10.8 Avoidance is addictive. The fatal attractor that leads to stuttering.
During a study-assignment in the US in the seventies, I became impressed by the rapid progress of the theory of behaviour-learning. The application of classical and operant conditioning models on the stuttering problem seemed to work towards a solution. C. Van Riper, in the fifth edition of his book Speech Correction has used a Map to illustrate the cascading evolution of a stuttering disorder. Conditioning events, reinforcing habits, were represented in the form of currents, straights and rapids; a mirroring pool of black thoughts was not omitted. The author, possibly disenchanted by his model, left it out of the succeeding editions. Inspired by the Van Riper model, I made a Map of the cascading process that ends in anticipation of failure and halting speech production.