Non-Aphasic Disorders of Speech

Abstract

Edwin Weinstein (now at the Mount Sinai Medical School) was the first person to draw my attention to a whole array of remarkable phenomena which can readily be mistaken for primary disorders of memory or language. I should hasten to add that this should not suggest to the reader that Weinstein shares my interpretation of many of these phenomena, since there are many points on which he and I will continue to carry on a friendly argument for many years. Both this paper and the one later in the volume ‘The varieties of naming errors’ as well as my thinking on denial syndromes all reflect, however, my debt to Weinstein’s highly original observations. These were, and perhaps still are, neglected by neurologists who thought that Weinstein was advancing a purely psychiatric explanation of the syndromes of denial and their accompanying errors in naming and distortions of memory. This belief was a naive misinterpretation of Weinstein’s more refined argument, i.e., that a special type of motivated denial behavior is seen in patients with certain neurological disorders.