This e-book allows for a discovery of the complex character of pain. The publication is an invitation to an intellectual journey through a realm of difficult human feelings and experiences. Approached by representatives of numerous disciplines – medicine, physiotherapy, psychology, literature, philosophy, anthropology, history and others – the question of pain demonstrates its vast character and the variety of influence it has in human life. Pain turns out to be an experience that goes far beyond a merely physical aspect.

Some authors try to present the various attempts of facing the phenomenon of pain, experienced as a result of a dysfunction of the body.Others consider quite the opposite perspective on human pain, analysing different manifestations of self-harm. Their studies show a panorama of reasons for the self-infliction of pain, the complex reality of which regards issues of emotion, communication and may also reflect the presence of a transcendental dimension of human life.

Table of Contents

Introduction               

Nicola Lazenby and Andrzej Dańczak

Part 1   Confronting Pain

The Perceptual View of Pain: An Urgent Question in the Philosophy of Mind

Ana Oliveira Monteiro

What Do You Think about Your Body and Your Pain?: Social Representations of Rheumatic Disease in Adult Patients

Céu Sá and Abílio Oliveira

Pains and Perceptions as ‘Healing Reactions’ in an Alternative Medicine Centre

Răzvan Ionescu-Ţugui

Pain, Pain Management and the Wish to Hasten Death in Anna Quindlen’s One True Thing

Wouter Schrover

Temporality of the Dancing Body: Tears, Fears and Ageing Dears

Mark Edward and Helen Newall

Part 2   Communicating Pain

Qualitative Methods in Pain Research: Adequacy of the McGill Pain Questionnaire

Weronika Kałwak, Radosław Stupak and Alexandra Bochaver

Pain in-between Cultures: Eldercare and Filipina Migrant Workers in Israel

Keren Mazuz

‘Rhetorics of Pain’: A Transcultural History of Bodily Pain from 1760-1960

The Birkbeck Pain Project

Sites of Pain: Trauma, Landscape and Architecture in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz

Megan Jane Cawood

Once Upon a Time There Was a Story: Appeals to Affect in Remembering Pain

Nicola Lazenby

Staging the ‘C’ Word: Performativity of Pain and the ‘Recovery of Experience’ in Marianne Paget’s The Work of Talk

Virginia Dakari

Inhabiting Wounded Bodies 

Teresa Casal

(Dis)regarding the Pain of Others: Deirdre Madden’s Remembering Light and Stone

Zuzanna Sanches

Part 3   Self-Inflicted Pain

The Medicalization of Adolescent Emotional Distress: Conflicting Explanatory Models of Bodily Self-Harm

Lina Cristina Casadó i Marín

Images of Pain: Self-Injurers’ Reflections on Photos of Self-Injury

Hans T. Sternudd

Sublime Pain: A Study of Voluntary Pain Acceptance

Hadi Fayyaz

The Bearable Lightness of Pain: Crucifying Oneself in Pampanga   

Julius Bautista

The Practice of Mortification in XVII Century Italy: Battle or Equation?

Elena Bonesi

Part 4   Transformative Pain

Is Pain Only Bad? On the Ambiguous Value of Being in Pain

Julia Engels

A Constructive Pain-Involved World: Some Developments of John Hick’s Theodicy

Andrzej Dańczak

Where Do We Find Ourselves? The Experience of Pain in Emerson and Joyce

Marina Guiomar