No Words To Say
Vivian Sheehan

Alan Holzman's informative and inspiring hour-long video, which is dedicated to the memory of Joseph Sheehan, illuminates the development of the UCLA stuttering therapy program under the direction of Sheehan's wife Vivian along with volunteer assistant (and stammerer) Peter Kupferman.

Vivian Sheehan hence expounds on her late husband's 'iceberg' concept that most of the problem is beneath the surface or any visible symptoms: "If you bring the iceberg up out of the water, it can melt". this project fits well with one 38-year old stammerer's goal, "to get rid of the feeling in my gut and to be able to speak more easily, albeit not fluently", through combating the stammerer's (sometimes paranoid) self-consciousness. Vivian Sheehan hints that the stammer may itself be rooted in such self-consciousness, and urges the stammerer not to let other people's feelings, that you don't know anyway, get you down. Since the listener is typically just as tense as you are, living through your blocks with you, the only way to lose such self-consciousness is seen to be by stammering openly and not treating the stammer as a taboo area: "Go and show your stuttering, which is the basis of all your fear".

At one stage a client asks Vivian Sheehan "What was so good about it (his voluntary stammer)?" and she replies "What was so bad about it?". The value of discarding the defensive baggage that ensures the stammer remains taboo and occluded is recognised when one participant focuses on "what" it is that is "doing the interfering with what's basically a natural process", out of the knowledge that "it was me that was doing the impeding".

The real worth of this essential - for both stammerers and therapists - video is the reminder that despite momentary, incidental dysfluency, the real purpose of speaking is to communicate without distracting yourself or causing other people to lose attention: an activity which, as indicated by this clinic's achievements is not prevented by temporary dysfluency.

Reviewed in the Autumn 1995 issue of 'Speaking Out' by Rob Bond

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