"Precisely," said Doctor Dattner, drily. "And, you see, the thought of it is still with you, for look how graphically you have described it all. The trouble is that it has been leading an independent existence, as it were, in the depths of your mind, with all its original emotional intensity. Your stammering, I can assure you, has been nothing more than the external manifestation, the symbol, of its continuing presence, and of the deadly power it has had over you—sensitive, impressionable child that you must have been. But I can also assure you that your stammering will now come to an end; for we have not only found its cause in the subconsciously remembered shock of your boyhood, but we have actually removed that cause by the very fact of recalling it to your conscious recollection and, consequently, finding a normal outlet for the repressed emotions."
Altogether, it had required just six hours of psychoanalysis, at the rate of about an hour a day, to recover this horror-encrusted memory of the stammerer's childhood. But, with its recall, and strikingly validating Doctor Dattner's confident prediction, he once more began to enjoy the blessing of a facile, flowing speech.
In another case—treated by the American neurologist, Doctor Coriat, who has made extensive use of psychoanalytic methods—the patient was a man of middle age, who stammered not only when he spoke, but even when he wrote, repeating letters and syllables in anything he tried to put on paper. He had been to two stammering schools and had been discharged from both as cured, but each time had speedily relapsed.
As in the case of Doctor Dattner's patient, psychoanalysis demonstrated that the causal agency of his stammering was a lingering subconscious remnant of distressing emotional states experienced in childhood. Only, in this instance, the distressing states related, not to an unexpected, stupefying fright, but to painful reveries indulged in as a child, and occasioned by certain unpleasant stories he had been told regarding the end of the world and the fate of the sinful.
"These," he recalled, "took complete possession of my mind. I became convinced that the end of the world could not be long delayed, and I was in an agony of terror. Constantly I kept asking myself what I should do to escape destruction. I knew I was a bad boy—very bad. Nothing could atone for the sins I fancied I had committed. But I kept my fears to myself; I did not dare confide them to others. Night and day I worried about them, picturing to myself the terrible happenings of the approaching time of doom."
Until psychoanalysis brought them up to the surface of consciousness, he had long ceased to think of these foolish imaginings of childhood. He had as entirely forgotten them as though he had never entertained them. But, as the event showed, it was their malign influence, working on a nervous system already infirm by defects of inheritance, that had produced a psychoneurosis which, in his case, had taken the form of a speech disorder through the suggestions unconsciously absorbed by watching his mother, who likewise suffered from a peculiar variety of stammering.
Another of Doctor Coriat's patients—a young woman—impressed him, from the day of her first visit, with her extreme timidity and self-consciousness. Both were so pronounced as to be abnormal, and he immediately suspected that they, in common with her stammering, would be found linked with subconscious memories of occurrences that had tended to deprive her of proper appreciation of her abilities and rights. She proved a good hypnotic subject, and, knowing that in hypnosis long-forgotten events are easily recalled, Doctor Coriat questioned her as to her previous history.
"Can you remember," he asked her, "just when it was that you began to stammer?"
"It was when I was a very little girl."
"Had any one or anything greatly frightened you before then?"