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Standing in Two Worlds-65-"Get to the Point, Already!"- Unraveling Stuttering and other disfluencies and The Prejudices that Surrounds them
Season 1
Prof. Juni begins by charting humanity’s ignominious tradition of attributing malice onto those of us whose maladies we fail to understand. Even after prejudice toward the physically disabled began to wane, this ignoble tendency remained steadfast when we confronted illnesses with no blatant physical cause, and especially when we saw people behaving “irrationality. Moored in the legends of the archetypal Eve whose defiance of G-d’s anti-apple injunction was “necessarily” caused by an unholy alliance with the evil snake, we consequently burned “nefarious” witches, performed gruesome exorcisms on hapless victims who “obviously” consorted (implicitly or explicitly) with the devil, shamed those of “poor moral character,” lambasted depressives, disparaged the anxious, and humiliated non-achievers as lazy-good-for-nothings.
Juni contextualizes this phenomenon, arguing that “blaming the victim” has been the prevalent response to injustice for millennia across all cultures. This stance serves a defensive psychological function: if we were to accept the presence of unexplained causes of maladies which are beyond the control of victims, then it would engender massive anxiety among all of us lest we, too, might become victims. Far better to see victims as sinners, incompetents, or of “bad character” – thus assuring ourselves immunity from such travails.
Focusing on stammering and stuttering, the discussant agree that verbal dysfluency evinces an inhibition of verbal expression which the speaker desperately attempts to battle. Juni elaborates traditional Freudian theory which anchors such dysfluencies in symbolic expressions of underlying sexual and aggressive inhibitive responses. The notion here is that the ego is inhibiting free verbal expression to avoid the likelihood that inappropriate sexual and aggressive content would burst forth from the repressed unconscious of individuals who suffered childhood traumatic experiences. Modern day psychoneurologists have succeeded, for the most part, in discrediting these hypothesized dynamics, pointing to spurious neurological inhibitions and recursive activation loops as the likely underlying causes.
Rabbi Kivelevitz highlights the significant self-esteem and self-efficacy deficits which become intrinsic in individuals with speech dysfluency, referencing both prominent historical figures (such as Joe Biden and King Arthur) as well as examples from his own constituents whom he counsels. Capitalizing on cultural humor as the gateway to prejudice, Juni illustrates the pejorative demeaning stereotypes of dysfluent individuals which pervade the biases of even the kindest and interpersonally sensitive among us. R. Kivelevitz stresses that notwithstanding the current medical understanding of dysfluency as a physiological and conditioned behavioral disorder, counseling is an absolute requirement for sufferers of this malady due to pervasive social censure and self-debasing tendencies.
Prof. Juni is one of the foremost research psychologists in the world today. He has published ground-breaking original research in seventy different peer reviewed journals and is cited continuously with respect by colleagues and experts in the field who have built on his t
Published on 3 years, 5 months ago