A review by bluejayreads
Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul by Ariel Glucklich

3.75

This book is very dense. It is incredibly interesting, as well - Ariel makes some intriguing points about the uses of pain in religious and ritual contexts, and his history of how conceptions of pain changed with the advancement of medical science from something inevitable, beneficial, and sometimes even desirable to something injurious, damaging, and to be removed at all costs was fascinating. However, I have two general criticisms. One is that it has a general air of being outdated, some of which probably has to do with the book being published in 2001, and some of it had to do with its weird overreliance on Jungian psychology in the early chapters - I studied psychology in college and I only heard Jung's methods brought up in discussions of the history of the field, so reliance on it as an actual analytical and interpretave paradigm felt very outdated to me. Second, it was incredibly dense in places. This isn't necessarily a problem with the book per se, as I'm pretty sure it was written by an academic for academics. However, in between intriguing ideas and vivid descriptions of historical uses and experiences of pain, there were long, dense sections about neurology, biology, and the neruobiological effects of pain and feelings about pain, and my eyes definitely glazed over several times. It does make some really interesting points and is solid overall, but be prepared going in for it to be pretty dense (and full of vivid and detailed descriptions of torture, medical content, injuries, and pain of all kinds). 
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