Caregivers and Students Facing Death
Based on a seminar for medical students entitled Caregivers Facing Death and from our own work in hospital ethnography and liaison psychiatry at the general hospital, we discuss the status of emotions in care. When asked by students about their experience with end-of-life, caregivers often describe emotions as dangerous, and the importance of protecting oneself from them as paramount. Based on this observation, we return to the place of emotions in the biomedical and social sciences literature. Emotions of interest to the social sciences are mainly those of patients, and clinical decisions are most often seen as constrained by values and norms imposed on caregivers, themselves without apparent emotion. This posture curiously reinforces the idea, widespread in health care and more generally in our societies, that emotions can impair the ability to think rationally and objectively and must be put aside. In ethnography, however, researchers’ emotions are seen as reliable indicators; similarly, the work of psychoanalyst Michael Balint emphasizes the need for clinicians to take into account the emotions of patients. On this basis, it would be possible to restore emotions to a central role in guiding the actions of researchers and clinicians alike.