Book Summary and Reflection: The Phenomenology of Pain by Saulius Geniusas
Book Summary and Reflection: The Phenomenology of Pain by Saulius Geniusas(1)
I. Introduction
The intention of the book is to explore what is pain. Many scholars explore pain from a biological or naturalist view that cannot fully explain what is pain. In this book, the writer reminds us that pain is more than that, it is an experience, and only in this sense that pain can be understood. When pain is treated as an experience, we will have to investigate how the experience of pain originates and how it develops.
To explore an experience, phenomenology is the most suitable methodology. Phenomenology involves putting alongside the previous knowledge/assumptions of the experience (epoch), and explore all the possibilities and variations of the experience via description to arrive at eidetic variations and factual variations (i.e. examples taken from the real world). Generalizing the variations (an interpretive process) will arrive at genetic phenomenology which can cover the diachronic experience and intention and unveil the content of universal transcendental experience.
II. Origination and Properties of Pain
Pain originates as a rupture in the field of experience that unsettles one's natural absorption in the world of beings. Pain can be a conceptual apperception as well as an affective apperception(2).
In the book, the writer summarizes the properties of pain below:
1. Pain is a non-intentional feeling sensation that contains experiential and affective content.
2. Pain is an intentional feeling that is consciousof something
3. Pain can be only given in a first-hand experience
4. Pain is fundamentally aversive.
5. Pain has a unique experiential quality.
6. Pain is an original experience
7. Pain is localized in the body
For points 3 to 7, it is not difficult to understand. However, points 1 and 2 are quite difficult to understand so I will briefly discuss them.
III. Non-intentionality of Pain
Pain has no referential content (not pointing to an object) (in some cases) and it does not share the same structure with other kinds of intentional consciousness. It has thus no intentional content as pain is irreal, although it is not given in consciousness but appears to consciousness.
In an extreme case, the disruptive effects empty consciousness of any intentional content language used to describe the pain. Furthermore, the description of feeling pain has to render to other objects (e.g. the pain is like being stabbed, the pain is like being burnt, etc.) so it means pain is not an object and is not referential to any objects.
Instead, pain is more of a sensation that consists of real experiential content that is immanently given to consciousness.
IV. Pain As An Intentional Feeling
According to the Logical Investigations of Husserl, experience obtains intentional character by means of "apprehension", "interpretation" or "animation" which bestows sense upon the real content of consciousness. Apprehension doesn't transform either sensations/acts of apprehension into objects of consciousness. Rather, through apprehension, consciousness reinterprets its own sensations as particular acts that are intentionally directed at their intention correlate (3). Husserl suggests there is a group of essentially intentional feelings, i.e. feeling acts. For instance, he thinks that pleasure without anything pleasant is unthinkable.
A feeling has two types, one is ascribing feeling based on objects (intentional feeling) and another one is ascribing feeling to the subject of experience (non-intentional feeling). The notion of pain is thus equivocal as it is both conceived as a feeling sensation and as an intentional experience (i.e. sensation is transformed into an intentional object of experience, e.g. when I touch a glass cup at dark, I can recognize it is a glass cup).
To conclude, pain is a complex structured experience that the sensory experience is the foundation, and the intentional experience transfers the sensation into an intentional object. We may recall that pain sometimes minor pain lives in the background and arises when we turn to it and reflect on it. Even if we are not fully aware of its existence, pain marks cloud every object of experience.
V. The Phenomenology of Pain Dissociation Syndromes
Patients who undertake brain surgery (Lobotomy & Cingulotomy) to remove the pain-relevant part of the brain don't feel pain anymore. Even if they take pills to help them feel pain, the pain does not trouble them anymore.
Another pain dissociation syndrome is hypersymbolia. Patients are suffering from painful experiences in the numbs part of their bodies when they visually identify a threat only to their bodies. Here, we can observe that anticipation plays a role in the experience (i.e. a relation between psychology and psychophysics)
VI. Pain and Temporality
Pain is an original experience that is given to the subject immanently, a reproductive experience pain is produced when one imagines the experience in an "as-if" condition/environment.
Pain as an experience poses a different temporality than the objective time. Time is inflexible and unyielding that we can classify pain as transient (short) pain, acute pain (linger until healed and chronic pain (lingering even after healing. While the subjective temporality of people in pain is more or less extended/contracted no matter which type of pain a person is undergoing. The living present (subjective temporality) of a person doesn't belong to the time (objective), rather time is constituted in the living present.
Husserl identifies the streaming consciousness as the primal phenomenon and often refers to it as the "phenomenon of all phenomenons". Everything that is given, is given only in so far as it gives itself in the streaming consciousness that is constituted by the past, present and projection in the future. Therefore, everything that has meaning for me has its meaning in the streaming consciousness.
With the constitution of the past and future as independent temporal fields, we transit from the constitution of subjective presence to the constitution of subjective temporality, conceived of as a synthetic unity of subjectively lived past, present and future.
VII. Pain and the Life-World: Somatization and Psychologization
There is a conflict between the implicit and the explicit experience of the present as pain being felt does not necessarily mean the feeling of pain is being explicitly conscious. Pain can be lived on three different experiential levels: Noematic level, co-attention level and in-attention level. Noematic level is correlated with what is experienced thematically, co-attention level is correlated with co-presence and in-attention is correlated with the peripheral horizon. (Supposedly, a pain of higher intensity will occupy more noematic level but not all the cases, e.g. depressed/hypnoetic patient)
In an extreme case of high-intensity of pain, one falls into the explicit temporality of pain which he concentrates exclusively on focal pain. The emergency of focal pain is often experienced as a breach that survives different temporal fields, that is focal pain is experienced as disconnected from the painless past and painless future, one now lives as infinite sameness that cut away from other temporal fields. In this case, pain obliterates the objective time.
Explicit temporality/memory functions as a specific kind of objectification, that exemplifies how the present reaches the past. While implicit memory marks how the consciousness of the past can determine the present that it exemplifies how the past reaches the present. Explicit anticipation has a terminus from which in the present and its terminus goal in the future. Implicit anticipation originates in the future and culminates in the present. (i.e. the distressing occurrence one anticipates in the future is transferred into the field of presence and lived as a bodily pain)
The temporality properties of pain allow pains to unfold on the horizon of the life world so the mental part of the sufferer affects the physical body of the sufferers, and in return. If there is a divergence between what the sufferer experiences and how he understands/interprets/ qualifies his experience, somatization and psychologization arise. Pain involves emphasis, expression, interpretation, transformation and denial, although not all cases involve all elements, the unbalance/divergence between elements may result in somatization and psychologization. In somatization, the sufferer identifies his sufferings as organic, while in psychological, the sufferer identifies his sufferings as inorganic.
Almost as a rule, pain is neither purely physiological nor purely psychological. Pain is a mosaic of physiological, psychic, cultural, historical and social factors, that unify in the framework of personal meaning. With reference to Husserl's world of horizon, one has a would consituted by four levels: the primordial level (correlated to one's experience), homeworld level (intersubjective) , alien world level (inconcordant experience) and objective world level in an ascending order. While if the experiences of oneself cannot harmonize with each other, that's where somatization and psychologization arises. In this inconcordant situation arises, listening can be a curative measure which allow patients to sastify his need of being understood. Although the patient may excaberate his own story, the objectivity in the phenomenological method can allow the patient to understand his subjectivites.
Footnotes
(1) The Phenomenology of Pain (Series In Continental Thought), Saulius Geniusas, Ohio University Press, 2020
(2) From Oxford Dictionary: the mental process by which a person makes sense of an idea by assimilating it to the body of ideas he or she already possesses.
(3) Principle 15 of Fifth Investigations is referred
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