From The Times, March 29, 1922:
Long before the time appointed for M Coué’s lecture at the Wigmore Hall yesterday afternoon the seats were filled with an audience in which women predominated. Among them were Lady Beatty (who is one of the trustees of the Donors’ Fund of the Institute for the practice of Auto-Suggestion), Lady Salisbury, Lady St Davids, Lady Maud Warrender, and Lady Ebury. Many of the audience had been present at the seances in the morning, or had had treatment from M Coué, and the story of the paralysed man who had recovered power over his limbs was quoted excitedly in many parts of the hall. M Coué had been working continuously since 10 that morning with about a 15 minutes’ interval for lunch, yet appeared fresh and smiling for a lecture which lasted an hour and a half, and was followed by a mobbing of which a prima-donna might have been proud. His gentleness, his sincerity, and his wit never failed him, and his disregard of social status and social difference were apparent in his relationship with every one who came with aches of the mind or body. One lady was wheeled up to the platform to hear him the better; a tongue-tied man after the meeting spoke when searching for his stick; a man from the Press seats gave testimony that he had found relief from the tortures of neuralgia, the result of a motor accident, after reading a book by a pupil of M Coué on auto-suggestion.
Auto-suggestion was not a new thing, M Coué said. In each of us there were two individuals — the conscious and the subconscious self. The subconscious was the imaginative; and it was this that was the principal. If we could govern it we could govern ourselves.
He went on to illustrate the cases where auto-suggestion might have curative possibilities — where the functions of some organ had lapsed because the will saw they could not work — as one who “thought blind” or “thought paralysis”. By letting the imagination control the will these organs functioned once more. It was the same with sleep or laughter or digestion. Such words as “difficult”, “I cannot”, “It’s beyond me” should not be allowed. “Cultivate confidence,” M Coué advised, “and say all your days in a monotonous monotone: ‘Every day, in every respect, I grow better and better’.”
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