ABSTRACT
This book is for and about patients, and that should mean just about all of us at some time or other. It presents a way of understanding how people learn to complain about their suffering so that they can cope as well as to be expected. This involves understanding how they come to discriminate between different sorts of dis-ease, which includes complaints caused by disease and the suffering of being ill at ease. In order to understand this I will show how the behaviour we see amongst adult patients develops. This starts with looking at how parents respond to their sick infants, and the infant’s primitive complaining-crying. Their crying evolves so that they are heard helpfully, given the
competencies of their parents. Everyone develops their own preferred ‘language of dis-ease’, their ways of making known that something is not right, both what they say and how they ‘say’ it. The way they have been looked after has led to things being different; if some behaviour is ignored there will be less of it, and more of other behaviour, or, as we say, the behaviour has been shaped. Pamela’s lack of tears does not mean to say that she is not in pain.
