42

What is palliative care symptomatic of? It might be an attempt to fill a gap in knowledge by calling upon everything that is known, or an attempt to pretend medicine has not split the subject into fragments, creating a Babel of logical thought processes; or they may be an attempt to cover the essential void by using the dying person as a living screen. Even if something had to be changed in our behavior toward death (and it is this awareness that inspired the pioneers in the field of palliative care), the nature of these issues and their implications is still unknown. In this article, the dying person as a fetish is viewed as a useful perspective to try to understand this new healthcare field from the point of view of psychoanalysis.