Abstract
In the twenty-first century, new forms of community in dementia are emerging. The existence of these communities challenges the individualisation of the self, which has come to characterise ‘person-centred’ approaches to dementia care over the past 30 years. In this article, an alternative approach (the inter-embodied self) is presented. This approach to promoting selfhood in dementia is based on the premise that the self is not an intrinsic aspect of embodied Being but is instead a transactive phenomenon, which exists in a perpetual state of becoming. As such, the primary goal of practitioners should not be the fixing, reviving or re-unifying of a pre-morbid self but, instead, enabling a rich and polyphonic montage of selves to emerge. Drawing on a short documentary film about experiences of friendship in dementia, the article concludes by highlighting the potential contribution of the inter-embodied self to contemporary dementia care.
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Notes
I am grateful to Dr Caroline Jenkins, Associate Professor, University of British Columbia, for this phrase.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Edinburgh University’s Chancellor’s Fellowship Scheme for providing me with the time to develop these ideas. I am also grateful to Dr Martyn Pickersgill, Dr Catriona Rooke, Dr Amy Chandler and Dr Neneh Rowar-Dewar from the Sociology of Health & Illness Writing Group for their advice, encouragement and support in developing this manuscript. I am also grateful to Dr Ruth Bartlett, University of Southampton, for her support and for allowing me to reproduce quotes from the film Agnes and Nancy (dir. Anne Milne).
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Jenkins, N. Dementia and the inter-embodied self. Soc Theory Health 12, 125–137 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/sth.2013.24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sth.2013.24