The aim of the article is to shape a methodological approach to the problem of pain experience as a cultural, meaningful and meaning-giving act. In this article chronic pain also acts as an example of paradigmatic challenge presented by qualitative research. A multidisciplinary theory, based on medical anthropology and social medicine, is needed in order to study pain as an embodied experience. Crucial for this approach is to understand pain as an intentional and meaning-giving experience, as an emotion. When neurophysiological theories conceptualize pain without a subject, as something happening in the body. In order to understand pain as emotion, a social and acting subject is needed. The study of pain as an embodied and intentional experience questions the body-mind dichotomy on the epistemological level. In the article Maurice Merleau-Ponty's theory of bodily subjectivity is presented as a fruitful and possible solution for this problem.