Blanton, Smiley, and Blanton, Margaret Gray. For Stutterers. New York:  Appleton-Century Co. $2.00.

This little book is the fruit of the experience with speech defects and their possessors which the Blantons have been acquiring over a period of 25 years. It is written definitely for “those people with the symptom called stuttering,” though it is so full of psychological wisdom simply

expressed that any number of people lacking the “symptom called stuttering” might profit from its perusal.

The Blantons believe that stuttering is the physical expression of an underlying personality disorder, and that it is this which must be discovered and treated if the symptom is to be alleviated. All the elaborate methods of speech training that are stressed in some quarters, the enunciation drills and public speaking, and so on, they believe of little value or in some instances positively harmful, because they serve to fix the stammerer's attention upon his speech and distract him from the real difficulty, which is an emotional one. The remedy lies in an untangling of the twisted threads in the personality pattern, which results in freeing the individual from his infantile fixations and enables him to discard the habit patterns that have been developed in relation to them.

The treatment which the authors recommend is psychological, an analysis which will uncover the causative emotional factors, followed by a period of reeducation and readjustment, in which the patient is helped to find new outlets for his energies, to change his attitude toward his environment or to change the environment itself if necessary. Psychoanalysis they do not believe indicated for all stutterers. They speak of the method which they consider most suited to the majority as individual guidance, and believe it is best carried out by the psychiatrist, presumably the one with analytic training. However, the chapters on “What the Parents can do” and “What the Teacher can do” seem to imply that with children at least, the doctor is more of a director of the remedial program, which must be carried out by the pa