[Patients and physicians: cross representations anthropological study of the construction of individuality in radiation therapy].

The methods of anthropology allow us to understand group dynamics by bringing to light a web of linked causalities in order to describe human and social relationships. The density and dimension of the relationship with a patient have direct repercussions on professional motivation. But this proximity has its drawbacks. The process of identification to patients is inevitable and the fear of "contamination" is not medical but symbolic: it is expressed in the difficulty of appreciating the distance, the difference between the "other" (the patient) and the self (the physician). Health professionals have therefore to find a delicate compromise between proximity and strategies of distance. The temptation is therefore great, of considering the patient only through his pathology. This "imagined patient" allows the clinician to define the frames structuring his relation to the patient. But at the same time, this creates a loss of identity for the patient. In this context, the relation between patient and clinician should be based primarily on a necessary individual acknowledgement of the patient who expresses it in a re appropriation of his illness. Thus he sets himself as an actor of the therapeutic relation and no longer as an object of clinical care.