Fixing Identity by Denying Uniqueness: An Analysis of Professional Identity in Medicine |
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Authors: | Rachel Kaiser |
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Affiliation: | (1) Department of Family Medicine, University of California Irvine Medical Center, 101 City Drive South, Rte 81, Bldg 200, Suite 512, Orange, Irvine, California 92868, USA;(2) Georgetown University School of Medicine, Washington, DC, USA;(3) Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA |
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Abstract: | Cultural forces such as film create and reinforce rigidly-defined images of a doctor's identity for both the public and for medical students. The authoritarian and hierarchical institution of medical school also encourages students to adopt rigidly-defined professional identities. This restrictive identity helps to perpetuate the power of the patriarchy, limits uniqueness, squelches inquisitiveness, and damages one's self-confidence. This paper explores the construction of a physician's identity using cultural theorists' psychoanalytic analyses of gender and race as a framework of analysis. Cultural theorists' politically-motivated work provides an excellent point of departure for destabilizing parts of the authoritarian medical hierarchy that can damage a student's professional development. Drawing on such discourse, this paper examines the processes by which a doctor's identity becomes rigidly defined and fixed by daily training. It finally proposes a way for a medical student to extrapolate himself from the current definitions of this identity and create a broader, more malleable concept of professional identity by defining himself from outside of, rather than through, difference. |
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