EN
Antagonistic interactions in nature are treated as relations exerting an extremely negative impact on at least one of those involved. Built around tension and conflicts of interest, these interactions lead to force-based resolutions. It is remarkable that people in the present-day culture transpose rules governing these relations onto everyday life, especially when a new situation arises. Then, it is necessary to assign each participant a status and role within the hierarchy. In the paper entitled An Antagonistic Relationship in the Dentist’s Office. An Interdisciplinary Case Study Magdalena M. Jaroń undertakes an interdisciplinary study of this problem in the context of specific relations between dentists and patients. Her study is an attempt to redefine antagonism, and as such it is positioned firmly within the theme of dentophobia. However, the author proposes an alternative approach, rooted in philosophy which aims to provide other sciences (including psychology, psychiatry, and medicine) with new areas of research. Magdalena M. Jaroń’s paper provides the reader with an overview of the current literature on dentophobia, as it tries to examine the anxiety- driving factors and suggest specific treatment or periprocedural elements which should be reduced. As it turns out, the research in this area has for years delivered unchanged findings, with the dentist’s office always characterized primarily by the „pain” (fear)/ „no pain” (expectation) dichotomy. The author points out that the nature of an antagonistic relation is not defined solely by how the people involved perceive it. It is the proper course of that relation that solidifies the relative positions of actors in that relation. A very specific conclusion follows: it is not the „pain” (understood as fear) or „no pain” (understood as expectation) that determine the severity of phobias, but what happens „in-between”, what fills the space of an antagonistic interaction between these two opposites. By specifying this tension in more detail, it is possible to ease the transition between the components that are contradictory. For this reason, the interdisciplinary attempt to extract antagonisms such as: sender-recipient, message-noise, chaos-order, patient- doctor, etc. from a communicative situation, constitutes a brand new cultural approach to dentophobia.