Susanne Johnson and Joseph Wieder's Relationship

Susanne Johnson and Joseph Wieder's Relationship combined years of professional trust with a deep, concealed love that Susanne believed Wieder never returned. She was his assistant and confidante, helped prepare his work, and regarded him as a rare genius; after his death, her account gave John Keller both insight into Wieder’s private world and a view of the devotion she had kept to herself.

Professional Closeness and Admiration

Johnson described herself as more than Wieder’s assistant: she had also been his confidante. She considered him an authentic genius, someone who would have excelled in any field, not only psychology. In her view, his gifts had made him a target for mediocre colleagues who resented him. She recalled that he had few friends at the university and was repeatedly harassed under different pretexts, while baseless rumors portrayed him as a drunk and a womanizer.

Her practical closeness to Wieder extended to his writing. Because he used neither a typewriter nor a word processor, Johnson typed his manuscript about memory. She knew it had been complete for weeks before his death, although she had not previously asked whether he had submitted it to a publisher or why the book had never appeared. The work placed her near an important part of Wieder’s intellectual life, even as she admitted that she had transcribed documents mechanically, without considering their contents in depth.

Laura Baines and the Research Project

Johnson knew Laura Baines as Wieder’s protégé, but was certain that the two had not been having an affair. Her testimony thus distinguished a close academic bond from the rumors and suspicions surrounding Wieder’s personal life. She confirmed that his completed book concerned memory, but her knowledge of its publication history remained incomplete.

She also remembered that Wieder had worked on a project involving therapy for soldiers with post-traumatic stress. Johnson had transcribed related documents, but, as an economics major rather than a psychology or psychiatry student, she said she had paid little attention to their content. She believed Wieder’s mental state had become unstable toward the end of the experiments. For roughly two months before his death, he stopped giving her documents to type; Johnson suspected he had ceased working with the people behind the project. These were her recollections and conjectures, not a complete account of the research or its connection to his death.

Concealed Love and Grief

Johnson eventually disclosed to Keller that she had been in love with Wieder. She was married and emphasized that she also loved her husband and children; her feelings for Wieder existed alongside, rather than replacing, that family attachment. She had never confessed her love and did not think Wieder had realized it. To him, she believed, she was probably only a friendly colleague willing to help even outside office hours.

She had hoped that Wieder might one day see her differently, but that hope was never fulfilled. His death overwhelmed her with grief, and for a long time she felt that her world had ended. Calling him the most wonderful man she had ever met, she revealed how profoundly the relationship had mattered to her while underscoring its asymmetry: the intimacy she experienced as love may have remained, in Wieder’s eyes, unspoken and unrecognized.