ABSTRACT
In many cultures, the experience of pain has been treated as the central and most intense passion. 1 Accordingly, the very word passion derives from the Latin pati which denotes ‘suffering’. In a Christian context, passion usually designates the Crucifixion, and the pain experienced by Jesus on the cross has often been described as the most intense feeling that ever was felt. 2 And even if pain’s status as the most intense feeling is contested, at least it is quite consistently seen as the most incontestable, basic one: One can doubt the nature of most other passions, but one cannot doubt being in pain. Pain is therefore often treated as an infallible index of reality (as in the saying ‘Pinch me, I think I’m dreaming’). Pain in that function allows us to orient ourselves within the world, it advises us not to bump into things and not to put our hands into the fire. As long as it is able to fulfil that function, it’s an inherent component of the ways in which we ‘make sense’ of our environment; for in this function, pain is able to signify something beyond itself, for example, it may point to a demand for an action, such as a retreat, or for a determinate object, such as food or medicine, or it may be interpreted as a punishment for a transgression or a mistake that in the future must be avoided. In this function, pain hovers threateningly at the borders of our symbolic world, tracing its contours, but also exceeding them. For intense and lasting pain, particularly voluntarily inflicted pain, does not keep within these symbolic limits and tends to grind its sufferers down, shattering their image of themselves and the world. Pain is then experienced as an overdose of palpable reality which destroys the very coherence of this same reality from within. Traumatic pain will be experienced as ‘inexpressible’; it can’t be put into words and thus may trigger a loss of confidence into the power of language. In the thrall of excessive pain, one is no longer able to turn suffering into a sign, to integrate it into a symbolic world.
