"Disabled Childhood" Commission chaired by Dr A. E. Sidlauskas
"Disabled Childhood" Commission chaired by Dr A. E. Sidlauskas (Ottawa) — 2nd International Congress of Audio-Psycho-Phonology, Paris (1972)
Full account of the “Disabled Childhood” commission, chaired by Doctor A. E. Sidlauskas (University of Ottawa) at the 2nd International Congress of Audio-Psycho-Phonology held in Paris from 11 to 14 May 1972. The discussion gathered around Dr Sidlauskas: Professor Alfred Tomatis, Mr Baltz (Lyon), Dr Spirig (Nieuwpoort Centre), Dr Sarkissoff (Geneva Centre), Mme Joanny (Nancy Centre), Mr Ladaule (Paris Language Centre), as well as a Canadian psychologist. The exchanges touch on intellectually gifted but maladjusted children (the Holy Mothers), the fundamental distinction between autism and schizophrenia, psycho-motricity under Electronic Ear, introjection as conceived by the Kleinian school, non-traumatic birth according to Leboyer, and the pedagogical scope of an education that rehabilitates the share of loss for the sake of a spiritual gain. Dr Sidlauskas concludes that the Electronic Ear “is not only a means of therapy, it is a great theoretical support in our understanding of personality”.
COMMISSION: “DISABLED CHILDHOOD”
Chaired by Doctor A. E. Sidlauskas (Ottawa)
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Dr SIDLAUSKAS — Opening of the proceedings
I think these problems must embrace any handicap — whether neurological, intellectual, psychogenic, organismic or psychiatric, that is to say at the basis of profound social disturbances.
I think we could divide the problems into several categories. Personally, I work with children who are gifted from the intellectual point of view, and if I can bring you a little of my experience, I shall do so very willingly. To do that, I should like us to speak of the disabled in adaptation, in learning, and in social integration, and of those who have natural gifts — that is to say who are intelligent — and who nevertheless cannot use this intelligence to progress.
There is a problem I should like to put before Prof. Tomatis: it is about children who show resistance to all the techniques, including that of the Electronic Ear. They are mainly the children of too-perfect mothers — what I call “Holy Mothers”. The children too are generally too perfect; they have never made a mistake, it seems, but they come to us at nine or ten years old with sometimes considerable scholastic delays. Everyone has faults, but not Mummy and not the child, because they are too perfect. I wonder whether one of you will offer a comment on this problem, which is one of my principal preoccupations.
It is a handicap whose extent no one realises and which yet paralyses adaptation. As I am always very interested in the case of children, it is very difficult for me to treat them without meeting their mother. What do you think, Doctor?
Prof. TOMATIS
I think, indeed, that it often happens that a very intelligent and at the same time very individual child encounters great difficulties in advancing. If he sees in his mother a perfect woman, he makes a mistake; for the one who sees in his mother an important woman who must be rejected, it is the same thing. He must be shown — if we wish to help him — that his mother is, at a given moment, the subject to be moved; that there are two different structures, the mother and the child. The idea is that we must not forget the subject of the mother who retains the child, that it is the mother who slows the elaboration of these two structures. In his unconscious, the mother, thanks to her intelligence, very strongly intellectualises her ties with the mother. They are in general children who have lodged themselves in an Oedipal representation of extreme power.
The child must be told that the mother that the child has within him is not the one in the family group, that she is simply a transmitter of life and not the possessor of this life. She must learn to detach herself from this child of possession, from this famous maternal instinct that makes her a hyper-mother and prevents the child from advancing. She must learn to cast off the moorings. One must try to free the child by putting him under sonic birth as much as possible, evening and morning if need be, even if it is painful for him. It is always a difficulty to go out, for these children are in the world of pain. The child must, however, be obliged to leave this reassuring and comfortable shell that is the uterus, where he dwells irresponsible and dependent on the mother. He must be made to listen, for a very long time, to filtered music for purposes of deconditioning, or offering a non-semantic information, with no relation to language. One can then have the child listen to pre-Gregorian chants, which recharge him and give him the desire to live the life of grown-ups, by perceiving that he takes the aspect of a future not yet desired but which must in their having been heard — there is an intellectualised, very powerful unconscious that will constrain him not to betray the mother.
In these cases so resistant, so fixed, it is desirable to isolate the child from the mother and to have him follow an intense psycho-sensory education under Electronic Ear. Several constraints of sessions will little by little be necessary. So be it! One must succeed in making the child autonomous, in structuring his personality. One must not hesitate, in this case, to do very numerous sessions. I know at least one who currently goes to an abbey and who is in a very strong schizoid posture. He is very brilliant on the intellectual plane, and his learning is remaining incomplete. He is only beginning to wake up, to cross the barriers of the unconscious, after having done 1090 sessions of Electronic Ear. I believe that we must show ourselves the most persevering if we wish to help these hyper-gifted children to get out of it.
It is a question of faith. The “adult” human being is still a child, I think, whose desire to live can suffice in an organic magma made of 80% water and a few mineral salts. Whenever we wish to suffer an energy of magma, the instant of reliving ourselves. Our structure is always an egotic structure, with each of the mother who makes the child for her, and when the latter is intelligent, he gives himself to this mother-child dialogue while remaining enclosed. He must then be isolated so that he may encounter a powerful nature facing him and become conscious of himself.
Dr SIDLAUSKAS
It has been noticed that these children, for example, are intelligent but have totally suppressed verbal communication. They speak very little and express themselves very poorly; on the other hand, they often devote themselves to sculpture and communicate through means that do not require the verbal flow.
Prof. TOMATIS
Of course, for verbalisation, language, risk distancing him from the mother. To refuse to speak about her, which he does not want. To enter into language is to go towards the other, it is to accept communication with the other — whereas the mother, with the father, is the general rule. From the moment the verbal flow installs itself, a transcendence appears. These children are victims of their intelligence, of their intellectualisation, in truth. To break this mother-child tandem and help the evolution of the being, I advise putting the mother also under Electronic Ear, in filtered music.
Dr SIDLAUSKAS
But the mothers must agree; one cannot put under Electronic Ear people who do not agree.
Prof. TOMATIS
On this particular problem, I have become very demanding. Either the mother accepts that we propose it to her, or she takes back her child; either she chooses to keep him for herself — and she will make a cretin of him — or she decides to help him by accepting to benefit, herself too, from Electronic Ear sessions intended to relieve her anxiety.
Dr SIDLAUSKAS
I agree with Prof. Tomatis. I have sometimes broken off relations with certain families in this sense, putting the problem categorically: either you agree, or we shall do nothing.
Mr BALTZ (Lyon)
I believe indeed that there are different kinds of problems. There are those evoked this morning, which concern cerebral motor disabilities, and intellectually gifted children presenting communication disorders.
There exist other children who, without having very acute problems, suffer scholastic failures: I mean those signalled to us as having delays in tonic-emotional evolution, who are not motor deficient, nor cerebral-motor disabled either, but who present an evolutional delay. This psycho-motor lag may be largely diminished by a coming-to-consciousness through the sensori-motor, as well as in the domain of synthetic-deductive operations, and we have quantities of children of this kind, who are likely to benefit from what we can provide through psycho-sensory education under Electronic Ear associated with psycho-motor work. We have children unable to read or write, and we have set right on the sensori-motor plane a number of pieces of information.
Dr SIDLAUSKAS
I understand, Mr Baltz, what you mean. I wanted to broach here the two extremes: on the one hand, cases of very intelligent and probably hyper-tonic children — like those of whom I spoke and who are certainly psychogenic — with a fairly secondary and free-floating anxiety, with an important mind, too high aspirations, no ground, no realisation, no self-suffering; and on the other hand, cases of children not wholly scattered, who do not know where they are, who they are, who find themselves poorly organised.
Prof. TOMATIS
It would interest us to ask Dr Spirig whether he has tried to do psycho-motricity under Electronic Ear. I myself have tried to do re-educations on poorly equipped children. I observed immediately a greater motivation of the children to adapt to changes and to institute themselves in motricity. If one manages with a great variety of games to attain this under Electronic Ear, I began to make the child speak and asked him to write with his right hand.
A psychoanalyst, Dr Sarkissoff, recently presented me with a big left-handed child who could not write with the right hand despite numerous attempts at psycho-motor, graphic and speech re-education. The child had tried to write with the right hand and could not. Taking him back in the left hand, I put him under the help of the Electronic Ear, I began to make the child speak and I asked him to write with the right hand. He then wrote as if he had always written with the right hand.
I think it is the same for the psycho-motricity of the whole body. If you put a child under Electronic Ear and have him do certain movements, asking him to speak to his body, to inform it, to direct it, to make his legs move, etc., you will see colossal progress. It seems that a dialogue installs itself between the touch and the bath which, you will remember, come from the same melanoma, from the same neurological slice. But, under certain circumstances, a kind of disagreement is created between the two elements of expression. Already the fact of speaking creates the passage; that of writing, by introducing longer circuits, copies a still greater braking, neither sound than psycho-motricity in the descriptive is fallen. When you wish to make a child walk, you put him under Electronic Ear with a walking and weighing tape. If you make him speak to his maton, to others in the lower limbs by speaking to them, by asking them to move, and you see him indeed hesitate his legs and often begin to walk. The will thus disposes of the pyramidal functions in an ever more efficient way to subjugate motricity.
Dr SIDLAUSKAS
In that sense, do you encourage the teaching that Dr Spirig is introducing with the deficient through the Electronic Ear?
Prof. TOMATIS
Most certainly. I think it is an excellent solution for awakening the cortical cells of these young handicapped children, for increasing their will and improving their psycho-motricity. This is found very well at the level of language, in the place of pharyngo-buccal motricity. I remember having had in our services, two years ago, in a little over ten years, an experienced speech therapist who wanted to apply her technical knowledge without bringing in the Electronic Ear. In that case it was a child who could not pronounce the “ch”. The child did not seem to have heard it, and he needed to be taught to pronounce it correctly. The child was put under Electronic Ear, explaining to him the disadvantage of being unable to communicate with his father, to speak to him, and so on. There was sufficiently of nothing to do in the human being so that he could elaborate language; he had had — for that, he had — his mother a blockage at the level of the palate. One can very well speak with a fistula in the palate. Perhaps very well even do it to these children under Electronic Ear. The surprising fact is that the speech therapist, taking him up again seconds weeks later, these alone very well make the palate speak. We told her that, by putting this child under Electronic Ear, we had him pronounce the “ch” as I wished. The speech therapist was very surprised and convinced of the contribution of the time. I had great pain in being obliged to part from her, for she was indispensable to sustain our techniques and apply them properly.
We recently had the passionate case of a child who had been operated on the soft palate because he could not say “p”. Now, his problem was “papa”. He was disturbed by his mother, who had enveloped him in an unconscious complex to the point of preventing the child from communicating with his father. Putting him under Electronic Ear and applying an adapted programming, we had him pronounce “p”. We simply re-established the relation with the father and he was able to use the audio-vocal technique.
I have already spoken to you of another subject to whom incredible damage had been done: the soft palate had been removed after a tonsillectomy, and the nasal cord would have been cut while trying to operate on the septum; lastly, the vocal cords had been peeled: behold the envy of his body, in other words, had only been to listen to a correct structure — otherwise, it existed throughout his structure to be able to assist phonation. This man was very, very badly handicapped to speak and even more so to sing. They had first felt that it could not be tried to make him sing and to repeat words. The subject considerably. I then said that under Electronic Ear he could sing everything, even at that time, no one to operate the device. After very little time, the results were surprising. The subject began to speak in a very correct way. The effect had a perfect of the Spanish functional situation, and it is to sing him, and then, some time later, he became Lavocat’s understudy. By giving him quality auditory postures, we thus provoked in him the most unexpected phonatory phenomena: these first performances of the mouth and phonation apparatus; it is really surprising — one speaks with what one has, the material of the elements, it suffices to set oneself to speak or sing. The human being is truly extraordinary in his adaptational processes!
Dr SPIRIG
Do you think one should play filtered music before or after the coming-to-consciousness of the body image?
Prof. TOMATIS
The question is pertinent. It is not a matter of playing music before the body image, for the body image is the fact of the self. Music, thanks to the rhythms it imposes, gives rise to the coming-to-consciousness of the body image.
Dr SIDLAUSKAS
A lady put to me just now, before the session began, a question about small psychotics. I do not know whether, with you, you have reached the point of doing it. Personally, I have reached the point of doing it. I deal mostly with schizophrenics — marvellously, but it is not the same with autistics. We have done some experiments with schizophrenics in other countries; we have not had the past, but I would tell you again to a certain point, but not enough to recondition them in the normal sense.
I should like to enliven the discussion a little about autism. We shall certainly agree with Prof. Tomatis to say that it is pre-natal. I should like to revive the comments and the debate. If everything is not from birth, it is true that both are psychoses, but I should like to point out that they are two different problems: in autism, it is the image of a hyper-cortical excitation, without bodily image; in schizophrenia on the contrary, it is bodily image; in the schizophrenic, by contrast, this image is already very strong, so well established that schizophrenic children are even sometimes capable of manifesting themselves. So in some cases, one may observe a very good musical acuity, whereas the autistics show no right musical ear or listen in the highs. There thus exist important physiological differences, manifest; it remains to know what this is due to. This being so, we have their personal histories — having your comment on the subject — both are psychoses.
Prof. TOMATIS
It would be useful to know the opinion of the analyst, Dr Sarkissoff. For my part, I believe that schizophrenia type schizophrenic is dealt with in a way with mother without communication with her, in a universe empty of the mother, who is not the bearer of a return of this open one to the analyst himself of the pregnancy. While the autistic is the one who has been refused existence by the mother, at birth, after she had fear of the approach of the father who, most often, refuses the child. The mother is not close enough to the father, who makes this child handicapped. She rejected the child while not wanting to. While, for schizophrenia, it is a question of permanent rejection, every day, of being manufactured like a doll and thrown into a corner, but to whom it does not ask for a response.
I have as examples two autistic children — I think I have already told you — of somewhat troubled birth. There surely was no father, or at least no father bearing the name, and there was an apparent fault on the mother’s part. The latter then imprisoning her child at birth in a secret, the child says nothing to respect this secret. It is the mother who is afraid that the child will speak.
Dr SIDLAUSKAS
I have noticed that, from the point of view of what you call “mental type” — I say “typological” — schizophrenics are generally rather “para-sympathico-tonic” with a strong viscerality, while in autistics one sees many children whose face and expression are rather introverted; it is a whole different constitutional physiological expression. Now, if one considers a mother who has produced an autistic child, one notes that she is a person terribly sensitive to all external sensory “inputs”; that is why she is anxious. One cannot say that she rejects the child, but that she is anxious about bringing him into the world.
Prof. TOMATIS
It is certain that autistics are emotional, intuitive-emotional.
Dr SIDLAUSKAS
Yes, while schizophrenics are people who much like touch, pleasure.
Prof. TOMATIS
I think there is important work to be done in this direction. It is certainly indispensable to distinguish autistics from schizophrenics; otherwise, one risks committing serious errors.
Dr SIDLAUSKAS
Many psychologists do not make the difference. As far as I am concerned, I have noticed that from the psychological point of view it is absolutely necessary to place the one and the other in a different environment.
Prof. TOMATIS
We have carried out an experiment going in the same direction as what Dr Sidlauskas told us about autistics. We excite the skin, the sensibility of these children, by placing a loudspeaker in place of the headphones, flooding them with sounds, which allows them to have a greater consciousness of the body.
A Canadian Psychologist
We have also such a case with us. It was a psychotic child whom we put under Electronic Ear with bodily exercises in rhythmics. At that time, we had noted that this child developed much better as soon as he learned to do these exercises, especially with a rapid rhythm, walking and reporting in his rhythm. I think this is in connection with the remark you made.
Dr SIDLAUSKAS
There exists a very fine film produced in California about children one might call psychotic. By the initiation of movements, an artist dancer established the language communication that these refractory children could not before. They knew constantly how to reject a person who treated their movements. It is a remarkable film, bringing into the light a new technique and a new way of approaching the child.
I have for a long time been in communication with the Rudolf Steiner schools, which have always applied techniques of re-education by means of sound and castanets. We followed applications of these techniques in England, where there exist several schools for the mentally deficient. There at least the same principles are applied: penetrating the body with sounds and synchronising with colour. I think Prof. Tomatis would also bear to compare the two.
Mme JOANNY (Nancy)
We have used with success a kind of technique that is not really re-education but is a bodily coming-to-consciousness, with children stretched out on the ground in relaxed positions of relaxation, trying to bring them to feel their body, to visualise it. It is one of the techniques of relaxation. Of course, we did not have bodily coming-to-consciousness and perhaps, I shall also say, in the sense of a caress of the body by the mind. And I have found, in certain rather destructured children, in some more affected, very interesting reactions.
Prof. TOMATIS
I think that one of the most remarkable elements is that you had the children lie down and that you placed yourself behind them. The fact of standing behind them obliges them to self-inform before reaching the other, or what they have done, in these conditions, many schemas are verbalised and integrated by the cutaneous pathway. When one speaks to someone while standing behind him, one elicits a self-information striking the whole body. By contrast, if you put a child in a foetal posture rather than stretched out and relaxed, you realise that he has no body image. There is no guard. Try to set him on all fours and speak, you will see that he no more experimental. You can also notice it, you can even reply to your for his name, but when it is a matter of asking easy questions, and then on all fours, you will observe it is much more difficult.
Dr SIDLAUSKAS
The children, in today’s schools, are often subjected to psychotropic drugs. They are given drugs so that they stay quiet. The Electronic Ear assists us in sensitising the individual to himself. Our approach concerning the Tomatian techniques of the Electronic Ear is founded on the concept of personality, which extends over two parameters: the ego and the self. The ego with all the attitudes, the positive learnings, and the self — that is to say, the learning of what is going on in me, of what I am.
The American continent has many competitive children who, in a certain sense, refuse to live because they are not producers. They become discouraged, are depressive but remain intelligent. The depressives of 11, 12, 13 years old, who are even suicidal, obtain very good performances in psychometric tests.
Dr SARKISSOFF
I believe that psychoanalysis can add a very important link to this problem: it is that of introjection, where the subject, in order to be conscious of the exterior, must be conscious of himself, inside his psyche, of the “good objects”, the identifications of a very happy nature in his act of love with his mother, with his family, and so with everyone. I think that these positive learnings, which can produce such performances, may also produce a depressive background that is linked to the insufficiency of all introjection, of all that elaboration of the inner world that enables the self and self-consciousness to be formed.
Dr SIDLAUSKAS
I should like to add that this introjection of love ties should extend over the future of violence between the close and the fifth month of life, because these children are also hyper-tonic. Now, has the child had another kind of introjection so that he could differentiate the maternal? It is for these reasons, the Ritalin to all. One characteristic of all this clinical observation is that these children do not in reality have what we call the “super-ego”. They are often character-disordered, far too early in their lives. They are made of social norms but their affectivity is completely inhibited. According to Tomatis’s conceptualisation, it seems that they lack “verticality”: their ego, their language advance a little, thus little organised. To everything existing, they do not possess externalised. They do not know where they are, who they are. They do everything according to the rule of this thought: that they are not in relation with authority as such. They are like little things that have only to transgress norms in order to exist.
These introjections are therefore at two levels and two kinds: one at the level of 3 years, in that crossed by sympathy with the father and culture, the other at the level of “collars of the pupil”. And the latter are very difficult to treat.
Dr SARKISSOFF
I think that the problem of this introjection is linked to the capacity to live through a loss — that is to say, to live sufficiently the loss of omnipotence, the loss of self in a savage one, the loss of all idealisations, the idealisation of self, the back mother whose loss is the horror one has had in that of idealisations. If man it is the “depressive position” — he is capable of elaborating, in his inner world, an object with which he will identify himself and build an integrated inner world, which will have all life to elaborate itself, into a source of inner richness, which will have all life to elaborate itself.
Prof. TOMATIS
We ought, in our education, in our pedagogy, to modify our structure, modify the frame of our language, our way of seeing. This loss of which we speak is not always frustrating and does not have a counterpart of something precious. The awakening capable of a plus is added to help the aspecto-pedagogical characters, always insisting on the fact that the subject can do something from his behind. He believes it necessary to elaborate the idea that he is going to lose something but never thinks that he is going to gain in return — that is to say, by choosing.
There is always the risk to be taken in approaching a kind of asceticism, thinking that asceticism consists in cutting off one’s head or in mortifying oneself. No, on the contrary, it is a matter of going from the negative towards a positive so much more important.
Educators should strongly imbue themselves with the idea that one always gains something. When one says “you must cut with this, you must cut with that”, one suppresses, one cuts with a life altogether in reality. One cuts them from elements that must be inert and giants; one simplifies, one goes towards other horizons. The role of the educator is to know how to say: each time one cuts, one renounces, one gains something. It is thus that all frustrations are borne, in so far as they may give rise to an enrichment of the inner world. It must therefore be shown that there is no frustration in the castrating sense of the word.
Dr SARKISSOFF
Normally, there is not. But one comes to the problem of children who do not bear frustration. And as regards the psychology of autistic children, I am not sure that all comes from the mother. I would not have given that, on top of that, there is a factor in the autistic child — a factor of intolerance to change, of intolerance to frustration. Is it at a thalamic level of which you spoke just now, because for a long time the child was treated at birth, since the only animal that came into the world crying was thought to be human? I believe it is quite healthy, and Dr Leboyer who does births without pain and without trauma — or that it is he at the bottom of the trauma at birth. But the autistic child who does not bear being born, does not bear the mother, who must not realise the mother’s behaviour, does not bear that aspect and our need by others — and which, it must be admitted, is often lived traumatically by the methods with which the child is accouched. But that is another problem.
Prof. TOMATIS
Here it is the mother who does not want to let go of her child, who shuts herself in pain… in the pain of letting go of this foetus that she would like to keep for herself alone.
Dr SARKISSOFF
So I think that if the child came into the world and something is not working in his development — that is what I have said — it is this mother who became anxious at some moment, which has its repercussion on the child. It is an infernal circle of anxiety, and the situation of anxiety, of discomfort, must find a response on the part of the child. There are other factors also, but as psychoanalysis later plants towards the mother, this may also be an initial factor of the situation of anxiety that must be found at the level of the child.
Prof. TOMATIS
I had occasion, recently, to attend a birth at this Parisian obstetrician of whom I have just spoken to you. The child was born without asphyxia; he was thus quite calm. By contrast, the mother was extraordinarily anxious; she did not stop saying to us, after the birth: “Are you sure nothing has happened to him? I am sure of you, that he is not like this, that he is like that”. Yet she could only think that everything was going badly for her child. The child, who is not crying and is calm, is then taken and placed on the mother. There is a marvellous dialogue between the child and the mother, who calms down at once and completely. I think then that the child had a mother for that and that he was perfectly capable of going to her. In other conditions, we might have had this anxious child of an anxious mother herself capable of going to her. For these cases of autistics, the problem is precisely whether one has not set in motion a vicious circle by making the mother secondarily anxious, the first ostotagine action coming from the child.
Dr SIDLAUSKAS
Is there anything else you would like me to reply to about the discussion?
Mr LADAULE (Paris Language Centre)
How are your methods accepted by the other technicians, by other psychologists?
Dr SIDLAUSKAS
What is unique to me is the apostolic spirit. I am not in too great a hurry to propagate our work. Very few people have approached us, very few people know what is happening and what we are waiting for someone to approach us to communicate.
Recently we received the very fine visit of a psychiatrist from New York, who is moreover a professor at the University Medical School. It does not seem that he is a very addressed person to the point that he poses any question — in such conditions, all goes — saying so to others in vain. It is very difficult to convince those who want certainties. Otherwise, it is very difficult. Given that — in Ottawa — there are other Centres that follow very closely, but we have done something that is to be received as to do publicly. We have done a piece of research that we have to do publicly, and in a month we know how to put the publications by increase. We are abstaining for bilingualism, for example; it will be that we must make a report publicly, which will give us a little publicity.
Once again, I want to say to you that, for me, the Electronic Ear is not only a means of therapy: it is a great theoretical support in our understanding of personality. We have seen many people talking about personality, about the structure of personality, but few people having really understood the functioning and integration of this personality. Tomatis’s ideas are therefore fundamental for an explanation of the structuring of personality.
I have learned much from the contacts I have had with Prof. Tomatis. And now I rejoice in those I have with his collaborators.
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Source: Actes du IIe Congrès International d’Audio-Psycho-Phonologie, Paris, 11-14 May 1972, pp. 104-117. Full account of the “Disabled Childhood” commission chaired by Doctor A. E. Sidlauskas (University of Ottawa). Document digitised from the personal archives of Alfred Tomatis. The original text, typewritten at the time on stencil, presents numerous typing defects and passages where the lines are visibly reconstituted from rapid note-taking; we have preserved this texture, remaining as close as possible to the source text, rather than smoothing it at the cost of a rewriting that would have altered the living word of each speaker.