While cancer care is expanding in scope and complexity, the meaning of care often remains reduced to institutional routines and clinical interventions. This PhD project explores how people diagnosed with cancer experience care, aiming to get a deeper and broader understanding of care as an emotional, relational and embodied human phenomenon.
Drawing on hermeneutic-phenomenology and a psychosocial framework, the study uses the Biographic Narrative Interpretive Method (BNIM) to generate in-depth life stories from eight participants aged 27-82, with different diagnoses, prognoses and life circumstances, and at different stages of the cancer care trajectory. Their narratives offer a rich insight into how care is lived, longed for, or missed.
Data interpretation is informed by Bion’s concept of containment, Winnicott’s notion of the holding environment, and Hollway’s capacity to care. Preliminary findings suggest that care cannot be reduced to a standardized experience but emerges through emotionally attuned and relationally grounded encounters. A recurring theme across the narratives is the presence or absence of motherly care, often surfacing as memory, loss, or longing, and the deep human need to be held.
These findings invite a more nuanced understanding of cancer care, one that moves beyond intervention and delivery models toward appreciation of care as a complex, relational and emotionally situated experience. Rather than prescribing what care should be, the study opens space for perspectives on how care is felt, remembered, expressed and made possible, or impossible – within different lives, contexts, and encounters across the lifespan.