Fictionality of parental narratives and the ethics of pediatric care

Abstract

Grounded on the psychoanalytic premise of an open subjectivity (Silva Junior, 1998/2019), this article will address language, speech, and narrative theory, emphasising the dynamic, narrative, intersubjective, and essentially fictional aspect of all subjectivity. We will specifically address the parental narratives about a child's illness during the period of pediatric hospitalisation, when the terror of the child's loss and death becomes the breaking point in parental narratives, causing the collapse of fictionality. In this perspective, the hospital experience is didactic: from the arising cleft opened by illness, the potency of the encounter, as possible source of traumas and cures, reappears in full simmering subjectivity (Silva, 2007). This is a theoretical-clinical work, anchored on hospital practice, which aims to encourage health professionals to recognise not only the fictional power of narratives, but also the specific subjective power of the words that emerge or fade in the encounters between the health team, the patient and the family so that, being aware of this ontological power, they take an ethical position, attentive to the present and future unfolding of their acts and words.