Autosuggestion
psychological technique
Autosuggestion is a psychological technique related to the placebo effect, popularized internationally by pharmacist Émile Coué in the 1920s. It is a form of self-induced suggestion in which individuals guide their own thoughts, feelings, or behavior. The technique is often used in self-hypnosis.
While Émile Coué created an autosuggestion craze in America in the 1920s, the technique had already been developed and widely taught by Dr. Herbert A. Parkyn through experimentation at his Chicago School of Psychology and in his 1906 book Auto-Suggestion: What It Is and How to Use It for Health, Happiness and Success.
History of Auto-suggestion
In Porphyry's Treatise on Abstinence, a certain Rogatianus, a Roman Senator, was cured of an articular disease of eight years' duration "by negligence of terrene concerns and a contemplation and intuition of such as are divine".
Principle of Auto-Suggestion
Starting in 1896 at the Chicago School of Psychology, Dr. Parkyn taught that auto-suggestion was the key principle underlying both mental and physical transformation. He defined it as the process by which an individual consciously or unconsciously directs influence upon the involuntary mind. Students learned that every change in thought, emotion, or bodily function begins with suggestion, and that auto-suggestion is the means by which this universal law operates within oneself.
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