 Complaining about chronic painRobert Kugelmann Social Science & Medicine, 1999, vol. 49, issue 12, 1663-1676 Abstract: This paper examines how a group of working class people describes and experiences chronic pain. This hermeneutical-phenomenological study concentrates on the lived body of pain from three perspectives, drawing on interviews with 14 people who were attending a pain management program. First I consider the terms in which pain is circumscribed in the narratives, stories told in the context of learning to manage pain. These terms are polarities, ways of specifying and legitimating pain in relation to "mind" and "body." Pain, in the discursive polarities that define it, is the private property of an individual, who must in some fashion prove that pain exists in an objective manner. The speaker, in this discourse, stands as the one responsible for the production of pain. In the second part, the analysis turns to what this discourse reveals about pain as a lived body phenomenon. Here the analysis centers upon the torment of having to inhabit the intolerable, upon how pain unmakes the lifeworld of the sufferer, and how, simultaneously, people make pain. The place of pain is the body, as body-in-place. The place of pain is at the boundaries of human dwelling, a kind of non-place, expressed metaphorically as "prison" or "homelessness." Finally, after these considerations of how pain is described, in part three, I turn to the act of "saying" pain, that is, to the narratives as addressed to someone else. The participants were not simply dispensing information; they were saying something to me. The narratives had the form of complaints. The form of the narratives, in the context of the pain program, was a quasi-legal call to rectify wrongs. Keywords: Chronic; pain; Phenomenology; Mind-body; dualism; Stress; Narratives (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:49:y:1999:i:12:p:1663-1676 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.