The instability of pain as a concept generates both contradictions and escape routes

Evidence

My point is only that when pain is a constitutive part of birthing it is not simply the negative experience of a patient, as biomedicine tends to regard it, but an aspect of a distinctive social act in which others assist. What I want to emphasize is that in the cases Klassen describes, pain is not the isolable condition of an individual body to be finally eliminated by chemical or surgical intervention. It is integral to an activity that reproduces and sustains human relationships. For how pain is felt is in some measure dependent on how it is expressed, and how it is expressed is dependent on social relationships. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 429 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Reflection transforms lived pain into a psychic object at a distance — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 882; Pain can be agentive rather than merely a passive state — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 385; Physical and psychological pain are not cleanly separable categories — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 404 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• The feeling of pain depends on how it is socially expressed #complicates (0.75) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 429