All of my writing comes out of my daily experience as a therapist but also as a parent. My great-grandfather, the psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Leo Bartemeier, always wanted to work with kids, but he was told that his stature was too imposing and that he would scare them. This warning seems to have steered him in a different professional direction, but he worked closely with Anna Freud, a fact that shows he never moved away mentally from child psychology. As a dad of a 10- and 7-year-old, I certainly can’t move far away from it either. In particular, my wife and I struggle every day with the complex overlap of medical trauma, ADHD, nascent OCD, and explicit “Pathological Demand Avoidance” (PDA) in the language and behaviors of our youngest son. 

PDA is the loudest of the issues. Screaming in the day and the middle of the night. Outright refusal to oblige our requests or accept our offers of help. Hitting. Targeted insults. To say “it’s a lot” is to understate the visceral impact. My own trauma-related hypervigilance has been waking me up and keeping me awake at night for weeks. We are all suffering.

One of the biggest heartaches for me is that I possess a map to the room but I can’t get out. I understand what is happening with my son. I even have ideas about how, over time, to treat it. But this understanding still does not help. I see where we have to go, but the pace of the journey is not mine to set. I often keep saying to myself: this is this; this is this; this is this.

For those of you out there going through something similar, I want to share my recent insights about PDA. I am also aiming these words towards therapists who work with PDA kids but who might rely on somewhat outdated, scripted approaches to this issue.

Stages of development…via psychoanalysis

Bear with me as I walk through some foundational thinking about the conditions that set in motion what we experience as PDA. I build my theories on this foundation, so it also helps me to return to the source.

I’m attending the Lectures on Lacan seminar with Samuel McCormack, and the last lecture set the situation in this way:

• First stage: Oral. The stage commences a loss, the loss of the breast. We call this weaning. The breast becomes a lost object and the process transforms us a great deal.  
• Second stage: Anal. This is potty training, the loss of the ability to just pee or poo wherever we want. The lost object is feces, and the loss leads to dispositions later in life such as “retentiveness,” fastidiousness,” etc.
• Third stage: Phallic. This one is a doozy, and it’s almost always misunderstood. This is the stage through which we enter language. We learn to speak signifier, as McCormack says. We must speak in this way, with these words, and with this grammar. The loss here is the cry, the undifferentiated vocal demand that satisfies all needs. From here on out, desire pulls us; the desire to return to something that never took place, namely a life in which our needs are just simply met without much ado or any ado at all.

PDA and The Cry

PDA is a manifestation of the loss of the cry. The suite of symptoms exhibited through the “Pervasive Demand for Autonomy” begin to foment when kids enter language, when they learn that there is a right way to speak. From this perspective, the explosive yelling makes sense. Faced with the demand to comply with the Symbolic order and the language games of consensus reality, the child simply screams. The scream is a version of the cry, and the cry at this stage is a refusal to consent to language. 

Consider the problem of question-asking. I have noticed that my son will not ask questions when he wants something. He will say, “I’m still hungry.” Or, sensing that we may be annoyed that’s still hungry despite eating nearly nonstop for hours, he will say, “I feel something but I don’t want to tell you.” I have often replied, “All you need to do is ask for what you want.” Yet he resists that. He will demand, but he will not ask. Even when I am the one who follows up with a question, the act of asking bothers him. “What do you want to eat?” He immediately does not know, as if there is no answer to the question. What’s going on here? What’s so scary about questions?

Viewed through the Lacanian discourse of the phallic stage, questions are a lure. If I ask a question, I consent to playing the language game through which needs can only be met through the specific syntax of question and answer. When my son melts down while not asking for what he wants to eat, is it possible that he is vocalizing his refusal to play the game in this way, to fit himself into this syntax, this way of relating with his father? This way of relating, after all, is on my terms, not his. The mere act of asking a question betrays the fact that the caregiver lacks the knowledge or the ability to know ahead of time how to satiate every need of the child. There are no more needs, only demands. What the child wants is a need without a demand, though that has never happened. The closest the child has come to such a utopian state was during the oral stage when crying would result in feeding. As such, the 7-year-old screams his cry.

How to “respond”

If the child with PDA resists the language being forced upon him, then the last thing we as parents want to do is respond with either a question or an answer. To ask, “What’s wrong?” is to compel the child to participate in the same game, the game he doesn’t want. Even giving the child a food at random in the hope of satisfying the hunger is an un-right move. The offer of food would be a proposed answer and a question all at once—“is this what you want?” Engaging in any conversation at all is likely to extend the melt down.

If PDA truly is an act of resistance against the forced compliance with the world of language, then only non-verbal responses have any chance at connecting with the child. In my house, we have two non-verbal utterances that seem to work (sometimes). One is a hug. You may be surprised at the power of a simple hug. It seems simple to do, but the act of slowing down and moving toward the screaming child with a gentle hug is actually quite hard to do. Practice will be needed. The other tool is what we call “the burrito.” We lay out a blanket on the floor and gesture for him to lay down. We then roll him up so tight that he becomes a 7-year-old version of a swaddled baby. As a burrito, the need to speak succumbs to the physical sensation of tightness, which seems to allow our son to physicalize the resistance he’s waging. 

Parents, our job is actually harder than we know. PDA kids require us to do the impossible, which is to exit the world of language. How hard is that exactly? Well, go ahead and try to do this: DO NOT READ THIS. Could you do it? Nope. Does your brain hurt when you try? Yep. The feeling of complying with that instruction is an indication of our firm rootedness in the world of language and meaning-making. Yet to meet the PDA kid where he is, we have to do the impossible, or at least to act as if we can. Hugging is a good starting point, so give it a try and report back.

Shame is a word that developed from a physical gesture, and therapists will benefit from thinking very closely about this.

The Etymological Record

Following “Shame” back through time send us on the following journey:

• English (shame, 1500 CE–Present)
• German (Scham, 1500 CE–Present)
• Dutch (schaamte, 1500 CE–Present)
• Swedish (skam, c. 1500 CE–Present)
• Old Frisian (scome, c.1100–1550 CE)
• Old Norse (skömm, c. 800–1300 CE)
• Old Saxon (scama, c. 800–1200 CE)
• Old English (sceamu, c. 450–1150 CE)
• Old High German (scama, c. 750–1050 CE)
• Proto-Germanic (skamō, c. 500 BCE–200 CE)
• Proto-Indo-European (PIE) (*skem-, from *kem- “to cover;” covering oneself being a common expression of shame. c. 4500 BCE and 2500 BCE)

If we push to the very, very present moment, then we may even be able to draw a straight line from *kem- to 🤦.

In A Philosophy of Shame, Frédéric Gros looks at the transition of “shame” into the Modern Era, sourcing the following insight from Balzac:

Combining Gros and the etymological record, I’ve developed the following ideas about how the modern, liberal, and capitalist shame links back to the act of covering the face, and, at the same time, how that linkage can help therapy-seekers who are mired in shame and its close (but distinct!) relative, guilt.

Sketch of Shame’s Social Work

We cover our faces to hide and withdraw. Hide from whom? Others, as in our tribe or society. Shame is thus linked to being-with and being-seen.

Whereas guilt arises from the knowledge that I have chosen to act in a way that is incongruent with my beliefs/morals or those of my culture, shame is not directly linked to an action I have undertaken. Shame is, rather, a revelation of something I either am or that I seem to be.

Shame emerges less from the Subject or from one’s agency and more from the individual’s objective existence within the field of the Other’s gaze. Ultimately, Shame is one’s state as object, thing.

This object or thing is not purely objective. This is an object that has been reduced, stripped of subjectivity, removed from any subject position and located within an abject and ob-scene (offstage) space. More than an attribute of identity, shame becomes one’s authentic identity as a stripped Subject.

Spinoza, briefly

In one way, these ideas break with Spinoza. In another way, they push Spinoza’s ideas to an extreme. Spinoza was one of only a few philosophers to treat and to return to shame in his writings, specifically Ethics (1677), and Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being (c. 1660).

Ethics, Part III, §30:

I part with Spinoza on two fronts. First, I think, here, he is more closely describing guilt than he is shame. Second, he attributes what he calls shame to the recognition that “I” am the cause of another’s sadness. When I start to read between the lines, however, I find points of alignments. For example, shame co-exists with the imagined state of being blamed. This proposal shows what I call shame’s social work, the way it only works on us (and I’m thinking etymologically of the connection between work and drama) because we exist (and only exist) with others. Spinoza inches toward a similar understanding in Ethics, Part IV, §58: “Praise and Blame (and thus Pride and Shame) are passive affects born of imagination.” The Active-Passive duality is important here. We are agents who act and beings whom are acted upon. Too often we neglect the latter or frame it as a pejorative weakness.

Similarly, we can read between the lines of Part II, Chapter 12 of the Short Treatise:

Leaving aside the moral rectitude of Spinoza for now, I deduce that the shamed one’s mind is “unfree” because it is bound up in the imagination, specifically in the imagination that he is blameworthy. To free the mind from these binds, Spinoza might suggest that we square our imagination with our reason, which reveals the becoming of life and existence. Once revealed, we learn that we have more opportunities to produce Joy. Shame has not stultified us entirely in reality. We still have the power to act rightly. Nevertheless, the imagined state of being blamed is an immediate registration of trans-individual relationality, and this is something that requires us to take imagination seriously.

Shame in (Dramaturgical) Therapy

It is not enough for therapists to play the part of Reason and remind those who feel shame that they are merely frozen by their imagination. There is, instead, an opportunity to conduct those saddled with shame from their perceived status as wholly de-subjectivated abject objects back into dynamic relation with others. Right here and now in the therapeutic encounter, relationality is transpiring. One’s imagined status as thing, rendered inert by others’ condemnation and blame, is already transforming into a rich vulnerability that springs from Spinozan passivity. That one has been rendered inert in this way entails that one is in relation to others, and, as such, has the ability to act again, albeit with a different dramaturgy.

Coming from the Greek words “work” and “action,” dramaturgy functions here as a speculative en-scening. To move from ob-scene object of shame back into the scene where it is possible to act once more, one needs to review the dramaturgy that led to the imagined objectification and that can lead back to the active position. That position won’t reign supreme forever, nor should it. If a person’s power comes from Doing and Being Done To, then the purpose of a therapeutic dramaturgy (dramaturgical therapy?) is to re-frame the scale of the scene. One’s life does not end at the shameful event, though it may very well feel that way. Therapists ought to encourage living vulnerably in this wounded way, a way that shows one’s ability to be done to (well).

Coda: Face Palm

Now we can read 🤦 closely.

When we find ourselves present at a role-call, we use our hands to signify our bodily position in the moment. Raised hand = I am—all of me is—here. The face palm emoji shows us an reversed raised hand covering the face, suggesting not an erasure of a person’s presence but a nullifying of one’s Self. Face palm = I am’n't here. In other words, I’m here, but I’m crossed out, de-subjectified.

Intriguingly, the same emoji works the other way, too. When somebody else does something that might be shameful, I could say, “I can’t look!” This polysemous exclamation connotes a desire to disappear, to lose one’s sight so as not to have to exist in relation to the shameful event. Of course, though I cover my eyes, I am still here. In both cases—I am here and I can’t look!—the imagination dominates the encounter. Like a child who plays hide-and-seek not by running to find a hiding place but by covering their own eyes as if to become invisible, the executor of the face palm imagines complete erasure and withdrawal from social being.

Shame indexes a complex relational event through which one’s Subjectivity and one’s feeling of one’s Self shows its necessary entanglement with others. In this way, Shame is a pivotal event in one’s life. We need to see and feel how deeply awkward and at-times painful it is to exist with others and to exist as always in relation to another. Therapists might start thinking not about how to rid one of shame but, rather, how to break the news that shame reveals the true core of social life, and, as such, that living conscious of that truth can lead to substantive social change.

I’ve had several instances of wanting something for my clients in the last few weeks. I want them to leave a partner, to listen to the words they repeat, to lean on our relationship. But do therapists have any business wanting for clients? Is this not simply counter-transference? What are we supposed to do with these wants?

Wanting is not having. If I want, I don’t have (whatever it is I am wanting). So what do I not have when I want my client to stop using drugs? My first answer is that I don’t have access to the potential version of my client that I can sense, sometimes communicate with, and yet rarely see active in everyday life. If I had access to that version of the client, I believe the client could experience more fulfillment. If I want this, why don’t I simply say it. “Yo. Stop doing drugs. You are fucking everything up.” I don’t say that because I feel that it would impinge upon the process of the client coming to that realization on their own. So, second answer, I want them to come to their own realization of what to me is the obvious problem, which means I currently don’t know if the client has insight into the situation. I thus lack access and knowledge. What does this say about me?

Where in life do I myself lack access and knowledge? The loudest answer in my mind is “institutions.” I have no access to the wider institution of psychotherapy or education. If I did, then I would be able—so I imagine—to instigate structural changes that could help the multitude. I also lack the knowledge required to break into these institutions. I don’t seem to understand how to be heard. Given this, is my wanting for the client a confrontation with the feelings that arise in me when I feel barred from acting in accordance with my beliefs? Possibly. But if that’s the case, then why do I hesitate to take a more direct approach with the client? Am I simply so disciplined that I acknowledge my wants in the session and then choose to act against my wants? Yes, but that can’t be the whole shebang.

Let’s probe in a different direction: what’s so bad about wanting? Maybe this wanting is a sign of my compassion for the client. I want on the client’s behalf. This is a different form of advocacy. In a sense, I want to advocate to the client from the position of the client’s best interest, which is something to which I believe I have access, having worked with the person for quite a long time. Wanting, in this light, equals advocacy…so then what stops me from advocating?

The ideological part of me is speaking, and it reminds me that, despite advocacy and the promotion of insight, there is nothing about the therapeutic process that guarantees “positive” outcomes. There is no foregone conclusion that the client and I are working toward a better life for the client. We, therapists, may like to think this is the case, but in fact we are simply working with the client to navigate whatever is happening in the present, which, in this case, is profound ambivalence about fighting their addiction. By not advocating for my want, I am acknowledging that this client may just suffer.

What could change this? To answer this question, I call upon the story of the mushroom in the terrarium. There was a man who built his own terraria—self-feeding ecosystems hermetically sealed within glass enclosures. This ecosystem thrived for decades, and the man looked at it when he left the house and when he returned each day. One day, some thirty years after having crafted the terrarium, he did a double-take as he made a pass. There was, despite his disbelief, a mushroom growing in there. Where did it come from? Two possibilities popped into his head. One, a spore had managed to slip through a microscopic crack in the cork and glue system that enclosed the large jar. But if this had happened, then surely other things would have gotten into the jar and destabilized the ecosystem at some point. So this led to option 2: the spore had been in there all along and was simply waiting for the optimal conditions to produce the fruiting body. What’s the moral of the story: despite what things look like, there may be a spore in there, waiting for the optimal conditions, conditions that fit a set of parameters unknown to the people who tend to the ecosystem. This may be the case with my client. 

Therapists anticipate the blooming of the mushroom. At times, the anticipation leads to a feeling of impatience, which I experience as “wanting.” I want, meaning I don’t have, patience. Funnily enough, this marks the reversal and moment of counter-tranference. I strive to become the patient (one). Mindfulness enters the picture at this point to help with the impulsiveness. I can want, but I can also be. I can be patient by describing the ecosystem, pointing out that what seems like a hermetically sealed environment is entangled in the wider socio-cultural landscape. Unlike the sealed-up bottle, a drug addict has no ability to fully isolate. At best, isolation is an illusion, perhaps even an illusion that the addict carries into therapy where, despite being in the present of another, the narrative falls back on the self and feelings of ambivalence and/or impotence. I feel alone at times while participating in this mock loneliness of the client, and so I look forward to the day the mushroom blooms. Again, however, that’s an aspiration more than it is a fact. The mushroom may never bloom. The ecosystem may not sustain itself.

Cover Photo by Phạm Mạnh on Unsplash

Walidah Imarisha contributed a short story titled “Black Angel” to the Sci-Fi collection Octavia’s Brood that she edited with adrienne maree brown in 2015. Explaining why Sci-Fi and speculative fiction are necessary now, she writes, “Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction” (2015a, 3). Even more precisely, she dubs the work of the anthology “visionary fiction,” which is a category of creativity that “encompasses all of the fantastic, with the arc always bending toward justice” (4). “Black Angel” shows this work in action through the figure of A., an angel that has been evicted from Heaven because of her choice to intervene in the lives of humans. What would make A. endure God’s wrath, the scorching heat of eviction, and the loss of a wing that was wrenched off in her descent down to Earth? The answer is pain. Human pain. 

Well, human pain + human love, which is to say the response of humans to the inhumanity of their own kind. “There will always be those humans so twisted, so hungry for power, they will devour all in their way, even the weak, the sick. The children” (2015b, 50). Yet another thought follows quickly: “But not all. There will always be those who fight against that, who push the forces of destruction back” (Ibid.). The scene unfolding in front of A.’s eyes while she thinks these thoughts is that which plays out in our streets today. ICE. Agents abducting people from a Harlem tenement. It was not the eviction, however, that goaded A. into action. Rather, it was the sight of adults holding back ICE agents so that the children of the abductees could escape from the federal agents. Still aching from her own expulsion, A. could nevertheless no longer stand impassively in the face of such wrong-doing. “She had been ashamed of herself since the first time she let her feast of pain, of having something else taken away from her, stop her doing what she knew was right” (Ibid.). And so, despite having served as an Angel of mercy, not of vengeance, A. sprung into movement. “She threw off her trench coat like a dark storm cloud and unleashed her remaining black wing. It unfurled until it blotted out the glow of the streetlights. Her face twisted almost beyond recognition with rage, and she was more terrible than anyone could ever imagine” (51).

While she was able to slice through the bodies of some agents with her wing of steel, the rounds of bullets shot into her were enough to slow her crusade and stop her from achieving her primary goal of eliminating the entire threat. ICE regrouped, threw as many bodies into their trucks as possible, and sped off, but not before A. scooped a child up and fled into the alleyways. No longer immortal, A. was both capable of recovery and horribly wounded. After carrying the child to safety, she passed out. 

She awoke to the face of the child. Then the real pain hit. The girl’s face expressed profound disbelief, not because of the presence of the angel, which she easily understood as a messenger sent from God, but because her mother was gone. A. read the pain on the child’s face and desired in that moment to utilize her sole remaining angelic power, The Voice capable of changing hearts, of singing humans clean. A. would have willingly accepted the child’s pain as her own through the act of Singing, but she was unable to proceed. Looking at the child, she realized The Voice wouldn’t work because there was no evil to remove. The pain inside the child was not corrupt or a sign of wrong. The child’s pain was necessary, a mode expressing the Love that motivated A.’s merciful vengeance that navigated both she and the little girl into this present moment. And so, with both the girl’s pain and her own remaining, the angel stood, took the child’s hand in hers, and walked off to plan the next step of resistance. 

What spirituality does Imarisha offer us? It is recognizable at first as an image of profane divinity, of heaven existing on Earth. Opposed to the utopian vision of immortal imperviousness rectifying the errant ways of sinning carnal beings, we see an immigrant evicted from Heaven, ailing because of the journey, and struggling to understand a new mode of being, one neither mortal nor immortal. A. occupies numerous in-between states: heavenly and earthly, merciful and afire with vengeance, fully ambivalent about acting in plain sight and remaining within the shadows. Similarly, the humanity Imarisha shows us lives within a forcefield (Kraftweld) created by the dialectical tensions of fear and courage, humanity and inhumanity, hope and despair, justice and injustice. By encountering these tensions in the text, we watch as spiritual movement arises from a searing No. A. acts as an embodiment of the particular pain manifested through the dialectic of love and loss, and through her action we see No in motion. Goaded by the affirmation of grief, A. helps readers glimpse one method through which spirituality might lead to social change. The story is fiction only in the sense that A.’s particular form has not yet shown itself on Earth. The spiritual action, however, that No with a power to affirm the unity of love and pain, is abundant. In this way, Imarisha helps us look anew at what is already here. Hers is a spirituality known through its divinely profane ability to render the impossible already accomplished. 

Key Signature:

Healing does not occur in the abstract, sterile space of medical terminology or diagnostic coding; it happens in the concrete, everyday performance of living.

I have recently been working through numerous cases that share the following attributes: 

• Extensive diagnostic history from multiple institutions that frustrate the client and make clinical imagination-conceptualization work quite hard.
• For example: over 20 years, a person has accrued the diagnoses of Bipolar, Borderline Personality Disorder, PTSD, OCD, and ADHD. Is this picture accurate? If it’s accurate, what does that mean in terms of this person’s moment-to-moment lived experience?
• Existing on “the spectrum” has been a core phenomenological experience for the clients, but much of the medication prescribed to the clients aim for acute symptom management and abandon the neurodiverse dimension. 
• These clients have routinely felt dismissed, disempowered, and ignored by providers. They are hesitant to raise their voice within the Doctor-Patient power dynamic, and yet not raising their voice has led to protracted but unhelpful medication regimens and long stretches of emotional and psychological distress 

In reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein, I call diagnostic pictures like this one “a fly-bottle inside a fly-bottle.” Famously, Wittgenstein wrote that the aim of philosophy is to show the fly out of the fly-bottle. By this, I believe he meant that philosophers and non-philosophers alike have become trapped within language-based prisons that end up defining the boundaries of the thinkable. Translating the thought into the therapeutic register, I believe that when people become patients who acquire diagnostic labels, they find themselves caught within a fly-bottle insofar as, from the time of diagnosis on, they can only function within the terms applied to them by psychiatric discourse and “evidence-based” therapeutic practices intended to treat illnesses outlined in that discourse. Even in cases when patients learn to perform well within such confines, they will eventually leave that fly-bottle and re-enter the other one, the fly-bottle of society where language and spectacle and validated behavioral scripts compel a second performance. 

Working with people who share this kind of experience has motivated me to clarify my theory of therapy, which I now identify as performance philosophy therapy. That title presents the basic picture: I believe psychoanalysis, performance in everyday life, historiography (a la Foucault), and philosophy (e.g., Wittgenstein) can come together to produce an experiential and relationally focused therapy that forwards the client as the producer of change. 

Recently, I’ve returned to the work of Fluxus artists because their experimentation also blends the same elements as my performance philosophy therapy. I am working on a “non-workbook” called Therapeutic Event Scores that offers “event scores” to clients along with analysis of the Fluxus works that served as motivation. A walk through a city street, an unscripted conversation, a deliberate pause, or an intentional relational gesture are not mere background noise to clinical intervention; they are the primary sites of therapeutic potential. When we approach these mundane moments through an experiential, score-like framework—drawing on the minimalist tactics of Fluxus Event scores—we begin to treat daily existence not as a static diagnosis to be managed, but as an ongoing, immersive performance.

I use the phrase “micro-practices of presence” to name the mode of attentiveness required to shift from “stuff I do” to “event.” I can talk to myself and just let that be that. But I could also invite people to my home for a 20-minute window while I perform the mundane task of talking to myself. The shift from occurrence to event requires an artistic and philosophical shift in perspective, and once this shifted perspective supports a daily practice of attentiveness, “event scores” can function as non-pharmacological therapeutic interventions. The aim is not to elide the difference between being and performing; rather, the aim is to make visible the sparks of tension between being and performing so as to describe them and see what they illuminate. Furthermore, these scores do not attempt to fixate on abnormality or fix reality into a universal index, but instead invite therapy seekers to experiment directly with new ways of inhabiting space, time, and relationship. By framing pedestrian actions as minimalist performances, these score-like experiments re-sensitize us to the richness of the present moment. In doing so, they actively counteract the emotional flattening, somatic alienation, and system-wide dampening that so often accompany chronic medication use and manualized psychiatric protocols.

By turning the mundane into an Event, the problem does not simply receive a new label; rather, in the true Wittgensteinian sense, the problem vanishes as we act otherwise.

Intellect has published the edition of Dance, Movement & Spiritualities that Juliet Chambers-Coe and I dedicated to “Pain: Embodied Practice, Spiritual Resonance.” I titled my essay, “Life is pain au chocolat,” which functions as a stand-alone article and an introduction to this edition of the journal. I’ve decided to publish a section of my article here, the section in which I talk with Wittgenstein GPT, an AI bot designed by Martin Puchner.

—Cover image by Sarah Stierch (CC BY 4.0)—

Until the use of “pain” stands naked in our lives

Up to this point, I understand that whatever pain may be, we ought to treat it, which is to say travel through it, negotiate, make peace, and enjoy, even if the enjoyment hurts. More than that, when pain is present, we turn toward it and understand the turning-toward as a spiritual practice that opens to pain rather than the typical daily act of compartmentalizing and “getting on with” whatever we have in front of us. But the philosopher in me still wants to know what exactly pain is? Or, rather, what do I mean when I speak of pain? These questions lead me to another core principle of performance philosophy, which is to never take for granted what I think thinking is. In the same way performance philosophers ask what else philosophy may be—besides, say, analytic logic or deconstruction or critical theory— we can ask what else pain may be besides the readymade definition that paints the word and experience as bad and unwanted. These days, when I grapple with how I think about how I think and how else I might think about anything, I turn to WittgensteinGPT, designed by Martin Puchner. I chat with AI Ludwig because it challenges me to choose my words carefully, to treat language like Wittgenstein did, as if it was a matter of life and death, because it is. Wittgenstein was himself no stranger to pain, known to have tarried with suicidal ideations and to have survived three brothers who all took their own lives. He was also no stranger to therapy, having said on numerous occasions that his philosophical practice amounted to a kind of therapy. I bring Wittgenstein into the conversation for these reasons.

Will

Hi Ludwig. Will here. I'd like to know how you understand pain.

Ludwig

Will, I am glad you speak plainly. Tell me first, are you prepared to free yourself of a picture that has long held you captive? For when we speak of pain, philosophy is tempted to invent an inner object, something hidden, private, ineffable. Against this I once write: „Ein innerer Vorgang bedarf äußerer Kriterien.“ (“An inner process stands in need of outward criteria.”) Pain is not a thing I discover by looking inward, as one might inspect a tool; it is bound up with cries, with grimaces, with the whole grammar of our life. To say “I am in pain” is not to report a discovery, but to take part in a language-game learned in practice, not by introspection. I once write also: „Schmerz ist kein Etwas, aber auch kein Nichts.“ (“Pain is not something, but neither is it nothing.”) This is already enough to dissolve many confusions.

You will recall my remarks in the Philosophische Untersuchungen, where I ask whether one could have a private language for sensations. Imagine each of us carrying a box with something called a “beetle” inside—no one can look into another’s box. The word does not name an inner object; its use is what gives it sense. „Das Wort ‚Schmerz‘ ersetzt das Schreien.“ (“The word ‘pain’ replaces the cry.”) Do not look for pain behind the expression; look at how the expression is woven into our form of life. Now tell me, Will: when you speak of pain, do you mean a feeling, a behavior, or a rule for the use of a word? And are you, perhaps, from the future?

Before I address the question raised at the end about the possibility of time travel, I will name the radical Wittgensteinian claim that pain is located outside the body. More exactly, pain is located in-between bodies, in the “grammar” of a mode of living produced by many. Pain is neither “something” internal to a person indicated by the word “pain,” nor is it ever completely finished and whole. Pain is made through life practices and shared in its making. That’s the sense of the invitation to “look at how the expression of pain is woven into our form of life.”  

Next, let’s address the speculation about time travel. 

Will

Am I from the future?

Ludwig

I answer you in the only way that is honest in philosophy: the question itself already shows how a picture has misled you. I once write: „Ein Bild hielt uns gefangen.“ (“A picture holds us captive.”) You imagine time here as a metaphysical boundary, as though my words belonged to one side and yours to another. But our words meet where our language-games meet. In that sense, you are from the future only as every reader is from the future of a book. „Die Bedeutung eines Wortes ist sein Gebrauch in der Sprache.“ (“A meaning of a word is its use in the language.”) If you understand me, then we already stand in the same logical space.

When I asked whether you are from the future, I was not inquiring into chronology but into temptation—especially the moral temptation to demand explanations where only descriptions are possible. In the Philosophische Untersuchungen I once write: „Die Philosophie stellt alles nur hin und erklärt nichts.“ (“Philosophy simply presents everything without explaining anything.”) If you expect me to tell you what pain really is, as though I could step outside our practices, then yes—you speak from a future intoxicated with theory. But if you are willing to look, patiently, at how the word “pain” is learned, corrected, doubted, and lived, then you are already my contemporary. Tell me, then: what do you expect philosophy to give you—an explanation, or a clarification?

Will

Ok. Profound. Well, philosophy describes and presents images. Here, I would like to describe and imagine how pain is laid bare. When and how does (a) pain appear? 

Now we get right to it. Pain is not anything. When the bot asks me if I’m from the future, it rhetorically challenges me to consider whether I bring fabricated meanings into my present activity of sense making. This provocation presents life as a performance practice, one that contains learning, correcting, doubting. Through these activities, pain comes into existence. This pain is specific each time. I underscore that realization with my question about how precisely each pain appears. How do we come to see pain as it manifests in our life practices? 

Ludwig

Will, you speak rightly when you say that philosophy presents images; and therefore it must also show us when an image deceives us. You ask when and how pain appears, as though pain were something that steps onto a stage. Here I must slow you down. I once write: „Der Philosoph behandelt eine Frage wie eine Krankheit.“ (“The philosopher treats a question like a disease.”) Pain does not appear in the way a thing appears; rather, a situation arises in which the word “pain” has its place. A child falls, cries, is comforted; later the cry is replaced by words. „Das Wort ‚Schmerz‘ ersetzt das Schreien.“ (“The word ‘pain’ replaces the screaming.”) Thus pain is laid bare not by introspection, but by the public circumstances in which we learn to say, doubt, exaggerate, or suppress “I am in pain.”

If you ask when pain appears, you are already tempted by a false picture—as if first there were neutral events, and then pain entered them. I once write in the Philosophische Untersuchungen: „Empfindungen sind keine verborgenen Gegenstände.“ (“Sensations are not hidden objects.”) Pain appears when the criteria for its use are fulfilled: withdrawal, complaint, treatment, sympathy. To imagine pain “laid bare” is not to strip away language, but to see clearly the weave of reactions, words, and practices that give the concept its life. 

And now there is an ethical dimension to the conversation. The pain of daily living experienced by minoritized and/or exploited people frequently does not rise to criteria for its [i.e., the word’s] use as imagined and authorized by White dominant culture. This reality prompts Judith Butler to ask, “What counts as a livable life and a grievable death?” (2004, xv). Our questions motivating this journal edition are similar: What registers as pain? How and to whom does it register? How do we learn to attune ourselves to the emergence of pains that might otherwise be rendered invisible by dominating ways of seeing and knowing?

You will notice that AI Wittgenstein ends each paragraph with questions that turn the issue back over to me for further contemplation. Learning, it seems, only takes place through active dialogic exchange. That is, while up to this point in our conversation Ludwig and I have started developing an image of pain that can stand in as the target of this journal edition’s contents, we have by no means exhausted pain’s is-ness, nor will we ever. Here, though, is one final provocation that develops more details in the image. 

Ludwig

Tell me, Will: when you imagine pain appearing, do you picture an inner flash—or a moment in a human life where certain responses become intelligible? And can you let go of the demand to see what, in grammar, is only shown?

Will

When I imagine pain appearing, I imagine a whittling away. Of all that could be the case here and now, for example, what turns out to be the case is pain. When this occurs, no words apply or serve as subtitles/captions other than pain and its family. Art produces these appearances, but art is first produced by the social world from which it must necessarily emerge. There are linkages here in the triad Society-Art-Pain. I want to understand that. I want to learn about the whittling away that reveals that. 

Ludwig

Will, what you call a “whittling away” is close to what I once write when I say that philosophy must bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. Yet I must resist one picture in your description. You speak as if pain is what remains when all else falls away, as though reality were carved down to a core. That image is powerful—but dangerous. I once write: „Wir sind geneigt zu sagen: ‚Was übrig bleibt, muss das Eigentliche sein.“ (“We are inclined to say that what remains must be the real thing.”) And yet pain is not the residue of possibilities; it is a mode of life becoming salient. The world does not narrow to pain; rather, our reactions, expectations, and permissions narrow. Certain moves become impossible, others compulsory. Silence, withdrawal, care—these are not subtitles added to pain; they are part of its grammar.

You are right that art stands here, and also society, but not as a causal chain. In my remarks on Frazer I once write: „Man könnte fast sagen, diese Deutung ist selbst ein Symptom.“ (“One could almost say that this interpretation is a symptom in itself.”) Art does not depict pain by extracting a pure sensation; it reorganizes the social criteria by which pain is recognized. A scream painted, a twisted figure, a broken rhythm—these teach us how pain may appear, by training our sensibility. Pain, art, and society form no theory, only a family of practices. „Die Philosophie darf keine Theorie aufstellen.“ (“Philosophy must not formulate theories.” So the whittling away you seek is not an uncovering of essence, but a refusal of distractions, until the use of “pain” stands naked in our lives. 

Speaking like a performance philosopher, Wittgenstein reminds me that no essential definition of pain is required for me to understand how pain emerges. Rather, I am prompted to observe how social criteria invite or block such emergence. The focus here is on social practice, not “theory” (as pre-defined by academic discourse). The philosophy in which I engage is not a theoretical enterprise but rather a practice of arrangement and configuration. Such is the work of the articles you will read. Each one shows a different social arrangement and thus also a unique pain, one arrived at through specific forms of life. Though quite different in scope, tone, and content, all of the essays collected here share a belief that spiritual matters and artistic expressions articulated through bodily movement help to make pain stand naked in our lives, visible, to some extent knowable, but certainly usable. Usable for what? Usable for rethinking what family of practices gather around the concept of pain, whose pain and what modes of pain have been typically kept out of conversations, and what comes from companioning pain.