ABSTRACT
This chapter intends to give a brief glimpse of how theorizing on stuttering is influenced by the zeitgeist within which ideas develop. According to Schultz and Schultz, the American public in the 1930s and 1940s took notice of psychoanalysis because the combination of sex, violence, and hidden motives, and the promise to cure a variety of emotional problems, proved attractive, almost irresistible. The essential proposal of the cerebral dominance theory of stuttering is that stutterers have failed to develop cerebral dominance, that is, the dominance of one of the cerebral hemispheres over the other hemisphere. Language - the meaning of words, language as a part of culture, language and perception, and the uses and functions of language occupied American philosophers for much of the twentieth century. The chapter ends with the reminder that scientific theories are to be understood as products of their historical, cultural and social milieus - the zeitgeist.
