Lthe Coué method? “Repeat this sentence twenty times morning and evening: ‘Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.'” And its secret? “Repeat, believe, imagine.” But who was the inventor of this dosage that flourished until the death of Émile Coué (1857-1926) and has had many twists and turns today? This is what Étienne Kern sought to find out, not as a biographer, but as a novelist, author of The FlightsGoncourt for the first novel 2022, based on a very real character, who wanted to fly from the Eiffel Tower.
As the writer is right to believe, like his subject, that “imagination does everything”. And love, absent or present, even more so. Émile is unloved by a father from a noble family, ending up as a railway worker in Troyes. It is there that this son – only – who became a pharmacist opens his pharmacy. Discovering the placebo effect, Émile senses that illusion can do everything. He will need all the love of his wife, Lucie, daughter of a horticulturist from Nancy, to embark on his path as a healer for some, a charlatan for others, which will make the front page of New York Times and will sell 100,000 copies of its Self-mastery through conscious autosuggestion in 1922.
Each step of this exciting destiny is narrated with remarkable empathy. And for good reason. Étienne Kern traces his tenderness for Coué back to that felt for Irène and André, friends of his parents, who so courageously survived the loss of a son. How does one welcome […] Read more
