Social Suffering: a new Understanding and Emergent form of Social Practice
Dr. Iain Wilkinson, Sociology, Uni. of Kent
In modern times there has been a tradition of defining suffering in contradistinction to pain. Accordingly, while it is generally understood that there is a close association between pain and suffering, it is also argued that ‘pain is more objective than suffering’ (Finn 1986: 4), and it is by distinguishing between pain as a physiological sensation and suffering as a subjective psychological response to pain that we begin advance towards a fuller understanding of the distinctive attributes of these phenomena. Pain is understood to have ‘a specific bodily place’ (Edwards 1984: 515) whereas suffering is held to involve far more than this. In contrast to pain, the domain of suffering is held to encompass body, mind and ‘spirit’. Whilst often accompanied by distressing bodily feelings, a greater emphasis tends to be placed on the extent to which the trauma of suffering takes place as a product of cultural sensibility and social experience.
More recently, a number of researchers have argued that this longstanding conceptual distinction should be abandoned. Following the discoveries of Melzack and Wall and the witness of medical anthropology, a new orthodoxy holds that culture and society are always liable to exert a moderating influence over bodily sensations of pain. The physiological experience of pain is understood to be moderated and comprised by the distresses borne through the social frustrations and cultural contradictions of everyday life. In other words, when compared to earlier viewpoints, the experience suffering is held to be far more intimately involved within constitution of pain. On many accounts, social experience is so much a part of somatic experience, that it is often the case that effective pain relief can only take place where the social circumstances surrounding a person can be made to change for the better. This encourages the view that many medical interventions need to supplemented or even replaced by forms of social intervention.
In this session I shall review the contribution of research and writing on ‘social suffering’ to these developments. I shall present a critical appraisal of ‘social suffering’ as an analytical category and as a point of reference for social dialogue and political debate over the causes and consequences of human pain and suffering. In this context, I shall attempt outline the contours of an emergent form social science that that engages the medical, the economic, the political, and the moral together. I shall argue that a focus on problems of ‘social suffering’ not only requires a new approach the categorisation of human problems, but also, the creation of new strategies and professions to materialize these in social practice.