Embodiment and meaning: Understanding chronic pelvic pain

The case of chronic pelvic pain in women is presented as an example to explore firstly, the problem of medical knowledge on, and interventions for, chronic pain; secondly, current new developments at the intersection of neuroscience and phenomenology, in particular Varela's proposal for a 'neurophenomenology'; and thirdly, methodological issues of significance for social interpretive sciences to enable their active contribution to this research programme. This paper argues that a non-dualistic concept of embodiment is fundamental to developing understandings of chronic pain, and that contributions from critical phenomenology need to be augmented with analyses from socio-political and cultural research. The social interpretive sciences, to contribute to a fully interdisciplinary neurophenomenology, need a methodology for analysing meanings (particularly narrative) within a theorization of language that is commensurate with critical phenomenological accounts of embodiment