Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Suffering, or to bear or be weighed down, is a universal human experience, central to the human condition, and in all likelihood, the primary reason why people seek psychological treatment. Historically, suffering has taken on various meanings and significance, and presently, fields from medicine to theology have conceptualized and defined suffering in several ways. Nonetheless, there seems to be a general agreement that suffering is a phenomenological experience involving not only physical, mental, and emotional pain but also existential and spiritual pain. In psychology, however, the meaning of suffering has been fundamentally altered. The language of mental pain and suffering has been primarily replaced by a vocabulary of illnesses and disorders with suffering reduced to diagnoses made from symptoms and criteria. Not surprisingly, given the phenomenological nature of suffering, psychology has largely been silent on the construct of suffering with discussion about suffering relegated to areas of pastoral psychology and occasionally, humanistic and psychoanalytic literature. Outside psychology, research on suffering has mostly been confined to the nursing and medical sciences, generally in the context of pain and palliative care, and mainly of a qualitative nature. Suffering has held various meanings over culture and time. The Stoics in Greece believed that suffering is at the ... log in or subscribe to read full text