Abstract
BackgroundMotivation is a crucial and widespread theme within medicine. From clinical to surgical scenarios, acquiescence in taking a pill or coming to a consultation is imperative for medical treatment to thrive. The “decade of the brain” gave practitioners substantial neuroscientific data on human behavior, helped to explain why people do what they do and created the concept of “motivated brain”. Findings from empirical psychology stratified motivation into stages of change, which became more complex over the decades. This research seeks to improve the understanding of how people make decisions about their health, and how to better understand strategies and techniques to help them resolve ambivalence in an effective goal-oriented way.MethodsWe establish a dialogue with Ricoeur’s phenomenology of the will in order to understand the meaning of these scientific findings. Starting from Husserlian phenomenology, Paul Ricoeur developed his thoughts away from transcendental idealism, through emancipating the intentional structures of the will from the realm of perception.ResultsThrough introducing the concepts of the voluntary and the involuntary, Ricoeur deviated from Cartesian dualism, which renders the body as an object body, a target of natural vicissitudes. The new dualism of the voluntary and the involuntary is dealt with by reference to what Ricoeur called the central mystery of incarnate existence, which considers man “double in humanity, simple in vitality”. This duality makes it possible to consider the brain to be the natural organ of behavior in the human body, and to use empirical psychology as a path to escape from shallow subjectivations of concepts.ConclusionsPaul Ricoeur’s simplicity (or unity) of existence provides an invitation for medicine to rethink some of its philosophical assumptions, such that patients can be considered to be autonomous subjects with authorial life projects. Ricoeurian anthropology has a deep ethical impact on how medicine should use technology, which arises from empirical psychology findings. The usage of this new knowledge also needs to be thoroughly inspected, since it shifts the social role of medical science.
Highlights
La motivation est. un thème crucial et répandu en médecine
How is this agent perceived? Is the human being conditioned by environmental determinants of behavior, performing actions that can be statistically predicted, and shifted, through specific techniques? Can there be more to this definition? What consequences to healthcare practices will follow if human beings are considered as something other than exclusively the object of natural sciences? What impact will there be, on the one hand, on the scientific agenda for investigating the motivated brain; and on the other hand, on the technology produced within this framework?
Stages of change and motivation Psychology is a field that has been a matter of dispute since its very definition [9]
Summary
La motivation est. un thème crucial et répandu en médecine. Que. ce soit pour un scénario clinique ou chirurgical, l’acceptation de prendre une pilule ou de se rendre à une consultation est. essentielle au succès du traitement médical. Les résultats de la psychologie empirique ont stratifié la motivation en étapes de changement, qui sont devenues plus complexes au fil des décennies. The daily act of prescribing a medicine is necessarily followed by patients’ reflection on whether they feel like taking it when they gets home, or not. This is even more dramatic in relation to surgical procedures, since consent alone is not enough. A motivated person is an agent of action, an action towards self-healthcare or some other objective. How is this agent perceived? Is the human being conditioned by environmental determinants of behavior, performing actions that can be statistically predicted, and shifted, through specific techniques? Can there be more to this definition? What consequences to healthcare practices will follow if human beings are considered as something other than exclusively the object of natural sciences? What impact will there be, on the one hand, on the scientific agenda for investigating the motivated brain; and on the other hand, on the (soft) technology produced within this framework?
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