ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that human experience of illness evoked by Hippocrates, the experience of pain. Pain features prominently in historical accounts of the visible and felt experience of illness and in recent debates about the representation of the body. The idea that empathy means an affective identification with the experience of the pain of another based on one's own prior experience of pain demands some qualification. Even the question of empathy to pain has been explored using brain scans. The facial expression of pain has recently attracted considerable interest in experimental and clinical research based on an increasing awareness that it supports the communication of pain as a second signal system besides the verbal one. While Sigmund Freud is anxious at the time that focusing on the psychological function of pain may cause him to overlook some physical cause, as he recounts in his "Dream of Irmas Injection" in the Interpretation of Dreams.
