Everybody is supposed to know Molière's last play The Imaginary Invalid (1763) and to laugh at the hypochondria of Argan, the man who tyrannizes his entourage because he believes that he is sick. He tries to force his daughter to marry the son of his physician, who happens to be a physician too, in order to have his son-in-law take care of his body rather than that of his daughter; incest and other little family accidents are never very far away in Molière's universe, which is one of the reasons that should prevent us from thinking that the likes of Argan are basically in good health. Is it not obvious, at least when we take a second look at Argan, that he is really very sick, that he is not doing well at all? More generally, my first question here, implied by Molière's play, would be: what exactly is the difference between real and imaginary suffering? Do we not suffer when we just believe that we do? What is the difference between medically correct pain and imaginary pain?

I am not arguing that pain is always imaginary – although we know that what we perceive as such is constructed, historically and culturally determined, at least to some extent, as shown by Roselyne Rey's impressive history of pain. Neither would I affirm that we suffer only when we decide that we do – that would be absurd. My point is, however, that in its complexity, suffering includes a performative dimension: it happens – not only to Argan – that we suffer because we believe or we say that we do. In the twentieth century, the French writer Jean Paulhan, for a long time editor-in-chief of the famous Nouvelle Revue Francaise, argues a contrario in the same way in a short story entitled “Imaginary Pains”: the suffering narrator seeks medical advice from a Chinese acupuncturist who sticks a few needles here and there in his body and tells him that, if he keeps suffering, it is just an effect of his imagination. And of course the narrator does keep suffering, but no longer knows what to do with his pain if it is just an illusion.