Smärtans dynamik

Abstract

This essay about experiences of pain has its basic empirical ground in two materials: interviews with people suffering from pain and observations from a multidisciplinary pain clinic in Sweden. My aim is to show, based on a constructivist approach, that pain, often associated with something outside culture, can be problematized as a cultural phenomenon. Pain in this perspective is seen as an unstable and dynamic notion shaped by cultural conceptions of body, consciousness and identity, which constitute the conditions for how we experience, observe and categorize pain. This means that experiences of pain are analysed as descriptions of time specific conditions in which pain is made comprehensible, and in the extension as descriptions of possible ways of understanding ourselves.