[An uncommon application of counseling in medicine: encountering death in education and in practice].
If scientific knowledge can be acquired through a series of learning strategies that are made easier by the tutorial system, personal and relational training is a more complex task. In fact, it means acquiring a particular mental structure that one only reaches with personal development. The emotional management of patients and of their relatives also requires a set of psychological and communicative abilities that are inborn predispositions, but have to be nurtured: learning from experience, sympathetic listening, self insight and understanding, attention towards transference and counter-transference, cannot be acquired from theory, but have to be experienced and verified hands-on. Living other people's emotional experience is not easy; sympathizing means being able to identify with them, but at the same time, to perceive oneself as separate. Moreover, the contact with suffering and sickness amplifies problems of the self, activating a set of emotions and defence mechanisms. One may get caught into other people's suffering, and be influenced by fear and anguish. Approaching illness, pain and death already represents a border-line experience. Students have to overcome the reassuring reality of theoretical study to carry out a strong and complex relational experience: that of a never-ending alternation of taking care and separation, of fulfilment and frustration, of continuous professional and personal testing. The emotional urge is varied and uninterrupted: managing patients cannot be reduced to a protocol of interventions technically defined.
Binetti
P
P
Dipartimento per l'innovazione educativa e didattica, Campus Bio-Medico, Roma, Italia.
Bruni
R
R
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology; D001291:Attitude of Health Personnel; D001293:Attitude to Death; D002055:Burnout, Professional / Q000517:prevention & control; D003376:Counseling / Q000193:education*; D004644:Emotions; D005195:Family Relations; D033062:Friends; D006801:Humans; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations; D010820:Physicians / Q000523:psychology; D013337:Students, Medical / Q000523:psychology; D013795:Thanatology