[Perception and attitude toward pain]

Traditionally, the pain sends back to the infringement of the flesh and the suffering on the infringement of the psyche. The relation of care and the accompanying are due to nature a social fact of relation. In the right line of a first study (Péoc'h et al., 2007) concerning professional representations of health care professionals with respect to the care of the pain, we studied in the context of the theoretical model of the "social thought" (Rouquette, 1973), attitudes, perceptions and the ideological positions of patients about their pain's living. 244 patients hospitalized within the Hospitals of Toulouse have completed a questionnaire included free associations tasks, attitude answers, and answers concerning the ideological dimension of pain (beliefs, religious or anthropological orientation), in fine, a fourth party entered into a phenomenological perspective. The object "pain" will be suspected under the angle of the consciousness and the lived of the patient by using the protocol of the "narrative story of life" (Le Grand, 1989), with a praxeological design. Results indicate that the conceptions of the pain proposed by the patient make references to two different areas: that of the body (evil, handicap) and that of the psyche (evil-being, suffering). The term suffering reveal the social face of the pain in a double constituent: existential (solitude, incomprehension) and ideological (" it is necessary to take its evil in patience ", P = 73,3 %; chi2 = 39,83, p. < .05). The representation universe of the pain comes along with a certain indecision between these two events of the disease : pain versus suffering.