31

This article is about the role of emotions in a broad approach to family care, based on a comprehensive sociological analysis of family care of Alzheimer’s disease. Some situations, decisions, or care activities may provoke very negative emotional experiences for patients: bathing can cause great anxiety; deprivation of certain freedoms, such as driving, can provoke anger; some reproaches may cause sadness. However, care is not limited to material aspects of support or to the ultimate purposes of decisions. It can also be defined through an attention to the emotions of the person with Alzheimer’s disease. This article is concerned with these aspects of profane emotional work, which can be expressed both in the research and production of positive emotions, and in the avoidance of painful emotional episodes. On the one hand, for some friends and family, it is a question of imagining and developing ways to support the emotional comfort of the patient and even to bring out positive emotions. On the other hand, this dimension of care should prevent the Alzheimer’s patient from experiencing painful emotions generated by awkward situations and interactions in terms of conjugal or filial relationships, acknowledgment of one’s disability, or lifestyle changes that occur too quickly. This attentive posture to the emotions of the person with Alzheimer’s, which transcends the instrumental support, can be theoretically illuminated by the care perspective, which enables us to analyze highly diverse forms of support, and to consider limiting, withdrawing, or even abstaining from certain forms of support, such as a concern for others and one’s singular experience.