This article suggests that there may be profound obstacles to our capacity to work together effectively across professional or disciplinary boundaries. These problems are rooted in our love of ourselves and our professions and our dislike of those not like us, dynamics which are also central to the production of our positive professional identities. Such a thickly textured notion of professional identity is at odds with contemporary health and welfare policy trends which stress ‘role performance’ as the start and finish of professional activity. Such shallow concepts of identity are an affront to the real ethical difficulties facing us as we struggle to move beyond professional narcissism and engage with the different professional ‘other’.
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