La douleur, entre objet et sujet

While pain has become a subject of medical knowledge and know-how, we have no satisfactory objective definition of pain itself, raising unanswered questions for researcher and clinicians. How are sensations and emotions associated.?Can a fetus or an animal suffer ? How can 'psychogenic' pain and the placebo effect be explained ? We are faced with the recurrent problem of the relationship between the body and subjectivity, that philosophical tradition has approached in terms of the body-soul relationship or, in a more contemporaneous line of philosophy, in terms of the body-mind relationship. Is pain a cerebral state or a functional state? Analysis leads us to defend the hypothesis that: the heritage of Cartesian thought and experimental medicine leads us to the paradox of pretending to separate 'what is physical' and 'what is mental'. We must reject this dualism as we have rejected materialism and assume two approaches: body-object and body-subject. This is the only way we can seriously define human pain as a subjective experience.