Les émotions dans la relation de soin : des racines de leur répression aux enjeux de leur expression

Health care worker scaring for pediatric patients with cancer are exposed to intense emotions. Arising from an attachment to the children and their families, these emotions are also a socially adequate response to the scandal of childhood suffering.For the health care worker, such emotional involvement is essential because maintaining the capacity to have emotions maintains the humanness of health care. Nevertheless, the health care worker has to cope with contradictory psychological and deontological considerations and thus develops a complex relationship with such emotions. Repressing emotions has traditionally been a prerequisite to serene objective decision making. Such emotional repression is also the means by which the health care worker maintains the relational integrity necessary for responding to the needs of many patients. Repressing emotions would also be indispensable for maintaining psychological balance both for the individual health care worker and for the health care staff, a necessary protection against burn-out. However, avoiding the question of how health care workers control their emotions would increase the risk of accepting excessive avoidance behavior; technicizing health care or real avoidance could accentuate the health care worker′s solitude. Accepted as standard behavior among health care workers, keeping one′s distance tends to limitthe expression of one′s eminently personal relations and accentuates the guilt feeling arising from a false normalization of behavior. Finally, if health care workers deny the true meaning of their emotions, they will missed aunique opportunity to discover that the health care relationship is fundamentally an encounter between two vulnerabilities. Far from being uncouthor theatrical, emotional involvement is one of many landmarks of sincereempathy. Considering health care workers′ active role in providing care and relief and measuring the reality of their passive involvement offers aprecious occasion to recall the origin and the finality of the health care relationship.