Session 7: Redeeming, Surviving, and Deciding

2nd Global Conference

Wednesday 9th November – Friday 11th November 2011
Prague, Czech Republic

A Conceptual Analysis of Suffering: How One’s Suffering is Redemptive of Others?
Daihyun Chung
Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea

There is a novel called “Please Look after Mom”1 by Kyung-Sook Shin. Shin portrays a mother who suffers many difficulties for the betterment of her children and toward the end of the novel, she juxtaposed images of the mother’s suffering with images of Michelangelo’s Pieta. The result seems to imply that all mothers in the human history suffered hardships for the sake of redemption of pains of their children. Then, I came to wonder why not to generalize the implication further. Thus arises my thesis of this paper that one’s suffering is redemptive of others.

There are some philosophers who are positive toward my thesis. For an example, Leibniz1 believed that suffering is good because it incites human will and says that sufferings are there not because God desired them to be there but because God allowed them. Scheler2 is more helpful for my claim. For he insists that all sufferings have meaning as sacrifice(Opfer). To him, all sufferings of members of a community are aimed as sacrifices for the well-beings of the whole of the community. An individual is said to suffer or die substitutionally for the sake of the whole.

In this paper, I recognize that the notion of suffering has physical aspects as well as psychological ones, but I would like to make a further distinction in the psychology of suffering, that between the object and the meta levels. When one suffers it takes a form of an object in the sense that the experience of suffering has an aspect which is private. But as the experience-content of one’s suffering is subject to scrutiny it will display meta characteristics since any mental language is social. I will pay attention in this paper to the meta aspect of suffering, assuming that the content of suffering at this level is social or relational and redemptive. In this sense, our mothers suffered many kinds of afflictions to relieve pains of their children. The notion of pain reflects one’s bodily sensation or feeling but it also contains some mental content. Then, I will try to propose a relation between notions of suffering and pain in such a way that one suffers on behalf of reduction of pains in others, in order to give three arguments to advance my thesis. But before I go into the main arguments, I like to show how the subject of suffering is important.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

‘Grief is love’: Understanding Grief Through Self-Help Groups Organised by the Family Survivors of Suicide
Tomofumi Oka
Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan

In 2006, the Japanese Government implemented the Basic Act on Suicide Countermeasures in response to an extremely high suicide rate. In accordance with this act, and supported by local government grants, mental health professionals have established support groups in many cities for the family survivors of suicide. Such families have met others like themselves in the support groups and have organised themselves into self-help groups because they were dissatisfied with the concepts of grief work that lay at the foundation of the professional support and because they felt the need to create new, alternative values and meanings for their grief. This ethnographic research aims to discuss the self-help groups’ beliefs regarding grief and the strong cultural influence of Japanese Buddhism on their attitude toward death and the deceased.

In 2008, the leaders of these self-help groups invited me to participate in their activities since I am considered an expert on self-help groups in Japan. They needed an expert’s support to validate their groups so that they could oppose mental health professionals who believe that suicide victims’ families should be discouraged from organising themselves. Though I have been invited to the groups’ open gatherings and conferences as a speaker or participatory observer, the meetings for sharing experiences of grief are strictly closed to outsiders, including me. However, because my co-researchers are leaders of the self-help groups, I have had numerous opportunities to conduct interviews with the leaders and members and to receive feedback on the results of my observations.

The groups’ beliefs, which they have developed themselves and which differ significantly from those of professionals who customarily provide support group services, are discussed as ‘liberating meaning perspectives’. Three themes are identified in the perspectives: ‘Living with Grief’, ‘Grief is Ours’, and ‘Grief is Love’. I also examine how these perspectives influence the social actions of the self-help groups.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

The Book of Joe
Donald Felipe
Golden Gate University, San Francisco,USA

Joe is sixty four years old. He has suffered from severe schizophrenia from his early twenties, and admitted to me that he lived with voices since his teens. He was a handsome young man, not unintelligent, born to loving parents, who cared for him in their home for twenty years, until the death of his father in 1995. Since then Joe has had a conservator and lived in a variety of care homes, half-ways houses, and lock down facilities. He now lives in a home for seniors with dementia and Alzheimer’s.

I sometimes find him sitting by himself in a kitchen area, well-groomed, listening to the radio, smiling, looking off in the distance.

His voices tortured him from his youth. He has attempted suicide, crashed cars, thrown objects through windows, scratched himself until he bled, pulled his hair out; he was also run over by a truck around twelve years ago. His leg was crushed and the surgeon said he would never walk again.

But Joe walked within a year. His conservator told me that she has never met a more compassionate and generous man.

He talks of God, and laughs joyfully as he says, “I live with God.” And he has told me, softly, without hesitation, that he has never suffered.

This paper is about Joe.