Handicaps of ChildhoodBruce, H. Addington (Henry Addington)
Science
Handicaps of Childhood
Bruce, H. Addington (Henry Addington)
Child development; Education
Similarly, it has been found that emotional disturbances are at the bottom
of stammering when it develops, not in childhood, but in adult life. A
particularly instructive case, because of the insight it affords into the
ingenuity with which the expert psychoanalyst gets at the truth in even
the most complicated cases of functional nervous or mental disorder, is
one that was successfully handled by Doctor A. A. Brill, already mentioned
in these pages, a pupil of the pioneer Austrian psychoanalyst, Doctor
Sigmund Freud. Doctor Brill's patient was a man who, after an early life
untroubled by speech defect, had begun to stammer from no discernible
cause, and had been stammering for a number of years before he consulted
the New York specialist. Several weeks of psychoanalysis elicited nothing
that would account for his trouble, and Doctor Brill was in much
perplexity, until he one day noticed that the words on which his patient
chiefly stammered were words beginning with or containing the letter
"k." It occurred to him that this letter might have some significant
association in the stammerer's mind, but the latter denied that it could
have.
However, after psychoanalysis had proceeded further, Doctor Brill learned
that there had been an event in the patient's life, though occurring some
little time before the development of the stammering, that had made a most
painful, even agonising, impression on him. He had been engaged to a young
woman who had eloped with his closest friend; and this had so wrought on
him that he had vowed never to utter her name again.
"And what was her name?" asked Doctor Brill.
The stammerer stared at him and burst into a violent tirade.
"Haven't I just told you," he cried, "that I have taken an oath never to
speak it? What business is it of yours, anyway? What bearing can it have
on my trouble of speech?"
"Only this bearing--that it may be the means of curing you. Come, now, I
am sorry you have taken an oath, because you will have to break it and
tell me the name."
"I'll die first."
With this he seized his hat and dashed out of the doctor's office in a
frenzy of indignation. Doctor Brill did not see him again for a month.
Then he returned, repentant. He would tell the name, he said, on condition
that Doctor Brill did not write it down in the detailed record which,
as is customary, he was making of the case. To this a prompt assent was
given, and the troublesome name was as promptly made known. As Doctor
Brill had expected, it began with K. He then said, leaning forward and
showing his sheet of notes:
"See, I have kept my promise. I have called her Miss W. And, now, we'll
soon have you quite well."
But on his next visit the patient was in despair. He was, he protested,
stammering worse than ever. Words that had never given him any trouble
before were now almost unpronounceable by him. On investigation, it turned
out that they were, one and all, words in which the letter "w" had a place.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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