

Visualization has a proven track record in psychotherapeutic contexts, and too many psychiatrists and psychologists have made use of it to list here. Techniques such as Guided Affective Imagery (GAI), which uses a series of ten imaginary situations, reach the parts other therapies find hard to reach. They allow the patient to daydream in a constructive fashion that quickly reveals layers of the subconscious to the therapist in a gentle, non-obtrusive way. Some techniques work with obviously symbolic images rather than normal pictures. In psychosynthesis, for instance, founded by Freud's associate Roberto Assagioli (1888–1974), one visualizes things like crosses, two hands clasping each other, a sword and a cup.

Visualizations are often used to help someone cope with anxiety, phobias, depression, insomnia, self-confidence and so on. The client is asked to visualize a scene in which whatever it is that is causing the anxiety is resolved or dissolved. Behaviourists use visualizations to acclimatize a person to something about which he is phobic. Suppose he is terrified of spiders; he is asked to visualize spiders in gradually closer proximity – starting out in the garden shed and ending crawling on his shoulder, perhaps – until the fear has been removed or reduced. Each image is introduced only once the previous one can be watched without fear. The opposite technique, designed to put someone off something rather than get them used to it, is aversion therapy. What strikes me about these kinds of therapies is that they empower the patient: she is doing the visualizing, and so it is self-help rather than imposed from outside.