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From: Russ Hicks
Date: 17 Oct 2005
Time: 14:29:33 -0500
Remote Name: 67.166.234.106
Hi Anita! .... As you well know, there is a lot of resistance to "categorizing" people into stereotypical groups. Some people like to think of people as one amorphous blob, but that really doesn't help critical thinking very much. The basis of the iceberg is there is a lot more to stuttering than the part you can SEE. I certainly know that was certainly the case for ME! As I pointed out, Joe Sheehan developed that concept in about 1970 and all I did was make a pretty picture of it and put words and a ship on the picture. I continue to think that's still a very valid analogy, but I agree with you that didn't address the problem of categories of stutterers. ..... When I became interested in covert stuttering in about 2003, I began to dissect the iceberg into its component characteristics such as density, size and hardness. So when I concentrated on the density aspect and began to mentally play with graphing the top and bottom of the iceberg according to how low the iceberg floats in the water (that is, the density of the iceberg), I was really astonished how clearly the categories of stutterers became visible! A fluent, emotionally charged stutterer is a perfect example of a covert stutterer! Obviously that's not ME, but we both know MANY people who fit that bill. What that visibility really did was to legitimatize the existence of covert stutterers! Hooray! Now we can see the folly of asking a person at a convention "What are you doing here? You don't even stutter!" Of course they don't "stutter." They're COVERT with very dense icebergs! To me that was one of those magical "ah HA!" moments! NOW I understand! .... Varying the density of all the icebergs also gives visibility - and credibility - to other categories of stutterers as well, such as Mild, Serious, and "Comfortable" (aka styrofoam iceberg) stutterers. I guess I'm really a styrofoam stutterer! Still pretty much disfluent, but with very little emotional baggage. .... We still lack the ability to really quantify either the X or Y scale. It's gonna take someone smarter than me to do that. Someone like Scott Yaruss or Bob Quesal. Once we can quantify those scales, we can begin to chart progress and direction of therapy far better than we do now. .... The obvious weakness in the iceberg analogy is the wild variations in a single person in a short time frame. I call that the "Infuriating Variability of Stuttering." In a single day we can be all over the map! Gosh... One of the students who commented on my paper above called it the "Flight of the Headless Fly." I love it! What a perfect analogy! .... One of my next challenges may be to isolate another of the physical characteristics of the iceberg, maybe the hardness. Why are some people so easy to work with and others nearly impossible? And who knows where that will lead... (smile) ....... Hope to see you in Long Beach next summer Anita! I gotta get over across the pond sometime...! .... Russ