Considerations on communicating the diagnosis of childhood cancer: the child‘s position, the parent‘s place, effects of the medical discourse, and the intervention possibilities of the discourse of the psychoanalyst

Abstract

This paper investigates the process of communicating the diagnosis of childhood cancer considering the child’s position, the parents’ place, the effects of the medical discourse, and the intervention possibilities of the discourse of the psychoanalyst. Based on three clinical cases, the discussion points out how the analytic listening helped the team faced with a bioethical conflict increasingly present in pediatric oncology: should the child know the truth, or should they be protected from it? Being aware of the impossibility of telling the whole truth, the analyst can disentangle themself in advance from these imperatives and provide a discursive turn which highlights the child subject’s singular knowledge in detriment of the formal academic knowledge.