The Disease Of Pain: What Is It And How Is It Related To Psychology?
Pain has two aspects, pain that comes from outside the body and pain from internal perception Sometimes both come into play. Pain is always subjective. The health professional has pain scales that do not always match what the patient expresses. We usually talk about acute pain and chronic pain.
Acute pain has to do with the activation of nociceptive systems associated with an injury and will disappear with the healing of the injury. Pain, here, has an essential function of biological protection, which warns the subject of a dysfunction or injury. The psychological elements that can be associated with these situations are not usually numerous and will have to do especially with anxiety.
Anxiety can be present in situations of illness, in the healing process where the subject’s life is disrupted and uncertainty reaches levels that the subject finds difficult to manage. Anxiety is, after all, a normal phenomenon since it is found in each of us to a greater or lesser extent.
Mind and body: the perception of pain
In all organic pain there is a participation of the psychic and we know this by observing clinical cases where distraction distances the subject from their pain That is, when the subject manages to become interested in something other than his own pain, the pain decreases as long as the distraction lasts. With that starting point, we will have to deal with the role of pain and what we could call the disease of pain.
On the one hand, pain has the function of signaling an injury, a danger. I bring my hand close to the fire and the pain allows me to protect myself from the pain of an organ, from an injury it warns me that I have to go to the corresponding professional. But when we talk about the disease of pain, we are referring to chronic pain. In these cases, several psychological factors are at play that maintain that pain.
We are going to expose here two fundamental elements that participate in maintaining pain Now specify that in all cases, the analysis will involve listening to how the patient talks about his pain, since we will not deal with the pain itself, but with the suffering subject.
Guilt fully enters into the phenomenon of pain. The guilt inherent to the subject is oedipal guilt. Therefore, it will not be about felt guilt, nor remorse, it is about unconscious guilt. And how do we know what comes into play in pain? Because pain often serves as a punishment to calm that unconscious guilt. We know the difficulty of the subject to come to terms with the guilt for the punishments that are inflicted. Thus, it is appropriate to state that chronic pain can often be considered as a punishment.
On another occasion, we will explain the constitution of guilt and its effects on daily life. And obviously when we talk about chronic pain, we also come to talk about enjoyment, masochism We know, thanks to Sigmund Freud, that the end of psychic energy, the end of the drive, is satisfaction. The drive is always satisfied, that is, that subject that we are, is divided into conscious and unconscious, lives, suffers, two different and sometimes opposite situations.
In his consciousness he suffers but in the unconscious there is satisfaction, which explains the subject’s difficulty in leaving places of pain. The satisfaction he derives from pain does not allow him to easily transform his position. And I repeat, it is an unconscious satisfaction, that is, neither reason nor will have the capacity to intervene to modify the psychic situation that produces pain in the subject’s material life. Only psychoanalysis has the necessary instruments to intervene and modify this way of enjoying pain.
Therefore, when we talk about pain illness, we refer to those different components that enclose the subject in a psychic structure that uses pain to express itself. Starting to talk to a psychoanalyst will obviously be a possibility to learn to direct these components towards other results. Speaking is an important enjoyment for humans and so is being listened to
