An Approach to Patient Care through Art

Abstract

In this work, it is a matter of reflecting on the subject when he is ill and on the need to claim his presence as an autonomous being in the healthcare environment where the advancement of science and technology seems to exclude him, creating ever greater barriers between professionals and patients. L"™intrus, the work that Jean-Luc Nancy will begin to write in the year 2000, will be the starting point and nucleus of this reflection. Basically it would be the exploration of three estrangements. In the beginning, the experience of the transplanted heart that Nancy receives with the experience of motherhood, specifically of childbirth, is related. This establishes a certain parallelism with pregnancy where a new being inhabits and is alien to the person who "occupies". It is an estrangement from outside in, the heart of the philosopher and the estrangement from the inside out, the baby. In the second part, self-care is explored, when one is aware of oneself and is able to relate to the other. This phase is where the mechanism of care is set in motion, a relationship of trust and acceptance between the patient and the healthcare worker. The estrangement would be, symbolically, that first perception of oneself as someone to know. And a final third part will be to observe the Hospital as a space where all the people who inhabit it develop their own semantics with some codes that condition, in turn, the interpersonal relationships and their roles. In this phase the third estrangement is manifested, the patient is perceived as a foreign body inside the hospital. Art with its peculiar dynamic to generate concepts or ideas through images and its language will serve as a driving element to these proposals.