Suffering is something hard to talk about, and the words we say cannot convey what we feel. Even by describing every detail of what caused our suffering, we can only point to the source of the sound, but never reproduce it. Suffering is akin to schizophrenia or any other mental illness in that it cannot be transmitted; it is locked deep inside each individual with no way to share it with anyone else. Each person is doomed to hear only their own painful song, the reality of which others accept only because everyone hears it in their own way. Yet suffering is not unique in this: joy, sadness, boredom, anger, and other emotions are equally “schizophrenic” in this sense—untransmittable, impossible for another person to experience in the same way. Only communication, both verbal and nonverbal, provides us with an imperfect tool to hum all these songs. A weak sense of rhythm, missing notes, somewhat chaotic tempo and dynamics—these characterize this communicative humming of emotions.

Essentially, all we ever encounter in life is a comparison of the pain melody in our own head with the hum of suffering in the Other. It does not matter whether it is a physical sign expressed through a contortion, a grimace, a scream, a visible injury, or words, expressions, cultural signs, and symbols—everything is doomed to be merely a trace of suffering, not the suffering itself. To recognize that someone is feeling pain in any of its forms, we need an interpretive effort to correlate the visible signal with our understanding of pain. If it is physical pain, in most cases we are inclined to believe that if a person says they are in pain or shows it through their body, then so it is. However, when a schoolchild says his stomach hurts, we may first wonder if he is faking pain to avoid going to school. Perhaps he is using the “hum” for selfish ends, achieving a desired result through suffering. Then what can we say about “emotional suffering”? About something that does not stem from external stimuli or evident physical dysfunction of the body (at least one not affecting the brain). How do we know if a person is suffering in such a case? Yes, we can rely on the same signs, but will we trust them as readily as we would in the case of a physiological cause? Will we acknowledge someone else’s hum of pain as a reference to that which we ourselves suffer from? Or will we dismiss that sign as false, due to its difference or the difference of the person who expressed it? It is precisely this that will be discussed in this and the following essay—psychogenic suffering and its place among people.

First of all, one might ask: What, then, is psychogenic suffering? That is the question I will answer throughout this text, but to begin with, I will start our story with a fairly simple definition whose boundaries will naturally blur as we proceed. That is, in this text we will not delve into the nature of physical suffering in its isolation from mental suffering.

Typically, suffering is considered to be a feeling whose cause lies in the psyche (as much as it is possible—conscious or unconscious), even if this feeling is perceived as acute physical pain from a comprehensible illness or injury (though it is often hard to draw a line between them). That is, it is something akin to pain, a variation of it, an unpleasant sensation, something one usually wants to rid oneself of or avoid. But why is that? Why do we so strongly dislike suffering, avoid it, fear it, or hate it? Perhaps because suffering itself is synonymous with loss, threat, or damage to what we consider valuable. In short, it means being harmed in one form or another. We do not suffer over something uninteresting, unimportant, or unwanted. A child cries if they lose a candy or a toy, and an adult reassures them by saying they will buy another one. The child does not know if they will ever again have that which they need; for them, it feels like the fatal loss of something precious (as though it were the last candy in the world). Only an adult can pave new pathways of desire by promising the child to make up for the loss. An adult is too experienced to suffer over a lost candy (they know it is easily replaced), but experienced enough to suffer over a lost job. In that case, much like the child, they can suffer not knowing if they will be able to regain what is truly valuable to them—a favorite job and/or the money they would spend on something they love. They may not know how their desire for work or for what it provides will find a new path toward fulfillment. It may mean distancing themselves from the image they strove for, losing social significance or contacts, and so on. The adult suffers more intensely than the child because their desire is more complex, refined, and ultimately more painful.

Suffering is the lump in your throat between something you value and yourself, an obstacle you cannot currently get rid of. It is when you feel thirst but cannot take a sip. This lump disrupts our relationship with the desired object, causes a deviation from the habitual state of connection with what we value. It does not matter whether it is a permanent loss, a mere threat, or a mere scratch. Different shades and types of suffering share the same origin. For example, death is one of the clearest examples of suffering. The death of a loved one signals the “museumification” of that person’s image; your relationship with them turns into a frozen shadow, unable to be altered by the person who once bore it. The object of your desire slips away, because when someone is important to us, it is not just the memory or the shadow they leave that we value but their ability to move, to make that memory change.

What draws us to communicating with the living is the possibility of being interrupted mid-sentence. Our desire is drawn to objects that cannot fulfill it but can prolong it in time, intensity, and space. We are not interested in an unchanging image with which we cannot play or interact. A monologue is only interesting when there is a dialogue, when there is some reply that makes the conversation less dull, richer, more unpredictable. Sometimes, being interrupted can anger or annoy us, but sometimes it is more like a dialogue between two very passionate souls who have so much to share with each other that interrupting becomes a sign they have found something kindred and truly valuable in one another. Each such disruption of one another’s narration is not perceived as aggression or disappointment, nor as a loss of interest, but rather as an even greater involvement in each other’s desire by both participants.

When someone dies, our dialogues with them become closed-off murmurs in which we grieve not only the fact that this monologue will never turn into anything else again but also that it will never again be interrupted—even by something silly or an inappropriate sound that breaks the flow. The object of desire slips away, leaving us only with the memory of it, the memory of the path by which we could always reach it. We are left to endure this suffering, to find a replacement for what has been lost—not in the sense of searching for a similar or identical person, but rather of “plugging the holes” in our desiring body that bleeds from the impossibility of achieving something. Now we must find a quick and accessible alternative to all the benefits once given, for example, by a beloved partner.

Desire needs a clear and convenient highway leading to a point it will not actually reach, providing us with a pleasant dissatisfaction, complemented by small satisfactions—none of which signifies truly achieving the point toward which the desire is directed. For instance, I might want to buy the “Critique of Pure Reason” believing my dissatisfaction stems from not owning that book. I go to a bookstore, see it on the shelf, notice some people who appear smart nearby, think about the knowledge that awaits me and who I will become once I read it. Finally, I purchase it, bring it home, and do not read it (or I read it thoroughly and write a dissertation about it—it does not matter). Will I then want another intellectual book? Certainly, because it is not Kant as such that I want to read—I want to be the sort of person I imagine reading Kant could make me (some figure of a “wise philosopher”). Hardly anyone buys a book simply for the printed letters inside it, rather for what those letters might mean to them.

Do you stop wanting to be attractive in society’s eyes (or in your own eyes, shaped by the culture in which you live) once you buy a beautiful item? No—desire never attains the object: it either suffers from its impossibility or ceases to strive for it. In our aspirations, we find ourselves on a long journey where a book or a new possession is merely a signpost of gratification, between which stretch extended segments of a road movie starring our yearning.

As has become clear, we experience suffering when an obstacle appears in the path of our desire—or even the suspicion or threat of its appearance—or when the point of arrival becomes impossible. In this sense, one can interpret hope as a desire that attempts to ignore suffering as an obstacle. Hope does not alter the final destination it longs for; it views suffering not as a barrier but as part of the journey. This may be a sign of perseverance that will be rewarded, or an indication of desire’s powerlessness, of an obsession with a single object whose path is either difficult or impossible. In such a case, the person takes a step back and no longer merely wants, for instance, their loved one to be alive—they want to want this. In other words, the object toward which the highway is being constructed becomes a different aspiration: they want to desire. From now on, this person’s satisfaction arises not from the loved one’s presence but from the fact that they desire them, remain faithful, and do not betray that especially cherished object. This is one of the ways we behave under the conditions of suffering that we cannot overcome. We do not seek new ways to keep our life functioning normally when something essential has been taken out of it; rather, we preserve this state, for some reason afraid to “betray” it.

An aestheticization of suffering occurs, along with a fixation on striving for the nearly impossible—a mummification of a dead, nonfunctional part of the body due to a reluctance to discard it and a lingering desire to keep living. The fear of remaining a “one-armed cripple” leads to a reality in which the limb is preserved as a terrible compromise: we still have the arm, but it serves no purpose other than making us afraid of losing it. The sharp pain of loss signals either a future healing or a chronic illness. It does not always arise immediately, since we are not always capable of realizing that someone can no longer interrupt our monologue, and that this parting is permanent, not temporary.

It seems to me that both wound-type suffering and threat-type suffering operate under a similar principle. In the first case, the object recedes from us but does not fully vanish, and we suffer because we can almost no longer attain it. For example, when a dream—one we ourselves might view as barely realistic—shatters because of moving to another city or country, where its slight inaccessibility becomes complete impossibility. Yes, we know that a dream is something remote from our current condition, and we understand that we may never achieve it. But we must know, or at least sense, that we still can possibly reach it someday.

Threat-type suffering is the awareness or anticipation of wound-type or loss-type suffering. It is that moment when certain facts or events in the outside world force us to feel damage to the path of our desire for what we value, or even the threat of losing it forever—before it actually happens. For instance, a jealous suspicion of betrayal can be felt and experienced as though a partner has already betrayed us, even if this is not the case in reality. In this way, threat-type suffering can transform into a self-fulfilling prophecy: returning to the example, we so exhaust our partner with suspicion that we ourselves destroy the relationship, pushing them toward betrayal (which we were so afraid of) or a breakup.

Suffering is a demand for its own removal, and its communication is a call for help in achieving that. It is unbearable precisely because it demands to end: sometimes, what is unbearable is not the situation itself but the impossibility of sharing it here and now with the one who is experiencing it. For one person, a shattered vase is a trivial household nuisance; for another, it is the collapse of something of lasting value that demands restoration—gluing the vase back together, buying a new one, or somehow coping with the loss. Right now, I should have a vase that embodies something meaningful for me—serving as the mediator of a desire; it just has to be there, even if I do not notice it or it gathers dust. But the moment it is broken, that “has to be” turns into a nagging “must not, must not, must not”. What long ceased to spark active interest—what was no longer a highway to desire—suddenly stops being a path and becomes a barricade. By the gravity of its loss, it pulls the desire in, which now confronts its own helplessness.

The situation worsens when suffering is caused by damage to, or the disappearance of, something current and alive. In this case, “must not” becomes desire’s terror against the individual who carries it, someone prepared to do anything to satisfy it. But often this turns out to be impossible, and the individual feels like a hostage to a despot who demands absurd things (for example, restoring what can no longer be restored) and punishes them anew each time those demands cannot be met.

Suffering and pain are the worst managers of human life, since they leave us no choice but to rid ourselves of them—sometimes resorting to good deeds, sometimes to terrible ones.

In the first part of this series of essays on suffering, I have examined suffering in and of itself, or as far as possible within the scope of a single individual. This is merely an introduction to what I wish to lay out next: how suffering functions in society, how it engenders the victim, and how the victim engenders violence. I will address these in the next two essays.