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The purpose of this volume is to present the author's conception of the mental cause of stammering and outline his methods of mental training as a remedy for the impediment. It is so true as to be axiomatic, that stammering is a psychoneurosis and not primarily a defect of speech, yet what the author terms “thought training” as a basis for speech correction, appears to us as nothing but new words set to the old music of speech training and corrective exercises.
It is useless to attempt to teach the stammerrer how to talk, as this method is directed only to the peripheral physical aspect of stammering. Such a method leaves untouched and unchanged the dynamics of stammering, the complicated mental state of the stammerrer, the character traits and the unconscious and genetic origin of this narcissistic neurosis in its various ego and libido trends. As we read over the author's detailed methods, they all seem to be directed to the speech defect alone. The keynote of the book is found on page 135, “A stammered sentence should never go unchallenged.” This appears to be essentially phonetic training, the patient being constantly reminded by this method that he is a stammerer. How different is this approach from that of psychoanalysis, where no attention is paid to the speech itself, except under certain occasions of active therapy directed towards the speech tics and external gratifications of the oral libido.