It is a well-known fact that the imagination cannot conjure up an image of something that has never been experienced.  If you had been born blind, you would have no mental picture of any color, no matter how much you might have heard about it.  Still your imagination might be a most prolific one.  The utmost feat of the human imagination is to combine mental pictures to form still other images which are impossible or absurd or which in their entirety have not been experienced.  In other words, new combinations of images are possible, but an entirely new or basic picture is beyond the power of the imagination to create.

So, with the specialist who would cure stuttering and stammering.  It is impossible for the man who has never stammered or stuttered to know the fear that grips the sufferer when he thinks of speaking.  It is impossible for one who has never stammered to imagine what this fear is like or to know the feeling that accompanies it.

For that reason, it is important that the man who attempts to eradicate speech defects should have been afflicted himself in order that his experience may have been acquired first-hand—­that the suffering may have been felt and all of the conditions and situations of the stammerer may be as familiar to him as to his student.

Value of Moral Influence in the Cure of Stammering:  In speaking of the necessity for good health, both physical and mental, before the eradication of stammering can take place, we must not overlook a few words about one particular type of derelict—­the will-less or sometimes wilful individual who persists in indulging in dissipation of every kind, the individual who, with cocksure attitude and haughty sneer, laughs in the face of experience and insists that “it will not bother him.”  To such as these, no hope can be held out.  Such tactics leave both body and mind in a condition that does not permit of up-building.  There is little foundation for any effort and with the passing of each day, there is a tearing-out of bodily and mental vigor that makes all effort useless.

But in the average individual, physical rebuilding is a process of but a few weeks.  The mental rehabilitation can usually be accomplished in an equally short period of time and when these things have been brought about, perfect speech soon follows if the correct methods are applied.

CHAPTER VII

THE BOGUE UNIT METHOD DESCRIBED

At the time a stammerer or stutterer first places himself under my care and before any attempt is made to apply the treatment, he is given a very thorough and searching examination for the purpose of learning the exact nature of his difficulty.  It must be remembered that no two cases of stammering or stuttering are exactly alike and that no two cases require exactly the same method of treatment, although the same basic principles apply to all.

Even if the stammerer’s case has been previously diagnosed by me, it is necessary to compare and verify the symptoms as previously exhibited with those existing at the time of his beginning treatment, in order to learn, first of all, whether his malady has more recently progressed into a further and more serious stage.