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If Dr. Barbara has succeeded in bringing the late Dr. Karen Horney's analytic concepts to the attention of speech specialists, he has done a service of considerable importance. In stressing the need to see the stutterer as a whole person and to treat the person rather than the symptom, Dr. Barabara is certainly on solid ground. He very correctly states that Horney theory is a most useful tool in this approach to the character disorders which in some instances result in speaking difficulties. When Dr. Barbara comments on the misuses to which speech is put in our daily life—to mislead, to confuse, to replace thought with pat phrases and formulas, to substitute surface for depth, to impose conformity rather than encourage individuality—he is pointing emphatically at the manifestations of anxiety in our society. He also specifies the kinds of goals the healthy individual pursues and indicates that psychoanalysis can help put one on the right track, on the road to self-realization, maturity, adult status, wholeness, or whatever term you prefer to use to describe the integrated, happy, productive person.
Dr. Barbara attempts to demonstrate specific speech patterns existing for each of the three primary neurotic types delineated by Dr. Horney: the self-effacing, the expansive, and the resigned individuals. He presents evidence to support this: there are self-effacing speakers who are apologetic, meek and mild, conciliatory, hurt by loud or aggressive words; there are “men of few words” and cerebral conversationalists among the resigned group; and there are the expansive talkers who use language vindictively and to achieve domination over their listeners. What is important to add is that just as a predominantly self-effacing solution may mask very intense aggressive urges, and the expansive solution may be the front for a great longing for dependence, so speech patterns can and do reflect the defense against specific drives. At times, however, speech permits the emergence no