Unfolded with pain: the aesthetics of anesthesia
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/arbor.2018.790n4007Keywords:
Pain, double, doppelgänger, anesthesia, phantasmagory, experimentAbstract
Throughout the 19th century, the literary theme of the “double” underwent a significant change, due both to the remarkable increase in the number of narratives devoted to this theme, and to the sinister nature it adopted at that time. Amongst the multiple factors which favored the advent of this doppelgänger we highlight the advances and discoveries that were made in the field of medicine during those years, especially concerning pain and the possibility of suppressing it. Suffering provokes in the patient a feeling of depersonalization and dissociation which makes him associate his suffering with an “it”, a sort of antagonist, as if a double emerges from the experience of pain itself. The discovery of anesthesia around 1850 brought about a reassessment of the experience of pain, which ceased to be regarded as inseparable from life. The capacity to suppress suffering facilitated its objectivization, and several poets and novelists turned the old and legendary figure of the double into a receptacle where its dissociative effects crystalized.
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