Word: paines
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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VIRTUALLY every man has experienced pain and therefore knows just how it feels. But he cannot tell anybody else what it is really like. Pain cannot even be precisely defined. Lay and medical dictionaries alike offer essentially circular definitions of it as hurt, distress or suffering-pain is pain. Half the medical textbooks say little about it, except for extreme and uncommon forms, and doctors learn correspondingly little about it in medical school. The great British physiologist Sir Charles Sherrington described pain as "the psychical adjunct of an imperative protective reflex." More simply, pain is what the victim perceives...
Pattern of Responses. It is only since World War II that the investigation of pain has been pursued as energetically as the search for disease-causing microbes. One of the difficulties that must be understood, says University of Wisconsin Psychologist Richard A. Sternbach, is that pain is not a "thing," and certainly not a single, simple thing, but an abstract concept used by observers to describe three different things: "1) A personal, private sensation of hurt; 2) a harmful stimulus, which signals current or impending tissue damage; and 3) a pattern of responses, which operates to protect the organism from...
...pain researcher views this pattern depends mainly on his specialty, Sternbach told a pain symposium last month at the City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte, Calif. Each investigator, he said, is "locked in" to thinking of pain in his own terms. Thus the psychologist views it as a basic, elementary sensation like sight or hearing. To the psychiatrist, it is an affect or emotion, like depression or anxiety; to the analyst, the product of an internal psychic conflict; to the neurologist or neurosurgeon, a pattern of neurophysiological activity. The biologist emphasizes its survival value. The existential philosopher, Frederik...
...this, ultimately, is the reason I left my romantc comrades in University Hall. They were enjoying themselves too much. Had they been in pain, I might have been able to stay, as an existential being crying out against an oppressive world I did not really hope to change. And then I would have been justified in quoting Camus. True, one must imagine Sisyphus happy, but only while he experiences "boundless grief" which is "too heavy to bear...
...have we made the choice we have? Again, there's really no telling. But it just might be that we have discovered that the civilization we have built to shield us from pain and uncertainty, to protect, preserve--yea enshrine--our comfort, has really done little more than steadily isolate us from the natural order that, as organic beings, we were once so much a part of. We are trying to recover what our apeman forbears had, even though it was interwoven with terror and ignorance, a feeling of belonging, a sense of unity with...