A Research of Clinical Sociology on the Process of Dying and Listening in the Terminal Care of Cancer Patients

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Terminal Care has become one of the important special fields of medical care. It makes out it's own subject of medical control as dying process. This Research investigates how terminal care makes out the dying process as social and psychological one and how it controls this process. It analyzes narratives of cancer patients in the terminal care settings and gets important findings. First, it makes clear the characteristics of the social relations of dying patients to doctors, nurses, families and other peoples. It discusses the way how dying patients cope with their identity crisis in front of death in the context of those social relations. Second, the listening by doctors, nurses and families has influence upon dying patients. It encourages them to accept their own death and to find the meanings of their own life. So dying process is normalized as ideal pattern, ‘good death', which is made by terminal care professionals. Third, dying patients can barely recognize their own individual death by narrating personal experiences. Doctors, nurses, families and other people, these listeners around dying patients have expectation of dying role in advance under the influence of psychological knowledge, typically the five stage model of Kubler=Ross. They fix their therapeutic gaze on the inner subjective worlds of dying patients by listening. The inner worlds of dying patients are cast by narrative-listening communication and controlled by medical care. The establishment of terminal care as special fields of medical care means further expansion of medicalization.