Suggestion and autosuggestion

Suggestion and autosuggestion : a psychological and pedagogical study based upon the investigations made by the new Nancy School (1921)by Charles Baudouin

The Nancy School was an early French suggestion-centred school of psychotherapy founded in 1866 by Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault, a follower of the theory of Abbé Faria, in the city of Nancy.

Three of the most essential and novel features in the teaching of the New Nancy School :
1. The main factor in hypnotic phenomena is not heterosuggestion but autosuggestion; and, as a corollary, the chief advantages of psychotherapeutics can be secured without a suggester and without the more salient features of the hypnotic state.

2. Of fundamental importance to success is the recognition of what Coue terms “the law of reversed effort” , the law that so long as the imagination is adverse, so long as a countersuggestion is at work, effort of the conscious will acts by contraries. We must think rightly, or rather must imagine rightly, before we can will rightly. In a word, our formula must not be, “who wills can”;

but “who thinks can"

or “who imagines can."

3. The most significant phenomena of autosuggestion occur in the domain of the subconscious (unconscious). The new powers which autosuggestion offers to mankind are based upon the acquirement of a reflective control of the operations of the subconscious. Herein, as Baudouin shows in his Preface and his Conclusion, the teachings of the New Nancy School at once confirm and supplement the theories of the Freudians and the data of psychoanalysis.