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The various current theories which have been promulgated to explain stammering, may be roughly divided into five groups, viz.: (1) Neurological (a disturbance of brain dominance); (2) Weak or absent visualization; (3) Auditory amnesia; (4) Psychoanalytic (a pregenital neurosis); (5) Partial or intermittent inhibition of the conditioned reflex of speech. It is to the last of these theories that the present volume is devoted.
According to the author, stammering may be divided into primary and secondary types. In the primary stammering of childhood, there is an increased susceptibility to speech disturbance because the conditioned reflex of speech has not become firmly fixed and therefore is immature and vulnerable. It is this vulnerability which produces inhibition from illness or emotional shock; this frustrates the conditioned reflex of speech thus producing stammering. Secondary stammering is the later period of sequelæ, an emotional conditioning in which the anxiety produced by association or associative inhibition has a selective influence upon words, letters, persons and situations. This latter viewpoint is open to serious objections. The conditioned inhibition with its selective influence on isolated words or letters is not physiological but is unconsciously motivated or the blocking of speech may be related to some phase or factor in the pregenital organization. Furthermore, in this discussion on primary and secondary stammering, both are referred to as if they were preëminently conditioned speech defects, whereas, on the contrary, as pointed out by the reviewer (in this QUARTERLY II), the beginnings of stammering in childhood are not of a psychoneurotic nature.
In order to reënforce his theory, the author prefaces it by a general discussion of conditioned reflexes, particularly as related to