Telling Suffering: Pain, Trouble, Trauma, and Their Stories

Spring Colloquium 2006

Stories of suffering are incomparable. And yet, narratives as acts of representation do have commonalities. Any experience of suffering is always already shaped by pre-existing stories (cultural, familial, professional). These models are not inflexible templates, yet they are powerful. Further, narratives of suffering are subject to the conventions of genres and the discourse rules in effect in any particular storytelling context.

All too often professional discourses are informed by one-dimensional views of self and suffering. There is a strong tendency in these discourses and practices to medicalize suffering by reducing it to a form of pain, to deny that suffering can have any significance or meaning either individually or socially, and to conceptualize the self that suffers in mechanistic, reductive, or passive terms.

Suffering is an experience of finitude, a feeling of powerlessness and dissolution in the face of forces beyond one’s control. It creates conditions of epistemological doubt, which challenge articulation by the sufferer and knowableness by the “other.” This has led some scholars to theorize this area of human subjectivity as ultimately ineffable, but the incomparable does have commonalities, as it becomes narrative.

How do these acts of narration — by sufferers, professionals, and academics — influence what counts as “experience,” both in memory and in how those now suffering understand themselves and their situation?

Papers from this colloquium were published in the Fall 2006 issue of The Hedgehog Review.