ABSTRACT

This chapter outlines the views that Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud advanced about the nature of aphasic disorders in the 1890s. It considers how they differed from prevailing concepts and assesses the impact which their positions had on subsequent thinking about aphasia. The chapter reviews the status of aphasia theory in 1890. Still, aphasia was scarcely a subject of great interest to either practicing physicians or medical scientists. The disorder had no specific diagnostic significance nor was it possible to correlate it in any meaningful way with brain function. Bergson approached aphasia from the vantage point of his rejection of psychological parallelism in its absolute form, his insistence on the unity of memory, perception and action, and his view that the brain constitutes a mechanism for the initiation of purposeful motor action rather than a storehouse of 'pure' or 'real' memories.