Stuttering and Personality Dynamics. Play Therapy, Projective Therapy, and Counseling: By Albert T. Murphy and Ruth M. FitzSimons. New York: The Ronald Press Co., 1960. 519 pp.

For psychoanalysts this work has dual significance: its intrinsic contribution to the nature and treatment of stuttering, and the use it makes of psychoanalytic insights. As to the first, it represents a relatively new trend among the eclectic speech pathologists: the disorder and its therapy are considered within an integrated psychodynamic frame. This trend represents a coming of age of that school whose long tradition has been to encompass this syndrome in terms of disparate, superficial facets, often to the point of absurdity.

The integration effected by the two authors is composed of Sullivanian 'psychoanalysis', Rogerian 'client-centered counseling', Mowrer's learning theory, the projective diagnostic techniques of clinical psychology, and various play techniques drawn from child psychiatry and child analysis.

Both the concept of stuttering and the essence of the therapeutic endeavor constitute two noteworthy features. The former is commendably comprehensive, indicating the authors' awareness of the many determinants of stuttering. They state that stuttering can be defined as 'what a person is'. Their approach to etiology and specificity