Schema Care Ethics: The Philosophy and Psychology of Caring Amidst Woundedness

This chapter examines Nel Noddings’s ethics of care, focusing on the problem of complicated care, such as when the cared-for refuses care or the one-caring is unable to respond due to emotional wounds in their own histories of caring. I bring this to dialogue with the psychology of the schema approach to build a “schema care ethics.” I begin with the radical relationality of schema therapy’s conceptualization of problems and needs. Then, I build on Noddings’s ideas of engrossment and motivational displacement with the schema ideas of limited reparenting and empathic confrontation. Further, I turn to the “wounded carer,” and how this affects the care process. Finally, these practical considerations build up to a final consideration of the philosophical ground of these two approaches in classical pragmatism and contextualism, allowing for a radical rethinking of what it means to care.