Beyond Loss: Dementia, Identity, Personhood - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199969264 ISBN 13: 9780199969265

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2014

Synopsis

Coming to terms with dementia is one of the great challenges of our time. This volume of new interdisciplinary essays by internationally established scholars offers new ways of understanding and dealing with it. It explores views of dementia that go beyond the idea of loss, and rather envisions it as multilayered transformation and change of personhood and identity, and as development that mostly is socially shared with others. The studies collected here identify new empirical, theoretical, and methodological areas that will be crucial to future research and clinical practice concerned with age-related dementia. Three general themes are singled out as of particular importance and interest: persons and personhood, identity and agency, and the social and the communal.

About this title

About the Author:

Lars-Christer Hydén is Professor of Social Psychology at Linköping University. His research primarily concerns how people with Alzheimer's disease and their significant others interact and use language - especially narrative - as a way to sustain and negotiate identity and a sense of self.

Hilde Lindemann is Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University. A former president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities and a Fellow of the Hastings Center, her published work includes Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair; An Invitation to Feminist Ethics; and Holding and Letting Go: The Social Practice of Personal Identities.

Jens Brockmeier is Professor of Psychology at The American University of Paris. With a background in psychology, philosophy, and language studies, his interests are in issues of memory, identity, and the autobiographical process, which he has examined in a variety of cultural contexts and under conditions of health and illness.

Review:

"Fortunately, the cumulative effect of reading this volume is clarified insight into the needs and personhood of persons with dementia, and a new appreciation of what family-centered clinical research on dementia hopes to accomplish." -- Metapsychology Online Reviews

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0199969264
• ISBN 13: 9780199969265
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224
• Editor: Hydén Lars C., Lindemann Hilde, Brockmeier Jens