ABSTRACT
When the author’s patient said that he had been prostituting his pain, the author understood that the patient had become plagued with headaches and dissociated from his experiences so what he talked about and his felt experience had become split off from and distrustful of each other creating a tension which was pushing him to the edge of trauma-induced psychosis. Words for such levels of pain which are associated with torture, and by torture it also includes childhood abuse and deprivation and any actions, which are on the far fringes of normal experience, can never portray the total physiological and psychological devastation of the experience. There is a growing number of research studies into pain in neuroscience and neurobiology giving greater understanding of how the brain functions in relation to pain. The NHS transformed the main clinical room into a metaphoric space, where patients would bring something for the others, so that the objects and stories could be shared.
