Abstract
This chapter aims to articulate new ethical possibilities made apparent during experiences of chronic pain, and suggest an ethics of temporality apparent in the mother–child relation. I also aim to bring an understanding of the complexity and diversity of subjectivities in pain and its impact on its social, intersubjective environment. The narratives of mothers who have experienced chronic pain for more than three months help articulate a gap found in the Western model of medical knowledge. I hope to shift attention from the perspective of a patient understood as an objectified object of pain and from pain as a separate object of study to a study of the concrete embodied experiences of mothers in chronic pain. Chronic pain poses a problem both for understanding its medical source but on a more personal level it challenges the very sociality and ethical becoming of subjectivity. The focus in phenomenological approaches to the personal intersubjective dimensions of mothers in pain is usually not considered by the neurobiological model; however, the vulnerability of maternal subjectivity opens a wide range of questions that can target existing gendered gaps in medical sciences and partly in the humanities. Chronic pain in maternal subjectivities illuminates the traumas of not being with- and for-the-child, and the loss of responsibility in modes of diachronic temporality. Mothers are condemned to isolating guilt and shame, but also to their continuous attempts to restore and to hold onto their own ethical becoming, whatever the cost. To address the gender gap is to bring the pain of maternal subjectivity into a common inter-affective dimension, and to accentuate a social organization of affective space. With the help of phenomenology, I aim to reveal a horizon where the gender gap exists—in this case, the complexity of ethical situations that mothers with chronic pain experience, where moral responsibility and the ethical locus of self are questioned, which has been ignored in philosophical and medical knowledge and practice. I draw on the phenomenological methods employed in the works of Edmund Husserl, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Henry, Arthur Frank, and Cheryl Mattingly to shape the way we understand the meaning of pain. To further support the discussion about the normativity of ethical situation in this chapter, Chapter 13 concentrates on ethical deficiencies of maternal subjectivity as constructed by Western socio-political life.
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Notes
- 1.
Subjectivity is understood as a genesis of the relation between the self, the other, and the world (see Zahavi 2008).
- 2.
In this paper, I focus primarily on chronic pain since its long-lasting period challenges the ways subjectivity unfolds itself in the lifeworld. The mothers, whose written narratives are taken here as testimonies, are between 35–55 years old and in most cases are from different areas of the United States and Western Europe, mirroring, thus, a Western medical paradigm.
- 3.
Phenomenology explains consciousness as a temporalizing flow that manifests as a duration and is structured as a threshold perceptual organism: retention, protention and urimpression. Urimpression is the first sensory experience, the ability of the mind to discern one sensory experience from another as well as from other background noises. The urimpression corresponds to the experience of the present moment, of ‘now’. One urimpression is followed by another. There arises a certain connection in the row of urimpressions: the first sensory experience has already disappeared but still exists in consciousness, and is retained. Every now-moment points to a connection with a future moment. Retentional consciousness makes possible the prospect of expectation called protention (Husserl 2019).
- 4.
In works by Emmanuel Levinas ‘woman’ is linked to the feminine and to maternity. The feminine is read as hospitality and receptivity which are primordial modalities of ethical relation with the other. The feminine stands for the Eros, the otherness of the beloved one, carnality, erotic embodiment, but also welcome and dwelling. It is an intermediate category which creates foundation for the ethical relation. Another aspect found in woman but does not define her identity is maternity. Maternity discloses a pre-original sensibility and unconditioned being-for-the other. Maternity is both, an empirical experience and a metaphor that discloses ethical subjectivity: “And the other whose presence is discretely an absence, with which is accomplished the primary hospitable welcome which describes the field of intimacy, is the Woman. The woman is the condition of recollection, the interiority of the Home, and inhabitation” (Levinas 2004, p. 155).
- 5.
In Levinas’s (2006) ethics, intersubjective temporality is characterized by diachronical time, which is a rupture in linear time initiated by the address of the other.
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Poleshchuk, I. (2021). Temporality of Maternity, Chronic Pain, and Ethics: Challenging Current Narratives on Pain and Health. In: Fitzgerald, A. (eds) Women’s Lived Experiences of the Gender Gap. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1174-2_12
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