PRESENTATION OF DR. ANTONIO BITETTI TO HIS AMERICAN COLLEAGUES
Good afternoon everyone,
I am Dr. Antonio Bitetti, an Italian psychologist and I have been dealing with stuttering for many years, with a treatment model that I have defined: Integrated Approach.

It is important to underline that I was a stutterer until the age of 30. I suffered a lot for my disorder and after graduating in psychology at the University “La Sapienza” in Rome, I began a group analysis program, at the suggestion of an important Italian psychoanalyst.

Usually, this therapy is not used to treat those who suffer from stuttering, but Prof. Leonardo Ancona, then director of psychiatry and psychology at the Catholic University, suggested that I undertake this path and after 5 years, I completely overcame my stuttering.

Years later, while reading the biography of this important professor, I read that he too had had a group analysis experience in London, way back in 1960, at a time when S. Foulkes’s group theory was in its infancy and it surprised me a lot.

In that group context I was the only participant to have this problem and during the whole process, sometimes, I wondered why I was in that context, the other participants had other types of psychological problems, very different from mine.

I gradually understood it and realized that even before 5 years of group analysis I found myself noting that I was no longer affected by stuttering. I began to feel a great sense of freedom, physical and above all psychological and relational.

It is difficult to explain what happens to a patient who lives that experience. I can tell you that it changes your life, because it forces you to see a new perspective on your problem. Group analysis, for those who can tolerate that experience, since it is a very strong experience from a psychological point of view, inevitably leads you to a gradual comparison with the problems of the other participants.

You feel that your problem is different from the other participants in the group, but it is not so. As J. Lacan, a well-known French Freudian psychoanalyst, said in his famous – Mirror Theory – “If you want to understand yourself, just look at others”.
In all these years, as a stuttering therapist, and ex-stutterer, I have never met anyone who has lived my same experience.