The essay explores the concept of need as a key to the care relationship. Instead of the more common negative sense of need, such as lack, deficiency, difference from a standard, offers a positive sense: the need is the place of active processing of the world, of things and the other, in the search for meaning through which man seek to continually build their identity. In this perspective, the need is not so much the absence but especially the presence: distance, elaboration, motivation, creativity, imagination, towards themselves and towards others. The need is also: look beyond the existing, more than the already known, the already experienced.
