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This volume is an interesting and vividly written narrative of the psychological and social handicaps of the stutterer. It is essentially
the inner life history of a stutterer from the early beginnings of his speech defect.
According to the authors, stuttering is a psychological manifestation of obsessions and inhibitions without any organic impairment of the brain or speech mechanisms. For them, stuttering is an inheritance of mental instability and any shock will react severely on the speech mechanism, since that is so delicately organized. The anxiety of the stutterer in speech activities is well emphasized, but it appears to the reviewer that this anxiety, as in many theories of stuttering, has been incriminated to too great an extent.
The physician of the narrative, who is treating the patient at his hospital for speech disorders, expounds his views on the mental hygiene and psychotherapy of stutterers. He reiterates, and justly so, that stuttering is not a speech disorder but is of psychic origin; the stutterer does not need to be taught to talk, and therefore all phonetic exercises are useless. The authors admit that only a minimum attention should be paid to this speech disorder, because the personality is so severely involved in the chronic stutterer that a complete rehabilitation is necessary. It is claimed that if the subconscious mind were free from obsessions there would be no stuttering. From the descriptive level this view point is accurate but the entire presentation lacks a dynamic analysis of the mental mechanisms involved in stuttering.
Their psychotherapeutic methods consist of refraining from muscular spasm, avoiding word substitution and maintaining mental and physical relaxation as much as possible. They add that the cure has nothing to do with physical attempts at speech because stuttering is a disorder of mental function and only reflects itself in the speech. Psychoanalysis is not mentioned, neither is there any attempt to penetrate