The Culture of PainThis 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. |
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American analgesic ancient Aristotle BEAUTY AND AFFLICTION behavior body Book of Job boxing brain called century chronic pain comic couvade Crue culture death describes doctors Don Quixote Duras emotional example fact feel Frankl Freud FUTURE OF PAIN Greek Gutierrez human hysteria hysterical illness INVISIBLE EPIDEMIC Ivan Ilych Joyce Carol Oates language Laocoön laughter libertine LIVING PAIN Marguerite Duras MARQUIS DE SADE MEANINGS OF PAIN medicine mind modern MYSTERY OR PUZZLE nerve nineteenth-century NOTES TO PAGES Oates organic model pain clinic PAIN OF COMEDY PAINFUL PLEASURES patients Philoctetes philosophers physician POLITICS OF SUFFERING postmodern punishment question Ronald Melzack Sade's Sadean satire Sebastian seems Selzer sense sexual simply social soul spirit symptoms torture traditional tragedy TRAGIC PAIN trans treatment truth twilight sleep understanding University Press VISIONARY PAIN vols Werther woman women wound writes York