Pain Part II: The Beginning of the Ordeal

The Beginning of the Ordeal

I am sitting in my room immersed in book with music playing on the CD player in the background, and I have been doing this for some time. Then suddenly I feel pain in my back. With the onset of pain I have no choice but to attend to two things: the pain itself , my body and the world around me, from which I feel estranged and vulnerable to more and more as the pain persists. No longer can I be immersed in my book, I can only see the book as Hilary Putnam’s reflections on functionalism , and the music which stayed in the background before comes to the forefront of my consciousness - I cannot enjoy it as I did before, but I know it is Mozart. I can recognise these things but I cannot interact with them , the immersion is lost. The above paragraph, an autobiographical account of the experience of episodic pain contains many clues as to understanding the existential and phenomenological experience of pain. There are five main points concerning pain-experience points which I will now outline.