Abstract
The title of the paper harks back to Schopenhauerian ‘der Positivitȁt des Schmerzens’,
a formulation which, stripped of its broader philosophical context, reads to
most of us paradoxical if not overtly contradictory. The folk (non-medical) perception
of pain may be evaluatively negative, but there are also pain conceptualizations
which reveal that humans infrequently think about this phenomenon along more
positive lines. Thus, being predominantly construed as an ‘evil-doer’, pain does not
preclude more positive construals, both in medical and non-medical fi elds. ‘Positivity
of pain’, then, is often explored within literary, anthropological, psychological,
theological, social, therapeutic and utilitarian realms, and, as Sussex puts it, “in its
interdisciplinary span, pain language is a prototypical example of a problem of applied
linguistics” (2009: 4). With this in mind, I take a closer look at some verbal
as well as verbo-pictorial manifestations of pain. The focus of the present study
is specifi cally on the overarching metaphor +PAIN as ‘GOOD-DOER’+ (naturally
contrasted with the previously hinted +PAIN as ‘EVIL-DOER’+), further broken
into more specifi c sub-metaphors. An attempt at capturing and describing some of
these apparently counter-intuitive pain metaphorizations reveals their ‘positive potential’,
a potential of tools with which to obtain control over pain and, in many
cases, re-forge it into something ‘better’, something evaluatively positive.
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