Temporality of Maternity, Chronic Pain, and Ethics : Challenging Current Narratives on Pain and Health

Abstract

This chapter aims to articulate new ethical possibilities made apparent during experiences of chronic pain, and suggest an ethics of temporality apparent in the mother–child relation. I also aim to bring an understanding of the complexity and diversity of subjectivities in pain and its impact on its social, intersubjective environment. The narratives of mothers who have experienced chronic pain for more than three months help articulate a gap found in the Western model of medical knowledge. I hope to shift attention from the perspective of a patient understood as an objectified object of pain and from pain as a separate object of study to a study of the concrete embodied experiences of mothers in chronic pain. Chronic pain poses a problem both for understanding its medical source but on a more personal level it challenges the very sociality and ethical becoming of subjectivity. The focus in phenomenological approaches to the personal intersubjective dimensions of mothers in pain is usually not considered by the neurobiological model; however, the vulnerability of maternal subjectivity opens a wide range of questions that can target existing gendered gaps in medical sciences and partly in the humanities. Chronic pain in maternal subjectivities illuminates the traumas of not being with- and for-the-child, and the loss of responsibility in modes of diachronic temporality. Mothers are condemned to isolating guilt and shame, but also to their continuous attempts to restore and to hold onto their own ethical becoming, whatever the cost. To address the gender gap is to bring the pain of maternal subjectivity into a common inter-affective dimension, and to accentuate a social organization of affective space. With the help of phenomenology, I aim to reveal a horizon where the gender gap exists—in this case, the complexity of ethical situations that mothers with chronic pain experience, where moral responsibility and the ethical locus of self are questioned, which has been ignored in philosophical and medical knowledge and practice. I draw on the phenomenological methods employed in the works of Edmund Husserl, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Henry, Arthur Frank, and Cheryl Mattingly to shape the way we understand the meaning of pain. To further support the discussion about the normativity of ethical situation in this chapter, Chapter 13 concentrates on ethical deficiencies of maternal subjectivity as constructed by Western socio-political life.