10.10 Battos meets his fate and becomes a stutterer: an escalation
An ancient Greek vase reminds us that stuttering has troubled mankind since early history. It depicts the young and talented Battos, asking the Pythia (the oracle at Delphi) for advice in the matter of his stuttering. The story as described by Herodot is that he received the advice to leave the country with his group of followers and to found a new settlement overseas, in North Africa. Apparently the Pythia knew that a change of environment, independence from home and growth toward manhood are favourable conditions for a "spontaneous" cure. We call such a cure spontaneous, however "therapy" may in some cases have been implicitly administered by a nourishing friendship or attachment to a loving woman.
We understand the way in which young Battos has acquired his stutter. The son of an ambitious father, he was the object of great expectations. His learned instructors were tireless in stimulating and prompting the boy to do mental exercises far beyond the level of his peers. Anxious to comply with the demands he exerted himself to the utmost. Until at the age of 4, tired after an exhausting session with his teacher, he failed to come up with the correct answer. He had a moment of cramp in his vocal cords, an alarming feeling that no breath and no word would come out of his chest. His instructor, equally alarmed at the moment of apparent crisis, hastily brought him home. There he was comforted on the lap of his mother. Burying his head in her bosom he had a crying spell. Mama, he gasped, I couldn't speak... Something in his young life had changed: his confidence was shaken, he had become vulnerable. Not only had he become mistrustful of himself, but also of people around him: what would they think of him? The balance between encouragement and high demands had once tipped towards the latter, with an unfortunate result (Map 10.6).
Always since then, when he felt uncertain about something, he would hold his breath, prolong the speech-sound he was making so as to avoid getting stuck again. Sometimes when he got annoyed by the habit of prolonging sounds he tried to cut them short by force. This created a new habit of explosive interruptions, false starts and repetitions at the beginning of words. All this he brought upon himself by excessively
10.11 failed