Pijn en handicap. Een analyse van het rehabilitatieproces

Abstract

Abstract: Pain and handicap. Analysis of the process of rehabilitation. The author analyses pain by focusing on the experience of people disabled through neuromuscular diseases or road accidents. Questions raised by the author are 'How does pain transform the body and the world of those people', 'What is the relationship between pain and disability'. The theoretical framework is phenomenology. In their life, healthy people act by using their body without perceiving that they do so. Through pain, however, the body appears, it is perceived, and this apparition disables us. Pain modifies 'the way to be in the world'. In the case of disabled people, pain produces a movement of retraction. The person concentrates on her/his body, and this withdrawal is simultaneously a shrinking of her/his world. The person looses her/his ability 'to make links' because s/he focuses on her/his body hurting her/him. Rehabilitation practices start from this rupture introduced by pain between the perceiving-body (body-subject] and the perceived-body (body-object). They work on this distance. Through exercises, the person learns to feel her/his body in a different way. This work, the work of adjustment, simultaneously transforms the body and the world of the person. This is the movement of extension the person is enabled, s/he becomes able to make links. The paper explores this double aspect of the experience of the disabled person. Vertaling: Christa Stevens.