“Do you have a feeling of doom and gloom? Forget it. I’ve achieved some marvellous things in my life. By far the greatest was to escape from the slavery of nicotine addiction.”

Allen Carr’s introduction to the third edition of his Easy Way to Stop Smoking could double as his epitaph. While his impending death from lung cancer was seen by many as a cruel irony and by others as a signal for sainthood, Carr remained faithful to his emphasis on positive thinking.

He had spent years in clinic with the secondhand smoke of addicts who, as part of his Easy Way of giving up, were encouraged to indulge their habit throughout the sessions. If that was the cause of his cancer it was, he said, a reasonable price to pay for ten million reprieved.

Carr had smoked himself; this former dependence lent sympathy and credibility to his quest. He grew up in a working-class family in Putney, southwest London, and gained a scholarship to the local grammar school. He completed his National Service with the RAF and trained as an accountant with Peat Marwick, qualifying in 1958. He had started smoking as a teenager and, by the time he had become a successful accountant, he was nursing a 100-a-day habit.

His attempts to cut down usually meant allowing himself one cigarette an hour, spending “ten minutes of each hour in bliss and the other fifty waiting for the next cigarette”. He once gave up for “six months of purgatory” before succumbing, in tears, to his vice. He determined to find a better approach and, two years later, he had constructed his Easyway method.

Quickly convinced by its efficacy, he told his wife that he was never going to smoke again. Better yet, he would cure the world of smoking.

He left his job to set up his own clinic in Southwest London, without any formal training. Two years later he had written his book, The Easy Way to Stop Smoking. Unable to find a publisher, he borrowed money from his friend Sid Sutton and published it himself. Today there are clinics in 33 countries and territories and his book has sold seven million copies.

His method emphasised that the cigarette did not give relief from everyday stress, merely relief from the withdrawal symptoms caused by the previous cigarette. Non-smokers, he assured his clients, felt this relief all the time. The biggest barrier to quitting, he believed, was fear: fear of discomfort, fear of social awkwardness, and fear of the self-loathing when an attempt to quit fails. Carr aimed to break this cycle, encouraging his clients to smoke through their treatment sessions; his readers to puff away as they turned the pages. Smokers were invited, as they read through Carr’s deconstruction of the weed, to reach their own epiphany: look dispassionately at what they were doing and decide that it was futile to continue.

Critics have pointed out that Carr’s key points could fit on to five pages rather than 140. Indeed, he makes few arguments against smoking that had not been aired more vociferously elsewhere. But the process of reading the book, chapter by chapter, exposes the smoker to the sort of suggestion, repetition and association found in hypnotherapy, which Carr also practised in his clinic sessions and in his home.

To many, his methods seemed counterintuitive. The medical establishment was largely convinced that some degree of suffering was necessary to stop smoking. An “easy way”, that told people that quitting did not need to be punitive — indeed, warned them that “cold turkey” methods would fail — seemed like a con; like one of the fad diets that promised weight loss without dieting or exercise. Carr’s sympathy for smokers and his antipathy towards nanny-state coercion put him at loggerheads with officialdom and with groups such as Action on Smoking and Health. He poured scorn on no-smoking days and on the total smoking ban.

“Smokers are fed up of being pushed around and made to feel like lepers,” he said after the ban was passed into law. “Smoking bans won’t work.”

Neither was Carr overmodest about his achievements, sometimes sounding exasperated that the Government preferred to use fear and scare tactic advertising or nicotine patches than to look into his own methods, for which he claimed a 95 per cent success rate. “Can you imagine if there were ten different ways of treating appendicitis?” he wrote. “Nine of them cured 10 per cent of the patients, which means that they killed 90 per cent of them, and the tenth way cured 95 per cent. Imagine that knowledge of the tenth way had been available for 14 years, but the vast majority of the medical establishment was still recommending the other nine.”

His easy way, later branded as Easyway, gained testimonials from Sir Richard Branson, Sir Anthony Hopkins and big corporate clients who had bought clinical sessions for their staff. His claimed success rate, backed by money-back guarantee, had its detractors, some pointing out that many clients whose treatment was paid for by their employers had no interest in offering feedback or claiming a refund.

The NHS remained unconvinced; the reluctance of policymakers to meet him or discuss his methods caused him a great deal of anger. This he exorcised in his last book, Scandal. He described it as “the book that the Government, Department of Health, the NHS, ASH and Quit do not want you to read”. As yet unpublished, he made it available for download on his website before his death.

Carr also published Allen Carr’s How to be a Happy Non-Smoker, Allen Carr’s Easyway for Women to Stop Smoking, Allen Carr’s Easyweigh to Lose Weight and Allen Carr’s Easyway to Control Alcohol. In later life he spent most of his time at his house near Málaga in Spain. He is survived by his second wife, Joyce, four children and two step-children.

Allen Carr, self-help author, was born on September 2, 1934. He died on November 29, 2006, aged 72