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Experienced for twenty-five years in the work of alleviating individual cases of stammering, Miss Gifford is at present Chief of the Bureau for the Correction of Speech Defects and Disorders of the Department of Education, in California. Of the purpose of her book she writes that it “is to show the stammerer that his problem is not primarily a physical one, but rather a psychic one—that is, a mental and emotional problem. To this end, a program of mental and emotional reeducation leading to personality readjustment must go hand in hand with the establishment of a new pattern of speech”.
This awareness of the deep psychical causes of speech disorder, together with her personal experience of the stammerer's problems and extensive actual work in the field of therapy, has made for a commendable popular treatment of the subject which should go far to counteract many lesser but more pretentious works aiming to reduce the problem of stammering to wholly mechanical terms.
The first two chapters offer specific speech exercises the purpose of which is to demonstrate to the individual the physical soundness of the speech organs and the lack of any irreversible organic basis for stammering. The nature of the material offered in the third and fourth chapters is indicated in the respective titles: Personality Readjustment, and Discovering Your Inner World. In these sections may be found an elementary useful orientation stressing the psychogenic nature of emotional conflicts; their formation in behavior configurations of creative and destructive drives; the especial importance for the stammerer in grasping the dynamic relation of psychosomatic tensions to factors of unconscious adaptation; and the deep connection between these factors and healthful or defective speech characteristics.
There are appendices providing practice charts and aids toward conscious efforts at reëducation, including excerpts for practice reading respecting specific breathing and articulation values. A referenc