PROFESSOR SPARkES
Making sense of pain:
reflections on a narrative approach
By Prof Andrew C. Sparkes
In this thought-provoking feature, Prof Andrew C. Sparkes examines how sufferers give meaning to pain, and how this process of
narration influences the way people make sense of their experiences of pain to themselves and others. How does the meaning we
give to pain affect our behaviour? How does the way we describe pain shape our sense of being-in-the world? And does this vary
depending on our background?
Sources of funding: None but actively destroys it: “bringing about unique to the individual the means of
an immediate reversion to a state anterior interpreting this experience to oneself and
Conflicts of interest: None to language, to the sounds and cries communicating it to others is strongly
a human makes before language is shaped by the cultures that people
Address for correspondence: learned” (p. 4). inhabit.
Professor Andrew C. Sparkes PhD
Director Qualitative Research Unit Pain is a unique qualitative feel “that sets Stories of pain… are strongly shaped by
School of Sport & Health Sciences it off from other sensory experiences: culture, class, gender
Exeter University St Luke’s Campus namely it hurts!”
Heavitree Road In this regard, as Dan McAdams4
Exeter In his book The Absent Body, Drew reminds us, “Culture provides people with
Devon EX1 2LU Leder3 reminds us that the biological, a menu of narrative forms and contents
andrew.c.sparkes@exeter.ac.uk fleshy, corporeal body is the primary locus from which the person selectively draws
of pain. For him, most basically, pain in an effort to line up lived experience with
effects a sensory intensification in which the kinds of stories available to organize
a “region of the body that may have and express it. Indeed, the story menu
●
According to Elaine Scarry5 previously given forth little in the way of goes so far as to shape lived experience
in her book The Body in Pain: sensory stimuli suddenly speaks up” (p. itself.
the Making and Unmaking 71). For him, pain is a unique qualitative
of the World, “For the person in pain, feel “that sets it off from other sensory We live in and through our stories …
so incontestable and unnegotiably experiences: namely it hurts. Pain is the Stories are made and remade, performed
present is it that ‘having pain’ may very concretization of the unpleasant, and edited, instantiated, contoured,
come to be thought of as the most the aversive” (p. 73). However, as Leder and lived out in the social ecology of
vibrant example of what it is to ‘have is quick to point out “pain, like any other everyday life and with respect to the
certainty,’ while for the other person experiential mode, cannot be reduced to norms of narrative content, structure, and
it is so elusive that ‘hearing about a set of immediate sensory qualities. It is expression that prevail in a given culture”
pain’ may exist as the primary model ultimately a manner of being-in-the world. (p. 16). Stories of pain, therefore, are
of what it is ‘to have doubt.’ As such, pain reorganizes our lived space strongly shaped by culture, class, gender,
and time, our relations with others and and other contextual factors. As such,
Thus pain comes unsharably into our with ourselves” (p. 73). they are co-authored by the story teller
midst as at once that which cannot and the social worlds in which their lives
be denied and that which cannot be As part of this reorganization of space make sense.
confirmed” (p. 4). In part, pain achieves and time, and of our relationships with
its effect through its unsharability, through ourselves and others, pain has to be So how might this process of narration
its very resistance to language. given some kind of meaning. Central operate and influence how people make
Indeed, Scarry goes so far as to say that to this process of meaning making and sense of their experiences of pain to
physical pain (and I would add mental sharing is the narration or the storying themselves and others? How does it
pain) does not simply resist language of pain. While the experience of pain is shape their sense of being-in-the world?
28 The Backcare Journal
backcare Winter 2009/10.indd 28 8/1/10 11:19:58
Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40