The Concept of Mental Pain - FullText - Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics 2013, Vol. 82, No. 2 - Karger Publishers

"From his perspective, pain is the awareness of a disruption in the person’s tendency towards maintaining individual wholeness and social unity. Sandler [2,3] defined psychological pain as the affective state associated with discrepancy between ideal and actual perception of self. Baumeister [4] referred to mental pain indirectly in his theory on suicide. He viewed mental pain as an aversive state of high self-awareness of inadequacy. When negative outcomes fall far below one’s standards of the ideal self and aspirations, and outcomes are attributed to the self, that person experiences mental pain. The basic emotion in mental pain is, thus, self-disappointment."

"Frankl [14] viewed suffering as a form of emptiness due to loss of meaning in life, underlining that cause of psychological problems originates from existential frustration. He added that ‘... existential frustration is in itself neither pathological nor pathogenic. A person’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease’ (p. 123). The individual basic concern should not be to avoid pain or gain pleasure, but to see meaning in life [15]. Suffering terminates at the moment a meaning is found for it [16]."