The temporality of becoming: care as an activity to support the being and becoming of the other

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study addresses what it means to care for a person who has been catapulted into an unfamiliar new world and has lost a sense of being-in-the-world. I develop the relational ontological framework extending Heidegger’s ontological structure of care and Bakhtin’s dialogical interaction to focus on encountering the Other in asymmetrical power and knowledge distribution situations. Within this theoretical framework, a longitudinal micro-ethnographic analysis of audio/videotaped high-tech medical encounters shows how the therapeutic dimensions of care unfold engaging a practitioner in a complex process of building a temporal-existential-horizon with and for the Other. The temporal-existential-horizon emerges at the tension between the physician’s desire to create for the Other a cohesive sense of being and an existential narrative that must ultimately be developed by the Other. A relational ontological approach makes visible in the analysis of the moment-to-moment interactions “becoming” as a learning process. For the patient, this means to inhabit a new world in which things matter and one can orient toward Others and new ends. For the physician, “becoming” is not only a social positioning manifested in the world the professional inhabits but also toward oneself, taking a stand on one’s path of becoming this kind of practitioner.