Conclusion

Abstract

Pain is a complicated phenomenon, an integral component of human experience that we most often do our best to avoid or end, but sometimes paradoxically seek out. Organizing an elaborate response system in the face of potentially harmful stimuli, pain involves the central and peripheral nervous systems; circulatory, respiratory, and endocrine systems; our feelings and our thoughts. Pain is a message that cannot be separated from its communication network. Injury doesn’t always hurt, and pain doesn’t always signal tissue damage but sometimes self-generates or self-perpetuates. Pain engraves our memories more deeply, draws us closer together, and takes us out of ourselves. Pain transforms the contours of the self and of the social body. Intensely private, as is all experience, pain makes us reach out to others, generates urgent if always incommensurable messages as we seek relief or at least the comfort of recognition. Pain comes in myriad forms, from discomfort to agony, acute to chronic, localized to diffuse, obvious to mysterious. Some pains curl us inward to lick our wounds and heal, but others scream for attention. We dissimulate, and we display, minimize, and fake it. We react, and we read the pain of others. Pain is a performance that we interpret, both when it happens within ourselves and when we witness the pain of others.