Reviews:

“Geniusas convincingly substantiates his claim that phenomenology is essential to reconciling various elements of the slippery concept of pain, while also elegantly teaching the basic principles of phenomenology. By focusing on Husserl rather than Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty, who are more commonly invoked in the contemporary phenomenology of health, illness, and medicine, Geniusas allows for a more analytical approach to his subject.”

—Jenny Slatman, author of Our Strange Body: Philosophical Reflections on Identity and Medical Interventions

“Remarkable … Geniusas carries out his inquiry in a methodological commitment to Husserlian phenomenology, but in a fruitful dialogue with other phenomenological orientations and contemporary disciplines that address pain and suffering. In privileging the notion of person as an object of suffering in the life-world, he proposes a new and original perspective on chronic pain. Finally, he renders phenomenological concepts understandable to a wide audience.”

—Agustín Serrano de Haro, Instituto de Filosofía, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Madrid)

Description:

The Phenomenology of Pain is the first book-length investigation of its topic to appear in English. Groundbreaking, systematic, and illuminating, it opens a dialogue between phenomenology and such disciplines as cognitive science and cultural anthropology to argue that science alone cannot clarify the nature of pain experience without incorporating a phenomenological approach. Building on this premise, Saulius Geniusas develops a novel conception of pain grounded in phenomenological principles: pain is an aversive bodily feeling with a distinct experiential quality, which can only be given in original first-hand experience, either as a feeling-sensation or as an emotion.

Geniusas crystallizes the fundamental methodological principles that underlie phenomenological research. On the basis of those principles, he offers a phenomenological clarification of the fundamental structures of pain experience and contests the common conflation of phenomenology with introspectionism. Geniusas analyzes numerous pain dissociation syndromes, brings into focus the de-personalizing and re-personalizing nature of chronic pain experience, and demonstrates what role somatization and psychologization play in pain experience. In the process, he advances Husserlian phenomenology in a direction that is not explicitly worked out in Husserl’s own writings.

Contents:

Acknowledgments

Introduction • Pain as Experience • The Phenomenological Approach • The Structure of the Following Investigation

Chapter 1. Methodological Considerations • Fundamental Methodological Commitments: Epoché, the Phenomenological Reduction, and Eidetic Variation • Three Allegations: Psychologism, Introspectionism, and Solipsism • Revamping Eidetic Variation: From Pure to Dialogical Phenomenology • The Genetic Method in Phenomenology

Chapter 2. Pain and Intentionality: A Stratified Conception of Pain Experience • Pain and Intentionality • Pain as a Feeling-Sensation • Pain as an Intentional Feeling • Apprehension–Content of Apprehension • Husserl’s Analysis of Pain in the Logical Investigations • Pain as a Stratified Phenomenon • Sartre’s Phenomenology of Pain in Being and Nothingness

Chapter 3. The Phenomenology of Pain Dissociation Syndromes • Congenital Insensitivity to Pain • The Discovery of Pain • Lobotomy, Cingulotomy, and Morphine • Threat Hypersymbolia • Asymbolia for Pain • Pain Affect without Pain Sensation

Chapter 4. Pain and Temporality • Objective Time and Subjective Temporality • The Different Senses of Presence: The Fundamental Levels of Time-Constitution • Implicit and Explicit Presence • The Field of Presence as the Horizon of Pain Experience • Memory and Pain • Anticipation and Pain

Chapter 5. The Body in Pain: Leib and Körper • Pain’s Indubitability and Bodily Localizability • The Phenomenological Account • The Lived-Body as the Subject of Pain • Pain as Empfindnis • Pain’s Twofold Localizability • Pain and the Constitution of the Lived-Body • The Structure of Pain Experience

Chapter 6. The Phenomenology of Embodied Personhood: Depersonalization and Repersonalization • The Phenomenology of Embodied Personhood • Chronic Pain as Depersonalization • Chronic Pain as Repersonalization • Implications for the Phenomenology of Medicine • Pain as an Expressible Phenomenon: The Basic Elements of a Phenomenology of Listening

Chapter 7. Pain and the Life-World: Somatization and Psychologization • Somatization and Psychologization • Somatization, Psychologization, and Their Origins in Experience • The Phenomenology of Somatization and Psychologization • The Life-World as the Wherefrom, Wherein, and Whereto of Experience • Between Homeliness and Homelessness: Discordance in the Life-World • Masochism and Somatization

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliograph

Index

About the Author:

Saulius Geniusas is associate professor of philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research primarily focuses on phenomenology and hermeneutics. He is the author of The Origins of the Horizon in Husserl’s Phenomenology, editor of numerous volumes, and author of close to fifty articles for various philosophy journals and anthologies.

Target Audience:

People interested in philosophy.