Emotional Pain And Suffering Overtime: A Review
- February 24, 2022
- Posted by: rsispostadmin
- Categories: IJRISS, Social Science
International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume VI, Issue II, February 2022 | ISSN 2454–6186
Emotional Pain And Suffering Overtime: A Review
Meghna Sandhir
Junior Research Fellow, Anthropological Survey of India, Eastern Regional Centre, Kolkata, India
Abstract
Pain, it stays, it is perceived in the mind and echoes in the body! But it stays. Pain experiences are considered and stimulated to differently by different people; it is used conceptually to define the subjective experience entitled to a particular human. It encompasses the beliefs, meanings and understandings lead by the society. Pain as is described by many has a definitional controversy; it is defined as a feeling, a symptom, a reaction, or may be an emotion. There seem to be different patterns in reacting to pain, depending on situations and circumstances. The major influence is that of culture. Mark Zborowski remarked how physical sensation of pain is often interpreted differently by members of different cultures. The following essay elaborately talks of how time plays its effortless and sometimes not so effortless spree on the emotions and suffering that one experiences. To concisely present the concept of pain, the main role of the below discussion is to deconstruct/ reconstruct the objectivity of pain, what about emotional pain and suffering can we conclude? to explore life’s varied losses in a manner…more about embracing than bracing against…? What if we trust that the dark nights of our souls are essential to our growth, that spiritual maturity cannot be attained without them? In this lifelong journey, we will carry emotional pain and suffering. This is a given. But carrying emotional pain and suffering can lead to transformation. And that is good news .
“Following Wittgenstein, this manner of conceptualizing the puzzle of pain frees us from thinking that statements about pain are in the nature of questions about certainty or doubt over our own pain or that of others. Instead, we begin to think of pain as acknowledgment and recognition; denial of the other’s pain is not about the failings of the intellect but the failings of the spirit. In the register of the imaginary, the pain of the other not only asks for a home in language, but also seeks a home in the body” (Das, 2007:57).
Chronic pain is multifactorial, a compilation of interplaying factors, a pattern of the mind and a replay of a cognitive framework. In this essay we attempt to comprehend the sufferer’s world, moving beyond the notion of acute and chronic physical pain and concentrating on mental pain and suffering. It is often observed that individuals often merge the two while narrating their disease, and do not openly consider sharing their experience. Medicine as a social institution throughout human history has focused on understanding the experiences of suffering (overwhelming somatic pain or disease and its anticipation and other types of serious distress resulting in the socio-moral framework) and facilitating healing (building significance and value for one’s experiences in the face of suffering). (Priya, 2012:211-213).
The period of the 1960-1970 is marked by an interpretive turn in social sciences, the seeds of such a paradigm shift in medicine and in the study of health and illness experiences in social sciences were sown by scholars such as Leon Eisenberg, Arthur Kleinman and George L. Engel. While Eisenberg (1977) focused on the need to study the socio- culturally contextualized experiences of illness, Kleinman (1973) drew our attention to the need to “conceive of medical systems as existing within and themselves shaping a socially and culturally constructed space” in line with Berger and Luckmann’s(1967) thesis of reality as social construction. During the same period, Engel (1977) proposed a biopsychosocial model as a viable alternative for the reductionist biomedical model (Priya, 2012:211-213).
With the help of a critical review of literature on the phenomena of human suffering and healing, this chapter is an attempt to highlight how the assumptions of social constructionist paradigm provide a theoretical foundation for a meaningful understanding of such human experience in their varied contexts.
