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Affecting the Body and Transforming Desire: The Treatment of Suffering as the End of Medicine

Drawing on philosophical ideas about suffering and neurobiological research on pain, this paper analyzes the question of suffering as a clinical entity. In particular it provides a critical re-examination of physician and medical humanist Eric Cassell’s classic study, The Nature of Suffering. Two continental philosophers—Karl Jaspers and Emmanuel Levinas—provide different philosophical critiques of suffering that are useful for this analysis. Jaspers provides an immanent “ontological” critique of the medicalization of subjectivity, whereas Levinas provides a critique of suffering as transcendent to cognitive conceptualization. Literature in the neurobiology of placebos and pain provides a useful tool with which to navigate through the philosophical question of whether suffering should be treated as a medical phenomenon.