The duality of care: Finding the right balance

This article explores a duality inherent in care between the treatment of disease and the care of the person; or, as Winnicott might put it, between the dimensions of cure and care . It shows how these two dimensions are distinct from one another, despite their entanglement in care practices, and argues that their effect in practice varies sharply according to the situation. Taking as a starting point Nathalie Zaccaï-Reyners’s analysis of the care of dependent older adults in nursing homes (EHPADs), I argue that the care–cure dimensions may be understood as a particular case of the more general duality of our relation to the world and to others. I then consider Hartmut Rosa’s account of this duality, between an instrumental relation and a relation of resonance. According to Plessner’s philosophical anthropology, this duality in our relation to the world arises from a distinctly human property: the capacity to sustain a double relation both to the environment and to oneself, at once immediate and mediated through the perspectives of others. Plessner characterizes this condition as the human being’s ‘eccentric’ or decentered positionality. Understanding this duality at the core of ordinary human experience – and the continual adjustments required to preserve its equilibrium – may shed light on the duality inherent in care, where balance must likewise be ceaselessly recalibrated, in response to circumstance, between its different dimensions.