MIND DOCTOR AT WORK.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXIII, Issue 4417, 22 May 1922, Page 3

MIND DOCTOR AT WORK.

A MORNING WITH THE MINDDOCTOR. • After two hours spent with M-. Coue, the French apostle of auto-sugges-tion, the main impression left is that of an extraordinary able little man with a fine sense of human frailty, mental and physical, and a formula for self-cure which rings in the ears : Ca passe, ca passe, ca passe, pa-pa-pa-pa.-papa-papa-papapaaa. ... Or, as he says in English: Goipg, going, going, ng-ng ngn-gngn-ngpgn. . . • Say this as quickly as you possibly can, in a monotone which resembles the buzzing of a bumble-bee trying to escape from a room, and you have M. Coue in his most characteristic moment. Gospel of Seif-cure. M. Coue said this a dozen times one day in a room at the house in Grosvenor Gardens, London, S.W., where he spends his mornings in preaching the gospel of self tcure. He said it to a dozen different people, men and wo men, who had come to be cured of their troubles. First he made them stand up, close their eyes, and indicate the seat of the trouble—-a painful joint, a persistent headache, or a stiff neck. Then he adjured them to repeat the words afiter him while his hand moved with equal rapidity up and down in the neighbourhood of tn.e pain. Without exception the people sb treated pronounced theniselves better for the treatment. Confidence in the method was quickly established by the recital o-f two recent cures vouched for by people in the room. At Wigmore Hall a man who had been cured of stammering during the morning seance at Grosvenor Gardens had spoken with great fluency to 600 people. M. Coue is himself impressed by this cure, the man having stammered since he was four years old. Auto suggestion and Crime. One question from the audience led M. Cone to give a little lecture on auto-suggestion and crime. He declared tha.t a child could be cured pf many things—such, as biting the fin-ger-nails—if the mother would stand about a yard f;rom its cot every pignt after " the "child had gone to sleep and say softly 25 times: “You will not, you will not. . . .’’ But could not such methods be used to compel a person to commit a crime ? M.. Coue said they could not, unless the person was an habitual criminal. It would take years of such efforts, he suggest-, ed, to induce a person to db something contraiy to his nature. Curing Tumours. Discussing the self-treatment of serious organic trouble,’ such as lesions of the heart, lungs, or other organs, M. Coue claimed that there was a mental as well as- physical side to all ailments, and if the mental attitude, expressed by "I can be healed” was correct, ,the physical would be more amenable to .treatment. His boldest assertion was perhaps the statement that a tumour could be cured. “The effect.” he said, “would be, in the first place, to cause the small veins, which supply blood to the tumour to wither and cease to function. This w’ould be followed by the diying-up of the tumour itself.” Finally M. Coue advised his listeners to seclude themselves for a brie? period each day, repeating the "Ca passe.” or "Going,” formula, and each morning to say, not forcefully, but in a quiet monotone: “Every day lam growing better and better.” M. Cone»and flue Blind. Blinded ex-soldiers were patients bf M. Coue one evening at St. Dunstan’s, Regent’s Park, N.W. After an address in broken Englisn to a hall crowded with blind men. nurses, and visitors, the little whitebearded Frenchman in the long black coat thoroughly enjoyed himself as he explained to a tall, wfell-set-up-man, Trooper Francis Michael Duignan, who is blind, what he was to do. Trooper Duignan clasped his hands, tolp hifself that he could not unclaps them, and did not do sb. M, Couemade him hold his arm x rigid and tell himself that he could not bend it, and he could not.

The Irishman evidently enjoyed the experience. Lady Pearson, the widow of Sir Arthur Pearson', was persuaded to mount the platform 1 , and with hands tightly clasped together and little M. Coue standing beside -her, told herself —with’ obvious results 1 — that she could not upclasp them.