[Next]
From: Anders Lundberg
Date: 10/18/00
Time: 5:09:39 AM
Remote Name: 146.21.116.174
Thanks for your comment, Gina. And the question you ask is a vital one indeed! About honesty, honesty to others, honesty to oneself and sometimes courage and honesty into the ugliness of oneself. Well, not just a philosophical matter, but a clinical one too. My thought about this is that you will never really know, you can only try to make the situation as "honesty-provoking" as you can, avoiding at least the most obvious probing from yourself or what the child thinks what you expect him/her to create. I often try to evaluate if the image I come to see or hear is comparable to some extent to other channels of expresssion about the problem; if the channels are "in tune" if I express myself in an understandable way. It is important, I believe, to know that stuttering not necessarily is an evil thing for children (or adolescents or adults for that matter!). It might just as well be something "as is", "a matter of fact" or very familiar in a quiet way. As interpreters of images we do have to develop a "Fingerspitzgefühl" to understand so we don't end up in merely confirming our own prejudices!