Carvalho, Caê Garcia; 0000-0003-1112-6680; http://lattes.cnpq.br/7234560101345225
Resumo:
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.