Origin and destiny of subjectivity: from professional roles to treatment processes, through an interpretation of the remains of the day by kazuo ishiguro

Abstract

This reflection addresses a very important topic for care professions, with a special look at psychotherapy. To clarify the role of subjectivity and the birth and maturation of a professional role, I will present an analysis of a literary text through which it will be easier to find out how the identity of a professional role is formed and starts to mature and get codified. In particular, what are the risks associated with its rigid codification to its technical normative? I intend to draw a comparison with some subjectivity building forms that have founded the Western human’s model in its professional articulations over the centuries.

Keywords:

• Care
• professional roles
• subjectivity

NOTES

Notes

1 Displaying an impersonal life seems to be his motto. In this connection, let me mention a quote taken from the wonderful book by David Le Breton (2015), Disparaître de soi, which describes Mr. Stevens’s push rather well: “He said goodbye to his old personality and became intentionally unknowable. Some people get thus rid of their center of gravity and let themselves slide into the non-place. The challenge is to cancel their birth, deprive themselves of layers of their identities to reduce to the minimum, not to start to live again, but to discretely erase themselves” (p. 23 of the Italian version).

2 “I have been devoting some time and effort over recent months to improving my skill in this very area. That is to say, I have been endeavouring to add this skill to my professional armoury so as to fulfil with confidence all Mr Farraday's expectations with respect to bantering” (p. 92). This is the way our butler starts listening on the radio to shows where protagonists perform witty comments, in order to suitably train himself.

3 Mr. Stevens often mentions Hayes Society, not only as the source of his inspiration, but also as the place where important themes to work as a butler were discussed, such as dignity, in order to give them a form, a charter. Our butler’s dissatisfaction about the results achieved by this association is, however, clear.

4 This term should, perhaps too synthetically, mean “the expression of truth.”

5 Foucault (1978) lists various ways through which the confession becomes a scientific argument. We need to bear in mind here what more directly refers to the clinical model. The transformation has taken place: “by clinically codifying the action of letting a person speak: combining the confession with the exam, the story of oneself with the use of a set of decipherable signs and symptoms: a strict questionnaire, hypnosis with the evocation of memories, free associations: (they all are) tools to make the procedure of confession enter a scientifically acceptable explanation field, to” (p. 60). Then he adds: “through the principle of an intrinsic latency of sexuality, a dark argument is built which is veiled by decency. Finally”, “through the medicalization of the effects of confession” (p. 60) sex is no more just guilt, but also disorder, perversion, morbidity, and so on.

6 Giovanni Cassiano (360–435 AD) was the founder of several monasteries. He also wrote relevant texts on the cenobitic life and, in particular, on the formation of the monks, such as De Istitutis Coenobiorum and Collationes.

7 In principle, what is excluded from the monk’s care falls into the privileged psychoanalytic hermeneutical field. It is well known that the analysis of the emotions, desires, and, in general, of what is part of the inner world are aspects in which psychoanalysis is specifically interested.

8 In chapter IV of The Cenobitic Institutions, Cassiano (2007) accurately lists the tools for the “formation of those who reject the world.” They consist of a wide range of rules and advice supported by examples drawn from the lives of illustrious monks. They present, in detail, training methods, precepts to be respected, humiliations, and rules of correction for the aspiring candidates. One of the methods is to teach young people not to conceal from the elderly any daytime or nocturnal thought, as hiding a thought from the elderly “is a clear indication of a evil thought” (p. 96).

9 Regarding obedience, during one of his lessons (March 19, 1980–tr. It. 2014) Foucault (2014b) claims that his structure contains the substitio, the submission. Submission is intended as the general form of relationship with others, patience is the attitude to set toward the external world and, finally, humility is understood as the relationship with oneself.

10 See Ruvolo (2016) and the related bibliography.

11 With respect to his commentary on Cassiano, Foucault (2012) stated: "Any kind of thought has a hidden origin, dark roots, secret aspects, and the role of verbalization is precisely that to uncover 'and bring to light' these origins and these aspects” (p. 86).

12 "The continuity of the time schedule, internalized in the form of a perpensatio horarum—a mental arrangment of the passing of the hours—becomes here the element that allows us to act on the life of individuals and communities. […] And although today we are perfectly used to organize our existence according to times and schedules and to consider our inner life as temporally homogeneous and linear and not as an alternation of discrete and heterogeneous units to be measured according to ethical criteria and rites of passage, we must not forget that it has been the cenobitic horologium vitae that intimately superimposed and almost made time and life coincide for the first time" (Agamben, 2008, p. 37).

13 Agamben (2008) recalled how “rule simply means conversatio fratrum, the way the monks of a specific monastery live” (p. 23).