Being a Patient as a Limit Category of Doctorhood: A Relational Account for Dehumanization in Medicine

This article presents an analysis of physicians’ and patients’ identities drawing on Lindemann’s theory about the socio-narrative construction of identities. The main thesis is that patients’ identity is constructed as a counterpart to doctorhood. This refers to the professional identity of physicians, constituted by master narratives that represent these professionals as outstanding individuals, capable of performing heroic or even supernatural actions, sometimes even comparing them to gods and superheroes, which ultimately dehumanizes them. I use the notion of symbolic couple that Serret has proposed to analyze gender identities to argue that, in the doctor-patient binomial, the identity of the former is the masculinized central category and that of the latter is the feminized limit category, which is defined as the negation of doctorhood. The argument is illustrated with empirical data collected through ethnographic research. The article concludes that dehumanization in medicine is not merely the result of the subhuman characterizations that doctors make of patients, but rather refers to a relational phenomenon that operates under a patriarchal logic in which the dehumanization of patients appears as a counterpart to the dehumanization of doctors.

patient, doctorhood, doctor-patient relation, deshumanization in medicine, symbolic couple, identity

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