Espiritualidade e crise existencial na vivência do câncer

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine how women perceive and live the experience of receiving a diagnostic of breast cancer. Field research involves a total of eight women who have experienced this situation, one of them being the author s self-reflection on a cancer diagnostic. A specific aspect of the present research is to identify the place that spirituality takes in the life history of the interviewed women. The State of Rio Grande do Sul presents a high rate of breast cancer. According to the agency Revistal Gaúcha de Enfermagem, breast cancer is the death main cause among women between thirty and fifty years old. Statistics of the National Cancer Institute indicates that breast cancer occupies the second place among the different sorts of cancer. Even though medicine has shown great advance in the last decades, breast cancer still continues to be a deadly disease. However, there are people who survive the fearsome and frightening fatal process caused by this disease. With cancer comes along the human finitude anxiety. The present work bases its reflection on how Eugen Drewermann and Paul Tillich describe the human existential anxiety distinguishing it from real fear. According to the authors real fear has its object defined, while existential anguish has as source of its permanent threat, the nothingness. Anguish and guilt are connected, but guilt is associated to the alienation from God. Acceptance of the existence as finite, through the courage of Being, which is an act of faith by divine grace, replaces anguish by trust in the God of Life. The authors above, both theologians, aim at interdisciplinarity. The purpose of this research is to act in collaboration with other sciences, specially with Analytical Psychology. A person in crisis working her/his interior processes might have facilitated the confident surrender to God. It is also briefly presented, according to Drewermann, how pathology evidences itself in the life of a person who, as all other persons, lacks the experience of the grace of God to his/her liberation. Concluding, the research approaches Erika Schuchartd s theory formulated in the model for working through crisis in eight spiral phases.