Two theoretical schools have emerged within the field of communication focusing on the alleviation of dysfunctional communications such as speech anxiety, communication apprehension, and speech reticence. The communication anxiety-behavior therapy school regards excessive anxiety to be a primary factor in dysfunctional communication. This school asserts that anxiety is a learned response susceptible to unlearning, that excessive anxiety during or in anticipation of communication leads to ineffectiveness, that behavior therapy is effective in reducing anxiety, and that communication teachers are qualified to implement such therapy. The speech reticence rhetoritherapy school holds that reticent persons perceive themselves to gain more by remaining silent than by participation. The position of this school is that communication teachers should implement rhetoritherapy programs to treat dysfunctional communication rather than programs to alleviate anxiety since anxiety is not the basis of dysfunctional communication, treating anxiety is the province of psychiatry, eliminating anxiety would also reduce motivation, and rhetoritherapy is a more effective treatment. A practical directive emerging from the perspectives of these two schools is that mass treatment programs without careful individual screening would unduly risk additional failures for troubled persons. (DF)