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Embodiment and Chronic Pain: Implications for Rehabilitation Practice

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Abstract

Throughout the Western world people turn towards the health care system seeking help for a variety of psychosomatic/psychosocial health problems. They become “patients” and find themselves within a system of practises that conceptualizes their bodies as “objective” bodies, treats their ill health in terms of the malfunctioning machine, and compartmentalizes their lived experiences into medically interpreted symptoms and signs of underlying biological dysfunction. The aim of this article is to present an alternative way of describing ill health and rehabilitation using the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in order to deepen our understanding of the rehabilitation process. I will explore how the experience of chronic pain ruptures the natural connection between body and world and how the rehabilitation process can be understood as the re-insertion of the body into the flow of experience, where the body “disappears” into its natural silence in order to allow the world to once again unfold. The experience of chronic pain places the painful body in focus, resulting in a diminished articulation of both self and world. Persons with illness suffer not only from the physical aspects of pain and discomfort but also from a loss of identity where one feels alienated and detached from things that used to give meaning to ones life. Rehabilitation must not only address the material (medical) body but also the diminished sense of self as well as the retreat from the world outside of the painful body.

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Notes

  1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) belongs to the French phenomenological tradition known as the “second wave” after the first German wave initiated by Husserl. French phenomenologists have been characterized as existential phenomenologists since they take up issues such as the significance of the body, the social, political and religious spheres of existence. Existential phenomenologists are “engaged” in the concrete struggles facing human beings. See Speigelberg [17] for an introduction to the phenomenological movement.

  2. Merleau-Ponty’s [14] last work The Visible and the invisible, published posthumously in 1964 from his working notes, showed a development in his thought from Phenomnology of Perception. The concept “flesh of the world” from this last work was meant to describe the event where perception and meaning are born, not as a relationship between a constituting subject and a constituted object but as an intertwining or ensemble of being. He questioned the privileged position given to consciousness within phenomenology and maintained that we need to find another way to investigate the human world. We do not need to follow his thoughts this far, but it is interesting to see how he spent his entire philosophical career reflecting on the nature of embodiment and how embodied human beings experience the world.

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  1. Department of Health Care Sciences, Ersta Sköndal University College, P.O. Box 111 89, 100 61, Stockholm, Sweden

    Jennifer Bullington

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  1. Jennifer Bullington
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Correspondence to Jennifer Bullington.

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Bullington, J. Embodiment and Chronic Pain: Implications for Rehabilitation Practice. Health Care Anal 17, 100–109 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10728-008-0109-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10728-008-0109-5

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