Attachment Theory and Spirituality: Two Threads Converging in Palliative Care?

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 Introduction
The goal of palliative care is to improve the quality of life of terminally ill patients by preventing or relieving them from suffering. Relieving suffering does not only mean to insulate patients from physical pain. There are many more aspects which contribute to the patient’s wellbeing such as social, psychological, and spiritual support [1]. This is why palliative medicine has to take a multidisciplinary approach to patient care. In the present paper, two important concepts come into focus, both founding a multivariate understanding of the patient’s needs and challenges in the palliative situation: attachment theory and the concept of spirituality. Attachment Theory is a concept that is concerned with human relationship behavior in situations of loss, separation, or helplessness and can help to understand the patient’s behavior, needs, and challenges [2, 3]. The patient’s spirituality in health care and research is addressed by the field of Spiritual care. spiritual care is an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural discipline [4] in health care that scientifically addresses the spiritual and religious needs of patients and has become a part of medical care and education. Both concepts have been treated by palliative research in diverse the and multiform ways, as we will propound in the overview of research literature in the following section. But no effort has been made to integrate them into one theoretical framework in reference to the palliative context. The aim of this paper is to discuss the relevance of both concepts to palliative care, in order to develop a theoretical foundation for both aspects of the palliative situation.....