Mental Aspects of Stammering

Charles Sydney Bluemel was one of the founding fathers in the field of speech pathology. He received a medical degree at the University of Colorado, specializing in psychiatry. Bluemel is best known for his distinction between primary (simple) and secondary (complex) stuttering (Bluemel, 1932). His theories about the cause of stuttering changed over the years. He first saw it as originating in the sensory imaging system-a breakdown in auditory imagery or what he called his auditory amnesia theory or transitory auditory amnesia (Bluemel, 1913). Later he elaborated on that theory saying that it was not in the weak auditory imaging, but a sudden break in consciousness resulting from a mental recoil from saying a particular word or vowel (Bluemel, 1930). In his 1935 book, Bluemel attributed the cause of stuttering to a conflict between inhibition of speech caused by trauma and the desire to speak. Finally, in Bluemel's latest writings (1954, 1957, 1962), he took a more holistic view of stuttering (mild nonfluency) and stammering (severe nonfluency), seeing both conditions as a general disorganization in a person's thinking or neuromuscular system. Disorganization, especially in cases of severe stammering was a psychoneurotic reaction to situational stress (1956, 1962). Bluemel argued for therapies that treat stammering (more complex stuttering) as a mental phenomenon rather than a physical one. His particular therapeutic emphases was on reducing stress and working on "thinking the words" rather than on pronouncing them (1957).