[Specificity of the psychological undertaking of a patient in thoracic oncology]

The question raised by the title calls for a balanced answer. As a matter of fact, like in many clinical situations in which an illness threatens the patient's survival, the singularity of each case makes any attempt of generalization simplistic. Writing about the speficity of the psychological undertaking in thoracic oncology has to avoid two pitfalls: denying any psychosociological specificity of thoracic cancerology, and thus not providing the reader's understanding with anything which could help them read the most frequent problematics. And secondly turn clinical qualitative data into generalities stuck on each case, and rejecting the singularity of the sick person as a subject. As we attempt to avoid both traps, the three next points will be tackled: the announcement of cancer is prototypical of a trauma, and calls up an intense affect of anguish. This affect can be read through social representations, which intervene within the exchange doctor - sick person. The subjectivation of this relation cannot be understood without taking the environment into account, and especially what the affected person knows about cancer owing to their belonging to a socius. In the traumatic atmosphere thus created, the rereading of the phenomenons - cropping up between a somatic symptom experienced by the patient and a traumatic language revolving around the compulsory term "cancer" - is achieved according recurrent thematic lines. As we do not wish to reach the exhaustiveness of the significant unities, neither their reassembly, we will limit ourselves to the development of one main line: that of the relation to time, to temporality, and to presentism.