PSYCHODRAMA TIC TREATMENT OF A STUTTERER

Abstract

J. L. Moreno illustrated his approach to stuttering with the case of Joe, a 20 year old who stuttered ever since his parents can remember, apparently since he began to speak. Dr. Moreno put him on the psychodramatic stage and told him: . . . "You can pronounce every consonant and vowel independently without stuttering. Only when you combine them into meaningful words of
the English language you are inclined to stutter. Try, therefore, to combine them freely, whether the sounds make meaningful word combinations or not. (This type of spontaneously created language I called 'Joe language')..2°' As expected, Joe did not stutter when he was free to create his own language. J. L. Moreno related that none of the stutterers he had treated stuttered during this test, suggesting . . . "that non-semantic feeling complexes can be trained . . . that the influence of language structure upon mental processes is exaggerated. . . that there are mental processes which grow up to maturity more or less independent from psychosemantic interactions .. , v '