Prologue

The Introduction explains the overall project and focuses on the question ‘What is it to be human?’. Rationality, language, self-awareness, self-knowledge, and moral sense have been indicated as the distinctive features of being human. In this book, I will build on and develop the assumption that to be human means to be in dialogue. Dialogue is a unitary concept that will guide me in attempting to address in a coherent way three essential issues for clinical practice: ‘What is a human being?’, ‘What is mental pathology?’, and ‘What is care?’. I will argue that to be human means to be in dialogue with alterity, that mental pathology is the outcome of a crisis of one’s dialogue with alterity, and that care is a method wherein dialogues take place whose aim is to re-enact interrupted dialogue with alterity within oneself and with the external world.