Pain and Its Transformations

Pain is immediate and searing but remains a deep mystery for sufferers, their physicians, and researchers. As neuroscientific research shows, even the immediate sensation of pain is shaped by psychological state and interpretation. At the same time, many individuals and cultures find meaning, particularly religious meaning, even in chronic and inexplicable pain.This ambitious interdisciplinary book includes not only essays but also discussions among a wide range of specialists. Neuroscientists, psychiatrists, anthropologists, musicologists, and scholars of religion examine the ways that meditation, music, prayer, and ritual can mediate pain, offer a narrative that transcends the sufferer, and give public dignity to private agony. They discuss topics as disparate as the molecular basis of pain, the controversial status of gate control theory, the possible links between the relaxation response and meditative practices in Christianity and Buddhism, and the mediation of pain and intense emotion in music, dance, and ritual. The authors conclude by pondering the place of pain in understanding - or the human failure to understand - good and evil in history.

ISBN 0674024567   Pages 456 ISBN13 9780674024564 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Harvard University Press   Weight (grammes) 786 Imprint Harvard University Press   Published in Cambridge, Mass Format Hardback   Series title Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative Publication date 02 Nov 2007   Height (mm) 235 Library of Congress 2007012985   Width (mm) 155 DEWEY 616.0472   Spine width (mm) 35 DEWEY edition DC22   Academic level Professional / Scholarly

1		Introduction by Sarah Coakley		1
2		Opening Remarks: Pain and Experience by Arthur Kleinman		17
		Response: Enabling Strategies - A Great Problem Is Not Enough by Anne Harrington		21
Pt. I		Pain at the Interface of Biology and Culture
3		Deconstructing Pain: A Deterministic Dissection of the Molecular Basis of Pain by Clifford J. Woolf		27
4		Setting the Stage for Pain: Allegorical Tales from Neuroscience by Howard L. Fields		36
		Response: Is Pain Differentially Embodied? by Anne Harrington		62
		Response: Pain and the Embodiment of Culture by Elaine Scarry		64
		Discussion: Is There Life Left in the Gate Control Theory?		67
		Discussion: The Success of Reductionism in Pain Treatment		70
Pt. II		Beyond "Coping": Religious Practices of Transformation
5		Palliative or Intensification? Pain and Christian Contemplation in the Spirituality of the Sixteenth-Century Carmelites by Sarah Coakley		77
6		Pain and the Suffering Consciousness: The Alleviation of Suffering in Buddhist Discourse by Luis O. Gomez		101
		Response: The Incommensurable Richness of "Experience" by Arthur Kleinman		122
		Response: The Theology of Pain and Suffering in the Jewish Tradition by Jon D. Levenson		126
		Discussion: The "Relaxation Response" - Can It Explain Religious Transformation?		133
		Discussion: Reductionism and the Separation of "Suffering" and "Pain"		138
		Discussion: The Instrumentality of Pain in Christianity and Buddhism		141
Pt. III		Grief and Pain: The Mediation of Pain in Music
7		Voice, Metaphysics, and Community: Pain and Transformation in the Finnish-Karelian Ritual Lament by Elizabeth Tolbert		147
8		Music, Trancing, and the Absence of Pain by Judith Becker		166
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