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Last updated: Tue, Jul 30, 2024
In the first major section of this work, I described the physiological process of pain (see How Pain Is Made). Physiology is about the mechanisms of the process. Its method is reductionist and synthetic--it builds up a picture of a complex phenomenon by breaking down the parts, analyzing them, and forming from them a picture that combines the parts.
In this section I attempt to describe how pain is seen through a psychological lense. This way of looking at pain is much different from the physiological view. Its focus is not on the details of the pain mechanism, but on the aspects of pain that people experience--stress, anxiety, expectations, suffering. It is at this level we find things like the mind, the person, and pain itself.
The science that is applied to understanding pain at this more-abstract level is different from science as it is applied to pain physiology. Inquiring into the emotional effects of chronic suffering, for example, is very much different from inquiring into the involvement of some specific molecule in neuronal signalling. Differences between the two approaches to study lead to important differences in the nature of truth in the two viewpoints. Truth and proof become much more slippery things in the more humanistic and more abstract realm of psychology. On the other hand, if you take to heart the IASP definition of pain as a "sensation," the psychological lense focuses more nearly on pain-the-sensation.
I begin this section by distinguishing concepts that are related but should be kept clear: psychology vs. psychiatry and science vs. medicine. Following that, I describe the methodological and epistemological challenges that present themselves to the scientist who tries to approach pain psychologically. Then I list some of the ideas or understandings related to pain that have originated in psychological thinking and migrated into the popular culture. I finish the section by emphasizing the difficulties in psychology, as it has been practiced, in distinguishing cause from effect.
Other sections within The Psychology of Pain describe in more detail the pain-related phenomena that have received attention from psychological researchers, how they have explained them, and the quality of those explanations.
Within this section...
Methodological Challenges in Psychology (Last updated: Sat, Aug 17, 2024)
Psychology Is a Source of Folk Theories (This page is incomplete.)
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Ideological Understandings (Last updated: Thu, Sep 5, 2024)