Stammering personalities: psychologising the stammerer in twentieth-century Britain

Lecture by Dr Andrew Burchell, Postdoc, Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University, Sweden.

While an eclectic range of mechanistic, viral or nerve-based explanations of stammering dominated in the nineteenth century, the beginning of the twentieth century (and particularly following medical encounters with ‘shell shock’ during the First World War) saw renewed focus in Britain on the psychological dimensions of stammering. This paper traces the threads of how stammering came to be psychologised in Britain, from the emergence of relaxation therapies to the rise of a particular Freudian understanding of stammering, and on to more behaviourist understandings through biofeedback technologies. All of these found their way, at different moments in time, into speech therapy training and the techniques promoted in local clinics, and they each placed varied emphases on family dynamics, stress and anxiety, and learned habit as potential aetiologies of stammering. I suggest that the principal legacy of these shifts – one that would outlive the influence of the individual theories themselves – was the delineation of a psychological ‘stammering type’, a set of personalities deemed to be most vulnerable to stammering and also most resistant to efforts to ‘cure’ it. This ‘stammering type’ would problematise the very idea of therapy for stammering itself and force therapists to question whether people who stammer were even open to therapeutic initiatives or if their personalities required intervention before they could plausibly benefit by it. I argue that focusing on the formation of, and resistance to, this ‘type’ reveals the hidden politics undergirding the changes that stammering underwent in twentieth-century Britain: from therapeutic techniques in which therapy for stammering was imagined as either individual or communal, to the later emergence of shared and politicised disability identities in which the psychologised ‘stammerer’ gave way to the ‘person who stammers’.