Consequently, according to this view, stammering is purposeful and
intentional and not accidental. This purposiveness is psychological and
individualistic. It is resorted to by the individual for very definite,
intimate, personal reasons. It is due to unconscious, repressed hidden
complexes which crowd or press between the words of syllables, as Stekel
puts it, and which produce the inner resistance which inhibit the free flow
of speech.
It is asserted that these hidden, repressed, unconscious thoughts are
related to the sexual impulse or wish.
Dr. Coriat enumerates the types of repressed complexes in childhood which
may bring about stammering as follows:
1. Repression of sexual acts or secrets and the fear of betrayal. 2.
Typical Oedipus complexes, with a fear of betrayal of the hate for the
father and a consequent embarrassment of speech in his presence. 3.
Masochistic phantasies, wondering and imitating how it would sound to talk
with the tongue cut out. 4. The fear of pronouncing or saying certain
sexual and, therefore, tabooed words, and thus betraying what the child
thinks, his hidden thoughts.
The stammering may then arise as a wish to say or think certain tabooed
words and the wish encounters a prohibition from within. These words may
relate to certain anal, urinary or sexual functions which are recognized by
the child as unclean, and thus forbidden to pronounce. 5. As a
manifestation of anal eroticism, that is, holding the feces so that he could
talk while trying to conceal the act.
. . Talking at these times would be difficult, because talking would take
away the muscular tension for withholding the feces."
At another place Dr. Coriat assures us that "the dreams of stammerers are
interesting because these dreams reveal their wishes to talk freely, their
resistances and transferences and, also, their reversions to childhood when
the stammering arose as an embarrassment complex or as a gainer of time to
conceal their sexual thoughts or libido."
I have presented Dr. Coriat's views so fully and quoted him so much at
length in order that there may not be any question of the absolute accuracy
of my statements.
What does this mean to the one who has followed the trail of the Freudian
movement? The meaning is plain. It is like the handwriting on the wall.
Dr. Coriat has permitted himself to be deluded by the Freudian sexual
theories and their application to the psychoneuroses, and in this special
instance to stammering.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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