Émile Coué (1857-1926) served for around two years as an assistant to
Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault
in his group hypnotic at Nancy. However, after practising for several
years as a hypnotherapist employing the methods of Liébeault and
Bernheim's Nancy School, Coué gradually began to develop a new
orientation called "conscious
autosuggestion."
Several years after Liébeault's death in 1904, Coué founded what became
known as the New Nancy School, a loose collaboration of practitioners
who taught and promoted his views. Coué's method did not emphasise
"sleep" or deep relaxation and instead focused upon teaching groups of
clients how to use autosuggestion by trial and error learning involving
a specific series of suggestion tests. Although Coué argued that he was
no longer using hypnosis, some of his followers, such as Charles
Baudouin, viewed his approach as a form of light self-hypnosis. Coué's
method became an internationally renowned
self-help and
psychotherapy technique, which contrasted with the methods of
Freud's method of
psychoanalysis and prefigured subsequent self-hypnosis techniques and, in some regards, the development of
cognitive therapy.