You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Whereas we do not see eye to eye with the authors as to their distinction of stuttering and stammering nor as to their conceptions of psychical and physical disturbances this small volume of 236 pages affords an excellent survey of the disorder of stuttering.
It is told in a colloquial journalistic style, this story of little Billy and the original difficulties he encounters, how he brought oranges from the grocers rather than lemons because he could not say the ‘word’—His troubles with the classmates who laughed at him, the differences in his writing and speaking performances, etc., and the stupid “castor oil” therapy of the family physician, the bogus ‘specialists’, they have a special chapter.
Billy is then taken through high school. A talented, gifted intelligence, but he still stutters. He gets good marks, writes excellent poetry but in spite of, or possibly partly because of, the inimitable stupidities of the milieu, who as in the ancient wolf story, turn on a wounded member of the herd and rend him to shreds, he is still the butt of the stupid fellow members and the annoyance of sadistic head teachers especially prominent in schools planned on unilitaristic lines.
And so on to the university we can follow Billy and his difficulties centering about his speech inadequacies. And then there are others in the same fix.
And the causes? These are lightly presented. Narcissism, day dreaming, dramatization and hostility. Not enough accent on the unconscious hostility and narcissism that lies deep down in the personality of the stutterer. As far as it goes we find it a fair presentation of the general situation but it does not penetrate much below the surface.