The little boy is playing. He falls and skins his knees, He screams. In an instant his whole being is overwhelmed with pain. For him there is only pain, his whole body, his whole world. Mother seizes him and holds him to her, kissing him on the cheeks. In a moment his distress is calmed and the pain passes, the sobbing dies down and he returns to his world of reality, and inquires about the thing he was playing with. Mother has quieted his distress, and the pain of his skinned knees does not disturb him unduly. Remember that this comes about by her kissing his cheeks rather than attending to the injured knees.
You may say that this is all very well for a child, but I am an adult, and I do not react like this. Perhaps so. But we adults react to pain with distress, only we do so slightly differently. We stop ourselves screaming; but the pain is still there. In a way we scream inwardly, and while this is happening, like the child, we feel consumed by the pain.
We can get some insight into this by comparing different cultural reaction to pain. The- Anglo-Saxon tradition is to present a stiff upper lip in the face of pain or disaster, on the other hand Southern Europeans have an accepted tradition of giving vent to their feelings. Such a woman in childbirth may scream when she experiences pain, and give full vent to her distress; her Anglo-Saxon counterpart may lie there silent, but tense and blanched, and in obvious distress. Both are suffering severe pain because the element of distress has got out of hand whether it is openly expressed or not. Another woman may be led to relax in her mind. Then there is no distress. And because there is no distress there is little discomfort.
*108\57\2*
