Attending to Persons in Pain

Catalog description

How are we to understand and attend to pain in ourselves and others? Given that pain is an irreducibly first-person phenomenon, this is no easy question. In this class, we aim to understand the roots of the various ways we attend to persons in pain today, and so to develop greater conceptual clarity and historical perspective on the diverse frameworks in which we encounter persons in pain. At the same time, we seek to nurture a recognition that attending to persons in pain threatens modes of control over that person's reality and our own. Therefore, in this class we seek to foster an understanding that attending to persons in pain today, whatever the setting, is a fragile and fraught enterprise that nevertheless continually calls for creative and faithful responses