Meaning making and re-making processes in the lived experience of illness, fragility and social exclusion (original) (raw)

Although over the last thirty years interdisciplinary studies have produced many theories and reflections on meaning-making processes concerning the experiences of illness, fragility and exclusions, many new and ancient emergency contexts remain subject to dismal focus or no exploration at all. Among them, for example, there is the condition of those who have lived afflicted with a chronic disease since their birth and throughout their existence, or of those who live immersed in an illness so intrusive and pervasive not permitting anything else but its care; besides this, the condition of those who have been hurt by a psychic or psychiatric disorder as outcome of a migratory experience; moreover, those who are troubled by difficulties facing one of the psychological and identity crisis of the human developmental path; last, the poverty as a condition that represents a more and more wide spreading, even if not unprecedented, emergency of the XXI century and, joint with this, the complex problematics that characterize the territories of our contemporaneous age where we spend our lifetime. All of these evidences lead us to take charge of some life spaces and body dimensions (still inhabited and unknown) that need, in order to be explored and understood, a reflective approach able to grasp new starting points of knowledge and meta-knowledge about spontaneous or induced meaning making processes that pervade them. Furthermore, this approach would be able to stimulate the exploration of those experiential contexts-cultural, material and symbolic-within which new ways of expression, inhibition or neglect contaminate the meaning-making process. Beyond the approach chosen to explore the complexity of these experiences, a phenomenological paradigm will inform our analysis, based on the considerations that no event, experience or fact is evident to itself but rather is the outcome of a process in which noema and noesis are inseparable poles: noema mediates the intentional relation between the mental act (noesis) and the object; noema is the object as it is experienced by persons that pervade it with personal meaning-making process and by which they live their lives and give shape to their consciousness (Husserl, 2002, pp. 223-227). In addition, it is necessary to recognize that nobody can have access to the first-personal givenness of the lived experience: *