Creative enquiry and the clinical encounter

> ‘Across the bay I heard the surgeon ask about the decorative button sewn delicately onto a night gown allowing access to the wound where a breast once was. He tried to garner interest from the anaesthetist in the family story of the button’s creation. I breathed in the humanity as I waited for him to come round to me with news of my op.’ > > (Louise Younie, cancer experience reflection, 2019) The clinical encounter sits at the heart of all medical practice. This may be a place of short exchanges, evaluation, and explanation. It may also be a sacred place of hope or despair, a liminal space that sits somewhere between life and death, a sharing of vitality, fragility, and mortality.1 The complexity and wonder of the individual patient encounter should not be underestimated. A collision of two — sometimes more — diverse universes of lived experience, seeking, in a short space and time, to work together on some of the most life-defining, world-fracturing experiences that patients go through. In this article we consider the ‘selves’ present in the clinical encounter2 and how creative enquiry can help to open up the space in-between, a space that is owned by neither but which might be shaped by both.3 Winnicott4 has termed this space ‘the third space’, within which the contours of self and the other might be perceived, where mutual assertion and recognition might lead to the emergence of meaning and fresh perspectives.3 Attending to this in-between space …