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Agnosia



Dear All,

Does anyone know who introduced the term 'agnosia' to refer either to (a) aphasia-like 
conditions in which there was some disturbance of object recognition or (b) conditions 
like Munk's Seelenblindheit?

I'd always thought that meaning (a) came from Freud's 1891 'Aphasie' where he defines 
the 'agnostic aphasias' as a third kind of aphasia in addition to the 'language' 
aphasias described by Broca and Wernicke, as one often involving vision. However, 
Marrianne Jackson uses 'visual agnosia' in translating the title of Lissauer's 1890 
paper. That, however, may be only a modern convenience, so to speak, because the 
word in Lissauer's title is Seelenblindheit. As I don't have the original German 
I don't know if he uses 'agnosia' in his text.

Cheers
Malcolm Macmillan 
School of Psychology 
Deakin University
Tel: + 61 3 9244 6846
Fax: + 61 3 9244 6858
E-mail: m.macmillan@deakin.edu.au

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