stretch of the imagination accounted for the results” (Shrout, ibid.). Coué (the hypnotist) concluded that it was cure by suggestion; but, rather than Coué having cured him, the man had cured himself by continuously telling himself the same thing that Coué had told him." The birth of "Conscious Autosuggestion" Coué discovered that subjects could not be hypnotized against their will and, more importantly, that the effects of hypnotic suggestion waned when the subjects regained consciousness. He thus eventually developed the Coué method, and released his first book, Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion (published in 1920 in England and two years later in the United States). He described autosuggestion itself as: Although Coué never doubted pharmaceutical medicine, and still advocated its application, he also came to believe that one's mental state could positively affect, and even amplify, the pharmaceutical action of medication. He observed that those patients who used his mantra-like conscious suggestion, "Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better", (French: Tous les jours, à tous points de vue, je vais de mieux en mieux; lit. 'Every day, from all points of view, I'm getting better and better') — in his view, replacing their "thought of illness" with a new "thought of cure", could augment their pharmaceutical regimen in an efficacious way. Conceptual difference from Autogenic Training By contrast with the conceptualization driving Coué's auto-suggestive self-administration procedure — namely, that constant repetition creates a situation in which "a particular idea saturates the microcognitive environment of 'the mind'…", which, then, in its turn, "is converted into a corresponding ideomotor, ideosensory, or ideoaffective action, by the ideodynamic principle of action", "which then, in its turn, generates the response" — the primary target of the entirely different self-administration procedure developed by Johannes Heinrich Schultz, known as Autogenic Training, was to affect the autonomic nervous system, rather than (as Coué's did) to affect 'the mind'. The Coué method The Coué method centers on a routine repetition of this particular expression according to a specified ritual, in a given physical state, and in the absence of any sort of allied mental imagery, at the beginning and at the end of each day. Coué maintained that curing some of our troubles requires a change in our subconscious/unconscious thought, which can only be achieved by using our imagination. Although stressing that he was not primarily a healer but one who taught others to heal themselves, Coué