O corpo e o espaço na cotidianidade da dor: o apelo dos lugares

Abstract

Our investigation focuses on individuals with chronic pain, under the framework of two diseases, rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia: the first appears as an affection of physical-organic basis, while the second does not present in its etiology any organic substrate and its diagnosis is given simply by exclusion of other diseases, since there is no clinical examination that can point out the prevalence of fibromyalgia. In this disease, how to understand pain? For us it is the existential meaning of the "meaninglessness of the world". We must say that, to understand this invisible pain, we resort to Freudian writings, when the symptom emerges from unconscious psychic dynamics. However, the absolutization of pain taking over the whole body indicates something else: it reveals to us an abortion of the desire to be - the nullification of the body by pain glares at the nullification by the desire to be in the world, and this is the idea of the "meaninglessness of the world." It is precisely in this sphere that a geographical analysis becomes pertinent. We start from the mutual constitution that prevails between subject and place, from their complicity of being, as Dardel points out. We will show how being articulates itself in its innermost with space, how this relationship between subject and place marks our way of being. Our thesis is that if chronic pain (especially in cases of fibromyalgia) is an undermining of the relation of being in the world and, at the same time, the fruit of the abortion of the world by the individual annulled in his desire to be, the experience of such or such a place can constitute a bascule point for a re-linking of the relation between subject and world. If space emerges as an element that coexists in our subjectivity in the wake of geography – following the phenomenological foundation of Humanistic Geography – the creation of new experiences of the world from places can reach the core of being, I mean, the desire to be, rekindling it. In the analysis of our empirical cases we will see the being recovering from the laments of the chronicity of pain for place. Indeed, it is surprising.