Het probleem van het stotteren. Geschiedenis van een spraakafwijking in Nederland, 1900-1980.

Abstract

In this thesis I’ve researched the way stuttering was seen by speech therapists and psychiatrists in the Netherlands during the twentieth century and the way they thought about how it should be treated. First I point out important developments in the history of medicine and psychiatry, after which I connect these to the most dominant theories from Europe and the USA on the causes and treatment of stuttering during the ages, with special attention to the nineteenth and twentieth century. This shows that there has been an ongoing scientific debate about whether stuttering is a physical or a psychological speech disorder. After that I turn my attention to the field of speech therapy in the Netherlands, starting at the early twentieth century. Most foreign theories can be seen in the Dutch practices as well. During the 1930’s and after World War II, the debate changed. Speech therapists started to realise that there is not one definitive answer to ‘the problem of stuttering’, but that the only factor of vital importance is the personality of the speech therapist himself. I focus in this thesis on theories, not on practices, but I also show the way in which speech pathology in the Netherlands became an independent profession, sharing the stutterer with the psychiatrist. The last part of this thesis deals with the stutterer as seen from the point of the disability studies, as ‘the Other’. I argue that stutterers were thought to be disabled and therefore disadvantaged on the labour market. The founding of special schools for speech flawed children is an important example of this. I also state that, in line with the disability studies, that stuttering is a speech disorder when there is a norm that sees fluent speech as ‘normal speech’. The stutterer has to conform to that norm, which creates the opportunity for the speech therapist to come to the fore as an expert.