The Culture of PainUniversity of California Press, 1991 M09 9 - 354 pages This is a book about the meanings we make out of pain. The greatest surprise I encountered in discussing this topic over the past ten years was the consistency with which I was asked a single unvarying question: Are you writing about physical pain or mental pain? The overwhelming consistency of this response convinces me that modern culture rests upon and underlying belief so strong that it grips us with the force of a founding myth. Call it the Myth of Two Pains. We live in an era when many people believe--as a basic, unexamined foundation of thought--that pain comes divided into separate types: physical and mental. These two types of pain, so the myth goes, are as different as land and sea. You feel physical pain if your arm breaks, and you feel mental pain if your heart breaks. Between these two different events we seem to imagine a gulf so wide and deep that it might as well be filled by a sea that is impossible to navigate. |
Contents
| 9 | |
THE MEANINGS OF PAIN | 31 |
AN INVISIBLE EPIDEMIC | 57 |
THE PAIN OF COMEDY | 79 |
HYSTERIA PAIN AND GENDER | 103 |
VISIONARY PAIN AND THE POLITICS OF SUFFERING | 125 |
PAIN IS ALWAYS IN YOUR HEAD | 152 |
THE USES OF PAIN | 174 |
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Common terms and phrases
acute pain American analgesic ancient Aristotle BEAUTY AND AFFLICTION behavior body Book of Job boxing brain called century chronic pain comic couvade Crue culture death describes disease doctors Don Quixote Duras effect emotional example explains fact feel Frankl FUTURE OF PAIN Greek Gutierrez human hysteria hysterical illness impulses INVISIBLE EPIDEMIC Ivan Ilych Joyce Carol Oates language Laocoön laughter less libertine LIVING PAIN Marguerite Duras MARQUIS DE SADE MEANINGS OF PAIN medicine mind modern MYSTERY OR PUZZLE nerve nineteenth-century normal NOTES TO PAGES Oates organic model pain clinic PAIN OF COMEDY PAINFUL PLEASURES patients Philoctetes physician POLITICS OF SUFFERING postmodern punishment question Ronald Melzack Sade's Sadean Sebastian seems Selzer sense sexual simply social soul spirit symptoms torture traditional tragedy TRAGIC PAIN trans treatment truth understanding University Press VISIONARY PAIN Werther woman women wound writes York
Popular passages
Page 15 - Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.
Page 16 - An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage'.