On the capacity to endure psychic pain

The Pain of Egg-Donation

“…Hence a questioning on the distinction to be drawn between suffering and pain is introduced: would their difference be a matter of affect intensity? If psychic pain has an existential connotation, in the sense of a suffering inherent to life, suffering from life [12], pain would be a certain mode of affirmation of subjective existence, of subjectivation: saying "I am (in) pain" will always allow to say "I am".…”

“…Freud in 1926 [11] assimilated the model of physical pain to that of psychic pain. Psychic pain being "experienced as if it concerns somatic pain", somatic pain becomes the metaphor of psychic, unarticulated, pervasive pain, embodying an unthinkable anxiety as experienced by the baby [12]. The pain of not being able to be loved by Mr P. for what she cannot give him, the pain of not being understood and being pushed into yet another IVF attempt, finds its place within this man's denial of her pain and his own, inherent to the miscarriage trauma.…”

“…In this respect, Akhtar [18] considers pain as different from anxiety in the sense that it is immediate, lacks readily available discursive content and is a response to a trauma that has already taken place. Wille [12], along the line of Winnicott's elaboration of the fear of breakdown as fear of a breakdown that has already happened [19], also advocates that actual pain is a pain that has already occurred.…”

“…To end up in an infantile position, is equally to reoccupy forgotten psychic positions: need for care, mothering, need to complain, all fulfilling a defensive function." Wille [12] considers actual psychic pain as rooted in preverbal, intra-uterine even experiences of pain to which the emotionally attuned pregnant woman or mother will respond by holding and soothing the fetus or baby. Therefore, the capacity to endure psychic pain is rooted in the earliest phases of human existence when soma and psyche are undifferentiated, in such way that somatic and psychic pain coincide.…”

“…By following the Freudian elaboration of pain in "Beyond the pleasure principle" [10], pain becomes a residue that neither the pleasure principle nor masochism can account for, laying beyond the displeasure-pleasure principle. In "Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety", Freud [11] went as far as drawing a direct analogy between psychic pain as the pain caused by object loss, and somatic pain as caused by bodily tissue injury, in terms of invariable libidinal cathexis [12].…”