Émile Coué and Autosuggestion

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. So if you have
ever heard the phrase every day and in every way,

(00:22):
I'm getting better and better, you know the work of
today's subject that's saying, incidentally, was co opted by Tony
Robbins for his motivational coaching business, which today's subject really
would not have been cool with. It really belongs to
a pharmacist from Tooi, France, who in the early twentieth
century developed a method that was intended to help people

(00:45):
overcome illnesses and make their lives better. This kind of
goes back to the self help books episode that we
did earlier this year. He is tied to that and
was a thing that I was debating over including in
that episode and decided I wanted to do one on
him on his own. He's kind of a little offshoot
of that, so they make one bigger picture of this

(01:06):
concept of self help. The lovely thing about it is
that Emil Koua was refreshingly earnest. He genuinely seems to
have wanted to help people regardless of what anyone thinks
of his system and his approach. I don't think he
was a particularly squirrely person. So it's nice to have

(01:29):
somebody who's not a jerk as the main person. Because
whether or not he and his ideas were effective, that
is something that is still debated, and we will talk
more about some of that at the end. Emil Kouay
was born on February twenty sixth, eighteen fifty seven, in Toi, France.
His family was not wealthy. His father was a railroad worker,

(01:51):
and not long after he was born, the family moved
to New jen Cercene, which was about fifty kilometers or
thirty miles northwest of Toi. Emil was smart, and all
the biographical descriptions of him make it sound like pursuing
an education was just a given, even coming from this
working class family. He attended school in New jen Cercine

(02:14):
until he was a teenager, and then at fifteen he
moved back to toa where he lived with an aunt
who enrolled him in school. There After that he went
to college to get a science degree. A biography of
Kua written in nineteen twenty three by his supporter Charles
Beaudoin suggests that there was some kind of issue maybe

(02:37):
with getting into college, but it is not really clear
what happened. All it says in this biography is quote then,
having leaning for science, he began to prepare unaided for
his degree of Bachelor of Science, in itself fine proof
of perseverance. His first failure did not discourage him. He

(02:58):
tried again and won out. Initially, Kua wanted to get
a chemistry degree, but his father thought that that was
going to leave his future a bit too uncertain, and
he instead encouraged his son to get a pharmacological degree
that would include some chemistry, but it also had a
very clear career path, and Emil Kua took his father's
advice and he followed that path. When he finished his

(03:22):
first run of school, he served in the army for
a year, and then he started working as an apothecary assistant,
essentially in his hometown of Twaw. For a while, he
worked for a druggist named de Launy, who was incredibly
pleased with Emil's work ethic he kept assigning him more
and more responsibilities. One of the biographies I read suggested
that eventually Kua took on the work of three different

(03:44):
people who may have lost their jobs because he was
so good at his work. Next, Kua attended the College
of Saint barb in Paris. He won a government scholarship
to continue his studies while he was there. He graduated
with his pharmacology degree in eighteen seventy six. Kuway stayed
in Paris to work as a pharmacist in turn at

(04:05):
Niceron font Malade Hospital. After that, he moved back to Toye,
where he started working as a pharmacist at an apothecary
owned by a man named Chalmineaud. Kuway became a full
partner in this store, and then after just a few
years of working there, he became owner of the shop
after Cholmineaud died. One of the kind of charming anecdotes

(04:28):
about his work in this shop is that he would
include brief upbeat notes personalized for his clients with every prescription,
and he felt that when he praised how effective a
medication was, those patients seemed to do better than if
he did not specifically call out the treatment as good.

(04:49):
When he was sending these little notes. While attending a
wedding intoin in the early eighteen eighties. Emil meant two sisters,
Marie and Lucy. Lemoin and Lucy hid it off and
they began a courtship. They were married in Nulcia on
August thirtieth, eighteen eighty four. Lucy's father, incidentally, was a

(05:09):
famous horticulturist in France. If you are fond of lilacs,
you have probably admired his work. He developed many of
the breeds of plant that remained popular today, and particularly
the double bloom lilacs that were first popular in France
and now are all over the world. In eighteen eighty five,
Kue met the physician m Boise Auguste Libau, who was

(05:31):
thirty four years older than Emil. In spite of that
age difference, these two men really got along. Like Kue,
Libo was from a working class family and had sought
a career in science. Libau had become a doctor and
was also interested in magnetism. Not magnetism in the context
of physics, but magnetism as it related to Mesbrism. Franz

(05:55):
Anton Mesmer had put forth the idea that animal magnetism
was a mysterious force that could influence people, and he
used that in the context of hypnosis. Libau was so
fascinated with hypnosis and so eager to study it himself
that he offered to treat medical patients for free if

(06:16):
they would consent to being hypnotized. He believed that he
could influence patients subconsciously in ways that would help their
body heal. He was said to have achieved almost miraculous
results with these methods. He wrote a book about his work,
which was published in eighteen sixty six under the title
Sleep and Analogous States, Considered mainly from the point of

(06:39):
view of the influence of moods on physical well being.
The initial meeting of Kua and Libo is often described
as being an encounter for Kua that, in the words
of one biographer quote, decided his entire life. Once these
two men met, Kua was invited by Libau to assist
with some of his cases, and this led the pharmacists

(07:01):
to really dive as deeply as he could for the
next decade plus into the study of hypnosis and suggestion.
He soon determined that le Beau was not really being
as methodical as he could or should with this, and
that there were actually far more possibilities for suggestion treatment
if only a clear process for its use could be established.

(07:24):
He did not think that he knew what that process was,
though he instead wanted to study a lot more so
he spent a great deal of time observing doctors and patients,
making notes about every aspect of their interactions, their medical cases,
whether they were being treated with medications, etc. This was
also around the time that mesmerism and ideas like mind

(07:47):
cures had become very popular throughout Europe and the United States,
so a growing number of papers and books were being
produced on these topics. Kuway read them all, or at
least tried to like as many as he could get
his hands on, and some of them he found to
be total garbage, but he included these in his study
of alternative treatments. It doesn't seem like he took them

(08:09):
at face value, though he recognized that a lot of
the writing was muddled by the kind of eagerness that
can just obliterate a scientific understanding, and some of it
was just straight up charlatanism. But he did think that
even those kinds of texts might have kernels in them
that were worth studying, even if it was to see

(08:30):
what sorts of claims held the most appeal for the
general public viewed through that lens. Every piece of information
had some value to Kua. One of these pieces of
writing was a book on hypnotism written in the United States.
Precisely what book that was remains a little bit unclear.

(08:53):
There are different things cited depending on what biography of
Kua you look at. Some name a specific book book,
other accounts will differ. In Kuway's New York Times obituary,
it mentions that this book came from Rochester, New York.
But that leaves a couple of interesting possibilities. One of
these is Hypnotism and Hypnotic Suggestion, a scientific treatise on

(09:17):
the uses and possibilities of hypnotism, suggestion and allied Phenomena
by thirty authors. That book was edited by stage hypnotist
and patent medicine peddler E. Virgil Neil, as well as
medical assistant Charles S. Clark. I will say I could
not find any information on Clark or the veracity of

(09:37):
his credentials. E. Virgil Neil, though, is one hundred percent
on my list for a future episode because he was
a big, old, fascinating mess. He was accused of mail
fraud and for a while he actually fled the country.
He is a minor character here today, though. This book
does have a section titled how to Hypnotize and Awaken

(10:01):
a Subject, and that was written by Edward H. Eldridge
of Temple College. This is interesting because as I did
some digging, I discovered that Eldridge and a handful of
other academics issued a disclaimer in Science magazine in November
nineteen hundred that they did not willingly have their work
included in that book. Their various researches and their papers

(10:25):
had been requested by the publisher, they were told for
research purposes. Only. Another candidate for what book this was
was Hypnotism As it Is a Book for Everybody, which
was published in eighteen ninety seven and was written by
ex LaMotte Sage, who had a number of dubious credentials.

(10:47):
This book is laid out as an informational examination of
hypnotism that seems to have been motivated to just largely
bust myths about the practice. Sage lays out early in
the book that his eleven fundamental propositions of hypnotism. This
list begins with quote one. Hypnotism within itself is absolutely

(11:11):
harmless two, no one can be hypnotized against his will.
From there, it includes the ideas that hypnotism is not
a special power, that being hypnotized does not mean that
a person is weak, that hypnotism is temporary and cannot
affect a person's will forever, et cetera. There's also discussion

(11:32):
in the book of various methods of hypnotism, but not
specific how to's on how to do it. It's also
a plot twist Explamotte Stage was a pseudonym of E.
Virgil Neil. So whichever book it was, and it may
have actually not been a book but a correspondence course
depending on what source you look at. But whatever material

(11:53):
it was that Koua got from the United States, it
seems like e. Virgul Neil was behind it. He did
incidentally offer a correspondence course in hypnotism, so that may
hold water. It doesn't seem as though Kua knew about
that disclaimer that Eldridge and other academics had been a
part of. But after reading whatever this material was, he

(12:14):
started to implement its techniques in hypnotism, offering, as Libau did,
his services to clients for free if they were gamed
to be hypnotized, and over time he started to develop
his own theory about why hypnosis worked. This is again
an instance where we assumed that Kua, as one biographer

(12:35):
put it, quote, brushed aside all that was nothing better
than puffery and humbug, and he likewise rejected the mystical
postulates which underlay some of the theories coming up. We'll
talk about the ways that Emil Kouay started to expand
his understanding of hypnosis and what he thought was even better,
but first we will pause for a sponsor break. Kuay

(13:07):
was really developing some very strong opinions about suggestion as
it related to health and well being, but he also
recognized that his own small experiments were not giving him
nearly enough information to draw any real conclusions. So sixteen
years after his first meeting with Libau, Kuay started to
study hypnotism and suggestion in earnest under him as well

(13:31):
as another man, Epolite Bernheim. Bernheim, who was originally from Mulous, France,
was right between Kua and Libau. In age. He had
gotten his medical degree in Strasburg and became the chair
of ambulatory medicine in Nancy in eighteen seventy nine. Then
after an eighteen eighty two meeting at Libau's clinic, he

(13:54):
came away convinced that hypnosis had great potential in the
field of medicine, and he became an ardent supporter and
student of Libau. His work helped cement what came to
be called the Nunci School, which encompassed the scientific hypnotism
work being done by Libou and others who wished to
get out from under that mystical and CD and kind

(14:16):
of wu woo assortment of associations that came with the practice.
As Kua worked with Libau and Bernheim, he started to
think that there was a key element to the way
people thought then enabled them to get the body over
obstacles in their treatment to actually get better, and that
element was imagination. This was linked not only to medical outcomes,

(14:40):
but also to behavior. So he thought, if someone thinks
things like I can't help it in regard to a
behavior that they would like to stop, they're very unlikely
to stop because they can't imagine a version of themselves
without that behavior. Kuwa came to believe that imagination was
more important than a person's WI because even if somebody

(15:01):
wanted very badly to change their own behavior. If they
can't imagine it, they won't succeed. And you can see
seeds of his eventual method here, something that he would
come to call auto suggestion. So this meant taking the
idea of giving a subject a suggestion through hypnosis the
way Libau and others had been working, and transitioning it

(15:23):
to give the power of the suggestion to the patient themselves. So,
in very concrete terms, it's the difference between a hypnotist
telling someone you will no longer crave cigarettes, and having
the subject tell themselves, I will no longer crave cigarettes.
And as Kua worked, he also came to the conclusion
that an adverse imagination, one that was prone to counter

(15:47):
suggestion and doubt, could actually undermine all of this work.
He called that the law of reversed effort. If that
phrase sounds familiar, it is also attributed to Aldous Huxley,
although in Huxley's case it applied to the concept of
trying too hard and thus undermining the outcome of your desires,
so kind of a different thing with the same name.

(16:08):
Kua believed that autosuggestion would work because he had come
to the determination that the source of the command isn't
actually the important part, it's the recipient and their imagination
doing the actual work. He founded the Lorraine Society of
Applied Psychology in nineteen thirteen to continue his work in
the field. He had sold his pharmacy Intoat and moved

(16:30):
back to NeSSI in the years before this. Over the
next several years he started collecting and systematizing his method
into what would become a book. He described the power
of the imagination this way quote, we can compare the
imagination to a torrent which fatally sweeps away the poor
wretch who has fallen into it in spite of his

(16:52):
efforts to gain the bank. This torrent seems indomitable, but
if you know how, you can turn it from its
course and conduct it to the factory, and there you
can transform its force into movement, heat, and electricity. And
he believed that any person could control their own imagination,
writing quote to do so, it is enough in the

(17:13):
first place to know that this is possible, of which
fact almost everyone is ignorant, and secondly to know by
what means it can be done well. The means is
very simple. It is that which we have used every
day since we came into the world without wishing or
knowing it and absolutely unconsciously, but which unfortunately for us,

(17:34):
we often use wrongly and to our own detriment. This
means is auto suggestion. Kho A thought that people are
actually always giving themselves unconscious auto suggestions, and that we
just need to learn to apply conscious auto suggestions to
self influence our lives. He instructed people to start small

(17:55):
by concentrating on some outcome they desired. He used example
phrases like this thing is coming, this thing is going away,
and this thing will or will not happen, and then
to repeat those phrases to themselves several times without thinking
of anything else. According to Kua, quote if the unconscious
accepts the suggestion and transforms it into an auto suggestion,

(18:20):
the thing or things are realized in every particular. One
of Kuay's conclusions was that it was the unconscious that
truly held onto all of the information that a person
is presented with in the course of their days. He
later wrote quote, if we compare the conscious with the
unconscious self, we see that the conscious self is only

(18:40):
possessed of a very unreliable memory, while the unconscious self
on the contrary, is provided with a marvelous and impeccable memory,
which registers, without our knowledge, the smallest events, the least
important acts of our existence. Further, it is credulous and
accepts with unreasoning docilla what it is told. Over time,

(19:03):
Kuway abandoned hypnotism entirely in favor of training patients to
use auto suggestion. It was through this work that he
developed phrases like every day and in every way, I
am becoming better and better. That, of course, is a translation.
Kuway's French version was tou les jours a two points
of view javedim U Zomu. He worked with patients one

(19:26):
on one and in group settings and developed programs to
help people control their pain and to recover from ailments,
with the caveat that recovery had to be in the
realm of possibility, So he wasn't looking at people who
had some kind of terminal situation saying that he was
going to make them live right and Kuway claimed in

(19:47):
his treatment journals that a lot of his patients did
recover from their illness, but there's their real substantiation for
data on that. Yeah, he was very careful to be
like I can't make someone regrow a lost limb, or,
as Tracy said, like somebody that is very near death.
I can't pull them back from the brink like that's
but if they have a prognosis where they could get better,

(20:08):
but we don't know, they have a good chance if
they'll apply these methods. In his Nanci research center, Kue
would tell patients that came for treatment, quote, you have
come here in search of someone who can cure you.
You are on the wrong track. I have never cured anyone.
I merely teach people to cure themselves. I have taught

(20:28):
many persons to cure themselves, and that is what I
am going to teach you. The experiments in which you
are about to participate will always succeed, even if they
should seem to fail. For I have never claimed that
my thought can realize itself in you. My claim has
always been that each person's own thought realizes itself in himself.

(20:51):
If therefore, at the moment when I ask you to
think I cannot unclasp my hands, you think, on the contrary,
I can, you will inevitably be able to unclasp them.
You may imagine that you have convicted me of error,
but in reality you will have proved the soundness of
the principle of autosuggestion. One of the things about Kua's

(21:13):
work and its popularity, I think, especially in the age
that we're living in, people intentionally undermining the reputation of medicine,
it's kind of a nice surprise that he was not
trying to replace medical treatment with his idea of auto suggestion.
He wanted people to see doctors, so unlike a lot
of other non medical approaches to maladies, he was not

(21:35):
touting this as something to do instead of a scientific
medical treatment. He wrote of it quote, I am not
a doctor and would much prefer to be considered in
the light of being the doctor's auxiliary. In all cases
of serious organic disability, I say to those who seek
me out, are you receiving medical treatment? If they reply yes,

(21:56):
I give the advice continue with it then and practice
auto suggest question. Also, if they reply no, I say,
consult a doctor then and follow his treatment. As well
as using auto suggestion. You will find that the two
treatments help each other. In just about any instance where
someone tried to call him like a miracle worker or

(22:16):
heap similar praise on him, Kua was always very quick
to negate those kinds of ideas. He always stated that
the work was done by the person using his method,
not by himself, and that it could help, but it
should not be considered a miracle. Yeah, we'll have a
particular instance that comes up later when he's on tour.

(22:38):
In nineteen twenty Kua published his book self Mastery through
Auto Suggestion, and after an initial slow start, it became
a very big hit in France, and in nineteen twenty
two it was published in English. Early on, in this
writing he explains his idea of the conscious and unconscious
selves in relation to auto suggestion, writing quote, in order

(23:01):
to understand properly the phenomena of autosuggestion, or to speak
more correctly, of auto suggestion, it is necessary to note
that two absolutely distinct selves exist within us. Both are intelligent,
but while one is conscious, the other is unconscious. For
this reason, the existence of the latter generally escapes notice.

(23:23):
It is, however, easy to prove its existence if one
merely takes the trouble to examine certain phenomena and to
reflect a few moments upon them. Let us take, for instance,
the following examples. The examples he gives are the way
that a sleepwalker can rise from bed and do various
things and then return to bed, all unconsciously while the

(23:44):
conscious mind has no memory of doing so, or what
he called the quote too frequent case of a drunkard
attacked by delirium tremens. Just in case you don't know
what that word is or those words are, Delirium tremens
is not when someone is deeply intoxicated. It is a
severe alcohol withdrawal which can result in delirium, confusion, hallucinations,

(24:08):
and other symptoms. So if you have ever heard the
colloquial saying of someone who is not drinking being described
as getting the DT's, delirium tremens is what that refers to.
In Kua's writing, he uses the example of someone in
this delirious state becoming violent, and then when they returned
to consciousness, being horrified at their own actions. Kua visited

(24:31):
London in nineteen twenty two to talk about his method
and became incredibly popular there, but there started to be
some problems in its perception. This was in the post
World War One period when the English had a fresh
surge of spiritualism and mysticism, and some of the work
Kue was doing seemed enough like magic to people that

(24:52):
it got sort of folded into these less scientific ideologies.
That meant that even though Kua wanted to keep his
work strictly scientific, its reputation got a little muddled in
the public eye. This made it really easy for detractors
to criticize his efforts as being woo woo fluff for Charlatanism,

(25:12):
and that was a problem that would follow him across
the Atlantic. And we will talk about that trip across
the Atlantic after we hear from the sponsors that keep
stuff you missed in history class going. In early nineteen

(25:34):
twenty three, Kua made a visit to the US to
tour and to lecture about his work. Newspapers were so
expectant of his arrival that they reported everything about his
crossing that he was seasick on the voyage, but he
had used his auto suggestion method to get rid of
that problem. He was already famous when he arrived, in

(25:55):
part because British Foreign Secretary Lord George Curzon had publicized
the that Kua's method had cured him of insomnia, and
he was not the only person that did this. Other
foreign leaders, dignitaries, and celebrities had offered similar stories of
the French pharmacists positive impact on their well being. By

(26:15):
the time this famed proponent of autosuggestion arrived in New York,
there were already plans for a national Kua Institute to
be established there. He was interviewed at a press conference
that was literally waiting for him on the dock the
second he stepped off the ship, and he startled a
number of the assembled journalists and enthusiasts by making very

(26:37):
clear that he was neither a doctor nor a miracle man,
that he had never cured anyone, and that quote, I
merely help people to help themselves. While he toured and
gave clinics, every minute detail of his days was reported.
Papers ran stories literally about the items he carried in
his hands, the phrase he most commonly used in group

(26:59):
sessions when talking to individual attendees, which was supp us
or it's working, And even the way his mustache was
waxed from day to day. All of this got written
about every single day. The country very clearly had Kua
fever at this point. Once Kua got to the US,
in addition to giving talks, he wrote articles that were

(27:20):
published in major newspapers all across the country, and one
of them he encouraged people using his method to just
plant the suggestion and then kind of chill out quote,
let the imagination do its work alone. Be quite passive
through mysterious, still unexplained processes, are subconscious does marvelous things.

(27:40):
Think of the very commonest movements of the human body
and ask yourself how they are operated. What has set
in motion the complicated mechanism when you stretch your arm
to reach a glass on a table, or when you
take a cigarette from your case. No one knows. But
if we cannot explain the phenomenon, we do know that,
in actual fact, it is an order resulting from a

(28:01):
mere suggestion which is transmitted through the nervous system and
translated into action at a speed infinitely greater than that
of lightning. There were detractors, and the medical establishment made
very clear that they wanted nothing to do with autosuggestion.
He was labeled as everything from just being a fad
to actually being a dangerous menace. But Kuai's work was

(28:24):
also embraced by a lot of people, and there was
talk of Kuaism seemingly everywhere. In Boston, it was reported
that he had to make a sneaky escape after he
gave his last lecture in the city because there was
an eager crowd of people hoping to talk to him,
many of whom were upset that booksellers had sold out
of his book before they could buy a copy. Throughout

(28:47):
his US visit, Emil Kouay was offered massive sums of
money for various engagements, but he turned all of them down.
Regardless of where anyone stood in their assessment of him
and his work, no one could claim he was a
charlatan because he didn't seem at all interested in cashing
in on his own popularity, and when people did things

(29:08):
like begging him to cure the sick as though he
were some sort of mystic, healer or religious figure, he
actually exclaimed, I am not a saint but a man.
I can affect no cures. I can only help you
to help yourselves. I get the feeling he got a
little frustrated in the US at times. Before Kua ever
got to the States, the phrase every day, in every way,

(29:31):
I am getting better and better had become so well
known that riffs on it were even being used in
advertising to claim that sales were getting bigger and bigger,
for example. But then a series of claims that Kua
had not come up with this phrase began. This was
attributed to everyone from Socrates to Pliny the Elder to

(29:53):
our old friend in this episode e. Virgil Neil. Still,
Kua was enthusiastically greeted as he did toured around the
eastern half of the country for almost six weeks. He
returned again later in nineteen twenty three, but his second
US tour was pretty quiet by comparison. People had just
moved on to other things. Also in nineteen twenty three,

(30:14):
while all of this touring was happening, psychoanalyst Charles Baudoin
wrote that biography of Kua that we referenced earlier. Baudoin
had openly endorsed the work of Kua even before that,
and his biography began, at least to my mind, somewhat
comedically with a physical description of Kua. This is literally
how it opens. Quote thick set, somewhat short, quiet, compact strength,

(30:39):
a remarkably high forehead, hair brushed back, a little thinned out,
and perfectly white for a number of years already, as
also the short pointed Beard. The rest of Baudoin's description
shares what a lively and upbeat personality Kua had, also
noting quote, he is the type of what is known
in England and especially in a Mayorreka as the self

(31:01):
made man. He never denies his lowly origin, and you
feel that he loves the masses with the sympathy then
may be called organic. In late June nineteen twenty six,
Kua went on a lecture tour of the Alsace region
of France. He reported that he felt incredibly tired on
this tour and when he got home he felt completely

(31:21):
worn out. Just a few days later, on July second,
nineteen twenty six, Emil Koua died of heart failure in
his home in Nanci, France. His wife, Lucy, lived for
almost thirty more years. She died in nineteen fifty four.
In the last years of Emil Kua's life, a number
of Kuwait institutes popped up in cities in Europe and

(31:42):
the United States, but most of those sputtered out. People
who claimed they had been cured using his method often
reported later that their problems had come back. The enthusiasm
for autosuggestion really started lagging, and these institutes shut down.
But we see the echoes of Kua's work everywhere today,
although his name is rarely invoked. When you see or

(32:05):
hear a fitness trainer telling a client that they have
to see themselves achieving their fitness goals in order to
more effectively achieve them, that is an implementation of Kuaism.
The very popular idea of manifestation also rooted in Kua's work,
although in a slightly different application. Of course, Instead of
telling yourself that something can happen in an effort to

(32:28):
influence yourself to do it, you are, according to people
who believe in manifestation, telling the universe that you want
that thing to influence it. But in reality, this idea
works for some people because they're practicing a different form
of auto suggestion. Right. They may think that they're drawing
energies to themselves, but they're kind of setting themselves in

(32:49):
motion to turn the thing they imagine into a reality
through their own efforts. We'll never know how Kua would
have reacted to these modern versions of his idea, is though,
given how concerned he was about people just throwing out
scientific treatments to focus exclusively on suggestion or autosuggestion, it
stands to reason that he might worry a little bit.

(33:12):
A lot of scientists have outright dismissed Kuay's work over
the decades or framed it as sort of quaint, but
there has actually been quite a bit of scientific study
of auto suggestion in the last century. In twenty ten,
research into autogenic training, which is a type of auto
suggestion that's designed specifically to teach patients how to relax,

(33:34):
found via fMRI that the brains of study participants who
used auto suggestive phrases of autogenic training showed activation in
parts of the brain that subjects who did not use
auto suggestion did not. Show. That just means something was
happening in the brain, not necessarily an effect beyond that.

(33:58):
According to researcher Mark Schlim and his team in their paper,
autogenic training alters cerebral activation patterns in fMRI, Patients who
had autogenic training also process their emotions differently than subjects
who didn't have it and had increased levels of self awareness.
Another study conducted in twenty seventeen, led by Nina Kamalasari,

(34:21):
examined auto suggestion in relation to quality of life for
geriatric patients. The participants in the active group were given
scripts of auto suggestive phrases which they were recorded saying,
and then they listened to those recordings of their own
voices multiple times a day for thirty days. The control
group had no auto suggestion, and at the end of

(34:43):
the thirty days, the patients who had listened to their
auto suggestion recordings showed improvements in their perceived quality of life,
meaning the patients felt that they had improved, as well
as in their serum cortisol levels and their adaptive immunity.
So congestion seems to have some uses that could have
some scientific validity, but there's also a lot of difficulty

(35:06):
measuring the specifics, even with the scientific study that includes
hard numbers on body chemistry. And that's because there are
so many nuances to this whole thing, like how much
does visualization play a part. Someone who's telling themselves something
positive may or may not form an image in their
mind of that outcome, and it is hard to sort

(35:29):
out that variation and its possible contribution to the efficacy
even with some kind of testing. Additionally, people who are
using auto suggestive self talk specifically crafted to accompany medical
treatment might also subconsciously or maybe even consciously, take better
care of themselves and pay closer attention to their health

(35:49):
because they're being reminded of it regularly. In some cases,
that could also improve their outcomes. And of course every
person is wired differently. Not everybody will be successful with
any of these methods, whether they have any merit or not. Additionally,
there are ongoing debates about whether someone self evaluating can
even report a true improvement, or if the auto suggestion

(36:13):
actually just shifted their perception rather than their actual state
of being. So while there's research on auto suggestion that
can be seen as encouraging, it's not necessarily considered definitive
in any way. Yeah, people still argue about it in
scientific community all the time because we don't know. But

(36:34):
I find it fascinating. My thing is like, probably couldn't
hurt if it makes you feel better, great, Yeah, I'll
have plenty to say about this on Friday and are
behind the scenes. Yeah. In the meantime, listen, I promise
one day I'll stop talking about embroidery. But that day
is not today, And it's because we keep getting so
many good emails from listeners and this one touches me.

(36:58):
So I hope I don't cry, but I might. It's me.
This is from our listener, Christine, who writes Hi, Holly
and Tracy, longtime listener and periodic writer. I am still
stuck thinking about your embroidery episode. Needlecrafts are a huge
part of my life, and when I started thinking about writing,
the list of everything I wanted to tell you just
kept getting longer and longer. I know how that happens.

(37:18):
That's why I'm so bad at replying to emails. Christy continues.
I learned to cross ditch so and crochet at a
young age. It keeps my hands busy and helps me
calm my brain. My mom does beautiful cross ditch Christmas
stockings for all her grandkids and his wedding gifts. They
make such an amazing gift for anyone who celebrates Christmas.
She follows a pattern, but also adds in some personal

(37:38):
touches and puts each person's name on their stocking. It's
a beautiful gift. That's the kind of stuff you will
keep for your entire life. I love it. This is
the part that gets me choked up. So sorry. I
am attaching a photo of one of the most amazing
needle art gifts my husband and I have ever received.
A few years ago, our best friend tragically passed away.
He and my husband were close as brothers and had

(37:59):
gotten ten tattoos not too long before his death that
translated to brother. When he passed, we received the attached
needlework with the Greek lettering from the tattoo. I don't
know who made it. It was an anonymous gift, but
it is precious to both of us. This is the
sweetest thing I've ever heard. Needlework has taken on a
little more meaning for me in the last three years.

(38:20):
I hope the person who made it knows how much
it means to us. So sweet and then excitement. I
have also included some pet tax for you. Are two
rescue kitties, Tiger and Bean. Bean thinks it is essential
to sit on the food buckets so we don't forget
to feed her. Listen, that's just efficient. Bean knows what's up.
Thank you for highlighting stories we don't hear every day,

(38:41):
and for not shying away from the hard stuff. I
think it is too easy for many people to avoid discomfort,
making it far too easy to allow harmful things to
happen around us without getting involved. Keep speaking up, saying
the hard things, and advocating for the people and stories
who have been missed in history. Christine, Christine, I obviously
love this email. These kiddies are listen. Tiger and Bean

(39:04):
are very precious and they need kisses and hooks and like,
listen the food. Sometimes you got to be reminded that
there's food there. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
We will be right back here with more episodes coming up.
Thank you so much for spending this time with us.

(39:25):
And if you would like to subscribe to the podcast
and you haven't done that yet, you can do that
on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your

(39:47):
favorite shows.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Émile Coué and Autosuggestion