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A review by e333mily
The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World by Elaine Scarry
3.0
“To have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.”
“Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.”
“For the person whose pain it is, it is "effortlessly" grasped (that is, even with the most heroic effort it cannot not be grasped); while for the person outside the sufferer's body, what is "effortless" is not grasping it (it is easy to remain wholly unaware of its existence; even with effort, one may remain in doubt about its existence or may retain the astonishing freedom of denying its existence; and, finally, if with the best effort of sustained attention one successfully apprehends it, the aversiveness of the "it" one apprehends will only be a shadowy fraction of the actual "it").”
“Because the existing vocabulary for pain contains only a small handful of adjectives, one passes through direct descriptions very quickly and…almost immediately encounters an "as if" structure: it feels as if….; it is as though.... On the other side of the ellipse there reappear again and again two and only two metaphors…The first specifies an external agent of the pain, a weapon that is pictured as producing the pain; and the second specifies bodily damage that is pictured as accompanying the pain. Thus a person may say, "It feels as though a hammer is coming down on my spine" even where there is no hammer; or "It feels as if my arm is broken at each joint and the jagged ends are sticking through the skin" even where the bones of the arms are intact and the surface of the skin is unbroken. Physical pain is not identical with (and often exists without) either agency or damage, but these things are referential; consequently we often call on them to convey the experience of the pain itself.”
“Insofar as an actual agent (a nail sticking into the bottom of the foot) and an imagined agent (a person's statement, "It feels as if there's a nail sticking into the bottom of my foot"') both convey something of the felt-experience of pain to someone outside the sufferer's body, they both do so for the same reason: in neither case is the nail identical with the sentient experience of pain; and yet because it has shape, length, and color, because it either exists (in the first case) or can be pictured as existing (in the second case) at the external boundary of the body, it begins to externalize, objectify, and make sharable what is originally an interior and unsharable experience. Both weapon (whether actual or imagined) and wound (whether actual or imagined) may be used associatively to express pain. To some extent the inner workings of the two metaphors, as well as the perceptual complications that attend their use, overlap because the second (bodily damage) sometimes occurs as a version of the first (agency). <b>The feeling of pain entails the feeling of being acted upon, and the person may either express this in terms of the world acting on him ("It feels like a knife...) or in terms of his own body acting on him ("It feels like the bones are cutting through...")</b>.”
“It is the intense pain that destroys a person's self and world, a destruction experienced spatially as either the contraction of the universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe. Intense pain is also language-destroying: as the content of one's world disintegrates, so the content of one's language disintegrates; as the self disintegrates, so that which would express and project the self is robbed of its source and its subject.”
“Regardless of the setting in which he suffers (home, hospital, or torture room), and regardless of the cause of his suffering (disease, burns, torture, or malfunctioning of the pain network itself), <b>the person in great pain experiences his own body as the agent of his agony. The ceaseless, self-announcing signal of the body in pain…contains not only the feeling "my body hurts"' but the feeling "my body hurts me."</b>.”
“Pain is a pure physical experience of negation, an immediate sensory rendering of "against," of something being against one, and of something one must be against. Even though it occurs within oneself, it is at once identified as "not oneself," "not me," as something so alien that it must right now be gotten rid of.”
“Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.”
“For the person whose pain it is, it is "effortlessly" grasped (that is, even with the most heroic effort it cannot not be grasped); while for the person outside the sufferer's body, what is "effortless" is not grasping it (it is easy to remain wholly unaware of its existence; even with effort, one may remain in doubt about its existence or may retain the astonishing freedom of denying its existence; and, finally, if with the best effort of sustained attention one successfully apprehends it, the aversiveness of the "it" one apprehends will only be a shadowy fraction of the actual "it").”
“Because the existing vocabulary for pain contains only a small handful of adjectives, one passes through direct descriptions very quickly and…almost immediately encounters an "as if" structure: it feels as if….; it is as though.... On the other side of the ellipse there reappear again and again two and only two metaphors…The first specifies an external agent of the pain, a weapon that is pictured as producing the pain; and the second specifies bodily damage that is pictured as accompanying the pain. Thus a person may say, "It feels as though a hammer is coming down on my spine" even where there is no hammer; or "It feels as if my arm is broken at each joint and the jagged ends are sticking through the skin" even where the bones of the arms are intact and the surface of the skin is unbroken. Physical pain is not identical with (and often exists without) either agency or damage, but these things are referential; consequently we often call on them to convey the experience of the pain itself.”
“Insofar as an actual agent (a nail sticking into the bottom of the foot) and an imagined agent (a person's statement, "It feels as if there's a nail sticking into the bottom of my foot"') both convey something of the felt-experience of pain to someone outside the sufferer's body, they both do so for the same reason: in neither case is the nail identical with the sentient experience of pain; and yet because it has shape, length, and color, because it either exists (in the first case) or can be pictured as existing (in the second case) at the external boundary of the body, it begins to externalize, objectify, and make sharable what is originally an interior and unsharable experience. Both weapon (whether actual or imagined) and wound (whether actual or imagined) may be used associatively to express pain. To some extent the inner workings of the two metaphors, as well as the perceptual complications that attend their use, overlap because the second (bodily damage) sometimes occurs as a version of the first (agency). <b>The feeling of pain entails the feeling of being acted upon, and the person may either express this in terms of the world acting on him ("It feels like a knife...) or in terms of his own body acting on him ("It feels like the bones are cutting through...")</b>.”
“It is the intense pain that destroys a person's self and world, a destruction experienced spatially as either the contraction of the universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe. Intense pain is also language-destroying: as the content of one's world disintegrates, so the content of one's language disintegrates; as the self disintegrates, so that which would express and project the self is robbed of its source and its subject.”
“Regardless of the setting in which he suffers (home, hospital, or torture room), and regardless of the cause of his suffering (disease, burns, torture, or malfunctioning of the pain network itself), <b>the person in great pain experiences his own body as the agent of his agony. The ceaseless, self-announcing signal of the body in pain…contains not only the feeling "my body hurts"' but the feeling "my body hurts me."</b>.”
“Pain is a pure physical experience of negation, an immediate sensory rendering of "against," of something being against one, and of something one must be against. Even though it occurs within oneself, it is at once identified as "not oneself," "not me," as something so alien that it must right now be gotten rid of.”