Suffering is a foundational yet understudied construct within the field of pain. There is general agreement that pain-related suffering involves disruption to one's sense of self. The selfhood literature characterizes two inter-related modes of self-experience. One mode entails in-the-moment experiences that shape one's stream of consciousness; another involves self-reflective thoughts about...
In recent years, the societal and personal impacts of pain, and the fact that we still lack an effective method of treatment, has motivated researchers from diverse disciplines to try to think in new ways about pain and its management. In this paper, we aim to develop an enactive approach to pain and the transition to chronicity. Two aspects are central to this project. First, the paper...
Qualitative research approaches under the umbrella of phenomenology are becoming overly prescriptive and dogmatic (e.g., excessive and unnecessary focus on the epoché and reduction). There is a need for phenomenology (as a qualitative research approach) to be renewed and refreshed with opportunities for methodological flexibility. In this process paper, we offer one way this could be achieved....
Enactivism is an emerging theory for sense-making (cognition) with increasing applications to research and medicine. Enactivists reject the idea that sense-making is simply in the head or can be reduced to neural processes. Instead, enactivists argue that cognisers (people) are embodied and action-oriented, and that sense-making emerges from relational processes distributed across the...