Pain Part I

It should be made perfectly clear as Sally French does (Swain,Finkelstein, French Oliver,1993,p19) that pain is not necessarily a phenomenon common to all physically disabled people. However pain is the paradigm example of why disability theory has refused to look at the body, at least from a phenomenological perspective. To admit pain, is to admit that disability “was about the body after all” (Shakespeare in Oliver, 1996,p39). This is the primary reason why I am examining it. I wish to show that the experience of pain, which is common to many though not all disabled people, is necessary to gain an understanding of disability for theorising. To illustrate how pain is pertinent to understanding disability, I am going to be giving an account of episodic pain interpreted by the phenomenological perspective outlined in the previous chapter. By doing this I am going show how “disability is embodied and impairment is social” (Hughs & Paterson,97,p336) and these aspects of disability and impairment presents a problem for the social model which it’s advocates are going to have answer for. Secondly, the ability to theorise and conceptualise pain as a lived-experience is the primary reason that one chooses a phenomenological perspective on the body as opposed to a post-structrualist one. I cannot see how the experience of pain could be conceptualised within a post-structrualist framework that takes its cue from Foucault. That is not to deny that the experience of pain is ultimately culturally mediate e.g. through language, only that one need not “conclude that language is “about” nothing other than itself, nor that language wholly constitutes experience, nor that language refers to experience that can be known in no other way.” (Csordas, 1994, p11), claims which are often made by many post-structrualists. Instead it could be argued “...that language gives access to a world of experience in so far as experience comes to, or is brought to, language” (Csordas, 1994, p11) The third and final reason for examining pain is that if this dissertation could also be viewed as a critique of Cartesianism, pain is an event which brings the body, which is often conceptually absent, to a position where it can be described and theorised about.