Psycholinguistics

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Andrea Germann - Psycholinguistin, M.A.
Netzwork Aging Research

Bergheimer Straße 20
D-69115 Heidelberg

Phone:+49 (0)6221 54 8139
germann(at)nar.uni-heidelberg.de

Fellows: Prof. Dr. Gertrud M. Rösch

Scientific images of dementia in the beautiful contemporary literature

A victim of your own self? Every illness, every sick person, has a story to tell, always a new, different story from which we can learn. Sentences such as "I lost myself" by Auguste D., "My language has died" by Walter Jens or "It is legitimate to be stupid" by Horts Wenderoth give us an insight into dementia. But forgetting also brings with it memories. Because just when a person starts to forget, this arouses great memories among relatives who want to capture something of the person with dementia before this knowledge is lost. This disease is fateful, but it requires symbols so that those affected can live with the diagnosis. The diagnosis of dementia itself stigmatizes, in addition, the mass media representation of the disease spreads even more fear (Gunther Sachs or Rudi Assauer). On the one hand, both the sick and the caring relatives are victims of the disease. The pathology peculiar to the disease forces the sick to go back into the past, and everyone has to deal with their own memories. Even though many fictional texts and reports from relatives have recently been published, the topos of forgetting has a long tradition, including in the works of Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift and Goethe.

Vita