Joy and sadness, pleasure and pain represent antagonistic and correlative feelings and perceptions, in that joy can be regarded as mood pleasure and sadness as psychic pain. Joy and sadness are specifically human feelings; pleasure and pain are sensory perceptions, of a physical order, which when they cross the psycho-physical frontier, to put it mildly, become joy and sadness respectively.
Just as death is deprivation of life, pain and sadness are also negative: pain is deprivation of well-being and sadness is deprivation of joy; but we need to deepen the knowledge of pain and pleasure, because not all pain is bad and not every pleasure is good. More, often pleasure and joy, intentionally sought after, lead to pain and sadness. And yet well-accepted and driven pain and sadness can be the beginning of a more full and solid psychic and globally human - health. Pleasure or joy, disconnected from anthropological roots founded on love, truth and freedom can become an existential falsehood that would lead to a crumbling of man.
Meaning of pain
Few themes reach the degree of universality that characterizes pain. Your registration is as common as it is inevitable. Just as no human being can escape death, which will occur sooner or later, nor can he be exempted from pain, which makes his appearance inexorably throughout life, whether in his body or annymic, physical or moral side.
Von Weisacker said that the true meaning of life and pain can only be understood from a perspective beyond death. Alfons Auer says that pain is one of the few modules by which man's true value is measured and revealed. This is because pain, both bodily and psychic, penetrates even the innermost part of personal existence, and inescapably demands from man a posture, an attitude. According to and as man speaks in this decision, that is, according to the attitude he adopts in the face of pain, he will contribute to the building of his inner structure towards maturity or bring him down by sinking him into an existence set up by selfishness and bitterness.
Pain, like all forms of suffering, entails, in substance, whatever its cause and expression, a bipolar reactive element: pain can lead to both selfishness and generosity; with poveda's words: to the contraction of life to the primary stump, instinctive; or detachment and transcendentalization, which better facilitates knowledge of man's existential limitations and spiritual possibilities.
Eliminating pain at all costs
The presence of pain in man's life constitutes an unanswerable reality, as is the fact that man instinctively tries to evade it and, when he cannot avoid it, adopts defensive attitudes to arm himself and thus make the painful experience less incisive, or tries to find compensation that, by way of evasion, and for the pleasure that entails , mitigate - in another order of realities - the pain that was not wanted or could not be accepted.
We live in painful times set up by anguish, uncertainty, resentments, economic precariousness, violence, the crisis of social, family, ethical and moral values. Man is hurting his life, as he presents himself today, and as an escape seeks pleasure as a defensive mechanism, bringing it into the category of vital principle, to which he makes all the values that give meaning to life and, therefore, to pain and suffering, impacting to face those realities that have a mature function.
Paradoxically, putting as a criterion of life the pursuit of pleasure engenders a tension, in that dissatisfaction following the attainment of relative pleasures demands and somehow determines new and successive checks. This tension often leads to anxiety and, finally, a deep disgust for life, which predisposes man to surrender, insecure and dejected, to an existence without illusions, configured by exhaustless.
This paradoxical derivation the pleasure that causes pain is caused by the loss of the sense of pain. The purpose of pain is not constrained to the pure biological or sensitive economy. Kant said pain is the sting of action and the basis of life's real feeling. The Christian, coherent and consequential, knows that love cannot be achieved without pain and that, behind every pain, and more safely and immediately, after the pain of death awaits a life in a new world: life is the reproduction of painful gestation that ends with death that, like childbirth, opens way in the light of a new life.
Pain is a disjunction between being and not being, between making or undoing the mature process of the human personality, between selfishness and generosity, between self-centeredness and transcendentalization.
The mature and plenifying function that pain can play in the development of the human personality refers to Alfons Auer (Metaphysics of Pain) when it says that nothing essential thrives in human life without pain. Sometimes it will be the pain of becoming and growing, which already makes its violent break in at the time of delivery; others will be the pain of helplessness and hardship, which penetrates the whole life and strikes the old man and the dying of his last crushing blows. These internal and external oppressions are not in themselves valuable, but they invite man to focus, increasingly, on the core of his personality.
Even if the disease actually has something to do with disorder and falsehood, and health with order and truth, in every pain there is a healthy force that drives us to move towards order and authenticity.
In pain man is shaken and unprotected from his usual safety. Health, well-being and even life cease to be something we take of course and that we do not value or appreciate when, as a free gift, we are offered. Pain also vanishes the illusion that the external things of life are our property, that they are sufficient and indispensable, in any aspect, to live a full existence. The mature man knows that such illusions perish and must give way to the truth. For only in truth is man found totally himself, only on the basis of truth can he realize the possibilities offered to him. Perhaps pain will free you from a crippling complacency in itself and prompt you to make serious commitments, or perhaps force you to observe a more prudent modesty regarding your life plans.
Progressive intolerance in the face of displeasure, associated with a growing attraction to immediate pleasure, causes man to lose the ability to face arduous commitments, which are the only ones that produce true satisfaction. The result of this attitude," says Konrad Lorenz, is the impatient and immature anxiety of which demands the immediate satisfaction of all incipient desires. The exaggerated desire to avoid at all costs the slightest disgust, which grows incessantly today, has as its insurmountable sequel the achievement of pleasures that are a consequence of effort, dedication and pain.
Pain, as a deprivation, is not good and should be put in the right means to eliminate it; and the doctor, as a health care professional, must contribute all his knowledge to achieve it. But, in Viktor Frankl's words, the elimination of pain at all costs cannot be a standard of medical action. In no way should the doctor aspire to euphoria at any price. Euphoria at all costs would be equivalent to partial euthanasia. The mission of psychotherapy every medical act is psychotherapeutic is not only to make man fit for work, for pleasure, it is also about helping him to be able to suffer.
In the face of pain, which is inevitable and which is an integral part of human existence, one must discover its meaning, its "why" and, then, it will not be so incisive. There is nothing as devastating as suffering and not knowing why it is suffered, and there is nothing as liberating as finding the truth, with the knowledge of the purpose which always exists of pain.
Perhaps these considerations are the reason for the hedonistic attitude and consequent suffering of today's man: the capacity to suffer is being lost, the values that give true meaning to life are relativized and, because of this lack of convictions and fortitude in the face of physical and moral pain, man divorces from any unpleasant situation without giving time to discover his value and meaning , and is anxiously cast into the search for pleasurable substitutes that degrade and plunge him further into suffering and his own inability to renew and, consequently, to mature and to bring about existential realization.
Psychological pain analysis
He said before that pain is one of the few realities from which no human being can be freed: he presents himself inexorable, sooner or later, in any of his forms, bodily or moody, physical or moral. As pain is so necessarily linked to life, its meaning will depend on what each man gives to his life.
John Paul II faced this reality - especially pressing in our day and, with regard to the sense of pain, says: "Within every suffering experienced by man and also deep in the world of suffering, the question inevitably appears why? It's a question about the purpose (for what); in short, about the sense This not only accompanies human suffering, but seems to determine even human content... Only man, when he suffers, knows that he suffers and wonders why, and suffers even deeper humanly if he does not find a satisfactory answer."
Alarm signal
Pain is an alarm signal that warns of a vital threat to body or mental health. Pain helps the doctor locate and diagnose the disease, such as sadness (mood pain) helps the psychiatrist diagnose the patient's depressive (endogenous or reactive, anxious, or inhibited) modality and provides guidance for appropriate treatment.
But often, pain - as an alarm signal - is gagged, through analgesic and symptomatic treatments, and the cause is difficult to find. Similarly, a sadness can be gagged by the pathways of compensatory evasion (alcohol, drugs, sexual excesses, anger at work, aggressiveness, etc.), without giving choice to the encounter and healing of the cause of that painful sadness.
When advocates of miscarriage and euthanasia argue that all "useless suffering" must be avoided, even at the cost of eliminating the lives of the unborn or the evicted old, they are stripping human life - and the pain that inevitably accompanies it - of its most dignifying sense. If man's supreme ideal were only physical and material well-being, health, pleasure, beauty, strength, then pain would be an absolute evil and euthanasia and abortion would serve to mitigate it.
But pain performs vital and psychological functions that give it meaning and therefore relativize it: pain is never absolute, nor useless. The doctor's mission cannot be constrained to the elimination of pain at all costs, but use it to find the cause and then apply the appropriate remedy to eliminate it; In the meantime, to facilitate through timely psychotherapy the patient to unravel from him the mature and enriching function of his personality, with the finding of a satisfactory answer to the pressing question of why of pain.
When man assumes and gives meaning to his pain, he turns to his own maturity; without the contradictions which always arise in the environment in which man moves, in his family, social and professional action, with the responsibility demanded by his rights and duties in the community - there is a danger of inhibiting himself and remaining, as paralyzed, adopting a more or less infantiloid attitude. Contradictions polish the edges and deformities of personality, to give the polished and cohesive form of maturity, to establish the unity of thoughts, affections and actions - consequence of being one, conscious and free - and permanence or stability in the fundamental attitudes or decisions that are made. Permanence that, let us clarify, does not mean inflexibility: when circumstances change, solutions change, but not the principles that determined the previous decision.
With pain, the personal attitude of the human being is no longer influenced and generated by the environment, to anchor itself more and more in inner principles, in an intrinsic self that adapts to all circumstances, but without identifying with them, remaining faithful to itself. Thus, the facts present preserve the future teleological unit, without losing sight of the past. There is no doubt that this is enriching itself.
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(Cfr Fears of Man, Ed. Rialp)
