Quand la nuit empiète sur le jour

Abstract

In this article I describe the theoretical bases and the elements of my professional experience which led me to develop an approach which aims at helping the terminally-ill to attain their ultimate development. My central hypothesis is that patients experience, during the terminal phase, the repercussions of the existential drama which become visible while beforehand they had been concealed behind the character armour. This drama consists in the acceptance or the refusal of the fact of having and of being a decomposable mortal body. In the first section, I refer to the work of Gesell in which I derived a conception of human development based on the observation of children. I focus particularly on the pre-puberty period (from 7 to 9 years), a period in which the existential drama surfaces and in which the bulwarks against anxiety are constructed. I also show how parents can, through contact with their children, re-live through them, certain periods of their own development. In the second part, I employ certain notions developed in the theoretical framework by applying them to the situation of the terminally-ill. The latter re-live, mostly in the form of nightmares, the existential drama of the pre-puberty period. The rode of helping agents is to have them share theses nightmares with others, ans thus to prevent terror from becoming omnipresent and to help them to realize their ultimate development. However, just as parents with their children, the helping agents terminally-ill, and in particular their own mourning. They ought then to understand well their own existential predicament.