Sigmund Freud's neglected 1891 monograph On Aphasia, excluded from the Freud Standard Edition as not sufficiently psychological, is crucial to an understanding of the origins of psychoanalysis. Valerie D. Greenberg explains how Freud's prescient study represents its time and reaches out to ours, articulating late nineteenth-century disciplinary ferment and anticipating twentieth-century neurological discovery.

Greenberg creates a meeting ground for two strains of inquiry. One has to do with Freud's early neurological writings and his career as a research scientist; the other with the origins of psychoanalysis in the late nineteenth-century intellectual culture, particularly in theories of language. Aphasia studies encompass inquiry into language, brain, and consciousness, and, ultimately, the entire question of mind-body relations.

The study of language disorders that result from brain damage shows the thirty-five-year-old Freud as a bold researcher who encountered in the sources he used some of the important ideas that would ultimately evolve into psychoanalysis.

Freud and His Aphasia Book helps to fill a gap in discussions of Freud's earliest work. With careful attention to Freud's language, his science, and his methods of investigation, Greenberg shows how his thinking linked him to an international network of cross-disciplinary researchers united by their fascination with patients whose striking deficits challenged the science of the time.