Beyond Acceptance: Recognition, Mortality, and Music Therapy in Oncological and Palliative Care

This essay investigates the conceptual limitations of acceptance and resilience within oncological and palliative care, proposing recognition as a more suitable existential category for understanding suffering in serious illness. Although acceptance and resilience are frequently utilised in psycho-oncological and clinical discourse as preferred coping and adaptation strategies, these concepts remain secondary; they characterise responses to suffering without adequately addressing the fundamental rupture from which suffering originates. In the context of life-threatening illness, suffering extends beyond symptom burden, uncertainty, or psychological distress, and is intensified by the immediate confrontation with finitude. In response, this essay develops the concept of recognition as the relational affirmation and preservation of personhood when illness threatens to reduce the patient to diagnosis, dependency, or dying. Drawing on Axel Honneth and adapting the concept of recognition to an existential-clinical context, this work contends that music therapy can serve as a concrete practice of recognition through musical address and attunement, memory and preference, and accompaniment at the end of life. The importance of music therapy in oncological and palliative care lies not only in its supportive and symptom-relieving functions but also in its ability to preserve personhood amid existential threat.