ABSTRACT
Throughout this study, particular attention has been given to the context of the lived experience of clinically inflicted pain. Inflicted pain is unique in the extent to which it merges subject and context. Nurses, normally an element of the patient’s situation, become the ones who control the cause of the pain—its onset, continuation and termination. Yet at the same time, whether or not they wish it, they are excluded from entering into a direct experience of that pain. Despite their physical closeness and the sharing in the tactile encounter during which pain is generated, patients and nurses inhabit different lifeworlds and so apprehend inflicted pain from very different perspectives. Phenomenology stresses the inherent uniqueness in how people experience their own bodies, which is different from how they experience external objects, including others’ bodies. In the words of Scarry (1985, p. 13), “To have pain is to have certainty, to hear about pain is to have doubt.” The worlds of patients and nurses are separated by a gulf of embodied experience, yet they are also inextricably linked.
