Greenberg creates a meeting ground for two strains of inquiry. One has to do with Freud's early neurological writings and his career as a research scientist; the other with the origins of psychoanalysis in the late nineteenth-century intellectual culture, particularly in theories of language. Aphasia studies encompass inquiry into language, brain, and consciousness, and, ultimately, the entire question of mind-body relations. The study of language disorders that result from brain damage shows the thirty-five-year-old Freud as a bold researcher who encountered in the sources he used some of the important ideas that would ultimately evolve into psychoanalysis.

“Readers will be compelled by this illuminating debut memoir…a captivating” (Kirkus Reviews) account of one woman’s journey to regain her language and identity after a brain aneurysm steals her ability to communicate. Lauren Marks was twenty-seven, touring a show in Scotland with her friends, when an aneurysm ruptured in her brain and left her fighting for her life. She woke up in a hospital with serious deficiencies to her reading, speaking, and writing abilities, and an unfamiliar diagnosis: aphasia. This would be shocking news for anyone, but Lauren was a voracious reader, an actress, director, and at the time of the event, pursuing her PhD. At any other period of her life, this diagnosis would have been a devastating blow. But she woke up…different. The way she perceived her environment and herself had profoundly changed, her entire identity seemed crafted around a language she could no longer access. She returned to her childhood home to recover, grappling with a muted inner monologue and fractured sense of self. Soon after, Lauren began a journal, to chronicle her year following the rupture. A Stitch of Time is the remarkable result, an Oliver Sacks–like case study of a brain slowly piecing itself back together, featuring clinical research about aphasia and linguistics, interwoven with Lauren’s narrative and actual journal entries that marked her progress. Alternating between fascination and frustration, she relearns and re-experiences many of the things we take for granted—reading a book, understanding idioms, even sharing a “first kiss”—and begins to reconcile “The Girl I Used to Be” with “The Girl I Am Now.” For fans of Brain on Fire and My Stroke of Insight, the deeply personal and powerful A Stitch of Time is an “engrossing” (Publishers Weekly) journey of self-discovery, resilience, and hope.

An up-to-date, integrated analysis of the language disturbances associated with brain pathology, this book examines the different types of aphasia combining two clinical approaches: the neurological and the neuropsychological. Although they stress the clinical aspects of aphasia syndromes, they also review assessment techniques, linguistic analyses, problems of aphasia classification, and frequently occurring related disorders such as alexia, agraphia, alcalculia, and anomia. In addition, they examine commonly encountered speech disorders, neurobehavioral and psychiatric problems commonly associated with aphasia, and the language characteristics of aging and dementia. Rehabilitation and recovery are discussed, and a neural basis for aphasia and related problems is proposed. Neuropsychologists, neurologists, speech therapists, psychiatrists, and occupational therapists will find this book invaluable when dealing with language disorders resulting from brain disease or injury.

This groundbreaking work brings together leading scientist-practitioners to review what is known about aphasia and to relate current knowledge to treatment. Integrating traditional linguistic formulations with new insights derived from cognitive neuroscience, this volume explores the neuropsychological bases of both normal and pathologic language. It reflects an understanding of brain structure and function based on new developments in connectionist modeling and functional neuroimaging.

Mauro Javier Cárdenas, the critically-acclaimed author of The Revolutionaries Try Again—“an original, insubordinate novel” (New York Times)—pens a profound story of literature about a man coming to terms with his dysfunctional Colombian family, as well as his own behavior, as an immigrant in America. Antonio wants to avoid thinking about his sister—even though he knows he won’t be able to avoid thinking about his sister—because his sister is on the run after allegedly threatening to shoot her neighbors, and has been claiming that Antonio, Obama, the Pentagon, and their mother are all conspiring against her. Nevertheless, Antonio is going to try his best to be as avoidant as possible, because he worries that what’s been happening to his sister might somehow infect his relatively contented, ordered American life, and destabilize the precarious arrangement with his ex-wife that’s allowed him to stay close to his two daughters. In fact, he’s busy doing everything except facing his problems head-on: transcribing recordings of his mother speaking about their troubled life in Colombia, transcribing recordings of his ex-wife speaking about her idyllic life in the Czech Republic; writing about former girlfriends whose words and deeds still recur in his mind; rereading stories by American writers that allow him to skirt the subject of his sister’s state of mind without completely destroying his own. Written in long, unravelling sentences that accommodate all the detritus of thought—scenes real and imagined, headphones and heartache, Toblerones and Thomas Bernhard—Aphasia captures the immensity of the present moment as well as the pain of the past. It cements Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s place as one of the most innovative and extraordinary novelists working today.

'This book is a wonderful idea and it meets a heretofore unmet need. It derives from a particularly interesting database, since it deals with aphasia in aphasic people's own language...It is strongly recommended.' Professor Audrey Holland, Department of Speech Pathology, University of Arizona, USA This book is about living with aphasia - a language impairment which can result from stroke. Drawing on in-depth interviews with fifty aphasic people, it explores the experience of aphasia from the dramatic onset of stroke and loss of language to the gradual revelation of its long-term consequences. The story is told from the perspective of aphasic people themselves. They describe the impact of aphasia upon their employment, education, leisure activities, finances, personal relationships and identity. They describe their changing needs and how well these have been met by health, social care and other services. They talk about what aphasia means to them, the barriers encountered in everyday life and how they cope. The book offers a unique insight into the struggle of living with aphasia, combining startlingly unusual language with a clear interlinking text.