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From: LH
Date: 10/6/01
Time: 8:33:17 PM
Remote Name: 24.237.148.210
Tara:
I'm not surprised that you haven't run into the concept of dissociation in the context of stuttering. It has been largely missed, except in some more poetic narrative descriptions of stuttering, and in passing referenc by researchers who were especially interested in the way people who stutter perceive their own stuttering experience.
Dissociative experiences are found among the general population and in connection with a pretty wide range of psychological and neurological disorders. The most common dissociative experiences are fairly mild, such as deja vu, selective amnesia, and such. Real loss of contact with self and surroundings is considerably less common, but also can occur in connection with other disorders, or by itself. The point of my study was to show that this can and does occur simultaneously (or nearly so) with a stuttering event and to suggest that this disruption of conscious awareness can have an effect on the likely course of therapy. I hope in the future to be in a position to actually test whether people who experience petite mort really do benefit from a different therapy approach from those who don't, but at this point the idea is just a strong hunch and an educated guess.
Lou Heite