This special issue of Neuropsychological Rehabilitation provides an opportunity to characterise some of the key clinical issues concerned with assessing and managing pathologies of subjective or conscious awareness. Elucidating the cognitive processes underlying awareness, and their corresponding phenomenological experiences, provides the necessary theoretical platform to inform assessments and justify interventions aimed at compensating for, and/or reducing the functional consequences of, impaired awareness. This special issue represents an attempt to bring together previously disparate research findings and conceptual issues from relevant fields within medicine and the psychological sciences and, in so doing, provide for a more coherent, comprehensive account which clinicians and theoreticians can use to better understand the apparently obvious but unwieldy construct of awareness.