Abstract

A correct reflection on psychological intervention referred to medically assisted voluntary death (MVMA) and its relationship with palliative care requires addressing some critical points. These include habeas corpus, understood as a constitutive element of everyone’s own and inalienable identity from which no norm, authentically based on respect for Universal Human Rights and the Italian Constitution, can derogate, in contrast to the rhetoric of the «slippery slope argument». The role of trust as social capital that individuals can rely on to make choices and act in care relationships is also considered, with particular reference to those in which the lack of a lexicon of grief produces as an outcome in one direction the self-isolation of the sufferer and in the other direction dynamics characterising it in relation to the terror of death. The authors also delve deeper into how spirituality and religiosity intervene in these horizons of reflection. Special prominence is given to the topic of the palliative psychologist’s competencies and the pathways that ensure their acquisition