Care, self-care and caring for yourself: a paradigmatic understanding thought for nursing care

Abstract

This article presents a reflection about care, self-care and caring for oneself and establishes these issues' relations with the paradigms of totality and simultaneity. On the first part of the text, care and its general aspects are contextualized; the second part discusses about care in Martin Heidegger's philosophical perspective; the third part explores self-care on Dorothea Orem's conception; the fourth part considers Michel Foucault's care of oneself. And finally, the fifth part aims to establish the relationship between the concepts of self-care and care of oneself, and the totality and simultaneity paradigms. Self-care and care of oneself are connected to the objectivism of the totality, and to the subjectivism of the simultaneity. These subjects lead nursing to comprehend such paradigmatic inheritance and its implications on the nursing care.