Prolonged pain as an existential feeling

Abstract This article explores the nature of pain experience, focusing on the long-standing debate concerning its intentionality. The paper challenges two dominant features of qualitative pain research, common to philosophical and empirical approaches: the tendency to treat pain as one unified and homogenous phenomenon and the related tendency to neglect the need for separate analyses of prolonged pain as a phenomenon in its own right. We argue that consciousness of pain can have several different shapes: pain can be both a non-intentional feeling-sensation and an intentional experience, depending on its internal structures, temporal character, and its experiential and motivational role in the subject’s overall situation. Grounded in classical phenomenological philosophy, the paper studies pain-consciousness and its intentionality, embodiment, and temporality in different variants and phases of pain experiences. On this basis, it distinguishes conceptually between three different types of pain-consciousness: (i) immediate pain as a non-intentional feeling-sensation that completely absorbs consciousness and resists thematization and reflection, (ii) post-immediate pain experience in which intentional and attentional consciousness makes sense of pain and its significance to the subject, and (iii) prolonged pain with long duration, variant phases, and stubborn persistence. Prolonged pain is usually characterized by recurrent oscillation between pain-sensations and relief, but here it is theorized as a pre-reflective and comprehensive manner of being in the world, akin to existential feelings in profoundly shaping the subject’s relationships to her own body, agency, and experiential possibilities, as well as to other bodily subjects. Understanding prolonged pain phenomenologically benefits further pain research, both philosophical and empirical, and it is highly significant for all projects of therapeutically managing and treating pain.