Abstract
Pain and Emotion in Modern History is a rich exploration of the affective expression of pain, the emotional experience of pain (with or without lesion) and the experience of others’ pain as pain (sympathy, compassion, pity, tenderness).1 Immediately it should strike the reader that ‘pain’ is at best a confusing label; at worst it is hopelessly inadequate. It must describe, at one and the same time, an appearance or surface, an inner (physiological and neurological) state and the reception of both these things as they are projected by another. This book goes a long way towards unpacking the polyvalence of ‘pain’. Essential to this project is a conviction that pain, in all its complexity, has been, is and can be expressed — bodily, orally, emotionally and linguistically.
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Notes
On affective expression of pain, Javier Moscoso has set the bar: Pain: A Cultural History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Esther Cohen, Leona Toker, Manuela Consonni and Otniel Dror (eds), Knowledge and Pain (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012).
Andrew Hodgkiss, From Lesion toMetaphor: Chronic Pain in British, French and German Medical Writings, 1800–1914 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000)
David Konstan’s Pity Transformed (London: Duckworth, 2001)
Jerome Kagan, What is Emotion? History, Measures, andMeanings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 9.
See David Biro, The Language of Pain: Finding Words, Compassion, and Relief (New York: Norton, 2000).
See Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003).
The capacity to suffer meaningfully has been bound up with what it means to be human and who gets to be included in that category. See Joanna Bourke, What it Means to be Human: Reflections from 1791 to the Present (London: Virago, 2011), 65–123
See David Biro, Chapter 4, this volume. See also Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 187–224
David B. Morris, ‘Narrative, Ethics, and Pain: Thinking with Stories’, Narrative, 9 (2001): 55–77
Lisa Folkmarson Kail, Dimensions of Pain: Humanities and Social Science Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2013), 1.
For an analogy, see Joanna Bourke, ‘Fear and Anxiety: Writing about Emotion in Modern History’, History Workshop Journal, 55 (2003): 111–33
David B. Morris, The Culture of Pain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 25.
Ronald Melzack and Patrick D. Wall, The Challenge of Pain (London: Penguin, 1996), 15–18.
Jan Plamper, ‘The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns’, History and Theory, 49 (2010): 237–65.
Barbara Rosenwein (ed.), Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998)
Barbara Rosen wein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006)
Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (London: Virago, 2005)
On the history of the scientific quest to locate emotions in the body, see Otniel Dror, ‘The Scientific Image of Emotion: Experience and Technologies of Inscription’, Configurations, 7(3) (1999): 355–401.
See William R. Uttal, The New Phrenology: The Limits of Localizing Cognitive Processes in the Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003)
Paul W. Türke, ‘Which Humans Behave Adaptively, and Why Does it Matter?’, Ethology and Sociobiology, 11 (1990): 305–39
Robert Turner and Charles Whitehead, ‘How Collective Representations Can Change the Structure of the Brain’, journal of Consciousness Studies, 15 (2008): 43–57.
Nikola Grahek, Feeling Pain and Being in Pain, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 36.
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© 2014 Rob Boddice
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Boddice, R. (2014). Introduction: Hurt Feelings?. In: Boddice, R. (eds) Pain and Emotion in Modern History. Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137372437_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137372437_1
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