Meeting a Patient as a Singular Event: A Philosophical Reflection

Although much research has been dedicated to describing the ethical and communicative conditions of the encounter between a health care professional and a patient, in fact we know very little of the encounter itself, nor of the concept of the identity of the subjects they implicitly fall back upon. By contrast, in this paper we want to start from the fundamental question: what happens when two people meet in a patient's room? How do we take hold of the uncertainty and unpredictability in every new encounter? To address this lack we turn to the work of the French Philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and his notion of the singular and its importance for the encounter in the healthcare setting. Nancy examines the philosophical presuppositions inherent in the ways we speak of human identity. We explain his analysis of 'together' or 'with', and of 'singularity'. Then we apply his idea of singular identity to shed a new light on the encounter mentioned above.