Probing Question: What causes stuttering?
Monday, February 21, 2011 - 16:31
in Psychology & Sociology
In the movie "A Fish Called Wanda," he's the guy who bungles the old lady's murder. In "My Cousin Vinny," he's the inept public defender for the accused. People who stutter are so often portrayed in popular media as either incompetent or disturbed that even they find themselves wondering what's wrong with them. One of the most influential individuals in 20th-century psychology, Sigmund Freud, blamed stuttering on you guessed it the parents. It was thought that a stuttering child was possibly mimicking speech quirks of a caregiver or else suffering a neurosis or personality disturbance.