ABSTRACT
Chronic pain defies the assumptions of the sensation theory. Therefore, a consideration of it can help expand conceptions of pain, reconstructing it along phenomenological lines. This chapter examines the experience of chronic pain from three related perspectives: social representations, discourses, and a phenomenological analysis of the lifeworld of chronic pain. The social representations come from newspaper accounts of chronic pain from the early twentieth century to the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, with the narratives and discourses from interviews with individuals in a pain management program. Finally, the chapter concludes with the appeals the narrators made for justice. In this way, chronic pain has an inherently moral aspect, and it can be said that these people were, among other things, experiencing moral pain.
