The culture of pain

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Morris, David B., Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Pain--Psychological aspects.

Pain.

Pain--Social aspects.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (354 p.)

Place of Publication:

[Place of publication not identified] University of California Press 1993

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Living Pain: Mystery or Puzzle?

2. The Meanings of Pain

3. An Invisible Epidemic

4. The Pain of Comedy

5. Hysteria, Pain, and Gender

6. Visionary Pain and the Politics of Suffering

7. Pain Is Always in Your Head

8. The Uses of Pain

9. Painful Pleasures: Beauty and Affliction

10. Sex, Pain, and the Marquis de Sade

11. Tragic Pain

12. The Future of Pain

Notes

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

ISBN:

0-520-91382-5

0-585-04121-0

OCLC:

1414455672