Seminar of the Tomatis Network (September 1982)

This document is the proceedings of a working seminar held on 4 and 5 September 1982 by the Tomatis Network, bringing together practitioners from the various audio-psycho-phonology centres across Europe. The theme chosen for this inter-centre meeting was stuttering. The programme was organised in three stages: theoretical presentations, a series of case studies contributed by each centre, and then a collective synthesis opening onto the continuation of the work.

The first part brought together two theoretical presentations. M. Baleydier (Montbrison Centre) set out the speech therapist’s point of view, with a clinical description of the disorders and symptoms — distinction between the forms of stuttering (clonic, tonic, mixed forms, stuttering through inhibition), articulation, rhythm and laterality disorders, and associated neuro-vegetative disorders. Professor Alfred Tomatis then presented the point of view of the psychologist and psychoanalyst: a historical review of earlier work on the voice and speech, the experience of delayed feedback, the cybernetic aspect of language (the notion of latency time and the relations between the two hemispheres) and a psychoanalytic reading of stuttering, understood as a “chronicity of stammering” and approached through the child’s relationship with its parents.

The second part gathered eleven case studies presented by the centres of the network: Montbrison, Tours, Béthune, Kreuzlingen, Saint-Nazaire, Zurich, Marseille, Geneva, Pantin, Paris and Brussels. These clinical presentations fed exchanges on cross-cutting themes — laterality and the stutterer’s handwriting, treatment methods, the place of psychotherapy and relaxation techniques — as well as on the contribution of the Tomatis method. The final synthesis led to concrete proposals for pooling resources: the creation of a study commission on stuttering, projects for shared diagnostic grids, comparative analyses (laterality tests, handwriting samples, voice recordings before and after treatment), and the announcement of a follow-up day planned for the next seminar, in March 1983.

Historical context — This seminar illustrates the collegial functioning of the Tomatis Network in the early 1980s: centres located in several European countries met regularly to compare their practices around a common clinical theme and to share their assessment tools. Stuttering, a subject of Tomatis’s research from the 1950s onwards, is treated here at the crossroads of speech therapy, the physiology of listening and psychoanalysis, faithful to the audio-psycho-phonological approach. The case studies mentioned have been anonymised: no identifying personal or clinical data is reproduced here.