ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the various ways in which kinds of suffering have been explored in the phenomenological tradition, especially in terms of the capacity of suffering to disclose aspects of normal world experience. In the first part of the chapter, James McGuirk draws on work done in phenomenological psychopathology to show how attention to suffering is both clinically fruitful and philosophically illuminating, inasmuch as this research articulates the co-belonging of suffering and a felt loss of the normal. In the second part of the chapter, attention shifts to work done in the phenomenology of illness, which paints a more complex picture of the relationship between suffering and normality by drawing attention to the possibility of the restoration of the normal within the context of suffering. In the third and final part, McGuirk draws on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Kurt Goldstein to argue that these two approaches are more consistent than they at first appear. This claim rests on the commitment in both positions to normality as an experiential, rather than just a linguistic category and to the idea that the reconstitution of the normal in suffering is bounded by aspects of embodiment that are only finitely plastic.
