The Culture of Pain (Paperback, Revised)

Drawing on history, art, literature, psychology, and medicine, Morris (Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense, 1984) offers an extended commentary, profusely documented and illustrated, on the nature, function, and various meanings of pain in Western culture. Considering pain as both a "biological fact" and "an experience in search of an interpretation," Morris interprets the psychic, spiritual, and physical experiences of pain and the symbolic, metaphoric, and symptomatic expressions of it from Plato to Joyce Carol Oates, Freud to Norman Cousins, Job to de Sade. The invention of ether in 1846 altered the meaning of pain but did not eradicate it, and to medical science most pain remains a mystery: chronic pain, hysteria, numbness (which is more dangerous than pain), redemptive or religious pain, visionary or revolutionary pain, edifying pain, tragic pain ("we no longer recognize" it), and comic pain (the best discussion in the book, though its relation to pain is tenuous). Morris surveys the creative uses of pain by artists, the instructive uses of pain by satirists, the erotic uses of pain by sadomasochists, the political uses of pain as torture, and the aesthetic uses of pain in the sentimental, melancholy, and sublime styles of Romantic writers who associated beauty with loss, suffering, and death. He concludes with a lyrical celebration of "The Future of Pain": "We must begin to proliferate its meanings." Such a statement reflects the major problems of the book: the exhortative tone, the use of the implicative "we" in place of sound argument, and the very proliferation of meanings so that pain becomes an abstraction, resembling pleasure, detached from the causes - anguish, deprivation, discomfort - however spiritual or mental in origin, that healthy people instinctively avoid and that most philosophers, long before Bentham, believed to be a threat to organized society and civilization. Without ideology, it is still an interesting but poorly organized book and no substitute for Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain (1986). (Kirkus Reviews)

This is a book about the meanings we make out of pain. The greatest surprise I encountered in discussing this topic over the past ten years was the consistency with which I was asked a single unvarying question: Are you writing about physical pain or mental pain? The overwhelming consistency of this response convinces me that modern culture rests upon and underlying belief so strong that it grips us with the force of a founding myth. Call it the Myth of Two Pains. We live in an era when many people believe--as a basic, unexamined foundation of thought--that pain comes divided into separate types: physical and mental. These two types of pain, so the myth goes, are as different as land and sea. You feel physical pain if your arm breaks, and you feel mental pain if your heart breaks. Between these two different events we seem to imagine a gulf so wide and deep that it might as well be filled by a sea that is impossible to navigate.

General

Imprint:	University of California Press
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	April 1993
First published:	1991
Authors:	David B Morris
Dimensions:	229 x 152 x 23mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - Trade
Pages:	354
Edition:	Revised
ISBN-13:	978-0-520-08276-2
Categories:	Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Cultural studies > General Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Anthropology > General
LSN:	0-520-08276-1
Barcode:	9780520082762

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