Émile Coué (1857-1926) served for around two years as an assistant to Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault in his group hypnotic at Nancy. However, after practicing for several years as a hypnotherapist employing the methods of Liébeault and Bernheim’s Nancy School, Coué gradually began to develop a new orientation called “conscious autosuggestion.” Several years after Liébeault’s death in 1904, Coué founded what became known as the New Nancy School, a loose collaboration of practitioners who taught and promoted his views. Coué’s method did not emphasise “sleep” or deep relaxation and instead focused upon teaching groups of clients how to use autosuggestion by trial and error learning involving a specific series of suggestion tests. Although Coué argued that he was no longer using hypnosis, some of his followers, such as Charles Baudouin, viewed his approach as a form of light self-hypnosis. Coué’s method became an internationally renowned self-help and psychotherapy technique, which contrasted with the methods of Freud’s method of psychoanalysis and prefigured subsequent self-hypnosis techniques and, in some regards, the development of cognitive therapy.

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