There is this to be added, though, that, sanely beneficial as is the psychological treatment of stammering, it often happens that the confidence-inspiring suggestions given to stammerers do not "take." The stammerer, albeit he may perhaps show improvement for a time, remains without clear articulatory power. When this occurs, the natural tendency among those treating him--in view of the demonstrated truth that stammering is the effect of a peculiar state of mind--is to throw the blame on the patient instead of on the method. Yet, actually, it is the method that is at fault--or, to be exact, it is the failure to apply the method, which itself is thoroughly sound--in such a way as to remove from the stammerer's mind not only the fear that haunts him and helps to perpetuate his stammering, _but also the ideas in which his stammering originated_.
Here we come to the central fact in the whole problem of stammering--a fact which, when it is widely enough known and appreciated, is certain to exert a far-reaching influence on the prevention of stammering, as well as its cure. Until very recently, few have been aware of this fact except a small group of foreign investigators, physicians with a psychological training, whose special business it has been to determine scientifically the possibilities, the limitations, and the exact procedures to be followed in supplementing, by wholly mental treatment, the ordinary medical and surgical treatment of disease. Impressed by the predominance of the mental factor in stammering, these investigators were particularly impressed by some of the peculiarities mentioned above--as, the ability of almost every stammerer to speak well when alone or when in a state of abstraction. Such peculiarities, they knew from long experience, bore a strong resemblance to oddities in the behaviour of victims of hysteria, psychasthenia, or other psychoneurosis, in all of which disorders there is a tendency for symptoms to disappear when the sufferer's attention is momentarily withdrawn from them. Accordingly, it seemed to the investigators quite possible that, in the last analysis, stammering was not so much a disease in itself as a psychoneurotic symptom.