Silja Samerski (*1970) began with her studies at the University of Tuebingen in philosophy and biology. She earned her undergraduate degree in the department of human genetics with a thesis in population biology. While working on the genetic make-up of Madagascar monkeys, she became keenkly aware of the ambiguity of technical language when it enters into everyday speech. Genetic and statistical terminology has a precise detonation for biologists. When, however, the same term appears as a part of ordinary conversations, it evokes innumerable connotations and becomes powerless to denote anything. This insight lead her to examine the havoc such escapees from the laboratory slang wreak in everyday language. What happens, for instance, to a pregnant women when a physician tells her fetus has a mutation F 508, and then goes on to explain the correlation of this genetic observation with the clinical diagnosis of Cystic Fibrosis?

In order to analyze the symbolic effect of professional consultations about technical and abstracts subjects Samerski recorded more than thirty genetic counseling sessions in three German locations. In these encounters, a physician specialized in genetics overwhelms a pregnant woman with textbook information and statistical tables. The geneticist embeds these technical fragments into an exhortation that challenges the pregnant woman to reach her own "decision", basing it on the information he has delivered. Inevitably, the demand to project such misplaced concretness unto the happening in her belly pushes the woman into troubling misapprehension. For her, a statical risk turns into a personal menace. And a "single base-pair alteration" at a defined DNA site sounds like an ominous prediction.

Through dialogue the woman is cajoled into accepting the "responsablility" for her further medical management. For no procedure could the medical system provide a compelling rationale. When the woman consents to opt betwen risk attributed by the professional to her pregnancy, inevitably she transforms her hoped-for child into an evaluated object whose existence depends on her cost-benefit analisys.

The transmogrification of a coming child into an object of choice ineluctably cripples the woman: her longing, vision and affections become student by her anxiety about risk figures. The predicament of these women made Samerski aware of analogous effects resulting from many other professional services rendered under the comforting euphemism of consueling - which car to buy, which career to pursue, which therapy to undergo.

In several years of collaboration with Barbara Duden and Ivan Illich, Samerski has prepared herself to explore the latent and symbolic functions of "context-sensitive" counseling.