The reader should not lose sight of the cold but important fact that the application of Freud's sexual theories to stammering in children is, in my humble opinion, fraught with the greatest danger. I cannot do otherwise than look upon this as positively anti-social. It would, it is my belief, be a glaring and rife source of danger to the community and to society in general for these ideas to be spread broadcast. Freud himself has shown that the child, before puberty, with his more or less undifferentiated sexual impulse, may be swept along into any one or more of the sexual aberrations or to intrafamilial sexuality. These goals exist only as POSSIBILITIES and should not, I contend, be referred to as predispositions or tendencies (almost as if they were instincts). The direction of the child's thought along this line before or at or after puberty may prove disastrous in one or more of many different ways.
Think of hinting at or talking about or harping upon matters of this sort to children, let alone to adults of the usual sort! It would be nothing less than a crime to society, to the family and to the growing child. In this respect I look upon the application of the Freudian theories as a distinct and glaring danger to the individual, to the family and to the community.
Efforts to stem the tide from flowing in this direction should be unfettered. It means much for humanity.
Even hinting (to the children) in a remote way about the various aspects of sexuality described by the Freudian school should not find its place and has no place in treating stammering per se in children.
Think of the effect of continual conversation and thinking of this sort upon a child at or before puberty, or at adolescence, or even upon an individual in adult life! His thoughts are continually drifted to his urogenital organs and the sexual possibilities of all sorts of human relationships, intrafamilial as well as extrafamilial.
The Freudians may object to any statements to the effect that they tell their patients about these sexual theories. I find Jones,[12] for instance, declares that Freud "deliberately withholds from his patients all knowledge of psychoanalyses except what they discover for themselves." Even granting this, the patient doesn't have to wait long or think much before he does discover for himself just what the Freudians mean.
[12] Ernest Jones: Professor Janet on Psychoanalysis; A Rejoinder. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Feb.-Mar., 1915, p. 407.
But Freud[13] himself contradicts this statement by Jones when he says: "If with my patients I emphasize the frequency of the Oedipus dream—of having sexual intercourse with one's own mother—I get the answer: 'I cannot remember such a dream.' Immediately afterwards, however, there arises recollection of another disguised and indifferent dream, which has been dreamed repeatedly by the patient, and the analysis shows it to be a dream of this same content—that is, another Oedipus dream."
[13] Brill's translation of Freud's Interpretation, p. 242. Italics mine.
Then again, listen to Brill:[14] "With reference to the question of determining that a person is homosexual.