‘In The Hospital Where It Happened’: Existential reflections on being a therapist in the acute hospital setting during the pandemic and the relevance of Simone Weil’s thought on suffering

Abstract

This paper asks a key existential question: how, as existential practitioners, do we be ‘in the room’ with suffering? It is a question that reverberates through all time, from the story of Job through all the world’s wars and, more recently, in the worldwide pandemic. Supporting nurses in a so- called ‘safe’ room on a COVID ward, it arose for me in a new and more urgent way. I found myself turning to the writings of the French philosopher, Simone Weil (1909-1943) who sought to understand this most perplexing and distressing question.