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Sharing lives, sharing bodies: partners negotiating breast cancer experiences

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You never have cancer alone, always together. Our body, yes; or, well, I do not really mean ‘our’ body, but she and I … we have gone through a lot. (Roland)

Abstract

By drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of ontological relationality, this article explores what it means to be a ‘we’ in breast cancer. What are the characteristics—the extent and diversity—of couples’ relationally lived experiences of bodily changes in breast cancer? Through analyzing duo interviews with diagnosed women and their partners, four ways of sharing an embodied life are identified. (1) While ‘being different together’, partners have different, albeit connected kinds of experiences of breast cancer. (2) While ‘being there for you’, partners take care of each other in mutually dependent ways. (3) While ‘being reconnected to you’, partners (re-)relate to each other through intimacy and sexuality. (4) While ‘being like you’, partners synchronize their embodied daily lives to one another, sometimes up to the point that the self cannot be distinguished from the other anymore. These ways reveal that being a ‘we’ involves complex affective, bodily encounters in which the many fault lines that both separate partners into individual selves and join them together as a unity are continuously reshaped and negotiated. Being a ‘we’ may be understood as something we have to do. Therefore, in being true to the legacy of Nancy, we argue at the end of this article for a sensible praxis of sharing a life and body, particularly in breast cancer.

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Notes

  1. The authors acknowledge that the variation within the time past between the diagnosis and the interview may have a significant effect on the experiences expressed by the respondents. Two of the authors elaborate on the factor of temporality in relation to breast cancer experiences in another article (de Boer et al. 2015).

  2. This way of analyzing empirical material, in fact, corresponds very well with various phenomenologists’ views on how to do their phenomenology. In line with Husserl (1960), Merleau-Ponty (1962) (and his successors) claim that we have to break with our natural attitude and thus to perform a phenomenological reduction. However, unlike Husserl, he emphasizes that the main lesson that the reduction can teach us is that a complete reduction is never possible (Merleau-Ponty 1962). The reduction does not reveal a world without our prejudices. More likely, it shows that we can never start from a value-free perspective. We have to take seriously our prejudices and explore them, something that hermeneutics professes. Phenomenology thus goes together with hermeneutics. Hermeneutic phenomenology, then, is concerned with human experiences as these are lived; it stays attentive to that which might otherwise be taken-for-granted, with the purpose of understanding and exploring the situated meanings of the subject as being-in-the-world, and as researchers, we acknowledge the need to reflectively attend to our own assumptions or prejudices as part of the interpretive process.

  3. In his later work, especially in The Visible and the Invisible (1968), Merleau-Ponty sets out an ontology that ensures that in some sense the other is always already involved within the self, and he explicitly suggests that self and other are but the obverse and reverse of each other. In this ontology, however, relationality figures as an aspect of the selves’ lived experiences, instead of—as Nancy would argue—as the constitutive ground of lived experiences as such. Moreover, in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty predominantly refers to visuality in outlining this kind of relationality. The concept of motor-intentionality and the notion of ‘I can’ is not extensively elaborated on.

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Funding

This research is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research—NWO (VIDI-grant 276-20-016).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Medicine, Institute of Health and Society, University of Oslo, Blindern, PO Box 1089, 0318, Oslo, Norway

    Marjolein de Boer

  2. Department of Thematic Studies, Linkoping University, Hus Temahuset, rum A:415, Campus Valla, Linköping, Sweden

    Kristin Zeiler

  3. Department Culture Studies, School of Humanites, Tilburg University, PO Box 90153, 5000 LE, Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Jenny Slatman

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  1. Marjolein de Boer
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Correspondence to Marjolein de Boer.

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de Boer, M., Zeiler, K. & Slatman, J. Sharing lives, sharing bodies: partners negotiating breast cancer experiences. Med Health Care and Philos 22, 253–265 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-018-9866-6

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