Beyond Loss

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.

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.

• Hyden, Lindemann, Brockmeier: Beyond Loss - Introduction ; Part I: Persons, Personhood, and Dignity ; 1. Hilde Lindemann: Second Nature and the Tragedy of Alzheimer's ; 2. Steven R. Sabat: The Person with Dementia as Understood Through Stern's Critical Personalism ; 3. Lennart Nordenfelt: Dignity and Dementia ; 4. Ingrid Hellstrom: 'I'm his wife not his carer!' - Dignity and couplehood in dementia that the relationship>" ; Part II: Identity, Agency, Embodiment ; 5. Jens Brockmeier: Questions of Meaning: Identity, Memory, and Dementia ; 6. Maria I. Medved: Everyday dramas: Comparing life with dementia and acquired brain injury ; 7. Pia Kontos: Body and Self in Dementia ; 8. Alison Phinney: As the Body Speaks: Creative Activity in Dementia ; Part III: Communication, Family, and Institutions ; 9. Lars C. Hyden: Narrative collaboration and scaffolding in dementia ; 10. Camilla Lindholm: Supporting a Co-Conversationalist with Dementia: The Case of Questions ; 11. Pamela Roach, John Keady & Penny Bee: 'Familyhood' and Early Onset Dementia: Using Narrative and Biography to plot Longitudinal Adjustment to the Diagnosis ; 12. Linda Orulv: In Battle with Time: Agency and Control in a Self-Help Group for Persons with Dementia