Voici le texte d’aujourd’hui en version complète :
In the autumn of 1992, at the age of fifty-two, I volunteered to be a guinea pig in an experiment conducted by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, one of the research units of the federal government’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. Medical researchers there were engaged in a long-term study of the chemistry of the brain as it relates to stuttering. They were also experimenting with a pharmaceutical approach to the treatment of stuttering–in other words, searching for a drug that, by affecting the chemistry of the brain, would help, perhaps even cure, stuttering.
If ever there were somebody in need of a pill to treat his stuttering, that somebody is me. Nothing else I have tried has worked–and I have tried almost everything there is to try. I have been to speech therapists and psychotherapists. To reduce the stress that exacerbates my stuttering, I have meditated, done deep-breathing exercises, and floated under a condition of sensory deprivation in a dark, enclosed isolation tank. I have been Rolfed and Reubenfelded. Like Demosthenes at the sea (but without putting pebbles in my mouth), I have worked hard to strengthen my voice by orating aloud. Every day for six months I declaimed Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Broad-Ax.” “Muscle and pluck forever!” the old bard wrote, and muscle and pluck I certainly had. Yet I still stutter–”just as good” (as my self-help friend John Ahlbach might say) as I have always stuttered, which is pretty bad if disfluency is the measure and fluency the ideal.
I have always stuttered. Ever since I began to speak I have stuttered. One speech pathologist told me that I was the most organic stutterer he had ever heard. By this he meant that even in situations of no apparent psychological stress, situations in which other stutterers can expect to be fluent, I can’t. Most people who stutter are fluent when singing, reading aloud to themselves, or talking to their pets. And it’s true, I can speak to my cat Garbanzo with fluent ease. But there is more to speech than communicating with cats, who, at best, are capricious listeners. The basic fact of my life is that every time I open my mouth to speak to another person, I expect to stutter and usually do.
Source: Marty Jezer, Stuttering – A Life Bound Up in Words, BasicBooks