Delving into the World of "Pain": Understanding, Experiencing, and Reacting to “Pain”

Contagion Through Culture

What Weber called “disenchantment”, the dissipation of our sense of the cosmos as a meaningful order, has allegedly destroyed the horizons in which people previously lived their spiritual lives….[modern seekers of meaning may feel] the world loses altogether its spiritual contour, nothing is worth doing, the fear is of a terrifying emptiness, a kind of vertigo, or even a fracturing of our world and body-space…The existential predicament in which one fears condemnation is quite different from the one where one fears, above all, meaninglessness. The dominance of the latter perhaps defines our age…In a way which we cannot yet properly understand, the shift between these two existential predicaments seems to be matched by a recent change in the dominant patterns of psychopathology. It has frequently been remarked by psychoanalysts that the period in which hysterics and patients with phobias and fixations formed the bulk of their clientele, starting in their classical period with Freud, has recently given way to a time when the main complaints centre around “ego loss”, or a sense of emptiness, flatness, futility, lack of purpose, or loss of self-esteem. Just what the relation is between these styles of pathology and the non-pathological predicaments which parallel them is very unclear. In order even to have a serious try at understanding this, we would have to gain a better grasp of the structures of the self..It seems overwhelmingly plausible a priori that there is some relation; and that the comparatively recent shift in style of pathology reflects the generalization and popularization in our culture of that “loss of horizon”, which a few alert spirits were foretelling for a century or more. [Sources, 17-19]

As any skilled host or hostess knows, the success of the dinner party often hinges on the atmosphere of the setting. The setting not only shelters the table but influences the course, content, and mood of the conversations that happen around it. Wright’s desert masterpiece is a case in point. The disciplines of neuroscience and architecture intersect in their 10318_000b.indd 5 4/10/15 1:26 PM 6 SARAH ROBINSON understanding of and obligation to their subject: the embodied human being, a being who can exist only in relationship; relationship to the places we inhabit, to each other, to the world. Architectural settings have the capacity to foster, weaken, or destroy these relationships. Both the neuroscientists involved in the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture who work at Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute and the students who study at Taliesin are aware of this interdependence. That weekend in the desert was a point of departure, a catalyst that cracked open a few new windows and opened others wide enough to knock the corner post out of the wall. Momentum has since gathered, and so have the contributions to this work. Here, practitioners from such disciplines as psychiatry, neuroscience, physiology, philosophy, cognitive science, architectural history, and architectural practice meet not only to explore what neuroscience and architecture can learn from each other: they situate the dialogue in historic context; they examine the implications for current practice and in reimagining architectural education; they dream the shape of the future. What emerge here are design criteria that have been forged over eons of evolution on this planet—whose imperatives are neither arbitrary nor negotiable. Attention is not narrowed in algorithms, signifiers, and particles, but directed toward the emergent, the affective, the sensual, the gestural and kinesthetic factors that pattern human perception and experience. [Mind in Arch, 5-6]

Opioids - culture of prescription - system is broken http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/28/health/what-are-opioids/index.html

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