The inner life
Autosuggestion
Direct answer
Autosuggestion is the giving of a suggestion to oneself, by repeating an idea until it is accepted without argument, as taught by the French pharmacist Émile Coué.
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At a glance
- Also called
- auto-suggestion, coue method, couéism
- Found in
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Related
- Affirmation, New Thought, Think and Grow Rich, Visualisation
Autosuggestion is the giving of a suggestion to oneself, by repeating an idea until it is accepted without argument, as taught by the French pharmacist Émile Coué.
A plain educational schematic; it does not diagnose a condition or replace professional care.
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What is autosuggestion?
Autosuggestion means suggestion applied by a person to themselves. Coué held that everyone does it unawares, since ideas dwelt on tend to turn into feeling and action, and that it could be done on purpose. His patients repeated a general formula of improvement in a low, even voice at the edge of sleep, without straining to believe it.
The heart of his teaching was what a follower named the law of reversed effort: when will and imagination pull against each other, imagination wins, so trying hard to sleep or to stop trembling makes matters worse. The answer was to work on the picture and leave the will alone. Coué claimed benefits for bodily complaints that were never tested by fair comparison; the modest effects of expectation on how symptoms are felt are better attested.
On the tree of the hidden arts: Imagination and intention.
What sets Autosuggestion apart
Coué's originality lay in what he removed. He gave up the hypnotist, the trance and the specific command, and kept only a general sentence the patient said for themselves. He also inverted the usual advice about willpower: effort, in his account, is what spoils a suggestion. That sets autosuggestion apart from the strenuous positive thinking that later borrowed its formula. His clinic took no fee, and he insisted that he healed nobody, since the patient did the work.
- Teacher: Émile Coué, 1857 to 1926, pharmacist of Troyes and Nancy
- Clinic: a free clinic at Nancy from 1910
- Rule: the law of reversed effort: imagination overrules the will
- Rule named by: Charles Baudouin, Suggestion and Autosuggestion, 1920
- Manner: a low, even voice, with no straining to believe
Often mistaken for something else: Hypnotic suggestion is given by another person to a subject in trance; autosuggestion is given by the person to themselves, awake or drowsy, in their own words.
The story behind Autosuggestion
Coué (1857 to 1926) kept a pharmacy in Troyes, learned hypnotic suggestion from Ambroise Liébeault of the Nancy school, and opened a free clinic in Nancy in 1910. His short book Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion appeared in the early 1920s, and lecture tours of Britain and the United States made Couéism a craze. Napoleon Hill gave autosuggestion a chapter of Think and Grow Rich in 1937.
Why Autosuggestion matters
Autosuggestion is the link between nineteenth-century hypnosis and the modern affirmation, and it explains why forced affirmations so often fail.
How to read Autosuggestion
People apply it as Coué advised: a short general phrase, said quietly and without effort on waking and before sleep.
Autosuggestion in practice: an example
A reader who cannot sleep stops ordering themselves to, and instead quietly pictures the heaviness of a body already at rest.
Where readings of Autosuggestion go wrong
Autosuggestion never stands in for medical care, and Coué's reports of physical recoveries were not checked by controlled study.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Aliases
- auto-suggestion, conscious autosuggestion, coue method, couéism, autosuggestion meaning
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
See Autosuggestion in your personal almanac
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More in Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
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Common questions
What is autosuggestion?
It is suggestion directed at oneself: an idea repeated, usually in words, until it is taken in without resistance and begins to colour feeling and behaviour.
What is the law of reversed effort?
It is the rule Coué's school drew from his practice: when a person's will and imagination conflict, imagination prevails, so the harder one tries against a feared picture, the stronger that picture grows.
Is autosuggestion the same as self-hypnosis?
They overlap. Self-hypnosis first induces a relaxed, absorbed state and then gives suggestions; Coué's autosuggestion skipped the induction and relied on calm repetition at the edge of sleep.
