Rethinking the Challenge of Expressing Pain in Language: in literature, theory and medical practice

Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World (1985) proposed an analysis of pain and the concepts of language, imagination, subjectivity, social isolation. This thesis examines the link between language and pain in relation to Scarry’s assumption that it is extremely hard to accurately describe sentient pain in verbal and written forms of expression. Despite pain’s resistance to language, language holds the healing potential of softening pain. The process of “externalization” (the act of externalizing one’s pain into the material world outside the painful inner existence) is a starting point from which the treatment of pain can begin. However, in order to carry out the externalization, one has to express pain in language. I employ three case studies in order to determine whether Scarry’s assumption about pain’s resistance to language can be overcome: Leo Tolstoy’s novel The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Alphonse Daudet’s collection of personal notes In the Land of...Show moreElaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World (1985) proposed an analysis of pain and the concepts of language, imagination, subjectivity, social isolation. This thesis examines the link between language and pain in relation to Scarry’s assumption that it is extremely hard to accurately describe sentient pain in verbal and written forms of expression. Despite pain’s resistance to language, language holds the healing potential of softening pain. The process of “externalization” (the act of externalizing one’s pain into the material world outside the painful inner existence) is a starting point from which the treatment of pain can begin. However, in order to carry out the externalization, one has to express pain in language. I employ three case studies in order to determine whether Scarry’s assumption about pain’s resistance to language can be overcome: Leo Tolstoy’s novel The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Alphonse Daudet’s collection of personal notes In the Land of Pain and a scientific instrument– the McGill Pain Questionnaire. The thesis employs a multidisciplinary approach to pain in which cultural, social and biological aspects are taken into account. It also seeks to re-evaluate the single label of ‘pain’ and proposes to view pain as a multitude of experiences.Show less

Leiden University Student Repository

Documents

In Collections

Rethinking the Challenge of Expressing Pain in Language: in literature, theory and medical practice