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From: Bob Quesal
Date: 10/17/03
Time: 12:09:55 PM
Remote Name: 143.43.201.67
Thank you for the kind words, Menachem. You ask a challenging, and politically loaded, question. I'll try to be as diplomatic as I can (meaning: not very) in my reply.
I'd say that there are basically two camps in stuttering right now. The "touchy-feely" folks who feel that there is more to stuttering than what appears on the surface (i.e., disfluent speech) and the folks who are convinced that the problem is all about fluent speech and those other things (attitudes, cognitions, beliefs, fear, etc. - the "unobservables) are unimportant and irrelevant to the disorder. I have a name for this latter group but cannot repeat it in this public forum, so let's just call them "fluency bigots."
I won't name names as to who the "main personalities" for each camp are, but it is fairly safe to say that many of the "touchy-feelies" stutter and most (virtually all) of the "fluency bigots" do not. In my opinion, that is extremely telling. (You've never experienced it - how can you understand it?) The fluency bigots say that if therapy does not work it is either the fault of the person providing the treatment or the person receiving the treatment. It is never the fault of the treatment, because the treatments have been shown, empirically, to eliminate stuttering. Those of us who continue to stutter have "chosen" to do so and "represent our profession's failures" to quote one of the most prominent (and clueless) fluency bigots.
The "touchy-feelies," on the other hand, believe that normal fluency is not a reasonable goal *for all people who stutter.* This belief (currently an "assertion" according to the literature) is derived from years of working with individuals who have completed the empirically proven programs but have relapsed (often multiple times). The fluency bigots' response to this, of course, is that the treatment was applied improperly, or the client isn't trying hard enough ("you can be fluent some of the time, why can't you do it all the time?"). Individuals who stutter, like Dean Williams (and many who do not), understand that there is more to the problem than what appears on the surface and understand that, in many cases, much can be achieved by addressing those issues. We just haven't done a very good job of providing data that passes muster in journals.
Let me climb off my soapbox now. I hope this answers your question, at least in part.
Bob Q.