Freud And His Aphasia Book

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.

These essays examine the seven deadly sins as cultural constructions in the Middle Ages and beyond, focusing on the way concepts of the sins are used in medieval communities, the institution of the Church, and by secular artists and authors.

There is extensive literature on Freud and language; however, there is very little that looks at Freud’s use of the spoken word. In Freud and the Spoken Word: Speech as a key to the unconscious, Ana-María Rizzuto contends that Freud’s focus on the intrapsychic function and meaning of patients’ words allowed him to use the new psychoanalytic method of talking to gain access to unconscious psychic life. In creating the first ‘talking therapy’, Freud began a movement that still underpins how psychoanalysts understand and use the spoken word in clinical treatment and advance psychoanalytic theory. With careful and critical reference to Freud’s own work, this book draws out conclusions on the nature of verbal exchanges between analyst and patient. Ana- María Rizzuto begins with a close look at Freud’s early monograph On Aphasia, suggesting that Freud was motivated by his need to understand the disturbed speech phenomena observed in three of the patients described in Studies on Hysteria. She then turns to an examination of how Freud integrated the spoken word into his theories as well as how he actually talked with his patients, looking again at the Studies in Hysteria and continuing with the Dora case, the Rat Man and the Wolf Man. In these chapters, the author interprets how Freud’s report of his own words shed light on the varying relationships he had with his patients, when and how he was able to follow his own recommendations for treatment and when another factor (therapeutic zeal, or the wish to prove a theory) appeared to interfere in communication between the two parties in the analysis. Freud and the Spoken Word examines Freud’s work with a critical eye. The book explores his contribution in relation to the spoken word, enhances its significance, and challenges its shortcomings. It is written for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, Freud’s scholars and academics interested in his views on the words spoken in life and in psychoanalysis. Argentine born Ana-María Rizzuto trained in psychoanalysis in Boston and was for forty years in the PINE Psychoanalytic Center Faculty and is Training and Supervisory Analyst Emerita. She has made significant contributions to the psychoanalysis of religious experience and has written in national and international journals about the significance of words in the clinical situation. She has written three books and lectured about her work in North America, Latin America, Europe, and Japan.

The study of language and the brain is heavily dependent on the work of the early aphasiologists, and those wanting to get acquainted with the discipline will come across frequent references to these classic authors. This collection brings together seminal publications by 19th- and 20th-century neurologists concerned with the relationship between language and the brain. In selecting texts the emphasis was on those parts that deal explicitly with the opinion of an author on language processes as revealed by aphasic phenomena. All texts are presented in English (many of them translated for the first time), and preceded by in-depth introductions by present-day specialists in the field. The book includes biographical sketches of the authors discussed, and bibliographies of their relevant publications. This volume is invaluable for professionals and students who prefer to read the originals instead of leaning on textbook summaries. Texts by: Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) [Claus Heeschen]; Paul Broca (1824-1880) [Paul Eling]; Carl Wernicke (1848-1905) [Antoine Keyser]; Henry Charlton Bastian (1837-1915) [John C. Marshall]; John Hughlings Jackson (1835-1911) [Bento P.M.Schulte]; Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) [O.R. Hommes]; Jules Dejerine (1849-1917) [W.O.Renier]; Pierre Marie (1853-1940) [Yvan Lebrun]; Arnold Pick (1851-1924) [A.D.Friederici]; Henry Head (1861-1940) [Patrick Hudson]; Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965) [Ria de Bleser]; Norman Geschwind (1926-1984) [Mary-Louise Kean].

There is extensive literature on Freud and language; however, there is very little that looks at Freud’s use of the spoken word. In Freud and the Spoken Word: Speech as a key to the unconscious, Ana-María Rizzuto contends that Freud’s focus on the intrapsychic function and meaning of patients’ words allowed him to use the new psychoanalytic method of talking to gain access to unconscious psychic life. In creating the first ‘talking therapy’, Freud began a movement that still underpins how psychoanalysts understand and use the spoken word in clinical treatment and advance psychoanalytic theory. With careful and critical reference to Freud’s own work, this book draws out conclusions on the nature of verbal exchanges between analyst and patient. Ana- María Rizzuto begins with a close look at Freud’s early monograph On Aphasia, suggesting that Freud was motivated by his need to understand the disturbed speech phenomena observed in three of the patients described in Studies on Hysteria. She then turns to an examination of how Freud integrated the spoken word into his theories as well as how he actually talked with his patients, looking again at the Studies in Hysteria and continuing with the Dora case, the Rat Man and the Wolf Man. In these chapters, the author interprets how Freud’s report of his own words shed light on the varying relationships he had with his patients, when and how he was able to follow his own recommendations for treatment and when another factor (therapeutic zeal, or the wish to prove a theory) appeared to interfere in communication between the two parties in the analysis. Freud and the Spoken Word examines Freud’s work with a critical eye. The book explores his contribution in relation to the spoken word, enhances its significance, and challenges its shortcomings. It is written for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, Freud’s scholars and academics interested in his views on the words spoken in life and in psychoanalysis. Argentine born Ana-María Rizzuto trained in psychoanalysis in Boston and was for forty years in the PINE Psychoanalytic Center Faculty and is Training and Supervisory Analyst Emerita. She has made significant contributions to the psychoanalysis of religious experience and has written in national and international journals about the significance of words in the clinical situation. She has written three books and lectured about her work in North America, Latin America, Europe, and Japan.

Psychoanalysis and neurological medicine have promoted contrasting and seemingly irreconcilable notions of the modern self. Since Freud, psychoanalysts have relied on the spoken word in a therapeutic practice that has revolutionized our understanding of the mind. Neurologists and neurosurgeons, meanwhile, have used material apparatus—the scalpel, the electrode—to probe the workings of the nervous system, and in so doing have radically reshaped our understanding of the brain. Both operate in vastly different institutional and cultural contexts. Given these differences, it is remarkable that both fields found resources for their development in the same tradition of late nineteenth-century German medicine: neuropsychiatry. In Localization and Its Discontents, Katja Guenther investigates the significance of this common history, drawing on extensive archival research in seven countries, institutional analysis, and close examination of the practical conditions of scientific and clinical work. Her remarkable accomplishment not only reframes the history of psychoanalysis and the neuro disciplines, but also offers us new ways of thinking about their future.