Handicaps of Childhood

by H. Addington Bruce

"Yes."

"What was it?"

"It was my father."

Then followed, in answer to further questions, a long series of reminiscences of the severe discipline imposed on her in earliest childhood by her father, a stern, hard man. As she related them, she seemed to feel again all the emotions that they had provoked—the shame, grief, fear, doubt, longing for sympathy. Literally, she lived through them anew, and to the trained understanding of the physician it was evident that she had never really forgotten them—although, in the waking state, she was able to recall her childhood only vaguely—but had subconsciously dwelt on them all her life, to the wrecking of her self-confidence, as well as the causing of her troubles of speech. Only by completely blotting them out, through psychotherapeutic means, could her restoration to health be effected.

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."