Abstract
Suffering from language disturbances with/without physical disabilities due to cerebral damages patients experience a loss of their world of language and/or of their own space. It can mean the loss of their self image. Even for a patient with severe aphasia, clinicians can facilitate various responses by asking and talking empathetically about the internal reality of the patient's own world. Patients may lack a sense of reality, reject reality, feel inconsistent with the present, experience loss of their own space, and/or feel anxiety. They may face the image of death and bury their own world beyond it, returning to the present at a later stage. This is the first step towards recovery when they accept themselves and turn towards a real life again. The role of language clinicians in rehabiliation is to help the patients understand their internal experience and through empathy to help them express themselves. The timing of terminating language therapy is when patients can feel their own active sense of loss and thereby adapt themselves to their external reality loss.
