Pain Part IV

The Body: Intentionality Experience

The painful body is the first thing which the individual’s attention is drawn to. Immersion is now irretrievable, bodily existence is no longer defined by the Merleau-Pontian cogito alone , the ‘I can’. The disabled painful bodily existence is now an “inhibited intentionality “ (Young in Welton,1998,p265) . An inhibited intentionality, as Iris Marion Young explains, “reaches toward a projected end with an “I can” and witholds its full bodily commitment to that end in a self-imposed “I cannot.” “ (Young in Welton,1998,p265). Merleau-Ponty would argue that to every action a person brings their whole situation. That is to say that people have not only a physical and experiencing body, also but histories and thoughts about the past and future. Whatever a person does, they do as situated subjects . For example, after a failed attempt to open the wine bottle, I may try again, but that failure may remind of another time when I failed to complete such an action. So when I try for a second time, whilst I begin the task thinking that I can do this, memories of past failures attempting such a task turn that’I can’ into an’I cannot’ and induce me to withhold the necessary bodily orientation to accomplish the task. Secondly, with the body no longer a body capable of intentional acts, of projecting itself in the world the body is no “ longer a “from” structure”, the painful body becomes that which to which he [sic] attends.” (Leder,1990,p74)

The World Space & Time

 Pain not only disrupts our intentionalities but also our ability to experience space and time. This disruption “never leads to complete collapse of the world. It is our nature, as being-in-the-world, to inhabt a significant continuum of space and time, projects and goals.” (Leder,1990,p75). The world we experience when in pain has a “constricted aspect...We are no longer dispersed out there in the world, but suddenly congeal here .” (Leder,1990,p75). And at one single point in space here we will remain, trapped until the current crisis is over, despite our best attempts to move and continue our task. Also “Our attention is drawn not only to our own bodies, but to a particular body part.” (Leder,1990,p75). Just as it “pulls us back to here , so severe pain summons us to the now “ (Leder,1990,p75). We are no longer free to make plans for the future, to plan what we were going to do next. The individual reading Putnam could not plan to find a certain chapter, or plan to read a different book in future. “Pain seizes him back to present. Its intensity and affectivity demand his attention right now.” (Leder,1990,p76)

Pain & not-being-at-home

It is after attempts to project themselves to the here and the then have failed that the individual is unable to act in the world. The individual can see the objects and knows how to use them, understands the significance of the book as thing-to-be-read. The fact the individual understands the salience of the book but cannot interact with it causes the individual to be anxious. They know how to use this, the book is a thing to be read, but that they had no control over the significance the book has, causes the individual anxiety. The individual must accept that the world has significances which were beyond their control, but they cannot. Now unable to interact with the world, the world is without significance, since it is of no use to the individual. And yet the world remains present. Anxiety disengages the individual from the world and is unable to engage in the world. In anxiety the world is revealed as if it were being viewed through a window or’outside’. The individual is unsettled, frustrated at their inability to act, and feels that they are not-at-home, that they do not belong here. This feeling will not subside until the pain-experience is over and they can interact with the world once again.

Body &World

In pain, “the body is no longer a nullpoint but an active presence whose call we must resist” (Leder,1990,p76). In pain we are trapped in the here and now, what I would term “mechanistic body” or Korper. Any attempt to begin our task again, to move towards the there, or plan for the future, the then, only enforces the situation the individual finds themselves in, that situation being to exist as a Korper and not a habit body when the attempt inevitably fails. “The disruption and constriction of one’s habitual world thus correlates with a new relation to one’s body. In pain, the body or a certain part of the body emerges as an alien presence” (Leder,1990,p76). Physical pain makes us aware of the body as object to perceived, one of the few occasions that the body appears to us in that fashion. “Yet at the same time pain effects a certain alienation” (Leder,1990,p76). Most patients of chronic or episodic pain “...describe their pain as an “it”, separate from the “ I.”. The painful body is often experienced as something foreign to the self.” (Leder,1990,p76). To think of the body in this fasion is of course an error. Pain is not some separate entity, a foreign’invader’, as Samuel Todes says, “we do not “have” a pain out there in some body area..” (Todes,2001,p60). Rather pain is you.