Journal zyxwvutsrqp for the zyxwvutsrq Theory zyxwvutsrq of Social Bchaviour r8:3 002 1-8308-82.50 zyxwvutsr Pain: Synaptic or Syntactic? JAMES WALKUP Pain, especially chronic pain, gives psychology the jitters. Treatment tech- niques rarely yield good theories and most theories are written as prescriptions designed to prevent the epistemological anxiety attacks that surface when psychologists face up to how little is known about pain. In what follows, I introduce the discussion with an example drawn from the institutional background of this scientific state of affairs. Then I evaluate the prevailing psychological models of pain and suggest some intellectual sources of the trouble I find in them. I close with a modest contribution toward a psychology ofpain, using phenomenological and cultural data on pain and social relations. Along the way, I argue for the importance of three pairs ofcontrasts which form the basis for an account of pain: between pain and language, between private and public, and between first and third person knowledge. Each of these must be included in an adequate theory and an adequate theory must avoid confusing one set with another. “SHOW ME WHERE IT HURTS’ The relevance of.each of these contrasts can be seen in the mundane encounter between the physician and the patient in pain. How is the patient is to answer the questions put to him/her? S/he must use language to locate, exhibit, and characterize pain. In doing so, s/he moves the pain from the privacy of unspoken experience into the public domain. And s/he must submit direct certain knowledge of his/her own experience to the evidential demands of third person knowledge of the world. In the next section, we shall see the theoretical stakes involved in these demands and why it is important to keep them straight. In this section, the focus is on a few of the concrete practices designed to bring