Feeling Pain and Being in Pain

In Feeling Pain and Being in Pain, Nikola Grahek examines two ofthe most radical dissociation syndromes to be found in human pain experience: pain withoutpainfulness and painfulness without pain. Grahek shows that these two syndromes--the completedissociation of the sensory dimension of pain from its affective, cognitive, and behavioralcomponents, and its opposite, the dissociation of pain's affective components from itssensory-discriminative components (inconceivable to most of us but documented by ample clinicalevidence)--have much to teach us about the true nature and structure of human pain experience.Grahek explains the crucial distinction between feeling pain and beingin pain, defending it on both conceptual and empirical grounds. He argues that the twodissociative syndromes reveal the complexity of the human pain experience: its major components, therole they play in overall pain experience, the way they work together, and the basic neuralstructures and mechanisms that subserve them. Feeling Pain and Being in Pain doesnot offer another philosophical theory of pain that conclusively supports or definitively refuteseither subjectivist or objectivist assumptions in the philosophy of mind. Instead, Grahek calls fora less doctrinaire and more balanced approach to the study of mind--brain phenomena.

The late Nikola Grahek was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Belgrade. From 1994 to 1995, he was Research Assistant to Daniel Dennett at the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.