About the article
E.A. Evstifeeva
In the context of philosophical discourse on pain, this article examines its ontological status as a real experience of anthropological existence. The author explains the problem of reducing pain to an object and discusses the objectification of pain in medical discourse, which leads to doctors distancing themselves from patients and depriving them of empathy as an attribute of doctor – patient communication. Pain is subjective and existentially experienced. It is argued that pain is a combination of physical, psychological and sociocultural factors, and that social behaviour is encoded in it. It is verbalised as the patient's narrative about their suffering. Based on social ontology, it is shown that pain, being a sign of power, is used as an instrument of punishment, since torture is the highest form of inflicting pain. In today's world of medicalisation, pain is sublimated through radical anaesthesia and narratives, which is a departure from the natural experience of pain as an evolutionary attribution. From an ontobiological perspective, empathy appears to be a sublimation of pain, a way of overcoming it. The biological discourse on empathy as the sublimation of pain recognises the biological basis of empathy as a behavioural act and highlights the problem of finding and establishing a boundary between prosocial actions to provide empathetic help and distancing oneself from another's pain. Biological science predicates the internal perception of another's state as emotional and cognitive resonance. To create communicative balance in the "doctor – patient" relationship and to prevent burnout in the medical profession, the doctor's imperative and maxims are oriented towards choosing between the intersecting processes of objectification and subjectification of the patient's pain and illness, towards accepting the illness as illness.
philosophical discourse on pain, objectification and subjectivity of pain, empathy as sublimation of pain, biological science of empathy, communicative balance in «doctor – patient» relationships.