ArticleNursing philosophy : an international journal for healthcare professionals2023
Empathy, caring and compassion: Toward a Freudian critique of nursing work.
Article in Nursing philosophy : an international journal for healthcare professionals, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Relationship Between Empathy, Moral Sensitivity, and Spiritual Care Competence Among Nurses: A Cross-Sectional Study.Journal of nursing management · 2025Article
- Empathy, caring and compassion: Toward a Freudian critique of nursing work.Nursing philosophy : an international journal for healthcare professionals · 2023Article
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Abstract
The aim of this paper is to summarize key psychoanalytic concepts first developed by Sigmund Freud and apply them to a critical exploration of three terms that are central to nursing's self-image-empathy, caring, and compassion. Looking to Menzies-Lyth's work, I suggest that the nurse's strong identification as a carer can be understood as a fantasy of being the one who is cared for; critiques by Freud and others of empathy point to the possibility of it being, in reality, a form of projective identification; reading Lacan and Žižek, I propose that repeated research into caring and repeated complaint about barriers to caring can be understood as manifestations of the death drive first posited by Freud. I conclude that psychoanalytic insights suggest that caring roles can raise profoundly ambivalent issues for those who care but they can also point the way to freedom from painful and self-destructive symptoms inherent in such work.
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