Wendell Johnson

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Wendell Johnson (1906 – 1965) was an American psychologist, speech pathologist and author and was a proponent of General Semantics (or GS). He was born in Roxbury, Kansas on April 16, 1906, and died in Iowa City, Iowa in August 1965.

Johnson's book People in Quandaries: The Semantics of Personal Adjustment (1946; still in print from the Institute of General Semantics) is an excellent introduction to general semantics applied to psychotherapy. In 1956 his Your Most Enchanted Listener was published; in 1972, his "Living With Change: The Semantics of Coping," a collection of selected portions of transcriptions of hundreds of his talks, organized by Dorothy Moeller, provided further general semantic insights. He also published many articles in his lifetime, in journals, including ETC: A Review of General Semantics. [1] Neil Postman acknowledges the influence of People in Quandaries in his own excellent general semantics book Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk (1976, Delacorte, New York):

I am tempted to say that there are two kinds of people in the world -- those who will learn something from this book (People in Quandaries) and those who will not. The best blessing I can give you is to wish that as you go through life you will be surrounded by the former and neglected by the latter. Neil Postman

Patricia Zebrowski, University of Iowa assistant professor of speech pathology and audiology, notes, "The body of data that resulted from Johnson's work on children who stutter and their parents is still the largest collection of scientific information on the subject of stuttering onset. Although new work has determined that children who stutter are doing something different in their speech production than non-stutterers, Johnson was the first to talk about the importance of a stutterer's thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, and feelings. We still don't know what causes stuttering, but the 'Iowa' way of approaching study and treatment is still heavily influenced by Johnson, but with an added emphasis on speech production."

One of the most thorough single Web site collections of material regarding Wendell Johnson is http://www.nicholasjohnson.org/wjohnson. It contains links to his Who's Who in America entry and c.v., bibliographies, excerpts from his writing, audio of his general semantics lectures, articles by others about Johnson, and an excerpt from Robert Goldfarb, editor, Ethics: A Case Study from Fluency (2005).

The latter is a book devoted to an impartial scientific evaluation of the so-called "Tudor study," a masters thesis in 1939 supervised by Johnson. The Tudor Study had been the subject of flamboyant attacks on Johnson in 2001 by a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News who left the paper very shortly thereafter, following public criticism from his editor. The panel of scientists who authored the report concluded that the Tudor study was focused on "disfluency" rather than "stuttering," no "stutterers" were produced, permissions were obtained, and harm was neither intended nor done to the subjects. Because, in their judgment, the study was poorly designed and executed by Tudor, as a result the data offered no proof of Johnson's subsequent theory that "stuttering begins, not in the child's mouth but in the parent's ear" -- i.e., that it is the well-meaning parent's effort to help the child avoid what the parent has labeled "stuttering" (but is in fact within the range of normal speech) that contributes to what ultimately becomes the problem diagnosed as stuttering.