Suffering

Suffering generally refers to any feeling causing pain, malaise, discomfort, or unhappiness, whether physical or emotional. While the experience of pleasure and joy is predominantly considered normal, situations of suffering or pain tend to assume a character of strangeness, often enforcing a change in the individual’s habits and in several cases also a loss of interest in the environs: It is somehow as if consciousness of one’s own existence overlaps everything, suspending the controls usually exercised by individuals regarding social relations. According to Manuela Fleming, both pain and suffering designate basic emotions and affections, residing between mental experience and physical experience. In etymological terms, though, suffering refers mostly to a generalized condition and the capacity of tolerance and resistance to lived experience, while pain is ...