I (\ f T if V A D 
C HILD REN 
ULK 11\UDL r YO COUE FOR CHILDREN EMILE COUE 
©The Misses Selby COUE FOR 
CHILDREN 
BY 
GERTRUDE MAYO 
WITH A PREFACE 
BY 
EMILE COUE 
ILLUSTRATED 
NEW YORK 
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 
1923 Copyright, 1923, 
BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC. PREFACE BY EMILE COUE 
About ten years ago Mile. Kaufmant came to 
me as a patient, but as she later admitted to me, 
lacking in faith. It seemed to her that there was 
something like charlatanism in what I was doing. 
But from the very first day she was converted 
and profiting by my councils she made rapid 
progress toward the relief she had hitherto 
sought in vain. Filled with my ideas and de- 
siring to do as much good as possible for others, 
she asked to become my disciple and little by 
little she became capable of treating patients as 
successfully as I myself could. 
As she felt herself especially drawn toward 
children she cared for them with all the tender- 
ness of a mother, and I have seen her obtaining 
the most extraordinary results with poor little 
sick children, in the most desperate conditions— 
who under her beneficent influence were brought 
back to health. 
It is a pleasure to give this recognition to Mile. 
Kaufmant’s work—and to say that she can ren- 
V PREFACE BY EMILE COUE 
VI 
der a very great service by working in hospitals 
for children. 
Emile Coue 
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5 / INTRODUCTION 
Those who have seen Emile Coue will agree that 
he is in himself the best endorsement of the value 
of his own method. He is simple, he is kind, he 
is strong, he is brave, he is happy—and he offers 
to teach us to become all of these things—assur- 
ing us that he himself is in no way extraordinary. 
He says that others can teach the method of 
auto-suggestion as well as he if only (and what 
an if!) they possess absolute conviction and a 
deep unselfish love for their fellow beings. No 
disciple of M. Coue has ever come nearer to real- 
izing these ideal qualifications than Mile. Marie 
Kaufmant, his earliest pupil. 
Mile. Kaufmant came to the house in the rue 
Jeanne d’Arc to a clinic. She saw there a man 
working for the good of others without heed of 
recognition or recompense. Her mind was sim- 
ple and fresh and it was there that it received its 
first profound impression. She accepted the 
principles of auto-suggestion as beautiful and 
“Christlike”—making them an integral part of 
VII VIII 
INTRODUCTION 
her fervent religious faith. In addition she had 
a passionate and instinctive love for children, 
combined with a sweet, unselfish nature. 
When the opportunity came to help with the 
children’s clinic it was as though all the forces 
of her life-current, spiritual and physical, had 
found an outlet through this one channel. With 
the faith that can “remove mountains’’ and the 
love “which passeth knowledge” she entered upon 
her life work. The results she has obtained in 
treating children have amazed and mystified even 
M. Coue himself. 
If this little book, in which I attempt to de- 
scribe something of what I have seen at Nancy, 
gives courage and inspiration to any mother who 
is hoping to teach conscious auto-suggestion to 
her children, it will have served its purpose. 
Gertrude Mayo 
New York, 
February 26, 1928 CONTENTS 
CHAPTER PAGE 
I The Clinic of Happy Children . 1 
II Castaways of Humanity . . 18 
III A Thought in the Mind . . 50 
IV A Story with a Point ... 77 
V Ifs and Buts 106 ILLUSTRATIONS 
Emile Cou6 Frontispiece 
PACING 
PAGE 
Facsimile of Preface by Emile Coue vi 
Mile. Kaufmant in the Garden Clinic ... 16 
Madeleine Beninger 40 
Mile. Kaufmant and Some of Her Patients . 48 
M. Coue’s House in Nancy 80 
The Chevreul Pendulum 120 COUE FOR CHILDREN COUE FOR CHILDREN 
CHAPTER I 
THE CLINIC OF HAPPY CHILDREN 
All the world has heard of M. Coue and his 
clinic at Nancy. Many graphic descriptions 
have been published of the scenes that take place 
there, so the account of my first visit will be very 
brief. The purpose of this book is to describe 
a department of the work concerning which very 
little has as yet been written. 
In the little upstairs room in the garden cot- 
tage I first found the clinic. My initial sensation 
as I looked about me was one of guilt that I 
should be occupying one of the coveted chairs 
without any disease in the least worthy of atten- 
tion. So many people were evidently suffering: 
that woman with black melancholia written on 
her face: that English officer they had carried up 
and deposited helpless in a chair. He was para- 
1 2 
COUE FOR CHILDREN 
lyzed in his arm and on one side, and his face 
expressed a desperate obstinacy. Then there 
were asthmatics, neurasthenics, cripples of all 
sorts and many nationalities. We glanced fur- 
tively at one another with a shy distrust and 
curiosity. I noticed particularly a dyspeptic- 
looking American business man who was very 
self-conscious. His supercilious smile seemed to 
be meant to indicate to all about him that he was 
there through no weakness of his own—but only 
to gratify his wife’s whim. 
Presently in the doorway M. Coue appeared, 
smiling and cheerful, rolling one of his little 
cigarettes of Maryland, and the clinic was on. 
He took a few steps into the circle, stopping 
suddenly at point, as one might say, with a sharp 
thrust of his little goatee, “And how are you to- 
day, Madame?” The woman addressed admitted 
rather grudgingly that she was better but added 
that her attack was not due until the next day. 
M. Coue stamped his foot with comic indigna- 
tion—“Madame a sa crise arrangee d’avancc. 
Quest-ce que je peux faire alors! It will come 
just as she has planned it.” It was funny and 
every one laughed, including the patient who was CLINIC OF HAPPY CHILDREN 
3 
being scolded. There is never any sting in M. 
Coue’s sarcasms. 
The paralyzed English officer had no progress 
to report, but said he had “confidence” and it 
sounded infinitely pathetic. Then there was a 
short, sharp encounter with a young man who 
stammered very badly, from which M. Coue 
emerged victorious amid a murmur of applause. 
“I have no longer any fear. I am cured,” said 
the young man, with an odd look of bewilder- 
ment. 
One or two women handed him slips of paper 
on which the nature of their illnesses were writ- 
ten—and an old American lady said that her toes 
were getting crooked and giving her pain. “I 
felicitate you,” said M. Coue with a very polite 
bow when she told him that she was seventy-nine 
years old. i 
Not until the end did the really dramatic inci- 
dents come. A rugged old type of Lorraine 
peasant woman said that her right arm and shoul- 
der had been helpless from rheumatism for many 
years and she was in constant pain. “A la bonne 
heure ” cried M. Coue gaily. “Here we have a 
real person with a real pain!” He drew her into 4 
COUE FOR CHILDREN 
the middle of the room, bade her shut her eyes 
and repeat with him the pa passe formula— 
“Zaba, Zaba, Zaba.” They buzzed in unison and 
it went so fast one could not hear the words while 
M. Coue, standing behind her and stroking her 
back, looked as though he were winding up a 
mechanical toy. 
Then a short, sharp command: “Now think ‘l 
Can/ Lift up your arm!” And up it went— 
half way—but there it halted and there was a 
grimace of pain on the poor old wrinkled face. 
“Hold it there,” M. Coue ordered. Again the 
whirring pa passe and the winding-up process. 
This time not only did her arm go straight up in 
the air, but it came down again, feebly at first, 
then with increasingly forceful whacks on M. 
Coue’s solid shoulder. 
The old woman laughed aloud with pride and 
joy in her own prowess—M. Coue laughed, too, 
and we all laughed with her and with each other. 
There was a gust of handclapping. For that 
moment we had forgotten ourselves; all our 
hopes and sympathies had been merged in that 
old peasant woman’s battle for self-mastery. 
The dyspeptic American had lost his supercilious CLINIC OF HAPPY CHILDREN 
5 
smile and was bending forward eagerly. The 
victim of melancholia was clapping encourage- 
ment. And the old American lady—well, I am 
sure she was not thinking of the crimps in her 
toes at that instant any more than I was thinking 
about the troubles I didn’t have. 
Chips and sparks were flying all about as M. 
Coue chiselled away at the incrustations and 
crystallizations of life-times on the human mind. 
He was a sculptor working on hard material. 
His blows were short and sharp. “You see that 
I am right—you cannot because you think T can- 
not.’ Think always ‘I can.’ ” 
The next drama was enacted with an old black- 
smith who laid down his crutches timorously and 
took a few faltering steps, which soon became a 
walk and then a shuffling dog-trot as M. Coue 
chased him about the circle like a terrier barking 
at his heels. Amid another burst of applause 
the old man looked over his shoulder a little rue- 
fully at his pursuer. “This is all very well here, 
M. Coue, where you have the Bon Dieu to help 
you, but just wait till I get home and the Devil 
will be waiting to get back into my legs.” “No, 
no,” cried Coue, laughing; “I have shown you COUE FOR CHILDREN 
6 
how to drive him out once and you can do it 
again.” 
Then we all closed our eyes obediently and 
received a long, comprehensive suggestion for 
health and happiness. It was soothing and even 
a little soporific. A young Englishwoman, who 
seemed either very, very tired or nervously ex- 
hausted, went sound asleep and woke with a start 
when M. Coue, at the end, counted 1, 2, 3! 
Then there was a general scraping of chair- 
legs as the clinic broke up. Thoughtfully, 
sceptically, hopefully—each according to his men- 
tal habit—we filed down the little stair-case. 
From the scraps of conversation overheard it be- 
came evident that almost every one of us had 
left some little portion of his pilgrim’s pack of 
maleficent ideas in that little upstairs room. But 
it was also true that many were already gather- 
ing their old individualities about them like wraps 
that had been discarded for only a moment. The 
dyspeptic was telling his wife that “of course this 
theory might work with peasant and Latin tem- 
peraments generally—but—” 
As I stood aside to make way while the 
paralyzed English officer was carried to his wheel CLINIC OF HAPPY CHILDREN 
7 
chair, I heard from over my shoulder the frag- 
ment of an amusing story being told about some 
one who had caught two red-nosed old cab-drivers 
at the station winking at each other meaningly 
as they drove away, each with an unsuspecting 
pilgrim—foreign and female—bound for the 
Mecca in the rue Jeanne d’Arc. 
What infinite faith and patience is needed for 
this business of re-cutting the human mind to a 
new pattern! 
There was, however, on most of the faces an 
expression of dawning hopefulness. M. Coue, 
smiling, chaffing, commanding, reasoning, had 
done his work of exorcising devils, though many 
of them were but lingering outside the door. 
There was that devil waiting to get back into the 
old blacksmith’s legs—and how about the little 
green devil of doubt who had driven my own 
machine so long and so badly. He was probably 
out there waiting. He would smile patronizingly 
at my suggestion of taking over the wheel. “If 
Madame had begun earlier, perhaps. Of course 
courage and confidence are admirable, but one 
must not be foolish about it now and expect too 
much.” Whereupon I should find myself back in COUE FOR CHILDREN 
8 
the tonneau, being bumped along as before, and 
my little green devil driver would wink back at 
other people’s little green devils, as we left 
Nancy and the kind wonder-working apostle of 
optimism behind us. 
This is what might have happened, but it 
didn’t, and it didn’t because of what I found 
when I came out into M. Coue’s garden, shaded 
by fruit trees and lilac bushes. A warm sun was 
casting leaf shadows on the white pebbled walks. 
No devil would have felt at home there. Over 
in a corner I saw a group of women sitting. 
They were most of them bare-headed, poor, and 
toil worn, and with them were children and ba- 
bies. It flashed across my mind that this must 
be the children’s clinic of which I had read. 
While I was wondering how I could come near 
enough to hear, without disturbing the quiet of 
that little gathering, I noticed the pitifully frail 
figure of a woman lying on a nearby garden 
bench, with many supporting pillows. Her eyes, 
very big and dark in the deathly whiteness of 
her face, were fixed on me, and she was pointing 
to a chair at her side. Gratefully I tiptoed over 
to that point of vantage. CLINIC OF HAPPY CHILDREN 
9 
From it I could see and hear what was going 
on in that little group at once so simple and so 
mysterious. Mile. Kaufmant was sitting in 
the midst of the circle, bending over the baby 
in her lap, talking to it in a voice low and musi- 
cal, accompanied by genble strokings of the 
hands. She might have posed as a symbol of 
Maternity, this grey-clad figure with soft dark 
eyes, hair touched with white and cheeks glowing 
with warm colour. 
The calm of the scene was almost religious. 
Mothers sat with their work-weary hands lying 
idly in their laps, looking peaceful and confident. 
The children too were curiously quiet, even the 
babies. Even a poor little imbecile child, whose 
arms fluttered unceasingly while its head rolled 
from side to side on its pillow, made no sound. 
Birds perched in the lilac bush and perfume 
floated over from a near-by flower bed. 
I found myself watching Mile. Kaufmant’s 
hands, fascinated by their movements. They 
were beautiful hands, sensitive and delicate, swift 
and deft. Stroking was a sledge-hammer word 
to apply to anything so infinitely gentle and ten- 10 
COUE FOR CHILDREN 
der. It was more like the fleeting brush of a 
humming-bird’s wing on a flower petal. 
Only occasionally could I catch a phrase of 
what she was saying and these snatches sounded 
much like what mothers have been saying to their 
babies since the beginning of time, except that 
Mile. Kaufmant was telling this baby that it was 
going to grow strong and well and happy, saying 
it in a way that left no room for doubt. Already 
her “petit chou” was better, the dreadful sore 
was beginning to heal, and to-morrow when he 
came again there would be still further improve- 
ment. And when at last she handed the baby 
back to the waiting arms, I saw there was indeed 
need of improvement; a wasted little skeleton 
with an abscess on its head. For a moment she 
whispered advice to the mother and I heard the 
promise of some needed delicacy. 
Now she was bending over a child of nine with 
pipe-stem legs piteously twisted. “Et toi, ma 
petite chatte?” The little girl closed her eyes, 
smiling, and then began another rapid flow of 
words, entirely spontaneous and without a break, 
except that once or twice a sentence ended in a 
“n’est-ce-pasV’ that sounded somehow like the CLINIC OF HAPPY CHILDREN 
11 
cheerful, hopeful chirp of a mother robin. Then 
a smile would flicker on the little cripple’s face 
as she murmured, “Oui, Mademoiselle ” 
It was as though the child’s mind had been a 
white screen upon which a moving picture was 
thrown, a delightful, enchanting picture of her- 
self as she was going to be—as she was even now 
beginning to be! Little by little her legs were 
straightening out, gaining strength and growing 
longer. Already her appetite had improved and 
it would grow better every day. She would eat 
all the food provided by her devoted “maman” 
thinking all the time how it was going to nourish 
her little legs and make them straight and fat 
as little girls’ legs ought to be. All this would 
be going on while she was sleeping, and every 
hour the swelling of her knees was getting less 
and less until . . . and here came word tableaux 
picturing a gay little girl with chubby legs, danc- 
ing, rolling hoops and singing for joy. Then a 
sudden return to a graver note. “You must never 
be sad any more, ma petite; I do not wish it. 
When one is sad then everything goes wrong. 
From now on you will be gay and happy and 
when the time comes for you to make your first COUE FOR CHILDREN 
12 
communion you will go like the other children. 
NJest ce pas, ma petite cherie?* 
I felt tears and a clutching sensation of pity 
as I watched the face of that crippled child, 
happy and smiling. This was a meningitis vic- 
tim and it seemed impossible that such improve- 
ments could ever be realized. 
Then from the bench beside me the invalid 
whispered that this little Leontine Freminet is 
one of the most interesting of the cases. Her 
improvement has already been extraordinary 
and every one believes that she will be one of the 
“great cures.” Only a very short time ago she 
had been brought there with a rigid contracture 
of the legs, the knees bent up and held under the 
arm-pits. “Look how she is taking a few steps 
on the garden path supported by her mother.” 
I must also see how the flesh is beginning to form 
under the skin on the pipe-stem legs. But the 
most amazing thing had been the improvement 
in her morale: When she first came her face 
seemed utterly hopeless and now look at the 
dawning intelligence, the smiles, and the actual 
suspicion of colour in her cheeks! 
I looked and listened and wondered with the CLINIC OF HAPPY CHILDREN 
13 
usual mental reservations crowding in. Of one 
thing I felt absolute certainty, and that was 
that every word that Mile. Kaufmant had said 
the child had accepted with absolute credence. 
So too did the mother believe. Indeed, every 
one in that circle was convinced that the changes 
described were taking place. If, as M. Coue had 
said, every idea must realize itself within the do- 
main of possibility, and in proportion to the emo- 
tional force behind it, then undoubtedly every 
spark of vitality in that poor little being had 
been summoned to do its work of repair and 
rescue. 
It would happen just as Mile. Marie had said, 
for did not every one know that she had cured 
hundreds and hundreds of other children who 
had suffered as they were suffering, and more. 
This good suggestion of M. Coue was the way 
of the Bon Dieu to bring back health and happi- 
ness to the little children whom he had sent into 
the world to be well and gay. It was only by 
some unfortunate misunderstanding that they 
had fallen sick. But now all this was to be made 
right and already the change was taking place. 
Upstairs in the cottage, M. Coue had been say- 14 
COUE FOR CHILDREN 
ing much the same thing to his more sophisti- 
cated, grown-up audience, only he hadn’t said it 
in the same way. He had given them an exam- 
ple in addition and subtraction as simple as two 
and two makes four and four less two leaves two, 
but some in that grown-up audience had gaped at 
the blackboard, wondering if it could not be done 
better in algebra. He had stated that a large 
proportion of human ills, mental and physical, 
were caused by fear, generated from the conflict 
of the imagination and the will, acting like two 
pairs of hands clutching at the steering wheel of 
the subconscious mind. This conflict could be 
ended by his method (child-like in its simplicity) 
and imagination, unhampered by fear, would 
guide the machine with the utmost possible effi- 
ciency. Unless this plan was accepted and acted 
on he could do nothing for us. He did not cure, 
he only showed us how to cure ourselves. Take 
it or leave it. 
Here in the garden, Mile. Kaufmant was ap- 
plying the same principles to the desperate needs 
of little children, only she did not rest her case 
on an appeal to pure reason. Woman-like, she 
was more intent upon the end than upon the CLINIC OF HAPPY CHILDREN 
15 
means. The house must be swept and cleaned 
and its windows thrown open before it would be 
in order for the day’s work. 
There she stood, a compassionate, compelling, 
ultra-feminine little figure, bending over a small 
boy encased in a heavy plaster cast. She was 
telling him that underneath that plaster even 
now the Bon Dieu, who loved sweet little boys 
such as he, was working, working to straighten 
his spine. That every minute he would continue 
to improve, because now that he had learned the 
“good method” of M. Coue he would tell himself 
every night and every morning, on the string 
with twenty knots, that he was getting better and 
better. Every day he would feel more and more 
appetite and he would eat with relish the nour- 
ishing soups and jellies she had sent to his 
Maman, and finally that he would soon, soon be 
well and strong because she, Mile. Marie, who 
loved him and whom he loved, desired it. 
Watching the child’s wrapt expression, I felt 
absolute conviction that no disintegrating thought 
of “I cannot” had wriggled through the solid 
phalanx of ideas which Mile. Kaufmant had mar- 
shalled to the rescue. Le Bon Dieu, the doctor, COUE FOR CHILDREN 
16 
M. Coue and the soups and jellies would all do 
their work. That little unconscious was going 
to do as it was told. Mile. Marie would see to 
it that it did. She was never mistaken. She had 
this affair in hand now and would see it through. 
When the clinic was over I ventured to ask a 
question as to whether very young babies could 
be influenced through auto-suggestion. Mile. 
Kaufmant seemed almost impatient at the ig- 
norant doubt implied. “Does not M. Coue tell 
you that no suggestion can ever be effective un- 
less it is accepted by the unconscious mind and 
transformed into an auto-suggestion ? I have 
treated hundreds of babies and they have all— 
all—understood me and responded with improve- 
ment. Ask these mothers if it is not so. No one 
knows what the soul of a baby is like, but mothers 
have always known since the beginning of the 
world that it is only through love that they can 
be reached, that it is the only language they can 
understand. I do not know what is meant by 
magnetism. I do not bother my head about these 
things. The caress—what is it but the love that 
passes out from the heart through the tips of the 
fingers? Even the littlest of babies feel it with- MLLE. KAUFMANT IN THE GARDEN CLINIC CLINIC OF HAPPY CHILDREN 
out the necessity of words. I am a woman and 
I think with my heart. Let men of science use 
their brains to find out why this is so; I do not 
know. But let them come and watch. Then they 
can frame their theories to fit the facts. 
“It has been my dream to work under medical 
observation, under ideal conditions of sanitation 
and cleanliness, where everything could be done 
to help these cases along. I would call it the 
fClinique des Enfants Heureuoc!’ ” She paused, 
looking into space and I could picture the cheer- 
ful white painted room she was dreaming of, with 
toys, bright pictures on the walls, running water, 
and all the ordinary conveniences for the care of 
children which were now lacking. The Clinic of 
Happy Children! 
Longing to hear more of the fascinating sub- 
ject, but knowing that my train was nearly due, 
I went away pondering on all I had seen and 
heard, my mind seething with the questions I had 
not had time to ask. 
The memory of that little garden, where I had 
seen sick children reviving like drooping flowers 
under a soft summer rain, went with me, never 
to be forgotten. 
17 CHAPTER II 
LITTLE CASTAWAYS OF HUMANITY 
That autumn all America began quite suddenly 
to talk of Coue. 
You heard very frequently that his method was 
at least as old as Hippocrates, who had known 
all about it, and that all good family physicians 
had been and were still practising auto-sugges- 
tion on their patients; that Coue’s contribution 
to the subject was next to nothing at all. Never- 
theless, prodigious numbers of people were read- 
ing the Coue book and the books about Coue and 
from every side there came rumours and first- 
hand testimony as to how these people were 
profiting by the idea in ways that seemed nearly 
miraculous. 
M. Coue was being called, among other things, 
the Henry Ford of psychology. That compari- 
son seemed a good one because it could be fol- 
lowed through. Ford had taken the complicated 
and expensive rich man’s automobile and simpli- 
18 CASTAWAYS OF HUMANITY 
19 
fied it part by part until he had at last produced 
the little “flivver” within the reach of every 
farmer. He had begun with an engine that had 
to be cranked from without, but later substituted 
a self-starter, as safer and more efficient. Just 
so M. Coue had first started the engine of the 
unconscious mind with hypnotic hetero-sugges- 
tion and later had substituted the self-starter of 
conscious auto-suggestion and thanks to him 
people by tens and hundreds of thousands, who 
had never known before that they possessed un- 
conscious minds, were finding not only that they 
had but that they could command them to their 
great personal advantage and convenience. 
Also I found that many of my friends were 
making earnest attempts to apply the method 
to the treatment or training of their children. 
They had never seen it done and were a little 
awkward and shy about beginning, but the idea 
of its tremendous possibilities had gripped their 
imaginations. 
More and more often I thought of the chil- 
dren’s clinic and of the woman who had had ten 
years of practical experience in doing what all 
these mothers were trying to do. COUE FOR CHILDREN 
20 
So in December I went again to Nancy, hoping 
to see more of Mile. Kaufmant and her work. 
It was bleak winter weather when I arrived 
there. Sun, flowers and children had all vanished 
from M. Coue’s little garden, although the crowd 
of adult patients was as great as before. I 
learned that the children’s clinic had been sus- 
pended because Mile. Kaufmant had been away, 
but my disappointment was forgotten in aston- 
ishment, when I recognized my informant. 
It was in the rue Jeanne d’Arc and I had taken 
several running steps to catch up with a woman, 
walking very briskly, a slim, straight figure. 
When she turned to answer my question I saw 
that it was the English invalid whom I had last 
seen lying on the bench in the garden three 
months before—her face was not one to be for- 
gotten. Later on I heard her story. She had 
received a terrible spinal injury in a coasting ac- 
cident, which had left her helpless and in constant 
pain. No one had been able to offer her any 
hope of recovery or even of improvement. After 
nine years of this living death she had come to 
Nancy. Her first step had been taken in October 
and here in December she was taking a two-mile CASTAWAYS OF HUMANITY 
21 
walk every day. A faith almost mystical shone 
in her eyes, and she was staying on at the clinic 
to help others by her example, a living beacon of 
hope on the way. 
When I inquired for the paralyzed English of- 
ficer hope had seemed so forlorn in the 
summer, I was told that he had gone home to 
England, not in his wheel chair but walking 
with the aid of a stick. He had stayed at Nancy 
for nine months, with a totally unemotional, 
dogged perseverance, doing everything that he 
was told to do, and believing that the method was 
mechanically correct and therefore bound to pro- 
duce a result in time. It did. A letter had re- 
cently been received from him stating that since 
his return to England, he had been able to throw 
away his stick. The signature was in his own 
writing, followed by the note “Written with my 
‘paralyzed arm.’ ” This was Captain Rogerson, 
of whose case much has been written. His 
paralysis was believed to have been caused by 
pressure of a fractured skull on the brain. 
It did seem almost unbelievable that these two 
who had seemed to me the most hopeless of all 
the cure seekers only three months before should COUE FOR CHILDREN 
22 
both have realized such triumphs. I thought 
then of the little paralyzed meningitis victim, 
Leontine Freminet, whom I had seen learning to 
walk, and wondered if she too were numbered 
among the “grandes gueries” 
Later I found Mile. Kaufmant in her home; 
she had just returned to Nancy. I told her of 
the interest that had brought me back to her from 
America, and as I had never heard the history of 
her connection with the clinics, I asked her to tell 
it to me, and here it is in her own words: 
“All my life I had been ill, but at the time of 
which I speak my condition was rendered more 
deplorable by a disease of the stomach and intes- 
tines and chronic appendicitis. In three months 
I had lost twenty-five pounds. I had been every- 
where and tried everything, but I was going from 
bad to worse. 
“For a long time I had heard people speaking 
of M. Coue, but the idea did not interest me. The 
doctors had been very kind to me, but they had 
all said there was nothing to be done. One day 
I went with a friend to see M. Coue, not hoping 
to be cured, but only to see how he practised his method. He asked me what was the matter with 
me, but being very timid by nature I did not even 
answer him. As I had gotten it into my head 
that my case was hopeless, there was no bene- 
ficial result from that visit. I had come there as 
a complete sceptic, even prejudiced against sug- 
gestion, but I saw a spectacle such as I had never 
seen before. 
“It was in M. Coue’s little office, and the 
patients were representative of all classes. 
Women of the best society were sitting on camp- 
stools while poor sick peasant women were in the 
armchairs. I saw a man with a face full of kind- 
ness talking to every one in the same way with- 
out the slightest difference. I watched the eyes 
of the sick people and noticed the complete 
change in their expressions after the seance. 
Everything was changed; it was as though bright 
sunshine had driven away a fog and every one 
in leaving said, ‘Thank you, Monsieur.’ In the 
magnificence of this spectacle I thought myself 
in the presence of a new St. Vincent de Paul. 
“I returned to the clinic but still with the fixed 
idea that I was impervious to good suggestion. 
Meaning to be honest about it, I said to M. Coue, 
CASTAWAYS OF HUMANITY 
23 COUE FOR CHILDREN 
24 
‘Don’t bother about me.’ He answered, ‘But you, 
too, should be cured. You are a great sufferer— 
I want you also to be one of the great cures/ 
‘No,’ I said, ‘please don’t trouble yourself about 
me, I only want to watch you.’ 
“Many times I returned to the clinic, always 
finding M. Coue giving the same loving care to 
his patients, without the slightest distinction of 
class. If there was any preference it was for the 
most unfortunate. I was filled with admiration. 
“Gradually I lost my sceptical and rebellious 
attitude and found myself becoming an enthusi- 
ast for the method. Little by little my pain dis- 
appeared. One day I went straight from M. 
Coue’s house to the church and made this prom- 
ise to God. ‘If I am to be cured, I shall conse- 
crate the health that is given me to the service 
of the suffering poor.’ I had no idea at that mo- 
ment just what I should do, but I was filled with 
a great desire to help others. One day M. Coue 
said to me, ‘If you have absolute faith and a pro- 
found desire, you will be able to do as I do,’ but 
this seemed to me then outside the range of possi- 
bility. 
“Six months passed, the patients becoming CASTAWAYS OF HUMANITY 
25 
more and more numerous every day, until 
M. Coue had more than he could possibly do to 
treat them all. One day he wrote me a letter, 
saying, ‘You admire the life I am leading, you 
think it is beautiful because I am enabled to do 
good. I believe that this life will become more 
and more beautiful as the knowledge of my 
method spreads abroad. This life can be yours 
as well. I have need of some one to help me, for 
you see that I can do no more than I am doing. 
I have desired with all my heart to train pupils, 
but I have never before found any one as fervent 
as you are, any one who would answer and to 
whom I could make this request. You have so 
great a sympathy for suffering human beings 
that nothing will hold you back. You will work 
only for the love of doing good and without 
recompense. I assure you that you will be a very 
good pupil and I want you to be my first.’ 
“In this realization of my long-cherished de- 
sire, I never thought that I should ever be able 
to perform cures, only M. Coue could do that. 
I began by keeping records of cases, preparing 
patients for treatment and doing what I could to 
cheer and encourage them. Then children began COUE FOR CHILDREN 
26 
to come to the clinics and M. Coue asked me to 
look after them particularly. Before I knew it 
I had begun to give them suggestion and found 
myself getting the most amazing results with 
childish infirmities of every sort. Nevertheless, 
I thought it would be impossible for me to suc- 
ceed with grown persons, although M. Coue as- 
sured me to the contrary. 
“One day there were again too many patients 
and M. Coue asked me to take some of them, as 
I had finished with my children. I said to them, 
‘Do not feel yourselves obliged to come with me,’ 
and they answered, ‘But, Mademoiselle, we have 
confidence in you also, and it is easier for us to 
talk to a woman than to tell our troubles publicly 
before everybody.’ So I entered upon this new 
work with all my heart, saying to my patients, 
‘Think that M. Coue is speaking through my 
mouth.’ My patients returned to me again and 
again and thereafter they continued to come in 
increasing numbers until I had sometimes as 
many as three hundred or three hundred and 
fifty persons on the same day. 
“It was in 1914 that M. Coue took the small 
house in the garden for his clinics and I furnished CASTAWAYS OF HUMANITY 
27 
the little upstairs room for the children. We 
had seven clinics each day, beginning at seven 
o’clock in the morning and working until seven 
at night. Every one went first to M. Coue, who 
explained the nature of suggestion to them by 
means of the various experiments. Then all 
those who wished to do so were invited to go up- 
stairs with ‘Mile. Marie.’ After that I had no 
more scruples. 
“Never did I have to hunt for a word, they 
came naturally from my heart. When I had 
been working all day long, having sometimes as 
many as forty persons in one clinic, I would find 
myself stronger toward the end of the day; as 
though I had been galvanized! I worked on 
without effort and the more people there were 
the easier it was. 
“Sometimes I would find a hundred people 
waiting patiently to see me and with the grace 
of God I would manage to treat them all. Many 
of those who came were sceptical and rebellious as 
I had been, thinking it folly to suppose that their 
troubles could be cured by auto-suggestion. 
“Later other pupils came to help M. Coue and 
I gave myself again entirely to children.” COUE FOR CHILDREN 
28 
Mile. Kaufmant had not had time since her 
return to see any of her patients. To my enquiry 
for Leontine Freminet, she answered that her 
progress had been very rapid. On her last visit 
to the clinic she had taken several steps around 
a table, without support, and her morale had 
shown wonderful improvement. Yes, by all 
means, I could go with her to see how the little 
girl was getting on. So, in the very chilly morn- 
ing of the following day we set off together to 
find Leontine in her home. It was in one of 
the poorest quarters of the town, and we had 
many delays on the way, because we were con- 
stantly meeting ex-patients or their relatives, and 
of course we had to stop to hear news of them. 
Many and varied were the stories I heard and I 
found that Mile. Kaufmant could give very prac- 
tical advice as well as good suggestion. 
Once her keen eyes spied, far off, the dwarfish 
figure of a little hump-backed girl, just as she 
was disappearing through the door of a factory. 
Before I knew what had happened she had darted 
off in pursuit with the incredible speed of a mouse 
and was bringing her back in triumph for me to 
see. CASTAWAYS OF HUMANITY 
29 
The little factory worker seemed delighted to 
recount the history of her illness and cure. She 
was twenty-two years old now—all her childhood 
had been spent in lonely misery, because of the 
loathsome tubercular abscesses which had kept 
her housed away from other children. Then the 
Demoiselle had cured her and everything was 
changed. She could work now all day long with- 
out being tired, and she was gay too, going to 
parties and to the cinemas with the other girls. 
No, Mile. Marie must not think that she is 
wholly frivolous. She tells all her friends about 
the “good suggestion” and many of them are us- 
ing it. Nevertheless, she is making up for lost 
time. “Life owes me something,” she said with 
a toss of her head and a flash of her bright, black 
eyes. Mile. Kaufmant smiled and shook her head 
a little doubtfully as she dismissed her patient 
with the injunction not to overdo it. 
At last we reached an ancient tenement house, 
and after many flights of stairs and dark, wind- 
ing passages we came at last to a door and 
knocked. It was opened by Leontine’s mother. 
Her kind, honest eyes filled with tears when she 
saw her visitor. “Surely the Good God has sent 30 
COUE FOR CHILDREN 
you, Mademoiselle; He has heard my prayers. 
My poor little girl! For three days she wept 
when she heard you had gone and in the night in 
her dreams she would call for you. Ever since she 
has been slipping back and back, until now she is 
almost as she was before—always sad and lifeless. 
She will only crawl on her hands and knees and 
God knows what that means in stockings! In- 
deed yes, Mademoiselle, I have tried to give the 
suggestion faithfully every night as you taught 
me to do, but I can no longer get her to make it 
for herself in the night and morning. She does 
not seem to care any more.” 
We found ourselves in a poor, cheerless room 
with an unmade bed, and something boiling on a 
little stove. Near the one window two little girls 
were sitting; one bright and curious, the other a 
wilted, down-cast little figure with spindling, 
twisted legs dangling from the chair. Yes, it was 
Leontine, but no longer the petite miraculee of 
the Garden. She did not look up or show any 
sign of life. 
Mile. Kaufmant was evidently much dis- 
tressed. She stripped off her gloves hurriedly, 
and seating herself before the child began to CASTAWAYS OF HUMANITY 
31 
examine and caress the helpless legs with mur- 
mured words of endearment, which finally took 
the form of suggestion. 
“Ma petite Chatte, you must not be sad. You 
were grieved because I went away, but now I 
shall not leave you again. Never do I really 
leave my children until they are quite well. And 
now you will begin again to make the good sug- 
gestion. You have stumbled, to be sure, but from 
now on you will make rapid progress. You will 
begin to smile again, knowing that you will be 
happy.” As the stream flowed on and on with- 
out a break, hardly a pause for breath, a faint 
glimmer of light showed on the little downcast 
face and at the end she raised her eyes for an 
instant and smiled shyly. 
As we went our way homeward through the 
crooked streets, Mile. Kaufmant talked of the 
pathetic case we had just left. “A child,” she 
said, “can be taught to operate itself, as it can be 
taught to operate a machine, and when it is well 
and strong the task is always simple. But with 
such a one as this, and nearly all the children who 
are brought to me are the little castaways of hu- 
manity given up by every one, there must be a COUE FOR CHILDREN 
32 
strong helping hand to cling to until they have 
found strength to help themselves.” 
Leontine, then, had been left to herself before 
she was in a condition to carry on the work she 
had begun so promisingly. Her mother had been 
unable to supply the galvanizing battery of emo- 
tion behind the outside suggestion and the child 
herself had not the strength of mind or body to 
carry on the night and morning self-assurance 
that she was getting better and better. 
On the following day, I turned the subject 
again to babies, by reading an extract from a 
letter written to me by M. Coue in which, after 
speaking of the good results which had been ob- 
tained by “caressing them tenderly and talking 
to them softly,” he said: “This has usually been 
attributed to a sort of magnetism emanating from 
the operator. That is possible, but I do not be- 
lieve it. It seems to me rather that the caresses 
and the musical voice of the person produce an 
auto-suggestion of health in the child which 
causes the cure. As soon as the child begins to 
understand what is said to him from the ages of 
five or six the same method will bring better re- 
sults.” Mile. Kaufmant nodded approval until CASTAWAYS OF HUMANITY 
33 
we reached the last sentence, and with that she 
did not agree. “M. Coue used to think that chil- 
dren under four years old could not understand, 
but after I had succeeded in curing a twenty 
months old baby of a painful illness, and the little 
boy had said on seeing me later on ‘a pu bobo’ 
(pain gone away), I took all the little sick babies 
that came to me—and it went marvellously well.” 
She was very definitely of the opinion that 
babies accepted suggestion as readily, if not more 
readily, than older children. This was perhaps 
because they had no negative ideas whatever with 
which to oppose it. She gave many examples of 
startlingly rapid cures to prove the correctness of 
her theory. 
“A little two-year-old girl came in October, 
1920. The father was an alcoholic, and the doc- 
tor had said that the child could not live through 
the winter. She had been in the Hospital for 
Incurables at Paris. When she came, both her 
eyes were bandaged and also her arms, which 
were covered with running sores. She would not 
eat and was extremely depressed and fretful. 
She went away smiling from the first treatment 
and began to eat. She came to the clinic the 34 
COUE FOR CHILDREN 
third time with her eyes unbandaged and a little 
later with the bandages removed from her arms. 
Nothing was left of the abscesses but the scars. 
Now she is strong, well and vigorous.” 
Mile. Kaufmant brought out her box of testi- 
monials for me to read. It was a big pasteboard 
box, decorated with the flags of the Allies and 
brimming over with scores and scores of letters. 
Many of them were from the grateful mothers of 
little babies. The one which I have chosen to 
quote in full carries the unmistakable note of sin- 
cerity which is characteristic of them all. I know 
that it cannot be accepted as evidence from a 
medical standpoint, but after all it is the kind of 
evidence on which many of our convictions must 
of necessity be founded. 
“Nancy, August 25, 1914. 
“Mademoiselle : 
“It is with the keenest and the greatest pleas- 
ure that I wish to thank you for having given 
back to my little girl of two and a half years 
health, which it seemed would remain unknown 
to her. 
“At about the age of eight months she had 
gastroenteritis, which she escaped with great dif- 
ficulty. Hardly was she well, when abscesses 
commenced both on the body and behind the ear. CASTAWAYS OF HUMANITY 
35 
“I went to three doctors in Nancy, the last of 
whom advised me to take her to the hospital for 
punctures. . . . After the punctures, a drainage 
was put in—always without result. One abscess 
was hardly healed when another appeared, and 
the only consolation I had from the doctors was 
that they said she would be thus until her four- 
teenth year. 
“Last February her eyes became so bad that 
she could no longer open them day or night, as 
though she had been thus since birth. Daily 
visits to the hospital became necessary; morning 
and night there was crying and screaming when 
the operation had to be resumed, and this lasted 
about four months without any amelioration. My 
little girl did not open her eyes even for five min- 
utes during the entire time. At the end of June 
you offered to take care of her. 
“At the end of the third treatment, my little 
girl opened the left eye and after five weeks of 
your miraculous treatment, the cure was complete. 
I no longer had a blind child but a little girl with 
wide open eyes, who appeared never to have been 
ill, to the great astonishment of all those who had 
seen her before. It was a miracle. Moreover, 
the child had been extremely nervous, suffering 
from insomnia, hitting her head against the wall. 
She was impossible. She had no appetite. To- 
day, thanks to you, and you alone, the trans- 
formation is complete. 
“Only recently headaches made me fear menin- 
gitis. She became ill tempered and once again 
she lost her appetite. Two of your kind treat- COUE FOR CHILDREN 
36 
ments were sufficient to eradicate these symp- 
toms. For this reason I can never thank you 
sufficiently for having done me the greatest 
service, for my daughter owes you a second life 
and the inestimable wealth of perfect health; ab- 
scesses, headaches, etc., all have disappeared. 
“Thank you a thousand times, Mademoiselle, 
with my thanks never sufficiently repeated, I as- 
sure you of my complete and eternal gratitude. 
“Madame Gauthier. 
“5 Cite de Saverne, Nancy.” 
In going through the letters I was struck by 
the fact that instances of instantaneous cures of 
the dramatic sort that are every day occurrences 
in M. Coue’s clinics for adults, seemed to be com- 
paratively rare with children. 
M. Coue has numerous cases of patients who 
come to him believing themselves to be deaf be- 
cause they once were so in reality. Their un- 
conscious minds having once accepted the idea of 
deafness, are unable to let go until the moment 
when M. Coue teaches them to think, “I can hear; 
I can hear perfectly.” Then the inhibiting idea 
is banished on the spot. 
Children will naturally have had less time or 
opportunity for acquiring such complexes and 
inhibitions. But if the instances of sudden cures CASTAWAYS OF HUMANITY 
37 
are rare there are still some to be mentioned, such 
as the case of Alice Mercul, aged ten, who had 
suffered from enlarged tonsils and adenoids, 
causing great difficulty in breathing. Four years 
before she came to the clinic she had a hospital 
operation, removing the tonsils and adenoids, 
which should have relieved the condition, but had 
not done so. After the first treatment she was 
able to breathe without opening her mouth and 
after six weeks she breathed with perfect ease. 
The case of Andree Schmidt is not quite so 
simple of explanation as the foregoing one. She 
was four years old when she first came to the 
clinic in October, 1920. Since the age of two 
and one-half years she had been unable to move 
and had spent the last year in a hospital suffer- 
ing from a tubercular condition so far advanced 
that the doctors had given her up. Every night 
she had a fever of 102 and she appeared to be 
unable to speak. After one treatment she began 
to talk and after the second her fever lessened. 
In one month she was well. 
And here is a letter from a grateful mother 
who is willing and anxious that her testimony 
should be published to the world. COUE FOR CHILDREN 
38 
“I, Madame Roudeau, living in Nancy in the 
Rue des Fabriques No. 51, am deeply grateful to 
Mile. Marie who has cured my little four-year- 
old girl, who had not been able to walk since she 
was one year old owing to rickets, caused by at- 
tacks of bronchitis. 
“All the doctors who had treated her told me 
not to try to make her walk. She had no strength 
and nothing that they prescribed for her made her 
any better. 
“Since the very first day we went to see Mile. 
Marie my child has walked. Now it is three 
months that that demoiselle has been treating 
her. She has never once had an attack of bron- 
chitis and one can see her getting stronger every 
day. I authorize Mile. Marie to show my letter 
to all the Mamans who are in despair over their 
sick children—so that they may know what bless- 
ings Mile. Marie is spreading about her. 
“Madame Roudeau. 
“Nancy, July 19, 1915.” 
Stammering is greatly improved or yields im- 
mediately to treatment in almost every case. 
One little boy came to the clinic stammering most 
fearfully. The operator, in this case M. Renee 
de Brabois, picked him up in his arms very ten- 
derly and talked to him for a few minutes, ex- 
plaining that he did not really need to stammer, 
it was only because he was afraid, and then as- CASTAWAYS OF HUMANITY 
39 
sured him with emphasis that now he could not 
stammer. He was cured—he would never stam- 
mer again. The little boy repeated these af- 
firmations without stammering. He was then 
invited to try to stammer as before. He tried 
again and again but found he could not do so. 
Indeed, stammering is such an everyday affair 
at the clinic and so certain of cure that it was 
hard to make Mile. Kaufmant talk about it at all. 
She preferred to go back to her grandes malades 
—the tragic aftermath of the great cataclysm 
through which France has just passed. 
As I paused over the photograph of a particu- 
larly lively, intelligent-looking girl, dressed for 
her first communion, Mile. Kaufmant told me 
that this was Madeleine Beninger, in whose case 
Mr. C. Harry Brooks had been particularly in- 
terested when he came to visit the clinic in Au- 
gust, 1921. His many readers will remember 
the sympathetic chapter devoted to the children’s 
clinic. Here is the story word for word as I 
heard it: 
“In May, 1921, a woman came to tell me of a 
little girl in her house who was suffering from 
Potts Disease. The child was lying face down- COUE FOR CHILDREN 
40 
ward in her bed, as it was impossible to turn her 
on her back. She asked me to go to see her, but 
I could not as I had many, many patients. The 
woman came again to tell me that the child was 
crying all the time, so I somehow managed to go 
to see her. When I arrived I found a child with 
such an expression of atrocious suffering and 
despair on her face! She was neither sleeping nor 
eating. From the very first visit she was helped 
—after the third treatment her suffering disap- 
peared completely and she slept from seven at 
night until eight in the morning. They had to 
wake her to give her her petit dejeuner and she 
ate with an appetite she had never known before 
at noon and at night. At the end of a month of 
this treatment (the child had her back in a plaster 
cast) the doctor found that the back was in place 
again and that the cast was no longer necessary. 
“The legs were completely lifeless. The doctor 
pronounced that they would have to be put into 
plaster for two years. The child began to cry 
and the father and mother did not want to take 
it back to the house from the hospital, so they 
brought it to me laid out in their arms. ‘The 
doctors want to put our child back into a plaster 
cast for two years—we want to hear what you will 
say.’ I told them that we could never interfere 
with a doctor’s orders. The little girl was in 
despair and cried out to me. I said, ‘We will 
see what can be done in one month.’ At the end 
of that month she began to move and after a 
while her bones regained their strength. She was MADELEINE BENINGER CASTAWAYS OF HUMANITY 
41 
able to go to her first communion though she had 
feared that she could not. Her mother wrote to 
me, ‘It is not only the child that you have saved 
but three persons. Seeing my child suffer con- 
tinually as I did, being powerless to help her, I 
was getting to be a neurasthenic. But my hus- 
band is very good and we are now all very 
happy.’ ” 
The box seemed inexhaustible, but the letters 
contained in it were all very much alike; only the 
nature of the diseases varied, covering in their 
wide range almost every affliction that the flesh 
is heir to from eczema to “demoniac possession.,, 
Most of them were of the major sort, with a tre- 
mendous percentage of tubercular troubles— 
meningitis, hip-disease, etc. Some of these letters 
were, ill-spelled and naive in expression, while 
others were very much the reverse. One and all, 
they sought to express the overflowing gratitude 
of maternal hearts toward the woman who had 
saved their children from suffering. It was the 
only recompense they could offer her, since Mile. 
Kaufmant, like M. Coue, has never accepted a 
sou from a patient. There were some touching 
little childish scrawls from the children them- 42 
COUE FOR CHILDREN 
selves, and once I came upon a highly coloured 
card decorated with religious symbols and the 
legend “Vive Sainte Marie ." 
Nor was there any dearth of first-hand living 
evidence to support these testimonials and I very 
soon found that incredulity no less than credulity 
can be strained to the breaking point. 
Mile. Kaufmant kindly let the word go forth 
that a visitor from America wished to see and 
talk to her patients and immediately a stream of 
children and their mothers began to arrive, will- 
ing and anxious to bear witness to the marvels 
worked by auto-suggestion in their individual 
cases. Many of the children were now at work 
and could only come after hours, like sturdy little 
Jean Germa, who arrived on his bicycle to show 
me the most frightful scar left on his leg by a 
tubercular abscess—healed in one month by auto- 
suggestion, after more than six months in a hos- 
pital without any relief. It was peculiarly in- 
teresting to find that there were cases where the 
doctors in the Nancy hospitals had summoned 
Mile. Kaufmant to assuage the suffering of in- 
curables on whom every remedy known to science 
had been tried in vain. I heard of more than one CASTAWAYS OF HUMANITY 
43 
instance in which she had done so with the final 
result that the patient had been restored to health. 
This is the story told me by Jeanne Grosjean, 
a sweet-faced, serious-looking girl of twenty-one. 
In 1920 she had been for a year in the hospital, 
apparently in a dying condition. Her heart was 
out of place and her side dilated. She had an 
abscess on the liver and ulcers of the stomach, 
besides an abscess on her head. In constant pain, 
she had only slept fitfully for six months and was 
unable to retain any nourishment. When the 
doctors had given up the case as hopeless, one of 
them sent word to Mile. Kaufmant, asking her 
to come to the hospital to see what she could do 
toward allaying the pain and giving some degree 
of comfort to the dying girl. Mile. Kaufmant 
went twice a week for eight months. Not only 
did she bring comfort, but a complete cure. At 
the end of that time Jeanne was examined by the 
doctors in the clinic, who pronounced that her 
heart and pulse were strong. The girl, when I 
saw her, was on the eve of marriage, and she 
begged Mile. Kaufmant to give her one more 
suggestion for continued health, and happiness. 
She did so, while I listened. It was a beautiful, COUE FOR CHILDREN 
44 
touching picture of the life that was to be hers, 
full of peace, contentment and usefulness to 
others and she was to have babies of her own to 
bring up in the way of the good suggestion. This 
girl, I thought, would go forward armed with a 
faith equal to that of her teacher. 
In listening to these stories of seemingly 
miraculous cures it was difficult not to become 
imbued with the idea that here was a woman 
gifted with some power of healing peculiar to 
herself, or at least that through long practice she 
had developed some natural force, as yet unclassi- 
fied by science. 
Of course, if this were true, it would put her 
work on an entirely different footing from that 
of M. Coue, who only teaches us to heal ourselves 
—and it would be of very little use or importance 
to the world at large. But Mile. Kaufmant 
would not permit such an idea. 
“Some women,” she said, “are unquestionably 
better fitted than others for the treatment of sick 
children, but innumerable mothers learn to give 
suggestion to the children perfectly. The amount 
of success attained is only determined by the 
intensity of their faith and the degree in which CASTAWAYS OF HUMANITY 
45 
they possess the love and confidence of their chil- 
dren.” 
To illustrate this, I was taken one afternoon to 
see Mme. D., the wife of the president of the prin- 
cipal bank in Nancy, a highly intelligent, culti- 
vated and sympathetic woman, who had become 
an ardent disciple of auto-suggestion. Having 
learned the method from watching the children’s 
clinic she had applied it to her own children with 
immediate success. Later on she had treated the 
peasants in the village near her country place in 
the mountains, and the stories of her cures and 
the letters from her patients were no less re- 
markable than those I had been hearing and read- 
ing previously. 
Nor is it to be supposed that these cures are in 
any way indigenous to Nancy. For instance, 
Charles Baudouin in his book, “Suggestion and 
Auto-Suggestion,” says: “A little girl aged 
eleven was brought to me at the Jean Jacques 
Rousseau Institute (Geneva) in November, 1915. 
On her temple was a tubercular ulcer the size of a 
florin. It dated from four months back and had 
obstinately refused to heal under treatment. The 
child proved sensitive and confiding. Sugges- COUE FOR CHILDREN 
46 
tion. Auto-Suggestion to be carried out by the 
patient conscientiously every morning and every 
evening. Great was my astonishment and 
equally great was the astonishment of my pupils 
when the girl returned a week later with the ulcer 
already cicatrized. The epithelium covering the 
surface was still diaphanous and pink in colour. 
A few weeks later the appearance was almost 
normal. Within a month from the date of the 
first suggestion the cough had completely disap- 
peared, although the time was the middle of win- 
ter. Next month a slight bronchitis supervened 
and was cured without difficulty. Appetite had 
become normal, sleep was uninterrupted, lasting 
from eleven to twelve hours. Rabinovitch, who 
kept this case under observation, tells me that the 
improvement was continued, although the pa- 
tient (whose family is in humble circumstances) 
lives in a damp ground-floor tenement and in 
hygienic conditions otherwise unfavourable. 
“In view of the results above recorded it will 
not surprise the readers to learn that two cases of 
Pott’s disease (tubercular curvature of the 
spine) have been benefited by treatment at 
Nancy.” CASTAWAYS OF HUMANITY 
47 
In listening to Mile. Kaufmant’s talks to her 
patients, I longed to have some of them tran- 
scribed word for word, and with this end in view 
I hunted up a clever little French girl who could 
take stenographic notes from rapid dictation. I 
find that much of the charm of these suggestions 
is lost in the attempt to translate them into Eng- 
lish. What equivalents have we for such terms 
of endearment as “Mon petit Chotu’ and “Ma 
petite Chatte” (my little cabbage, my little fe- 
male kitten) ? 
But here is one as nearly as I can give it. The 
six year old child to whom it was addressed had 
had infantile paralysis and I had seen her in the 
garden group in August. 
“You, my little one, are now getting well. I 
can no longer tell which of your legs was the sick 
one. Since you came to me your pains have van- 
ished. It is well that you no longer suffer and 
that your leg is growing strong. Now you are 
going to begin again to be hungry and every time 
you eat—slowly, very slowly, chewing the food 
very fine and turning it over and over in your 
mouth, you will think, ‘This is for my little leg.’ 
Your legs will keep on growing longer and longer 
and little by little you will begin to do what other 
children do. Already you are beginning to walk COUE FOR CHILDREN 
48 
a little, and your progress will be very rapid. 
Naturally you must always be prudent. You 
will think that you can walk with the help of your 
Grandmamma—that you can use your legs more 
and more easily every day—and very soon you 
will be walking like other little girls. You will 
know that everything your Grandmamma tells 
you to do is for your good and you will wish to 
obey her. You will not be fretful and nervous 
any more and you will go to sleep in your bed 
like a good little doll (une petite poupee bien 
sage). You will eat well in the morning, at noon, 
at four o’clock and in the evening. Everything 
that your Grandmamma gives you is very nice, 
you love it and have pleasure in eating it. You 
will think that I am beside you and the nourish- 
ment is going into your legs and making them 
strong—and very soon you will be perfectly 
well. You will be a child who can run and jump 
with the other children. You will be cured.” 
There are many others, and I am tempted to 
give more of them, but this will serve as a work- 
ing model. 
Very little has been written concerning the 
children’s clinic and there is much more to be said, 
but I hope that the description I have attempted 
to give will convey some idea, however inade- 
quate, of the inspiration one gets from actually 
seeing what is going on there. The method holds MLLE. KAUFMANT AND SOME OF HER PATIENTS 
Standing center, Jeanne Grosjean (See Page 43). 
Standing right, Marie Wagner (child who was blind). 
Seated right Leontine Freminet and her sister (See 
Page 29). Left of Mile. Kaufmant, Child to whom 
suggestion was given (See Page 47) CASTAWAYS OF HUMANITY 
49 
possibilities as yet undreamed of, in the education 
and training of parents as well as children. Not 
only for sick children, but for those fortunate 
ones who only need protection in their natural 
state of health and happiness from the evils 
wrought by bad auto-suggestion, often given un- 
consciously. CHAPTER III 
A THOUGHT IN THE MIND 
M. Coue does not offer his method of conscious 
auto-suggestion as a substitute for medicine. He 
would have us employ it as medicine’s most 
powerful aid and coadjutor. This fact must be 
borne in mind. 
If in describing the Nancy clinics I have given 
instances in which medicine and surgery have 
proved impotent to effect cures, until the power 
of auto-suggestion has been brought up as a re- 
inforcement, it must on no account be deduced 
that they are any the less necessary. 
The inference to be gathered is that while the 
doctor can diagnose, operate or prescribe, the 
patient must learn to furnish the element of vital- 
ity without which a return to health may be im- 
possible. 
In other words: if the child is sick, call the doc- 
tor—then see what auto-suggestion can do to help 
him in remedying the condition. 
50 A THOUGHT IN THE MIND 
51 
The foregoing chapters have dwelt at length 
on the personality and methods of the pioneer 
directress of the first children’s clinic of its kind 
in the world. The reason for giving so full and 
detailed an account of her work and her own atti- 
tude toward it, is, that by so doing I have hoped 
to make it clear to any mothers who may read this 
book that the only equipment needed for success 
is love and faith in the potential power of auto- 
suggestion, combined with a thorough under- 
standing of the simple principles of the method 
as taught by Emile Coue.1 
It is undoubtedly true that any one to be suc- 
cessful in teaching auto-suggestion on a large 
scale must be gifted to an extraordinary degree, 
not only with the qualities already mentioned, 
but also with the supreme gift of bodily expres- 
sion, a power of look and intonation which can 
project a glory of confidence into the minds of 
total strangers; a personality to conquer resist- 
ance, cast out fear and produce an immediate 
realization of that state of happy expectancy in 
which auto-suggestion acquires its greatest power. 
i “The Practice of Auto-Suggestion,” by C. Harry Brooks, is 
recommended. COUE FOR CHILDREN 
52 
Now, as very few of us possess these qualities 
in a pre-eminent degree it is indeed fortunate 
that they are not essential for the successful 
teaching of auto-suggestion to a child—your own 
child. 
On the steamer, coming over from France, 
I heard M. Coue explain to Mme. Knipper- 
Tcheckova of the Moscow Art Theatre, his own 
sure and tried remedy for stage-fright. “I al- 
ways imagine,” he said, “that I am looking out 
on an audience of little children, confiding, un- 
critical and anxious to hear. So I have no more 
fright. I know that they will understand me.” 
If any audience of little children is the ideal 
one to M. Coue, then yours will surely be the 
most ideal of all, for you, more than any one 
else in the world, possess your child’s love and 
confidence, and so you can proceed to your task 
with every assurance of success. 
In considering the use of auto-suggestion, the 
first question to occur to an expectant mother, or 
to the mother of a young baby, is always, “How 
soon can I begin?” The answer is, “Begin at 
the beginning.” M. Coue advises starting in 
even before the child is born, but at any rate A THOUGHT IN THE MIND 
53 
from the earliest hours of its life. If there were 
no other reasons for doing so, it would be enough 
that an enormous advantage is secured in accus- 
toming both mother and child to the process, so 
that the first dawn of consciousness will find the 
baby responsive and the mother well past the 
nervousness and uncertainty of the novice. She 
can become as nearly perfect as nature will per- 
mit in making her voice soft, low and musical, if 
it is not so already. The suggestion, when it 
has become a matter of habit, will be produced 
spontaneously and without that hesitation which 
conveys an idea of uncertainty to the speaker as 
well as the hearer. Psychologists, in observing 
the practice of Mile. Kaufmant, have attributed 
much of the potency of her suggestions to her 
rapid utterance as well as to the soothing quality 
of her voice. 
I have already made use of the cinematograph 
for a comparison, but here again it may make the 
reason for this a little clearer. 
You know that tired, overwrought people often 
go to the “movies” for rest and relaxation at the 
end of a day filled with worries and perplexities. 
They do this, not only to be amused, but because 54 
COUE FOR CHILDREN 
they find there a kind of mental oblivion, and 
this peculiarity is common to all movies, good or 
bad. The attention being fixed on a constantly 
moving picture, produced with lightning rapid- 
ity, the mind soon becomes as blank as the screen 
on which the picture is being thrown. The whir- 
ring film unreels itself so fast before the eyes 
that there is not a fraction of a second in which 
other ideas than those conveyed by the picture 
may gain entrance to the mind and it is more 
than possible that a slight degree of hypnosis re- 
sults. 
With spoken suggestion the mind is reached 
through the ear, but the effect should be the same. 
There is a smooth flow of words and word pic- 
tures following each other so swiftly that there is 
no chance for other thoughts to slip in between. 
This is the explanation that M. Coue gives, when 
instructing his patients to repeat the pa passe 
formula so rapidly that the words are lost in a 
buzzing sound and the idea of pain has no oppor- 
tunity to intervene. 
Of course there is no implication here that a 
baby is to be assailed from birth with an avalanche 
of carefully thought out words. Mothers have A THOUGHT IN THE MIND 
55 
always found natural expression for their de- 
light and admiration. All that is necessary at 
this stage is to realize that these words are actu- 
ally the first suggestions and to go on intelli- 
gently developing such outpourings of maternal 
love into conscious auto-suggestion. Later, when 
infantile troubles and difficulties come along an 
equally natural and personal form of phraseol- 
ogy will be ready to express the thoughts of cor- 
rective improvement. 
M. Coue in his “Education as It Ought to 
Be” advises parents to give suggestion to children 
while they are asleep. He tells them to approach 
the bedside very softly so as not to wake the child 
and murmur the suggestion twenty times over in 
a very low voice—this too is always a part of 
Mile. Kaufmant’s instruction to the mothers of 
sick babies. 
Now, no mother could ever do this without be- 
ginning to wonder about the nature and content 
of the little unconscious to which her words are 
being addressed—but here we have something 
that is wrapt in the Eternal Mysteries. If all 
the opinions which have been expressed on this 
subject by the wisest minds in the world could COUE FOR CHILDREN 
56 
be cited here it wouldn’t bring us any nearer to 
the exact truth. 
If you are of a mystical turn of thought you 
will naturally incline to think with Wordsworth: 
‘Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; 
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, 
Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
And cometh from afar: 
Not in entire forgetfulness, 
And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
From God who is our home.” 
Or you may speculate on the theory held by some 
psychologists that the unconscious is adult at 
birth and comprehends the whole race experience. 
You may think of it as an utter blank or as a 
closely written page of Heavenly Secrets which 
will slowly fade away in the light of earthly ex- 
perience. For practical purposes the difference 
in theory doesn’t matter. 
Electricity is something that we employ every 
day without understanding its nature. To at- 
tempt to know all about the human soul before 
consenting to make use of its deepest forces 
would be like refusing to make use of the electric A THOUGHT IN THE MIND 
57 
current until the company that puts it at our 
disposal could furnish us with an exact statement 
as to what electricity really is. 
M. Coue and Mile. Kaufmant probably repre- 
sent the two extremes of opinion on this subject. 
M. Coue, having based his theory and method on 
what is known of the processes of the adult mind, 
capable of reasoning and understanding, cannot 
give the same explanation for the reactions of 
children under four years old, and, unlike most of 
us, he is not given to expressing definite opinions 
where his information is inadequate. Conse- 
quently he merely says that “it seems” to him 
that babies are reached by “a sense impression, 
producing an auto-suggestion of health.” 
As the unconscious mind never sleeps but goes 
on with its activities in the form of dreams and 
the direction of bodily functions, it is at least evi- 
dent that it will receive the same sense impression 
from the low soothing voice while the baby is 
sleeping. With this certainty in mind you can 
set out confidently to follow the practice of Mile. 
Kaufmant, to whose “extraordinary results” M. 
Coue has born witness in the preface to this book. 
Baudouin says, in “Suggestion and Auto-Sug- COUE FOR CHILDREN 
58 
gestion,” “I should point out that to be really 
fruitful this simple method should be put in prac- 
tice every evening without exception. Coue is in 
the habit of saying that a child should have sug- 
gestion every day, just as every day it has a cup 
of milk or a cup of cocoa for breakfast. The par- 
ents should make it a part of their routine. In 
such conditions the results are sometimes so re- 
markable that parents to whom I have advised 
this procedure have at the end of a few weeks told 
me that they were positively ‘alarmed’ by the 
marvels that had ensued. I may add that if the 
parents set out awkwardly at first, no great harm 
will result, since suggestion can undo whatever 
suggestion has done. Should an error be made it 
will be easy to correct it.” 
The study of child psychology has made won- 
derful advances in the last decade, and we are 
constantly hearing of the wonders accomplished 
through the analytic study of individual children. 
We have seen the establishment of children’s 
courts, where children are handled not as poten- 
tial criminals, but as human beings who are in 
danger of going astray and only need a helping 
hand to get them back into the right path. Now- A THOUGHT IN THE MIND 
59 
adays, it is hardly possible to open a magazine or 
a newspaper without finding an article on child- 
psychology from the point of view of education 
or of race preservation. 
We read of such investigative experiments as 
the one being conducted at the Psycho-Clinic of 
Yale University, where, according to Arnold 
Gesell, Ph.D., Professor of Hygiene, “fifty un- 
selected normal infants are being studied at dif- 
ferent age levels.” Dr. Gesell goes on to say 
that “most of the physical and development de- 
fects of school children originate or pre-exist in 
the preschool period. Practically every case of 
mental deficiency originates and is recognizable 
in the preschool years. 
“Three-fourths of all the deaf, a considerable 
proportion of all the blind, one-third of all the 
crippled, and over three-fourths of all the speech 
defective come to their handicap in the preschool 
period. Numerous cases of mental abnormality, 
of perversion, of faulty habit formation and of 
conduct disorder have their roots in the preschool 
years. Our kindergartens and nurseries must 
reckon with many problem children, manifesting 
serious errors or defects in behaviour develop- COUE FOR CHILDREN 
60 
ment. One-fourth of all our school beginners 
fail of promotion at the end of the first year in 
public school. Retardation, abnormal prematu- 
ration, normal precocity, superiority and normal- 
ity all tend to reveal themselves well before the 
child cuts his sixth year molar.” 
All such investigations and studies are of 
enormous value and significance, but the unique 
advantage of the Coue method is that it can be 
applied to all children, with or without a study 
of their individual needs. It is good for “what 
ails them,” it cannot fail to be of positive benefit 
and it may be combined with any sort of treat- 
ment that is indicated. 
What we are asked to do is to train ourselves 
to realize that every movement and sound we 
make, every word we utter in the presence of a 
child is capable of being transformed into an 
auto-suggestion for better or for worse. With all 
the intelligence we can command we are to strive 
to eliminate such words and acts as would tend 
to produce harmful auto-suggestion, substituting 
others of a contrary nature. 
There is always some one around to say that 
this idea is not new—some one who has read the A THOUGHT IN THE MIND 
61 
same thing a hundred times elsewhere and can 
quote any number of passages to prove it. Un- 
questionably, it is as old as the hills, but M. Coue 
is not content with just saying it over again—he 
insists that the idea must become a reality in our 
daily lives, that we must put it into practice. 
A thought in the mind is worth two on the shelf. 
And when one really begins to think about it 
it is not nearly as simple as it sounds. Just try 
to analyze the suggestions you give out in the 
course of any one day and find out how much 
has to be weeded out of them if they are to 
be even harmless—innocuous. Robert Louis 
Stevenson once said that he could make the daily 
newspaper into an Iliad if he only knew what to 
leave out. Most suggestion given to children 
even in the unpalatable form of direct admoni- 
tion would register in the end, were it not so hope- 
lessly entangled with harmful ideas, ideas of fear, 
weakness, humiliation, administered at the same 
time. 
If we can only do away with some part of the 
welter of wrong suggestion in which we habitu- 
ally live, we shall still do wonders for the next 
generation. What a triumph it will be when COUE FOR CHILDREN 
62 
some of these endless chains of stupid, insidious, 
cruel ideas which have been parroted down from 
parents to children, since the beginning of time, 
can be broken. 
Consider the case of seven-year-old Susan en- 
gaged in the harmless amusement of examining 
her small self in the mirror. Her mother sees 
her and says almost automatically, “What a vain 
little girl, admiring herself in the mirror!” 
Now, she doesn’t really mean that, and she hasn’t 
stopped to think about it; she has said it instinc- 
tively because that is what her Aunt Susannah 
said to her thirty years ago under precisely the 
same circumstances. If she had thought back 
she might have remembered that for a long time 
after that she had glanced into the mirror fur- 
tively and always with a sense of shame, wonder- 
ing why she was “vain” and what she had to be 
vain about. And then one day she was caught at 
it again, and this time Aunt Susannah had firmly 
implanted the promising germ of an inferiority 
complex. “Really, what a snub-nosed, freckle- 
faced little girl like you can have to be so vain 
about I can’t imagine.” Of course such bad sug- 
gestions do not always take root and flourish any A THOUGHT IN THE MIND 
63 
more than virulent microbes do; it all depends 
on the amount of resistance they meet. A 
healthy, happy, not over-sensitive child, is able to 
produce good auto-suggestions to drive out many 
of the bad ones, but where the child already has 
a tendency to morbid self-consciousness such 
suggestions are most favourable for its increase. 
Bacon says: “ ’Tis not the lie that passeth 
through the mind, but the lie that sinketh that 
doth the harm.” And, after all, what is this 
venerable notion about children and mirrors? Is 
Hannah More responsible, or does it go back to 
the beginning of time? 
There may be one child in a hundred who has 
indeed developed the thought of personal vanity, 
but is that any reason why the other ninety and 
nine should have the idea of a vice as yet uncon- 
templated suggested to their innocent imagina- 
tions, when by chance they examine their reflec- 
tions with natural curiosity and interest. In one 
happy nursery I know, there is a pier glass, which 
affords a considerable amount of harmless amuse- 
ment to the children, who skip and gesticulate 
before it, and practise making faces at themselves 
whenever they feel like doing so. No children COUE FOR CHILDREN 
64 
have ever impressed me as being more unaffected 
and unself conscious. 
A suggestion may be good or bad according to 
the way the thought is expressed. One woman 
has told me that she does not approve of teach- 
ing the Coue method to her boy as a means of 
relieving pain. I find that her only conception 
of Coue’s teaching is that we are called upon to 
spend a considerable amount of our time in a 
state of retirement and relaxation, cultivating a 
state favourable to the “outcropping” of the un- 
conscious and reciting mysterious formulas. 
“No,” she says proudly, “I prefer to say to my 
boy when he has hurt himself, ‘You will not cry, 
for you are the son of a brave soldier.’ ” She does 
not realize that she has used a perfect example 
of a good suggestion,—the presentation of a con- 
structive idea of improvement with an emotional 
urge behind it. The boy sees himself overcoming 
the desire to cry and his imagination seizes upon 
the picture of himself in a heroic attitude, pleas- 
ing and emulating his gallant father. 
But let an ignorant nurse take the same idea 
and give it a twist in the wrong direction and see 
what happens. A THOUGHT IN THE MIND 
65 
“Think how ashamed your father is going to 
be when he finds out that he has a cry-baby for a 
son.” The same thought leading into a blind 
alley. The boy is a cry baby and he is going to 
bring shame to his father and to himself. A sug- 
gestion to be good must always point the way 
out of a difficulty. The heroic, courageous atti- 
tude toward life makes a vivid appeal to youth- 
ful imaginations and children find their models 
for hero-worship in the stories they hear and in 
their older playmates. 
A short time ago an accident which might 
have been a very bad one occurred at the Zoo. A 
boy attempted to pat the bear on his nose and 
the small hand being mistaken for a new variety 
of peanut was badly lacerated before it could be 
withdrawn. The boy was perhaps too dazed and 
frightened to cry, but at any rate he didn’t, he 
just stood gazing at the bleeding hand without a 
whimper. The little son of one of my friends 
was standing nearby and witnessed the whole 
scene in round-eyed astonishment. It was evi- 
dent that the other boy’s pluck had made a deep 
impression. A few days later his mother saw him 
give his own finger a severe pinch in the door. COUE FOR CHILDREN 
66 
It must have hurt a lot but he did not cry, he 
just stood gritting his teeth, repeating over and 
over, “He didn’t say miffing—he didn’t say mif- 
fing.” In his imagination he was transported to 
that scene in the Zoo, and he was getting healthy 
pride and satisfaction from thinking that he was 
behaving like that other boy who had so captured 
his admiration. 
Children sometimes invent extremely practical 
and useful forms of suggestion for themselves 
without any outside prompting or interference 
whatsoever. A little girl with a greedy love for 
sweets, discovered very early in life that uncon- 
trolled inroads on boxes of candy belonging to 
grown-ups were apt to produce disastrous results 
in the form of punishment. Finding that prom- 
ises made to others were difficult and irksome 
to keep, she invented the idea that a promise 
made to herself and reinforced solemnly with up- 
lifted hand, was peculiarly binding and sacred 
and could never on any account be broken. 
This idea was so completely accepted by the 
unconscious that when once the hand had gone 
up, the very thought of a wish for another piece 
of candy vanished instantly not to return. This A THOUGHT IN THE MIND 
67 
was a secret private arrangement never men- 
tioned to any one. The habit proved so useful 
in all the affairs of life that it remains in practice 
to this day when the child is a grown woman. 
Where such helpful forms of conscious auto- 
suggestion do not occur naturally to the minds of 
children, it is possible to propose them as a means 
of overcoming their difficulties. 
There is such a thing as falling into the way of 
saying “Don’t” with and without reason. 
It must be said sometimes, but whenever possi- 
ble some other form of activity should be offered 
as a substitute for the one that is being prohibited. 
Can we fail to remember the awful feeling of 
boredom that used sometimes to sweep over us 
when there was nothing that could properly be 
done, and when an hour seemed as long as a week 
does now? An old Irish nurse, who had a pe- 
culiarly active and mischievous boy in her charge, 
used sometimes to lose track of him entirely, and 
presently she would be heard wailing about the 
house, “Horrnsby, Horrnsby, where iver ye are, 
come out o’ thot. What iver ye’re doin’, quit 
ut.” 
This is the sort of “general suggestion” that 68 
COUE FOR CHILDREN 
can and should be avoided. If something can be 
put within the child’s reach that it will want to 
do of its own volition it is infinitely better, and 
does away with the necessity of saying “Do this” 
and “Don’t do that.” Don’ts with many parents 
are nothing short of a nervous habit. 
The Boy and Girl Scouts Organizations are 
doing an incalculable public service in getting 
hold of boys and girls in their most restless stage 
and giving them a natural healthy outlet for their 
activities while training them for usefulness in 
after life. 
Every one knows that there is no way of learn- 
ing quite as satisfactory as finding out for one- 
self through experience. And so those reactions 
that come to small children naturally through 
sense impressions in the course of investigating 
their surroundings are of the highest educational 
value. 
A mother says to her baby, “Don’t go near 
that hot stove,” but the baby has a great curiosity 
concerning the stove and some time when it thinks 
she is not looking it stretches out a small pink 
finger toward the hot surface until it gets the 
sensation of a tiny burn. The baby jumps back, A THOUGHT IN THE MIND 
69 
thrusting the finger into its mouth, perhaps 
without even crying, for it knows it has done 
wrong and sees now why it “mustn’t touch.” 
The lesson has been learned once for all. If (and 
it is an actual fact that this used to be advocated 
in stern New England) a parent had taken the 
small hand in charge and had conducted the ex- 
periment forcibly, the value of the lesson would 
have been lost. The children to whom this cruel 
thing was done must have received a horrid 
shock to their confidence in the good intentions 
of their elders. 
Unfortunately all of the baby’s self-conducted 
experiments cannot come to such satisfactory 
conclusions and the mother needs all her tact and 
wisdom in overseeing them. 
If ridicule is to be used at all in helping chil- 
dren over the beginnings of bad habits, it should 
be employed with great subtlety and unmistaka- 
ble kindness. We must be very sure that we are 
not getting the wrong reaction from a sensitive 
child. Many children seem to thrive on teasing, 
and of course there is no doubt that it is a great 
advantage to have the susceptibility to teasing so 
dulled by experience that one becomes immune COUE FOR CHILDREN 
70 
to it in after life, but if we are considering its 
use in suggestion we must go about it more in- 
telligently than is usually the case. Of course 
the healthy rough-and-tumble give-and-take sort 
of teasing that children get among themselves is 
a very different matter from the heavy-footed 
proceedings of grown-ups. 
One over-sensitive little girl of six was given 
to shedding tears on the slightest provocation and 
so her very much older sister, deciding to take 
the matter in hand, invented this ingenious plan 
of action. Whenever the child began to be tear- 
ful she was made to face a blackboard on which 
the sister proceeded to sketch a face with round 
eyes, shedding tears exactly as the child was do- 
ing it; their course would be traced down the 
cheeks of the image to a running accompaniment 
of sarcastic and humorous comments. The 
trouble was that the small victim of this well- 
meant effort received an overwhelming impres- 
sion of being bullied as well as teased and was 
also convinced that the sister was enjoying its 
misery. This produced a feeling of helpless rage 
and impotence to stop the tears as long as the 
process continued. A THOUGHT IN THE MIND 
71 
Another woman who understands children has 
used the same sort of scheme with many children 
and with unfailing success—the whole difference 
being that with her the idea is conceived and car- 
ried out in a spirit of intelligent kindliness. She 
invites the child into conference, and armed with 
pencil and paper, proceeds to draw a turnip with 
an amusing curly tail, and then goes on to tell 
about a highly entertaining organization to which 
many children belong, called the “Turn up 
Club.” She explains that this is a club in which 
children learn how to cry all they want to with- 
out interference from grown-ups, who, it appears, 
only object to the variety of crying that is done 
with the corners of the mouth turned down—this 
point is illustrated on the turnip-face. In the 
club it is done with the corners turned up. By 
this time the child is usually ready to try it, with 
the results that can be imagined. 
Tears are a small matter, but ridicule is a ter- 
rible weapon to use with children. M. Coue 
often compares conscious auto-suggestion to a 
gun, which we must learn how to handle if we 
are going to make it useful and not dangerous. 
Here is an example of what can, and what actu- 72 
COUE FOR CHILDREN 
ally has happened when it has been pointed in 
the wrong direction. 
A highly nervous child of four years old was 
given to violent fits of crying. He was staying 
with some relatives, who tried to get him out of 
these tantrums by making fun of him. They 
managed to do it in a way that excited the child 
still more, until the crying became hysterical, 
and on one occasion he emitted a curious sound, 
a sort of whoop that sounded like a crow. The 
relatives thought this very funny and proceeded 
to mimic the sound, inviting the child to do it 
again whenever he cried after that. Very soon 
the crow became a feature of every crying fit 
and before they realized what was happening it 
began to occur in the course of ordinary sen- 
tences when he was in the least excited. 
Now when the boy is a grown man the habit 
remains fixed. He is very clever and has man- 
aged to be unusually successful in business in 
spite of this handicap. But imagine the em- 
barrassment of talking over the telephone or 
holding an important business conference, when 
this odd interruption is likely to occur unex- 
pectedly in the midst of any conversation. A THOUGHT IN THE MIND 
73 
“Suggestion can undo whatever suggestion has 
done,” and it is highly probable that this afflic- 
tion would yield readily to the Coue method of 
treatment. 
Many readers of Du Maurier’s “Peter Ibbet- 
son” must have experimented with the fascinat- 
ing idea of “dreaming true,” with what degree 
of success it would be interesting to know. At 
Nancy I met a charming young Englishwoman, 
who told me that her small girl had succeeded in 
controlling her own dreams. The child had been 
suffering from terrifying nightmares from which 
she waked screaming every night. At last her 
mother had suggested that she should try think- 
ing of the pleasant things she would like to 
dream about while she was dropping off to sleep, 
without letting her mind dwell on the fear of 
bad dreams. The child was very sceptical and 
did not seem at all impressed by the idea, but 
after several successive nights had passed off 
quietly the mother made inquiries. “Oh, yes,” 
said the little girl, “I thought I might as well try 
doing what you told me, and it worked. Now I 
make my dreams and of course they are nice 
ones.” COUE FOR CHILDREN 
74 
The preponderance of imagination in the lives 
of many children often leads to curious con- 
fusions between truth and fiction. When a boy 
looks you in the eye solemnly and relates some 
incredible adventure in which he has slain a lion 
or seen a cat with three tails, it does not neces- 
sarily mean that the child is untruthful—it is 
much more likely to mean that he is going to be 
an author or a naturalist when he grows up. 
He may have constructed the scene so vividly 
m his imagination that his unconscious mind has 
accepted it as a reality, and he actually believes 
he is telling the truth. It ought not to be hard 
for the average grown-up to understand this 
mental process. Does it not sometimes happen 
that we have had personal encounters wherein 
we have figured in a way that would have been 
highly creditable, even brilliant, if only we had 
thought in time of that repartee, which did not in 
fact occur to us until several hours later. Some- 
how in telling the story the repartee gets fas- 
tened on in its proper place and after it has been 
told several times in this satisfactory form we 
forget entirely that this is not just the way it 
happened. A THOUGHT IN THE MIND 
75 
Heal lies are generally told to avoid the con- 
sequences of wrong-doing and are actuated by 
fear. As in all other forms of naughtiness the 
child should not be permitted to think that it is 
natural for it to do this sort of thing. “Boys 
like you who tell lies go to prison” is the worst 
suggestion possible under the circumstances. If 
such a statement seems unnecessary to you, it 
need only be said that there are plenty of cases 
on record where children of supposedly intelli- 
gent parents have actually been shown a prison 
and told that this is what they are headed for if 
they continue in their evil ways. Tell the child 
that he is not a liar, that he cannot possibly be 
one, with any amount of elaboration on the es- 
sential meanness of the lie itself, not of the boy 
who has told it. 
It seems impossible to avoid the question of 
corporal punishment, so it may as well be faced 
squarely now—to spank or not to spank. I am 
not certain where M. Coue stands on this point. 
The only passage in his writings that has a direct 
bearing is the following: “Above all avoid treat- 
ing children with brutality, for you risk giving 
them an auto-suggestion of fear and hate.” Of COUE FOR CHILDREN 
76 
course there is a considerable difference between 
a mild spanking and brutality and it is possible 
that under some circumstances M. Coue might 
consider the former as a salutory “Sense impres- 
sion”—I do not know. But if you are among 
those who cling to the belief that spankings have 
their place in the education of the young, and 
think that your offspring are of the sort that 
need to be spanked—it will at any rate be well 
to bear M. Coue’s warning in mind and try to 
see that the punishment is administered in such 
a way as to avoid the possibility of those unde- 
sirable effects. 
Unfortunately, no state is less favourable to 
getting the reaction of another than one of 
righteous wrath, and if one waits to cool off it is 
somehow very difficult to start in in cold blood. 
There seems to be something inherently croco- 
dilish and unconvincing in the “This hurts me 
more than it does you” attitude. I personally 
have only executed one spanking and that was a 
total failure. When the baby turned around 
and remarked solemnly, “You did a mistake to 
me,” I was more than ready to agree. CHAPTER IV 
A STORY WITH A POINT 
With your baby you have things very much 
your own way, but with an older child certain 
problems may arise which you will have to meet 
by various methods, depending naturally on the 
type of child with whom you are dealing. 
A friend of mine decided that the Coue idea 
was an excellent one, and she concluded to put 
part of it, at least, into practice. She wished to 
suggest to her small boy, who was extremely 
fanciful about his food, rejecting most of what 
was offered to him, that he should like his break- 
fast, his milk, his poached egg, his stewed fruit. 
Having waited until she was sure he was asleep, 
she sat down beside his bed and proceeded to 
follow the formula, telling him slowly and dis- 
tinctly what she wanted his unconscious mind to 
accept. She had murmured on softly for a few 
minutes when his head rose from the pillow, he 
fixed hurt and astonished eyes on her, and de- 
77 COUE FOR CHILDREN 
78 
manded: “Mamma, why do you talk like that?” 
My friend was so nonplussed by this that she 
could only escape as gracefully as might be, nor 
has she essayed again to influence her sleeping 
son, and as to trying it when he is awake, she 
frankly says that she does not know what to say 
to him. 
Here is one way out. 
There is no child who doesn’t love a story. A 
sick and fretful child can be soothed more easily 
by telling it a story than by any other means. 
It is with this in mind that you can best catch 
your child and teach it auto-suggestion. 
Baudouin says, “In the education of children 
nothing could be more erroneous than to believe 
that in them imagination is an imperfect form of 
reason, so that imagination must be suppressed 
and must be replaced by the perfected reason. 
Imagination is something very different from the 
larval form of reason. It has its rights side by 
side with and independently of reason; it is a 
precious force for the individual were it only as 
a medium for the outcropping of the subconscious 
and as a precondition of suggestion. We must 
teach children to do justice to all their faculties; A STORY WITH A POINT 
79 
they must not let any one faculty encroach; they 
must not, for example, allow imagination to 
usurp the place of reason; they must cultivate 
every faculty, imagination as much as the rest, 
nay more than the rest. Fairy tales which cer- 
tain ‘positive’-minded pedants would like to pro- 
scribe are the starting point of artistic education, 
and should on no account be neglected.” 
The tale of Mile. Kaufmant in the garden at 
Nancy has in it the makings of a delightful story, 
just how delightful and interesting will of course 
depend on the way you tell it, but knowing what 
kind of stories your children like best to hear, 
you can arrange it accordingly. 
Here is the way it is being told to a very little 
boy when he has met with some small accident. 
He likes it better than any other, and always 
cries “Say it again” when it is done. 
“Once a little boy, just as big as you, was play- 
ing and running very fast, when all at once, 
down he fell, right on such sharp stones, and cut 
his leg and bumped his nose and his lip and they 
swelled up and he cried, for it hurt very much. 
So his mother picked him up and ran with him 
until they came to a lane with a high grey wall 80 
COUE FOR CHILDREN 
and pink roses spilling over the top. Presently 
there was a little green door in it, and over the 
door was written: ‘Qa Passe/ and the little boy’s 
mother said to him, ‘This is the place where we 
shall get all the hurt stopped.’ She pushed open 
the little green door and in they went. And in- 
side was a most beautiful garden. He looked 
around and he saw at one end of the garden many 
little children, boys and girls, all looking sad. 
Some had legs hurt like his and some were ill 
and had to lie down. But at the other end of the 
garden all the children were playing and were 
laughing and well, without any trouble at all. 
Then he looked again and saw that in the midst 
of the little hurt children there was sitting a 
lovely princess. She wore soft blue and silver 
clothes, and had long beautiful hair and a little 
crown of lilies on her head. The children gath- 
ered around her and she took each little one on 
her lap—just as I am taking you now—she 
stroked the hurt place and said to the pain, ‘ “Go 
away, go away!” You say it with me: “Go away, 
go away.” We will say it over and over, and 
look! Why, the pain went away! Why, you are 
better, just like the other little boy!’ And that M. COUfc’S HOUSE IN NANCY A STORY WITH A POINT 
81 
little boy stayed there a little longer, looking up 
into the princess’s face and feeling so much bet- 
ter, just like you. Then she said: ‘Now, you are 
well enough to go away and play with the other 
children,’ and he laughed, he was so pleased and 
happy. The princess kissed him and he was well 
and went away.” 
If your child is suffering from something more 
severe than a tumble, something that will take 
several days to be cured, you will vary the story 
to suit the case. You will tell how the child in 
the Princess’s lap was made a little better, how 
it smiled and felt happier, and how she told it 
that when it hurt very much it should stroke the 
hurt place itself and say, just as she was saying, 
“It goes, it goes, it goes” (or, better still, “Ca 
passe, fa passe33). That this always helps, and 
very soon it will make it quite well. You should 
make the child realize that it is a true story you 
are telling, that the garden is a real one, though 
far away—that some day perhaps you will really 
take your little boy to the garden. You can pic- 
ture the voyage to him, the steamship, the great 
wide ocean over which you will travel, the arrival 
at a port in France with the people all speaking COUE FOR CHILDREN 
82 
French and looking so different in their blouses 
and caps from the people on the pier at this end. 
And then comes the strange foreign train with 
its small compartments and off you go through 
such a pretty country, with castles and little grey 
towns and farms looking like gardens, all of 
them so carefully tended and planted in long 
narrow strips. Presently you reach a town 
called Nancy, where you get off. And in that 
town you find the lane with the high grey wall 
and the roses and at last the little green door. 
There are lots of other children going in, too. 
They all smile and say, “Here comes another 
little boy to see the Princess, who makes us strong 
and well and happy, because she loves us.” And 
he will push the gate open himself and walk in- 
side. 
It will be well, as your child develops interest 
and understanding, to explain that the reason the 
pain listens to the Princess and obeys her is be- 
cause every child has two minds. The one the 
child knows all about, that thinks and speaks and 
is so useful and clever, that listens to what is said, 
understanding what it hears; the mind that 
learns to read, that wants to play, that asks so A STORY WITH A POINT 
83 
many questions, and another mind deep inside, 
that is just as busy and useful, although it keeps 
so quiet a child doesn’t know anything at all 
about it, and forgets it entirely. Yet that is the 
mind which manages the works inside you, that 
sends the blood coursing through the arteries, 
that digests your food, that breathes, and that, 
if you see something that is going to hurt you, 
makes you jump out of the way before, as you 
would say, you could stop to think. 
The outside mind doesn’t have to think, you 
see, because the one on the inside is always on 
the job, attending to its own particular business. 
This is the mind that works the pains, and hands 
them over to the mind on the outside. The out- 
side mind gets nervous and excited and won’t let 
you forget the pain at all. It keeps calling back 
to the inside mind for more about that pain and 
at last you feel very bad indeed. 
But if you listen to the Princess, and lie very 
quiet while she speaks in her soft voice, your out- 
side mind soon forgets about being excited and 
the mind on the inside has a chance to hear and 
to do as she tells it to. It begins right away to 
work with all the soothing, healing things inside 84 
COUE FOR CHILDREN 
you that are only waiting for this chance to get 
to work and push the pain away. Very soon you 
begin to get better and better and before you 
know it you are well. 
Children understand this and are interested. 
To them the idea of possessing two minds is quite 
as easy to comprehend as the fact that they have 
two hands. You can go on from this point, teach- 
ing gradually that the boy or girl can speak to 
the inside, the unconscious mind, just as success- 
fully as the Princess in the garden. When your 
child is hurt or sick, tell it the garden story, and 
when you reach the place where the Princess 
takes the little child from far away into her arms, 
stroking the place where the pain is and saying, 
passe, pa passe”—very fast, like a bumblebee 
buzzing, do the same yourself. When once you 
have your child accustomed to this idea, teach it 
to train its unconscious mind according to the 
Coue method. Tell it that the best times to talk 
to the inside mind are in the morning, just as it 
wakes up and in the evening as it is dropping off 
to sleep, because when the outside mind is al- 
most sleeping, the inside mind is most awake and 
ready to take orders. A STORY WITH A POINT 
85 
You can make a cord, with twenty knots in it, 
from twisted red, white and blue strings, and say 
that this is the kind that is given to the children 
in the garden as they go out of the little green 
door. For every knot the child is to say, “Every 
day in every way I am getting better and better,” 
until it has said it twenty times over. This is to 
be done every night and every morning without 
fail, even when there is no sickness. It will 
please most children to feel that thousands of 
other children all over the world are doing this 
very same thing and getting health and fun out 
of it. 
In the children’s clinic the problem of the 
“naughty” child is also handled with unfailing 
success. But first let it be distinctly understood 
that Mile. Kaufmant is absolutely against call- 
ing a child naughty or admitting that it is natural 
for a child to be “bad.” When such cases are 
brought to her she says at once, “What—you 
have done that! A child like you! It cannot be, 
but you will not do it any more. To-morrow 
you will be better.” 
Scolding a child, telling it how naughty it is, 
how it will surely come to a bad end if it goes on COUE FOR CHILDREN 
86 
as it is doing, all this is the worst way to go about 
the business. Such statements might be accepted 
for fact. Suggestion must be positive. You 
must never lose the child’s confidence in you nor 
weaken its confidence in itself. You must em- 
phasize the fact that it is a good and loving as 
well as a beloved child. If it has been naughty, 
has fallen into tears and tantrums, you can use 
the same garden story. The Princess is talking 
to another little boy, this time, whose inside mind 
has somehow managed to get all mixed up, and 
made a lot of mistakes which have brought un- 
happy feelings. The Princess is holding him 
very tenderly in her arms, telling him that she 
knows he likes to do sweet, nice things, and to 
be good and happy. That he will never do any- 
thing like this bit of disobedience again because 
his inside mind understands now and won’t want 
to. And when he goes to bed that night he will 
tell his inside mind that it is going to forget all 
about the naughty thing and be good. 
The point is to draw a line between what the 
child has done, that may be wrong, and the child 
himself. The thing is wrong and not to be done, A STORY WITH A POINT 
87 
but the child is all right, and can certainly get 
the better of his mistakes. 
Almost any child’s problem can be solved if 
some one is at hand with kindness, patience and 
understanding, the necessary time to give full at- 
tention and find out just what is the matter and 
bend every energy to the removal of this particu- 
lar obstruction to normal happy existence. As 
this is very seldom the case, the sooner a child 
can be taught the way to handle his own prob- 
lems, to “operate his own machine,” the better it 
will be. 
You can reach a boy or girl most easily 
through their own particular interests. If your 
boy is deep in the mysteries of radio, use it as an 
analogy. Explain that the outside mind com- 
municates with the mind inside by a means re- 
sembling radio. There are no wires between the 
two, but the inside mind has antennas that catch 
the signals, thrown out by suggestion—by the 
words uttered through the agency of the outside 
mind. If the boy is having trouble at school 
with a particular lesson, get him to radio to him- 
self morning and night. Just as a radio message 88 
COUE FOR CHILDREN 
is repeated over and over again in broadcasting, 
so he must repeat his message again and again 
until the receiving station of his inside mind has 
got it. Tell him that the conditions for radio- 
graphing to his inner mind must be favourable 
to get the best results. There must be peace and 
composure, no storms, rushing about, no other 
confusing messages trying to get through. 
When he is quiet and relaxed in bed is the time 
for him to send his message. Suppose it is arith- 
metic that is bothering him, then he should send 
his message in words approximately like these: 
“To-morrow my arithmetic is going to be much 
easier to me. I ska*n’t make mistakes and I shall 
understand it without trouble. It will get easier 
and easier and I shall do better and better work 
every day. Soon it will be so easy that I shall 
like doing it. Beginning to-morrow my arith- 
metic will be easier and easier every day.” 
Tell him he should give his message time and 
repeat it often, keeping it up for several days, 
and that he will notice very soon that his inside 
mind’s receiving station has caught the message 
he is sending over and is responding to it. Any 
difficulty should be approached in like manner, A STORY WITH A POINT 
89 
always remembering that the constructive ele- 
ment is to be stressed, the confidence in well- 
doing and well-being strengthened, the mischief- 
working fear of failure displaced by contrary 
thoughts. 
M. Coue says that we must ask the Creator 
why it is so much easier to make bad suggestions 
than good ones. The bad suggestion is the com- 
mon one and that is why constant vigilance is 
required if we are to use conscious auto-sugges- 
tion in the right way. It is far more natural and 
usual for relatives to wonder audibly where on 
earth the child got that funny nose or to remark 
that something really must be done about its 
mouth, than to say that it moves easily or has 
nice eyes. Yet to call a child’s attention to its 
imperfections is distinctly the wrong type of sug- 
gestion. We know that the ideal condition is to 
be as nearly as possible unconscious of ourselves— 
with the general impression that the exterior we 
present to the outside world is at least not dis- 
pleasing or revolting. Any child started out in 
life with a contrary conviction is bound to have 
itself on its mind, more or less, and to become 
self-conscious. 90 
COUE FOR CHILDREN 
I know of one child who went through her 
adolescent years thrusting out her under jaw in 
a manner that was actually so forced as to be 
absurd as well as unbecoming. It seemed to be 
an unfortunate peculiarity that no one knew how 
to explain. But when the girl grew up she re- 
vealed the fact that the habit had been caused by 
overhearing one relative saying to another, 
“What a pity that child has such a weak chin.” 
A child’s imagination is a very alert and living 
thing and no adult can realize the force with 
which suggestion acts on it, transforming a given 
idea into an auto-suggestion. If this point needs 
any proof I can offer the following story told me 
by a woman whose work in child-psychology has 
already achieved wide celebrity. In a class of 
normal children of about six years old she had one 
little boy called Johnny who was always climbing 
about and disturbing the other children. Faced 
with the necessity of inventing something to keep 
him quiet and occupied she told him to put his 
hand down flat on a chair and look at it, saying, 
“I believe if you do that your hand will hold you 
still,” and after that the class proceeded in peace 
for the remaining twenty minutes. As the other A STORY WITH A POINT 
91 
children got up to go, the teacher turned to see 
the little boy still standing motionless by the 
chair. “Why, Johnny,” she said, “the class is 
over, why are you still standing there?” Johnny 
looked up at her reproachfully and answered, 
“You said my hand would hold me still and it’s 
doing it.” To her astonishment she discovered 
that the child was actually rooted to the chair and 
that the hand could not be released until a defi- 
nite counter-suggestion had been given. 
This, to be sure, is an extreme case, but is 
probably not as unusual as one would think, and 
it is well to bear this story in mind while we go 
on to consider the need of sterilizing our daily 
suggestions to children. 
Whereas it is probably true that the average 
child would be better off without any outside in- 
terference at all than with the sort of suggestion 
it usually gets, the question is really not worth 
discussing, for the reason that no child ever is 
or ever will be left entirely alone. They are by 
nature dependent on their elders and they are 
bound to receive suggestions, just as they absorb 
a certain number of microbes in the air they 
breathe. If there is no nurse to tell them about COUE FOR CHILDREN 
92 
hobgoblins, or if by a miracle there is no other 
child to furnish unhealthy explanations of nat- 
ural phenomena, there will still be a number of 
adjustments that have to be made as the ques- 
tions come up day by day, and there is always 
a right and a wrong way of going about it. 
Certain things are dangerous and must be let 
alone, such as a dog of uncertain temper, medi- 
cine bottles, or matches. Arbitrary commands, 
backed by threatened punishment, do not always 
keep a child out of danger. The elaborate ex- 
planatory method of taking the child into your 
confidence has the serious drawback of occupy- 
ing too much time when the situation is a critical 
one. Now Mile. Kaufmant teaches Obedience 
per se as one of the conditions necessary to 
health and happiness, and she emphasizes that 
idea in all her suggestions to children. We shall 
do well to follow her lead in the matter and make 
“obedience” a familiar word with a very definite 
meaning. 
It is the ideal of obedience that should be sug- 
gested as something fine and satisfactory in it- 
self. Some things must be let alone because they 
will hurt, but get it over with the fewest words A STORY WITH A POINT 
93 
possible, and above all, avoid making dreadful 
pictures of the fearful consequences to follow, 
should the command be disobeyed. 
Here is a story to illustrate that point: A little 
boy I knew delighted in playing with matches. 
Spankings had little effect and there seemed to 
be no way of stopping him, so at last his mother 
gave him a copy of “Striibel Peter,” with its in- 
comparably exciting and terrifying pictures of 
conflagration and disaster following upon 
Peter’s disobedience. Did this have the desired 
effect? Not at all! On the contrary, the boy 
actually set fire to a curtain deliberately, in order 
to reproduce the scene which had so stirred his 
imagination. The child was not a pyromaniac, 
either. 
Most children will respond readily to the idea 
that they are to be trusted, and it is not a difficult 
thing to awaken in an ordinary child a sense of 
personal honour and its responsibilities. Effort 
in that direction will prove far more profitable 
than if given to arousing fear, or suggesting the 
possibility of deceit and disobedience. 
You will find Coue constantly reiterating the 
importance of confidence in yourself, of a con- 94 
COUE FOR CHILDREN 
viction that you are able to master all the ele- 
ments of your being, an attitude of mind that 
when confronted with a problem will say at once, 
“I can,” never “I cannot.” This is the attitude 
you should seek to cultivate in your boy or girl, 
and not only where mere physical health is con- 
cerned. There are sick souls as well as sick 
bodies to be guarded against, and many lives 
have been made difficult or even ruined through 
the ignorance of those in whose hands lay the 
training of the child. 
The boy who gets into mischief most often is 
usually full of vigour, a vital, healthy and en- 
tirely normal little person. To harp on his 
wrong-doing, to tell him again and again that he 
is a bad boy, that he will be severely punished, or 
as many mothers do, to exclaim before visitors 
that Tommy is always so disobedient, that you 
cannot trust him, that he cares nothing for what 
is said to him, that he is the worst little boy in 
the street, with all the other wailings and accusa- 
tions that may come to mind, is to train him in the 
very things you want most to avoid. His imagi- 
nation seizes on what you say and makes much 
of it. The constant repetition of such remarks A STORY WITH A POINT 
95 
acts as suggestions which he accepts, and which 
will in time have a strong effect on his unconscious 
mind. He will become steadily more mis- 
chievous, he will distrust his impulses toward 
good, he will believe that he is naturally bad and 
act according to that belief. 
This being so, the reverse follows. Criticism 
there may be, but it should always keep in view 
the point to be arrived at, that of getting away 
from the fault toward the desirable state of gen- 
tleness or truthfulness or obedience required. 
Just as in auto-suggestion for illness, it is not the 
pain or the sick state that is made the subject of 
thought, but its opposite condition of freedom 
from suffering or bad health. 
It may safely be said that no other one dif- 
ficulty causes more acute misery in the life of the 
average child than the question of clothes. In 
the first place the child’s attitude toward clothes 
is generally misunderstood. The fondness for 
one garment or the dislike of another usually has 
its foundation, not in vanity but in its sense of 
personal dignity. Often as not, it is some trifling 
question such as gloves versus mittens that has 
taken on a deep significance. The fact that mit- COUE FOR CHILDREN 
96 
tens are unquestionably better for making snow- 
balls is not enough to counter-balance the fact 
that other children of the same age are appear- 
ing at school in woollen gloves. 
Your small girl may go out feeling perfectly 
happy and contented when from your point of 
view she looks a little fright, or perfectly misera- 
ble when you are most pleased with her appear- 
ance. When there is a sudden and apparently 
inexplicable dislike for some perfectly worthy 
article of clothing, it is nearly certain that the 
child has some reason for visualizing itself as 
making an absurd appearance in it. This is par- 
ticularly apt to be the case when the thing is in 
any way unusual and unlike what other children 
are wearing, and it is nothing short of cruelty 
and folly to force the child to go out in the world 
clad in the offending garment. You can be sure 
that if you do so your child will not only en- 
dure acute discomfort but it will also have its 
vitality and efficiency lowered for the time being 
at any rate. 
What kind of a time would you have and how 
scintillating would you be if you were made to 
go out to dinner in a Mother Hubbard wrapper? A STORY WITH A POINT 
97 
You will say that the comparison is far-fetched 
because you will be thinking of that pretty and 
expensive velvet coat that your little girl hates 
for no reason at all and will not wear to school if 
she can possibly help it. No, the comparison is 
not far-fetched, because nothing is pretty unless 
you think it so and if you think a thing 
ridiculous it is ridiculous to you. If in 
your imagination you visualize yourself as pre- 
senting a ridiculous appearance, then you are 
not going to be at your best and have a pleas- 
ant time. This is a very vexing question to 
parents, as it isn’t always easy to substitute other 
clothes for the eminently suitable ones that have 
already been provided just because of a child’s 
whim. A good deal can sometimes be done with 
a very subtle form of counter-suggestion. The 
mother of a little boy who would rather die than 
wear a certain handsome and becoming blouse 
suit of shepherd-plaid, because he has seen a girl 
wearing a dress of the same material, might try 
turning the conversation to the hardy Scottish 
shepherds, six feet tall, who wear the same sort 
of stuff, and if that doesn’t work, if she is unable 
to think up another idea sufficiently convincing 98 
COUE FOR CHILDREN 
to displace the auto-suggestion already at work 
in his subconscious mind, then she had better 
save time by sending the suit off to the dyers 
to be produced later as a perfectly new one 
of dark blue, indubitably masculine and incon- 
spicuous. 
Growing girls in the gawky stage are often 
peculiarly sensitive about their appearance. No 
grown-up who has lived through such a period 
can ever forget the wretched, hang-dog sensation 
of having to go forth weighed down by some de- 
tested hat or frock, one’s whole outlook on life 
blurred and distorted by helpless misery. Of 
course the girl should be able to auto-suggest 
herself into another frame of mind, but if she 
doesn’t know how to do it for herself, it is the 
time for some one to lend a hand if troublesome 
complexes are to be avoided. 
Before leaving the subject, I want to say once 
more that no argument, however sensible, no 
threat, no pleading, is going to get a child over 
one of these difficulties, unless a contrary idea is 
actually accepted by the unconscious, and dis- 
places the conception already there. If the child 
sees itself as ridiculous, what you yourself may A STORY WITH A POINT 
99 
think about it will make no difference whatsoever. 
You can force it to wear the thing in question, 
but you cannot make it happy or efficient while 
it is doing so. Wilfred Lay says, in “The Child’s 
Unconscious Mind,” “The force of the negative 
in unconscious thinking is virtually nil. . . . The 
only way to abolish an idea or stop an action is 
to efface it with another idea.” 
Then there is also the question of the child 
who is fussy about his food. “Eat your nice oat- 
meal,” says Tommy’s mother; but unfortunately 
Tommy’s unconscious mind is entirely occupied 
by the preconceived idea that oatmeal isn’t nice. 
It is something disgusting and revolting and he 
is dabbling at its edges with his spoon, telling 
himself that it can’t be done. “You eat that oat- 
meal at once,” roars his father, and Tommy picks 
up the spoon and attempts to swallow a mouth- 
ful in fearful haste and while he continues to 
think, “I cannot swallow it.” Of course he 
chokes on it, for his throat has contracted in obedi- 
ence to the thought, “I cannot swallow.” 
Various sorts of pressure are then brought to 
bear, so that eventually he does swallow it all, 
but the result of eating a thing while the imagina- 100 
COUE FOR CHILDREN 
tion pictures it as loathesome is to surround that 
particular species of nourishment with a horror 
that may last a lifetime. That “nice” oatmeal has 
to Tommy all the engaging qualities that you or 
I might find in a bad oyster. 
To this day I cannot look at a harmless baked 
apple without a shudder and I should never think 
of trying to eat one. Until M. Coue explained 
the law of reversed effort, by the experience of 
the clasped hands which can’t be opened, while 
one is thinking “I cannot, I cannot,” I never 
fully understood why it was so nearly impossible 
to swallow a baked apple under pressure from the 
outside. In the light of this scientific discovery, 
a means should be thought out for inducing 
Tommy to think “I can” before he attempts to 
swallow the oatmeal, for oatmeal ,is really a 
shocking think to choke on—as any one knows 
who has ever tried it. 
The power of suggestion, waking and sleeping, 
can be brought to bear in overcoming these 
whimsical dislikes in matter of diet. Knowing 
your child’s ruling passions you will know best 
how this is to be done. If his ideal is some fa- 
mous athlete, he may be induced to auto-suggest A STORY WITH A POINT 
101 
the oatmeal down his throat, if he is told that 
his hero has to devour a plateful every morning 
while he is in training. Let him picture himself 
becoming day by day more like his magnificent 
model in the development of brawn and muscle. 
He will tell himself, “If he can—I can.” 
Instances without end could be produced as 
evidence of the extreme susceptibility of child- 
hood, but fortunately there are not many people 
so hopelessly grown up that they cannot remem- 
ber what it felt like to be a child. Most of us 
have only to think back a little to find stories of 
our own which only need a little analysis to be 
perfect illustrations of the truths on which the 
Coue method is founded. 
In a recent number of The Bookman an arti- 
cle has appeared by Dr. Rufus M. Jones, Pro- 
fessor of Philosophy at Haverford College. Dr. 
Jones, writing on “The American Parent and 
the Child,” emphasizes over and over again the 
immense force and vitality of the impressions 
given children in the home. Speaking of the 
young child, we are told: “He is in fact almost 
as sensitive to suggestion as is the hypnotized sub- 
ject.” The italics are his. He says later on, COUE FOR CHILDREN 
102 
speaking of the power of the home suggestion 
and the home spirit on the young mind, “These 
same forces that start the malleable youth in un- 
fortunate directions and produce a set of char- 
acter and a tangle of habits and dispositions 
which baffle the teacher and professor, may 
equally well organize and form those inner tend- 
encies and springs that shape the gentleman, the 
scholar, the moral hero and the saint. Goodness 
is as contagious as badness.” 
Even if one ventures to disagree with Dr. 
Jones in his last statement that Goodness is as 
contagious as Badness, the important fact still 
remains that Goodness is contagious. By sug- 
gesting goodness, health, grace and happiness to 
the growing child, you form his mind in those 
measures and incidentally you shape your own 
mind as far as is possible in the same mould. 
For no conscious auto-suggestion can be given 
without thought—with thought comes the weed- 
ing-out process and when once we begin to work 
on that cluttered bramble-patch we call the mind, 
it is astounding how many rocks and roots and 
discarded what-nots have to be thrown out be- 
fore we can do anything at all. A STORY WITH A POINT 
103 
Yes, it is a lively kind of mental exercise that 
is waiting for us when we start out to apply the 
Coue method in family life, not at all like the 
state of Nirvana my friend pictures, and we shall 
find plenty of use for our wills as well as our 
imaginations. One of the most distinguished 
psychologists in England confessed after an hour 
of talk with M. Coue that he had been picked 
up every five minutes or so on bad auto-sugges- 
tions. We shall be doing well indeed if we are 
not all but deprived of speech during the early 
stages of the undertaking. 
Here are a few of the most crucial things that 
M. Coue would have us remember to do and not 
to do in the presence of children: 
Always maintain an even temper. 
Speak in a firm but gentle voice. 
Avoid any suggestion of cruelty that would 
destroy confidence. 
Never speak ill of any one. 
Always answer their questions with kindness 
and intelligence. 
Never tell them they are lazy or naughty. 
Always give them encouragement, even in the 
most discouraging circumstances. COUE FOR CHILDREN 
104 
Never talk of illness before them—teach them 
that health is normal. 
Never instil fear of any of the conditions nat- 
ural in life. 
Never give them ideas of unnatural things to 
be afraid of. 
Awaken a love of study and work. 
Teach them to be polite and amiable to every- 
body. 
Develop self-confidence and decision by every 
means. 
Teach them to think always that they are going 
to succeed. 
Teach them that they must work hard to at- 
tain success. 
Above allgive them a good example in all 
these things. 
If all this sounds old and familiar, like Sunday 
School texts, remember that M. Coue will not let 
us off with the texts alone. He insists that we 
must analyze each one of these ideas in the search- 
light of what we now know of auto-suggestion, 
carrying them through to their ultimate conclu- 
sion in all the ramifications of daily life. A very 
different matter this from hearing the same A STORY WITH A POINT 
105 
thoughts read once a week from the New Testa- 
ment and then going off and forgetting about it. 
We may never be able to define the uncon- 
scious mind, to grasp its secret, but we are learn- 
ing how to make use of it, and that is all that is 
required for our purposes; it has become a part of 
our stock in trade. Coue has proved certain facts 
in regard to it and has shown us the way to con- 
trol certain of its powers. In teaching our chil- 
dren what he has taught us we are helping to 
guard them from the dangers of ignorance, and 
are using consciously and wisely what has until 
now been left to the most haphazard chance. CHAPTER V 
IFS AND BUTS 
The objections that are made to the employment 
of the Coue method are almost without excep- 
tion based on misunderstanding of M. Coue’s 
intention. In this chapter I shall try to answer 
or even to anticipate some of them. 
There are those who decry his teaching be- 
cause it has no connection with any established 
form of religion, or with their own particular 
one. M. Coue has described his personal belief 
as “The Religion of Humanity,” and he goes on 
to point out that an affiliation with any special 
doctrine would impair the usefulness of his 
method in other quarters of the globe. In view 
of the phenomenal spread of the idea within the 
past few years it seems hardly fantastic to sup- 
pose that Polynesian mothers may some day be 
teaching it to their children, in the hope of saving 
their race from the extinction with which it is 
now threatened owing to the forcible introduc- 
106 IFS AND BUTS 
107 
tion of our notions of civilization. Even now 
East Indian and South African patients are no 
unusual sight at the Nancy clinics. 
On the other hand, it has already been shown 
that a woman, a devoted adherent of the Roman 
Catholic Church, has found in the method a vehi- 
cle for the practical expression of her faith, in 
doing good to others. It occupies the same posi- 
tion in relation to religion that it does to medi- 
cine. 
Next we come to the allegation that M. Coue 
designs to “dethrone the will.” This is of all 
others the objection that is oftenest put forward 
and it has the least foundation in reason or in 
fact. 
The will and the imagination, the conscious and 
» 
the unconscious minds, are two separate entities, 
each with its own sphere of action. The will can 
and does direct the imagination, when it has 
learned how to do so, but it must never fight with 
it; they must work in harmony. M. Coue says, 
“When the imagination and the will are at war, 
the imagination invariably gains the day.” 
The will knows nothing about operating the 
functions of the body, such as breathing, circu- COUE FOR CHILDREN 
108 
lation and digestion and if we attempt to control 
these functions by will power alone our efforts 
will be futile. There is no question of weakening 
the will by training the imagination to be a help 
rather than a hindrance. 
Every morning as we wake up and every 
evening as we go to sleep we are to give our 
orders to the unconscious mind just as we would 
perform any other regular household duty. 
This is the only respect in which M. Coue’s 
teachings may be said to affect the will, and any 
person, man, woman or child, who can follow 
out this direction faithfully, without having a 
stronger will power at the end of six weeks, must 
have had a will as strong as a will can be before 
he began the experiment. 
Have you tried it? Have you ever tried to do 
anything, no matter how simple or easy, twice a 
day, without ever missing a single time, no mat- 
ter how tired or how sleepy you were, and did 
it or did it not take will power? The most im- 
portant task prescribed for the conscious mind 
governed by the will is this little daily repetition, 
and if you can do it you need not worry about 
having your will dethroned. IFS AND BUTS 
109 
To quote Baudouin again, “Induced sugges- 
tion is not a violation of the subject’s individual- 
ity; it is a means of training the subject’s will 
power of auto-suggestion.” He also says that 
he thinks auto-suggestion should take a primary 
place in education. “For by its use, not merely 
will the child learn self-control, not merely will 
it develop his physical energies and be able to 
resist disease, but in addition, he will be able to 
develop (in a degree hardly conceivable by those 
who have not seen this method applied) his work- 
ing powers in all fields. He will learn to obtain 
the maximum of results with a minimum of ef- 
fort, he will acquire a method which will be a 
stand-by to him throughout life.” That child 
who is equipped for life with a working knowl- 
edge of his own mental machinery is going to 
have a tremendous advantage from the start of 
the race. Nothing is ever learned as thoroughly, 
as quickly or as easily as those things we learn 
when we are young. The boy aviator learns to 
adjust himself to the control of his plane and 
very soon acquires what Baudouin calls “response 
models”—meaning that certain responses to 
given circumstances become automatic and re- COUE FOR CHILDREN 
110 
quire no conscious mental process to produce 
them. 
And so the child who has been thoroughly 
grounded in the meaning and use of auto-sugges- 
tion will know exactly what to do when danger 
threatens and he will do it instinctively, with per- 
fect self-mastery. Think what this will mean in 
the economy of time and energy which might 
otherwise be spent in floundering panic. The 
boy who feels despair over his mathematics; the 
girl who is miserably self-conscious; the child 
confronted by the thousand and one difficulties 
that so often make childhood anything but that 
happy state it is generally supposed to be, will 
have learned a way out. A surprising number of 
people will admit, when the question is put to 
them, that nothing would induce them to live 
through their youth again. M. Coue insists that 
we were put into the world to be happy, but how 
can we expect success in the “pursuit of happi- 
ness” if the imagination uncontrolled is to be per- 
mitted to lead us into every quagmire by the way. 
Certain forms of suggestion that seem to work 
admirably with grown people are not so well 
adapted to the needs of children. Adults can IFS AND BUTS 
111 
sometimes be dynamited out of a state of mind or 
a train of thought. Often their delusions have 
crystallized, as I said before in likening M. Coue 
to a sculptor, but in dealing with the minds of 
children we have a material soft as wax, that 
must be moulded very gently, as every finger 
print leaves its trace. 
Once a woman in a trolley-car was having a fit 
of hysteria so violent that all the combined efforts 
of the passengers proved unavailing to calm her. 
At last the motorman groaned heavily and shut 
off the power. Shoving his way back into the 
car he leaned over the afflicted lady, emitting a 
sudden roar, “Shut up, pie face!” and instantly 
the hysterics ceased. “That’s the way I always 
fix my wife,” he remarked as he returned to his 
post. 
Now, this suggestion of the motorman’s, sub- 
stituting as it did a new and startling idea for the 
one that was making the trouble, was good of its 
kind, and perfect for that occasion, but very 
rarely do children profit by such treatment. 
Many people hold that the best thing to say to 
a child when it has received some slight hurt is 
“That’s nothing.” This is only one form of auto- COUE FOR CHILDREN 
112 
suggestion and it is good in as far as it proves 
effective. 
The cry-baby child needs to be turned away 
from that fault as from any other, not by jeer- 
ing at it, not by petting or humouring it, but by 
picturing the opposite ideals of endurance and 
self-control. But this should not be carried too 
far. Too much repression may be dangerous. 
Nature provides a relief for nervous organiza- 
tions in tears or outcries, and many doctors are 
warning parents against too severe a system in 
this respect. Good sense is required in handling 
this problem as in most others. 
At the same time that you are working to im- 
plant standards of courage and cheerfulness, the 
bearing of small troubles easily, the child can be 
taught to help more serious hurts by calling upon 
the unconscious force within him. This will not 
make a coward of him, but will, on the contrary, 
help him to bear pain and conquer it, without 
putting a dangerous strain on his nervous organ- 
ization. “That’s nothing” and “Ca passe” can 
go hand in hand as helpful allies working to ac- 
complish the same end. 
Sooner or later we must reckon with the friend IFS AND BUTS 
113 
who thinks that “this Coue idea of coddling and 
generally spoiling babies is something that has 
long since been discarded from good practice. 
Babies should be left severely alone.” This 
again is a misconception. Babies, like kittens, 
should not be handled too much and certainly 
they should not be spoiled, but if they are let 
alone it need not be done severely. 
No baby should be without the “sense impres- 
sion,” if you like, that its mother is watching over 
it with loving care. When that is lacking the 
child misses something that is absolutely essential 
to its well-being. One of the best known child 
specialists in the country is in the habit of ad- 
vising parents to keep their sick children at home, 
whenever it is possible to do so, rather than to 
send them to the best equipped of hospitals where 
every care will be given them, short of the per- 
sonal attention of the mother herself. 
There are also illuminating statistics of child 
mortality in hospitals where, in spite of every 
medical and sanitary advantage, the death rate 
percentage is higher than when babies suffering 
from the same diseases remain in their homes, 
even poverty stricken ones, under mother care. COUE FOR CHILDREN 
114 
A woman who has been in charge of a cele- 
brated nursery wherein babies are held for adop- 
tion tells me that children who in the nursery 
have seemed unattractive and uninteresting, al- 
most invariably bloom into fascinating cherubs 
under the loving care and attention of their 
adopted parents. 
Perhaps some friend may have doubts about 
the Garden Story. She thinks the idea of the 
lovely Princess too “sentimental.” Remember 
that in telling this story you are making an ap- 
peal to the child’s imagination, and the “lovely 
Princess” has held her appointed place in Fairy 
Stories since time immemorial. If, however, you 
know of anything else that would appeal more 
strongly to your child’s imagination, then by all 
means make use of that figure instead. 
The Garden Story should never become com- 
mon nor should any child he permitted to get it 
through simulation of aches or pains. 
As to the objection that the method might 
lead to an exploitation of emotional tendencies, a 
sentimental dependence between the child and 
its mother or any one else—that is impossible, 
unless indeed the teacher is at fault. As a matter IFS AND BUTS 
115 
of fact the exact reverse is the case. The teach- 
ing, if successful at all, develops in the child, not 
an emotional dependence upon another person, 
but a calm and reasonable reliance on its own 
power and on its own ability to control the con- 
ditions under which it lives. It produces the 
most dignified and responsible attitude toward 
life of which it is possible to conceive. 
What does M. Coue mean when he speaks of 
the “Domain of Possibility”? He himself an- 
swers this question by saying that if a leg or an 
arm has been cut off, it will be impossible to grow 
another through auto-suggestion. If a bone has 
been broken, auto-suggestion cannot set it, but 
after the surgeon has done his work and the bone 
has been set, the healing and knitting process 
may be greatly accelerated with the aid of his 
method. 
The parents of a child who is desperately ill, 
or afflicted, may find themselves wondering 
whether this particular case is not outside the 
bounds of the domain. 
At the children’s clinic a spectator asked Mile. 
Kaufmant: “How do you dare to tell that child 
she is going to get well? How could you ever 116 
COUE FOR CHILDREN 
face her disappointment, the betrayal of the 
hopes you have aroused, if she is not cured?” 
The reply came without an instant’s hesitation. 
“No child’s case is ever hopeless when there is a 
mind to work on. Where there is growth there 
is constant change going on, and with the aid of 
auto-suggestion all the vital forces can be rallied 
to work in the direction of betterment. Every- 
thing that is possible will be obtained; one never 
knows how far the improvement may go, but no 
child has ever failed to respond. I know that 
this is so, and it is because I know it that my 
treatment is effective.” 
There should be no place for misgivings in the 
mind of the person teaching auto-suggestion. If 
you fancy it to be impossible to keep out depress- 
ing doubts, it is because you have not understood 
one of the most important principles of the 
method. No two contrary ideas can occupy the 
mind at the same time; when one goes in the other 
must come out. 
It is therefore the function of the conscious 
mind to choose between the two contrary ideas 
and to elect that one which seems to be the most 
useful and desirable. By the practice of con- IFS AND BUTS 
117 
scious auto-suggestion you can guard your mind 
against the intrusion of the other idea. 
The policies advocated by M. Coue have al- 
ways been followed more or less instinctively by 
naturally kindly and sympathetic parents and 
teachers in dealing with children, but now that 
we can analyze them in the light of the recent 
discoveries in the field of auto-suggestion we 
know that they must be followed if trouble is to 
be avoided. 
“He is most firmly good who best knows why.” 
M. Coue is in the habit of giving to every new 
patient what he calls the “experience” The pa- 
tient is instructed to clasp his hands at arm’s 
length from his body, looking at them fixedly 
and pressing them together with all the force he 
can command. When the pressure has reached 
its maximum, he is told to think, “I cannot un- 
clasp my hands. I cannot, I cannot; I want to, 
but I cannot.” This experiment is very simple, 
although it is frequently misunderstood. The 
idea is that without the motor thought, “I can” 
the fingers cannot be relaxed. The thought, “I 
want to,” only produces an effort to tear them 
apart while the fingers are still firmly clasped. COUE FOR CHILDREN 
118 
Many people fancy themselves to be incapable 
of holding the thought, “I cannot,” as directed, 
and confuse the issue by permitting themselves 
to think, “Maybe I can,” or, “I can if I want to.” 
Others who are highly imaginative and suggest- 
ible (it is used as a test of suggestibility) get the 
idea at once and are greatly impressed by the 
force of the resulting struggle between the imag- 
ination and the will, illustrating the law of re- 
versed effort. 
Baudouin and Brooks, writing on the Coue 
Method, have agreed that another experiment is 
more suitable for introducing children to the 
natural law on which the Method is founded— 
and this is the Chevreul Pendulum. Without a 
description of it this book would be incomplete. 
The experiment is highly amusing, in fact it 
is only a new kind of game, but it is a game that 
is of the very greatest importance as a prepara- 
tion for life. Your children will be fortunate 
indeed if they can learn the lesson early and in 
so agreeable a manner. Once they have under- 
stood it your task of explaining its many appli- 
cations will be easy. 
The paraphernalia required is of the simplest: IFS AND BUTS 
119 
On a sheet of white paper draw a circle about 
five inches in diameter. Inside the circle, reach- 
ing from rim to rim, draw two heavy black fines 
intersecting in the middle, one perpendicular and 
the other horizontal. Letter these fines A, B, 
and C, D. Now tie a piece of thread about eight 
inches long to a lead pencil or any small fight 
stick, and fasten at the other end a bob, a heavy 
button will do, a lead dress weight, or a heavy 
ring. Lay the paper on the table and stand 
before it, holding your tiny fishing-rod in both 
hands with your elbows free from your sides. 
Hold the rod firmly with the bob suspended over 
the point of intersection, which should be marked 
with an O. Now look at the fine A, B, following 
it with your eyes, from side to side. Keep your 
mind dwelling easily on the idea of the fine. 
Presently the bob will begin to move along that 
line. Your earnest efforts to keep the rod still, 
to prevent the pendulum from swinging will only 
increase its motion, by bringing in the law of re- 
versed effort. 
After a while transfer your eyes and your 
thought to the fine C, D, and observe the be- 
haviour of the bob. Finally transfer your 120 
COUE FOR CHILDREN 
whole attention to the circle, following it 
round and round with your eyes. The bob 
will do the same. Sometimes the results obtained 
in the last test are amazing and the bob will whirl 
around with great speed with a diameter of eight 
inches or more. 
This experiment, like the one mentioned 
previously, is a test of suggestibility, and the child 
for whom the bob moves fastest, and with the 
most ready obedience to the change of thought, 
is the one who will obtain the most immediate 
results from the practice of auto-suggestion. 
The children should be told that this game illus- 
trates the law of reversed effort, the most valua- 
ble of Coue’s discoveries, and the root of his 
teaching. It is because of this law that the im- 
agination leads when there is a contest between it 
and the will. Holding the rod in the hands and 
making an honest effort to hold it absolutely still, 
the thought is fixed on the idea of motion along 
a certain line. As soon as this idea has been ac- 
cepted by the unconscious mind, it is transformed 
into auto-suggestion of movement, and the order 
is transmitted to the muscles governing the arm 
and hand. Thereafter the effort of the will to THE CHEVREUL PENDULUM 
©The Misses Selby IFS AND BUTS 
121 
arrest the motion of the bob becomes a conflict 
with the imagination, which by the law of re- 
versed effort produces a movement more and 
more pronounced. The idea implanted in the 
imagination controls the functions of the body. 
When you are sure that your boy or girl has 
understood this you can go on to explain how the 
knowledge of the law is to help them every day 
in the business of living. If they are sleepless 
and try to force themselves to sleep, they will only 
become more and more wide awake and restless. 
If they have forgotten something and try to 
force the will to bring the thing back to mind it 
continues to escape them,—doing the very reverse 
of what they desire. The conflict, generating a 
fear of failure, makes failure certain. 
There is another consideration that ought not 
to be passed over. Only the other day I heard a 
young mother saying: 
“I suppose this Coue idea is all very well, but 
I never could understand philosophy. It balls 
me all up to read even one of these Bergson 
books, not to mention Freud. I’m not going to 
start in on this new thing and come out feeling 
that I’m all kinds of a fool. That’s about all the COUE FOR CHILDREN 
122 
suggestion I should get out of it and it wouldn’t 
make life any more enjoyable.” 
Many people do dislike reading philosophy; it 
confuses them, or even distresses them, perhaps 
for the reason this young woman gave, perhaps 
for another. But nothing could be simpler than 
Coue or the method he teaches. No doubt there 
will be plenty of esoteric books written about him 
or founded upon his discovery, but he himself 
will never “ball” anybody up. All that he wants 
understood is the fact that a suggestion conveyed 
to the unconscious mind will have a direct effect. 
That the suggestion given to oneself without ef- 
fort or act of will, at a time of quiet and relaxa- 
tion, repeated quickly and without conscious 
thought, will be seized upon by the unconscious 
mind. That done, the matter is to be dropped. 
The unconscious mind will attend to the rest; the 
conscious mind can go about its business. 
This is really all any one needs to know. But 
faith in the method being a part, and an impor- 
tant part of its efficacy, the reason lying behind 
the formula should be studied in order to give 
you proper confidence. The relation between 
will and imagination, the different parts they IFS AND BUTS 
123 
play and your power to affect the imagination in 
the way you wish by presenting to it ideas in 
simple form and words, these fundamentals are 
all you need. 
In the pages of this book I have outlined a 
few of the ramifications of induced suggestion 
and auto-suggestion. It has been shown that 
their tremendous influence is constantly at work 
in all our lives and most powerfully and continu- 
ously with growing children. 
You will see the necessity of surrounding your 
child in as far as possible with constructive, up- 
building suggestions. From the few examples 
I have given you will observe the actual harm 
resulting from suggestions which have never un- 
til now been generally recognized as bad. 
Never permit yourself to forget that nothing 
is so fundamentally important in maintaining the 
general atmosphere of health and happiness you 
wish to create as M. Coue’s famous little 
formula: 
“Every day in every way I am getting better 
and better.” 
Some people shy at using the suggestion in the 
words prescribed. For one reason or another COUE FOR CHILDREN 
124 
they prefer to invent phrases of their own to be 
used in the same way. One of my friends had 
told me that she likes to sing hers to the jolly 
tune of a nursery rhyme, “The Farmer in the 
Dell.” 
“My pain has gone away, 
My pain has gone away; 
Heigh-ho, the Dairy-oh, 
My pain has gone away.” 
This is an admirable illustration of the mis- 
take of attempting to branch out for oneself and 
improve on M. Coue’s idea. It will be seen that 
the word “pain,” the idea we are trying to get 
away from, occurs in every line, except the third, 
and in that the remarks concerning the Dairy are 
aside from the point we are aiming at. 
M. Coue’s own words are as concise and easy 
to say as it is possible to make them and they 
cover every possible condition, both mental and 
physical; they represent the result of years of 
intensive practical experimentation. Hundreds 
of thousands of people have found them bene- 
ficial, so why should we bother our heads to try 
to improve on them? IFS AND BUTS 
125 
Whosoever has tried them, will know that by 
the time he has arrived at the twentieth repeti- 
tion he is very apt to drop off to sleep, smiling 
peacefully. 
In the morning, when the conscious mind 
emerges from sleep, if the habit has once been 
acquired, that same little cheerful self-assurance 
of well-being and happiness to come will be wait- 
ing to enter it, taking precedence over all the 
annoying thoughts left over from the day before, 
which would otherwise come crowding in to nag 
and harass us at the first dawn of consciousness. 
Do not imagine, either, that the string with 
twenty knots may be dispensed with, for by 
using it you are reinforcing the idea with a sense- 
impression. It enables you to carry through the 
twenty repetitions with the minimum of con- 
scious effort of the will. 
Therefore give the string to your child and tell 
him to murmur the words easily, sleepily, letting 
the knots slip through his fingers. Tell him that 
he need only say them loud enough so that the 
inside mind that is listening through his ear can 
hear them. That inside mind knows far better 
than he does what needs to be done for better- 126 
COUE FOE CHILDREN 
ment in every way and it will be ready to carry 
out the general suggestion to the best advantage. 
The child’s consciousness will thus be predis- 
posed to expect health and good and he will take 
it for granted that these are customary, almost 
inevitable. 
THE END