Pain and bodily care: Whose body matters (original) (raw)
Related papers
This is a working paper, as you can see from the notes to myself in the text. The next phase of developing these thoughts is to work further on the paradoxical conclusion of this version. This may turn out to be a book chapter.
The aim of this article is to explore nuances within the field of bodily self-awareness. My starting-point is phenomenological. I focus on how the subject experiences her or his body, i.e. how the body stands forth to the subject. I build on the phenomenologist Drew Leder’s distinction between bodily dis-appearance and dysappearance. In bodily dis-appearance, I am only prereflectively aware of my body. My body is not a thematic object of my experience. Bodily dys-appearance takes place when the body appears to me as ‘‘ill’’ or ‘‘bad.’’ This is often the case when I experience pain or illness. Here, I will examine three versions of bodily dys-appearance. Whereas many phenomenological studies have explored cases of bodily dys-appearance, few studies have focused on the opposite of bodily dys-appearance, i.e. on bodily modes of being where the body appears to the subject as something good, easy or well. This is done in this article. When the body stands forth as good, easy or well to the subject, I suggest that the body eu-appears to this person. The analysis of eu-appearance shows that the subject can attend to her or his body as something positive and that this attention need not result in discomfort or alienation. Euappearance can take place in physical exercise, in sexual pleasure and in some cases of wanted pregnancies. I also discuss, briefly, the case of masochism.
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2011
Pain, crucially, is unpleasant and motivational. It can be awful; and it drives us to action, e.g. to take our weight off a sprained ankle. But what is the relationship between pain and those two features? And in virtue of what does pain have them? Addressing these questions, Colin Klein and Richard J. Hall have recently developed the idea that pains are, at least partly, experiential commands—to stop placing your weight on your ankle, for example. In this paper, I reject their accounts. Against Klein, I use dissociation cases to argue that possession of ‘imperative content’ cannot wholly constitute pain. Against them both, I further claim that possession of such content cannot even constitute pain’s unpleasant, motivational aspect. For, even if it were possible to specify the relevant imperative content—which is far from clear—the idea of a command cannot bear the explanatory weight Klein and Hall place on it.
The Legitimacy of Pain as an Object of Study
Advances in Applied Sociology, 2022
Pain, as a multidimensional phenomenon, must be tackled from different perspectives. The sociological perspective is one of the less frequent approaches in the bibliography. The main results of a pioneering study about the social legitimacy of pain are set forth in this paper, analyzing citizens' pain today, the feelings it causes in them, the type of pain they suffer, and how this type of pain has an influence on the perception of their own pain and that of others. A quantitative design was adopted, through a cross-sectional survey of general population living in Spain (n = 1600) conducted online in 2021. The results point out that a high percentage of citizens were in pain when they took the survey, even if they stated that they were in good health. In general, feeling pain means having a worse quality of life. Having pain of a psychological origin involves higher levels of shame or guilt, as well as the feeling of being judged by others, than the other types of pain. The pain caused by cancer is the one with the highest social support, followed by the grief caused by the death of a loved one, while the pain with the lowest support is the one caused by alcoholism or obesity. Feeling that one's pain is understood and legitimized by others is fundamental to being able to face it, that is why it is important to carry out studies analyzing pain from this perspective.
The Philosophy of Pain - Introduction
Forthcoming in The Philosophy of Pain, edited by D. Bain, M. Brady, and J. Corns. London: Routledge
Over recent decades, pain has received increasing attention as – with ever greater sophistication and rigour – theorists have tried to answer the deep and difficult questions it poses. What is pain’s nature? What is its point? In what sense is it bad? The papers collected in this volume are a contribution to that effort ...
2005
When my wife was pregnant, our birthing coach asked the class " What is pain? " I thought I might finally get to display some of my philosophical training, but alas, the correct answer was: " Pain is whatever she says it is. " The coach's " sufferercentric " definition echoes the one offered by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP)— " Pain is always subjective " —as well as the definition of pain offered by the philosopher Saul Kripke in his argument against identity theory— " Pain. .. is picked out by the property of being pain itself, by its immediate phenomenological quality " (1972/1980, p. 152). These subjective conceptions of pain pose problems for the scientific study of pain, as Price and Aydede point out in the introduction of their chapter. If the essence of pain is its phenomenological quality, then it seems the only way to study it directly is through introspection and subjects' verbal reports...
The subject’s relationship with pain and its impact on identity and existence
2012
What is pain, what does it mean that the subject has a relationship with it, and how does this affect his identity and existence? My definition of pain is derived from that proposed by scientists such as Melzack and Wall, and Freud. Pain is a dynamic, multilayered, diverse collection of experiences which impact and influence the subject throughout life. Pain is a kind of conglomerate of past, traumatic, neurobiological, psychological and emotional imprints-pain as in suffering or being in pain. The aim of this thesis is to argue that it is not pain, as such, but the relationship of the subject to (his/her) pain which is most significant to his/her processes of life. In examining the combination of two theories of pain, namely, Freud's psychosexual theory of development and Melzack's theory of the Neuromatrix, my thesis endeavours to evidence my theory by using case study methodology. The similarities in the theories which are a hundred years apart have sparked my interest to propose that there is the distinct possibility for the existence of what I have named a Psychomatrix-patterns of pain (loss-abandonment, grief, rejection, desire) imprinted from infancy within an innate matrix that are specifically translated by their own 'psychological and emotional neural loops' and therefore, similar to the neuromatrix concept. As pain is triggered these 'loops' become more ingrained as information is analysed and coded to create a continuous (subjective) experience of suffering or being in pain. This is also true for positive emotions, such as love and joy, however I suggest that pain is the primary, and most significant emotion that needs to be understood in order to understand the others which are triggered by the same neuralpsychological and physicalpathways as incidental emotions of the quality of existence. A vast spectrum of (on-going) research has identified the impact of cultural, religious, social and political factors on pain and pain management. I suggest that all of these figure in the conglomerate. Using a psychoanalytical frame of reference this is a theoretical and conceptual thesis. My final conclusion is that pain becomes an object that compels the subject to respond accordingly and consequently, from birth to death, defining his/her identity and existence.
Pain as a Secondary Quality: A Phenomenological Approach
Problemos, 2023
This work proposes that pain meets the requirements of being characterized as a secondary quality, as it covers, like a color, a determined extension. The argument seeks to establish a literal pain-color analogy through an inquiry into the intensity and location of the pain. From the classic intensity/location relationship reported by patients with acute appendicitis, three degrees of pain are distinguished: mild, moderate, and severe. The objective is only achieved by examining the Body's extensional determinations (primary quality) insofar as each of these degrees of pain covers three particular measures. Once these three measures have been explored according to the perforation process (tissue damage), the work ends by identifying pain as a transcendent moment.