Antropologia medica e relazionalità emergente nella pratica clinica

This article, situated at the intersection of medical anthropology, philosophy, and clinical practice, argues that the therapeutic efficacy of medicine cannot be fully understood in terms of deliberate actions, technical procedures, or individual agency alone. Starting from Irvin Yalom’s claim that the real agent of change in therapy is the relationship itself, the author challenges dominant biomedical models that conceive the doctor–patient relationship as a controlled, intentional process. Instead, the article proposes understanding clinical encounters as relational events in which therapeutic effects emerge at a pre-intentional and often unthematized level. Drawing on empirical research from placebo studies, particularly Fabrizio Benedetti’s work on the neurophysiology of the doctor–patient relationship, the article shows how expectations, trust, and implicit communication can activate biological mechanisms influencing clinical outcomes independently of specific treatments. These findings support a non-linear view of causality, where the relationship functions as a dynamic context that modulates therapeutic effects. The theoretical core of the article is developed through a phenomenological reading of Edmund Husserl, especially his concept of the “unity of the field” and passive synthesis. This framework allows the author to describe the clinical encounter as a structured experiential field that precedes and orients intentional acts. From this perspective, care is not merely something the physician does to the patient, but something that happens between them, as an emergent, embodied, and relational process