Dr wolf wolfensberger biography

A Brief Biography

Dr. Wolf Wolfensberger was born in Mannheim, Germany in 1934 and emigrated to the United States in 1950. He studied Philosophy at Siena College in Memphis, Tennessee, received a Master of Arts in Clinical Psychology at St. Louis University and a PhD in Psychology from Peabody College for Teachers (now part of Vanderbilt University) where he specialized in mental retardation and special education.

He was a mental retardation research scientist at the Nebraska Psychiatric Institute of the University of Nebraska Medical School in Omaha from 1964 to 1971. Between 1971 and 1973, he was a visiting scholar at the National Institute on Mental Retardation in Toronto, Canada, then moved to Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York as a professor and Director of the Training Institute for Human Service Planning, Leadership and Change Agentry.

Much of Dr. Wolfensberger’s work has been concerned with ideologies, structures and planning patterns of human

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Download Title Page, Forward, Biographical Notes, Contents, Prologue.pdf (872 KB)

Download Chapter 1, The Role of Ideology in Shaping Human Management Models.pdf (677 KB)

Download Chapter 2, The Concept of Deviancy in Human Management.pdf (2.1 MB)

Download Chapter 3, The Principle of Normalization as a Human Management Model, Evolution of a Definition.pdf (356 KB)

Download Chapter 4, Typical Programmatic and Architectural Implications of the Normalization Principle.pdf (1.7 MB)

Download Chapter 5, Societal Integration as a Corollary of Normalization.pdf (1.3 MB)

Download Chapter 6, Additional Architectural-Environmental Implications of the Normalization Principle.pdf (3.3 MB)

Download Chapter 7, Additional Implications of the Normalization Principle to Residential Services.pdf (2.3 MB)

Download Chapter 8, Implications in the Field of Mental Health.pdf (4.2 MB)

Download Chapter 9, Normalizing Activation for the Profoundly Retarded

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Biography

Wolf Peregrin Joachim Wolfensberger was born July 26, 1934, in Mannheim, Germany, the youngest of three children.  Like many other children in Europe during World War II, he was evacuated on two different occasions to the relative safety of the countryside, where he was taken in by farm families until the end of the war.

With his mother, he emigrated to the US in 1950.  They came to Tennessee, but eventually he also lived in the states of Indiana, Missouri, New Jersey, Michigan, Nebraska, and New York.

In February 1960, he married Nancy Artz from Indiana, and they had three children–Margaret, Joan, and Paul–and eventually three grandchildren:  John Tate, Jennifer, and Hadley Sager.

He obtained his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Siena College (now defunct) in Memphis, Tennessee, while also working virtually full-time.  He received a master’s in psychology and education from St. Louis University in Missouri, and a doctorate in mental