This article approaches Ovids story of Echo and Narcissus in the Metamorphoses through some of Maurice Merleau-Pontys writings on expression and speech. Echos speech as portrayed by Ovid clearly illustrates how Merleau-Ponty describes speech in Phenomenology of Perception as a "paradoxical operation" through which we use words with already given sense and in that very process both stabilize and alter established meaning. Instead of reducing Echo to a moment of the identity and fate of Narcissus, I bring out Echos own voice and the expression of her subjectivity through creative repetition. The short dialogue between Echo and Narcissus makes manifest that Echos words cannot be reduced to a simple repetition of a clear and distinct original. Rather, her speech emerges in relation to an original that is only made present as an original of a repetition in that very repetition. Echos voice is disruption of the words she repeats and each repetition is also its own origin. Echos own voice is only made present when we listen to it as something other than a simple repetition of the voice of Narcissus. The fragments she returns through her echo, lose their fragmented character through modifying and altering their already given meaning. What Echo lacks is not primarily a voice of her own but rather an unbound origin which by itself remains mute and thereby runs the risk of not expressing anything at all. Echo is repetition but it is precisely as repetition that she is also originating speech.

n/a

Background: joint planning and decision-making within couples have evident effects on the well-being of the family. The purpose of this study was to investigate the level of pregnancy planning among pregnant women and their partners and to compare the coherence of pregnancy planning within the couples. Methods: pregnant women and their partners were recruited from 18 antenatal clinics in seven Swedish counties between October 2011 and April 2012. Participants, 232 pregnant women and 144 partners, filled out a questionnaire with questions about pregnancy planning, lifestyle and relationship satisfaction. 136 couples were identified and the womens and partners answers were compared. Results: more than 75% of the pregnancies were very or rather planned and almost all participants had agreed with their partner to become pregnant There was no significant difference in level of pregnancy planning between women and partners, and coherence within couples was strong. Level of planning was not affected by individual socio-demographic variables. Furthermore, 98 % of women and 94 % of partners had non distressed relationships. Conclusion: one of the most interesting results was the strong coherence between partners concerning their pregnancy and relationship. Approaching these results from a social constructivist perspective brings to light an importance of togetherness and how a sense and impression of unity within a couple might be constructed in different ways. As implications for practice, midwives and other professionals counselling persons in fertile age should enquire about and emphasise the benefits of equality and mutual pregnancy planning for both women and men. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Conceptions of autonomy in western philosophy and ethics have often centred on self-governance and self-determination. However, a growing bulk of literature also questions such conceptions, including the understanding of the autonomous self as a self-governing independent individual that chooses, acts, and lives in accordance with her or his own values, norms, or sense of sell This article contributes to the critical interrogation of selfhood, autonomy, and autonomous decision making by combining a feminist focus on relational dimensions of selfhood and autonomy with phenomenological philosophy of the embodied self as being-in-the-world. It offers a philosophical investigation of different dimensions of bodily relational autonomy by turning to phenomenological accounts of the lived body as self-reflexive. When so doing, we hope to contribute to bridging the gap that sometimes exists between discussions of autonomy in analytic moral philosophy and of freedom and facticity in phenomenological philosophy. We see this gap as unfortunate, and hold that a nuanced understanding of autonomy and autonomous decision making can be reached if these strands of philosophy are brought into dialogue.

Pain research is still dominated by biomedical perspectives and the need to articulate pain in ways other than those offered by evidence based medical models is pressing. Examining closely subjective experiences of pain, this book explores the way in which pain is situated, communicated and formed in a larger cultural and social context.

Dimensions of Pain

explores the lived experience of pain, and questions of identity and pain, from a range of different disciplinary perspectives within the humanities and social sciences. Discussing the acuity and temporality of pain, its isolating impact, the embodied expression of pain, pain and sexuality, gender and ethnicity, it also includes a cluster of three chapters discusses the phenomenon and experience of labour pains.

This volume revitalizes the study of pain, offering productive ways of carefully thinking through its different aspects and exploring the positive and enriching side of world-forming pain as well as its limiting aspects. It will be of interest to academics and students interested in pain from a range of backgrounds, including philosophy, sociology, nursing, midwifery, medicine and gender studies.

There is perhaps no experience that better brings to light to us the singularity and solitude of our lives than the experience of pain. Hannah Arendt, for instance, describes the experience of great bodily pain as being “the most private and least communicable of all,” isolating us from others who have no access to the privacy of our experience (1958: 50). When we are in overwhelming and allconsuming pain, we are urgently and immediately present to ourselves without words, images or metaphors to shield us or to connect us in recognizable ways to our surrounding world and to others. There are, as Virginia Woolf writes so fittingly, “no words for the shiver and the headache […] let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry” (2002: 7). Elaine Scarry goes further and famously argues that pain does not simply resist language but has the power of destroying language. The experience of acute pain, writes Scarry, transports us back to “a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned” (1985: 4). One of the reasons for this resistance to language is that pain is not intentionally directed towards any object in the world and a body in pain is wholly selfreferential. Pain does not relate to anything external and transcendent to it and it is fundamentally not about anything except itself. Even though it is urgently and indubitably present as perhaps the most tangible of experiences, its lack of intentionality at the same time makes pain amorphous and elusive, constituting it as unsharable in essential ways. In the following I partly want to challenge the idea that pain is unsharable. Without denying the privacy of the experience of pain and its often devastating force of isolation, I want to draw attention also to the ways in which pain is sharable and binds us to one another. The sense of sharing I want to bring to light is not one starting out from individual entities such as human bodies but, rather, one that constitutes individual beings and the singularity of their experience. I take seriously the insight that the body in pain is wholly self-referential and turn to the notion of intercorporeality in order to bring out the relationality of embodiment and thereby provide a more comprehensive view of how to understand the self-referentiality of the body in pain. I suggest that the experience of pain brings to light the relationality of embodied subjectivity and the corporeal character of this relationality. It makes manifest embodiment as primarily intercorporeal and the force of isolation as destructively altering the intercorporeal attachments of our bodies, depriving them of the dynamic structure essential to their being and at the same time making these attachments urgently present precisely as damaged and absent.