Power and pain: The location of pain and fear in dentistry and the creation of a dental subject

Sarah Nettleton

Social Science & Medicine, 1989, vol. 29, issue 10, 1183-1190

Abstract: It has been argued that the meaning of pain in childbirth and in general medicine has changed and that this change was part of a cognitive transformation that occurred in medicine during the post World War II period. This paper uses Foucault's notion of the gaze and his unique conception of power to explore the extent to which the understanding of pain, and the associated concept of fear, in dentistry, reflects those understandings found in medicine and obstetrics. Within the discourse of dentistry the conception of pain is both object and effect of the profession's techniques of observation and analysis. Analyses of pain and fear occurred on two levels: the micro-level of the individual and the macro-level of the population. The examples of the case history and the epidemiological survey are used to demonstrate these two levels of power/knowledge. The first technique contributed to the constitution of the psychological space, the second technique confirmed the social space. Within these spatialisations new conceptualisations of pain were realised and a subjective dental subject was manufactured. The findings of this paper add weight to the thesis that the functioning of power/knowledge transcends professional and disciplinary boundaries and is a process which is far more subtle and fundamental than one of political manoeuverings by interested groups or individuals or the accumulation of an increasingly sophisticated knowledge.

Keywords: dentistry; pain; fear; power/knowledge (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1989
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