Apprehension–Content of Apprehension
Husserl’s Analysis of Pain in the Logical Investigations
Pain as a Stratified Phenomenon
Sartre’s Phenomenology of Pain in Being and Nothingness
3. The Phenomenology of Pain Dissociation Syndromes
Congenital Insensitivity to Pain
The Discovery of Pain
Lobotomy, Cingulotomy, and Morphine
Threat Hypersymbolia
Asymbolia for Pain
Pain Affect without Pain Sensation
Objective Time and Subjective Temporality
The Different Senses of Presence: The Fundamental Levels of Time-Constitution
Implicit and Explicit Presence
The Field of Presence as the Horizon of Pain Experience
Memory and Pain
Anticipation and Pain
5. The Body in Pain: Leib and Körper
Pain’s Indubitability and Bodily Localizability
The Phenomenological Account
The Lived-Body as the Subject of Pain
Pain as Empfindnis
Pain’s Twofold Localizability
Pain and the Constitution of the Lived-Body
The Structure of Pain Experience
6. The Phenomenology of Embodied Personhood: Depersonalization and Repersonalization
The Phenomenology of Embodied Personhood
Chronic Pain as Depersonalization
Chronic Pain as Repersonalization
Implications for the Phenomenology of Medicine
Pain as an Expressible Phenomenon: The Basic Elements of a Phenomenology of Listening
7. Pain and the Life-World: Somatization and Psychologization
Somatization and Psychologization
Somatization, Psychologization, and Their Origins in Experience
The Phenomenology of Somatization and Psychologization
The Life-World as the Wherefrom, Wherein, and Whereto of Experience
Between Homeliness and Homelessness: Discordance in the Life-World
Masochism and Somatization
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Some of the chapters of this book are heavily revised versions of earlier publications. Chapter 2 is a revised version of “Pain and Intentionality” (Geniusas 2017a). Chapter 5 includes material from an earlier study, “The Subject of Pain: Husserl’s Discovery of the Lived-Body” (Geniusas 2014b). Chapter 6 is a revised version of “Phenomenology of Chronic Pain: De-Personalization and Re-Personalization” (Geniusas 2017b).
I would like to thank Agustín Serrano de Haro, Gary B. Madison, Simon van Rysewyk, Charles Rodger, and John Quintner, who have read through some chapters of this study. I also owe a word of thanks to Jagna Brudzinska, David Carr, Nicolas de Warren, Dalius Jonkus, Claudio Majolino, Dermot Moran, Luis Niel, Dieter Lohmar, Dmitri Nikulin, Witold Plotka, and Dan Zahavi. Finally, I am grateful to the Research Grants Council of the University Grants Committee in Hong Kong for the General Research Fund grant, which enabled me to devote the time needed to prepare this study for publication.
INTRODUCTION
PAIN AS EXPERIENCE
We can say about pain what Augustine (2006, 242) has said about time: “What is pain? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” Concessions of this kind are common in pain research. For instance, Thomas Lewis begins his Pain with the following admission: “I am so far from being able satisfactorily to define pain . . . that the attempt could serve no useful purpose” (1942, v). So also, Johannes J. Degenaar remarks: “I thought I knew what pain was until I was asked to say what the word ‘pain’ means. Then . . . I realized my ignorance” (1979, 281).
Such statements might take one by surprise, especially in light of the overabundance of literature on pain that we come across in various sciences. The available literature, however, consists largely of empirical research on various neurological mechanisms as well as other factors that elicit a painful reaction on the part of some organisms. We are flooded with intricate and fascinating details about pain mechanisms, although we know little about the nature of pain experience.
In the phenomenology of medicine, it is common to draw a distinction between illness and disease and to maintain that while the nature of the disease is determined neurophysiologically, the nature of illness must be fixed phenomenologically (see, for instance, Toombs 1993). We come across
