“The King’s Speech” & an Approach to Stuttering by Miriam Mondlin

As a person who has studied and written on the subject of stuttering and its cause for many years, I am thrilled by the film which has received 12 Oscar nominations, The King’s Speech, starring Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush. It tells the moving story of how Australian-born speech therapist, Lionel Logue helped King George VI overcome his painful stutter when speaking in public.

As a child and a young woman, I suffered from this speech impediment and was able to identify with much of the torment experienced by the King.

The film also has me value even more the fact that my own stuttering ended through my study of the philosophy Aesthetic Realism in classes with its founder, poet and critic Eli Siegel. In this article I discuss some aspects of the film: what is presented about stuttering and Logue’s approach to it, and show how it ratifies what I have seen to be Eli Siegel’s definitive explanation of its cause.

I learned that stuttering wasn’t my private torment or curse but arose from an inaccurate way of seeing the world and myself, which could change. To my great relief Eli Siegel explained that stuttering is just one form of the central conflict every person has--between respect and contempt for the world, and it has an ethical and philosophic basis. “Stuttering,” he writes in his book Self and World, “is a collision” of the desire “to be other, to be related,” and the desire “to be a snug, perfect point, capable of dismissing anything and everything.”

I believe Logue’s love of the beauty of words, very much the poetry of Shakespeare, and his delight in acting was an important factor in his work. Every person, I learned, wants to put together the opposites in ourselves that are made one in the world and in all art. “The world, art and self explain each other;” stated Mr. Siegel, “each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” In stuttering there is a disjunction of many opposites—stoppage and flow, hiding and showing, public and private, for and against, going forward and holding back.

In a lesson, Eli Siegel explained to me: "The way we are friendly to what is different from ourselves, and then hope to see it as hostile affects us in ways we don't know. Do you think this could contribute to stuttering?" While many things in a person’s life can give rise to stuttering, such as a trauma or shock of some kind, I’ve seen that one’s attitude to the world is a contributing factor in every instance of stuttering no matter how it began. An aspect of Logue’s method deals with the opposites of for and against. At one point Logue asks the duke about how he sees his father and brother, and he refuses to say what he feels. Logue then asks him to put words to his favorite song, which happens to be “Swanee River” to express his thoughts about his older brother, whom he resented. He is asking him to give something he’s been inwardly angry about, beautiful, outward form—through a melody he likes. He also encourages him to curse in a lively fashion, sometimes with melody, to help him express himself.

I love the exact, respectful, and beautiful way Eli Siegel got to the heart of what a person who stutters feels to himself—in these magnificent sentences from 1946:

A stutterer is a person who doesn’t want to talk and at the same time wants to very much. A babbling brook joined with Death Valley is something like what goes on in a stutterer’s mind.

Screenwriter David Seidler had a deep hope to understand stuttering more himself and to have people know what it actually feels like. We feel the “babbling brook joined with Death Valley” palpably in the character of King George VI, played greatly by Colin Firth. In the beginning of the film there is a close-up of his quivering lips, showing dramatically that desire to go forth, while at the same time his teeth are tightly clenched. There is bursting forth and shutting down, side by side.

Geoffrey Rush is wonderful as the speech therapist. We feel Logue’s lovable unconventionality, his humor, and his beautiful conviction that the duke can stop stuttering. And we see his good will. Logue is willing to look ridiculous, even pompous, if necessary, and to risk the duke’s getting angry at him, which he does, to get him to express himself in a proud way.

In “A Philosophy of Stuttering” Mr. Siegel stated:

In expression, we have to give ourselves to people. This is much harder than many of us believe. It involves thinking that what isn’t us is on our side. If a stutterer could believe that what wasn’t himself was on his side, there wouldn’t be stuttering.

At the end of the film, in a very moving scene, as the king is about to give the speech on worldwide radio, leading the British nation into World War II, Logue has the king feeling that what isn’t himself is on his side when he says “Forget everything else and just say it to me. Say it to me, as a friend.” This enables the king to see that the outside world, in the form of Lionel Logue, as “on his side,” and it enables him to speak to a nation at such a momentous time.

The greatest hope of every person, whether he or she stutters or not is to see what isn’t ourselves—the world, and people, as on our side. I know for a fact that the education of Aesthetic Realism makes this possible.

Works Cited

Siegel ,Eli Self and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism New York: Definition Press 1981. Chapter 11. An Approach to a Philosophy of Self and Disease, Stuttering, pp.322-331. Print.

--. “A Philosophy of Stuttering.” 1946. The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, No. 1751, ed. Ellen Reiss. “Stuttering & the Human Self” 2009. Also ncludes parts of Miriam Mondlin’s paper “How My Stuttering Ended.” Print. Web.

Mondlin, Miriam “How My Stuttering Ended” The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, No. 1113, “Expression: Impeded or Free?” ed. Ellen Reiss. 1994. Print.

-- “How My Stuttering Ended” The Stuttering Homepage. Individual Paths towards Recovery. 1999-current. Judith Kuster, Minnesota State University, Mankato, MN. Web.

-- “How My Stuttering Ended.” Canadian Association for People Who Stutter (CAPS). 1999-2006. Web.

About Miriam Mondlin.

Miriam Mondlin is a consultant on the faculty of the not-for-profit Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City. Her article, "How My Stuttering Ended," which was part of a public seminar titled "What Interferes with Your True Expression?" has been published on the websites of the "Canadian Association for People Who Stutter," (1999-2006); "The Stuttering Homepage" of the Minnesota State University, and in the Rock Island Argus and other newspapers. Mrs. Mondlin studied in classes with Eli Siegel, poet, critic and founder of Aesthetic Realism, in which he lectured on the poetry of the world, literature, science, art, music, economics and the questions of the human self. Her study continues in classes taught by Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism Chairman of Education.

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Miriam Mondlin