Al saber la verdad Edipo se arrancó los ojos: Bioética de la revelación del diagnóstico

Abstract

In his XV SONEPSYN lecture delivered at the 59th Chilean Neurologic, Psychiatric and Neurosurgical Congress, Iquique, October 2004, the author deals with the moral role of physicians in the disclosure of diagnosis of severe diseases. Freud's cancer medical history beginning in 1923 is analysed according to the respect for the patient's autonomy as well as the patient's beneficence. But psychiatry is competent to provide an analytical framework by means of which moral problems of diagnosis disclosure can be evaluated. Psychiatric ethics as such is concerned with unmasking the falsifications of desire that inhabit the moral life. The sole ethical value that is brought into play is veracity. The movement from misunderstanding to recognition is the standard itinerary of psychiatric experience, and it designates what might be called the veracity threshold of truth in psychiatry. We cannot expect anything else from this enterprise of the ethics of veracity but a critique of authenticity