Wendell Johnson

Wendell Johnson (April 16, 1906 – August 29, 1965) was an American psychologist, actor and author and was a proponent of General Semantics (or GS). He was born in Roxbury, Kansas and died in Iowa City, Iowa. The Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing Center, which houses the University of Iowa's speech pathology and audiology programs, is named after him. He is known for the experiment nicknamed the "Monster Study" for the damage it did to its human subjects, although this study has defenders.

His son is former American Federal Communications Commission (FCC) commissioner Nicholas Johnson.

Considered one of the earliest and most influential speech pathologists in the field, he spent most of his life trying to find the cause and cure for stuttering -- through teaching, research, scholarly and other writing, lecturing, supervision of graduate students, and persuading K-12 schools, the Veterans Administration and other institutions of the need for speech pathologists. He played a major role in the creation of the American Speech and Hearing Association. In 1930 Johnson published the book Because I Stutter, based on his master's thesis, which describes his struggles with stuttering from an autobiographical perspective.

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):

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