Reflections on spiritual abuse in a palliative care setting
The objectives of this article are twofold : first, to examine the concept of spiritual abuse and second, to discuss what kind of support should be provided to victims of such abuse. The first part of the article is devoted to a synthetic analysis of two epistemological aims : Casoni and Brunet’s treatment of the process of idealization and Briançon’s understanding of the victimization process based on his reading of Emmanuel Levinas. A clinical vignette is then presented from an autoethnographic perspective in order to consider the second purpose of this study in relationship to the culture of palliative care. Using the concepts of transcendence and emancipation, I argue that this kind of abuse calls for a specific kind of spiritual care. A number of avenues for abuse prevention and reparation are discussed.