Jay, I appreciate your very thoughtful comments on this topic.
I guess for me it seems a difficult proposition to determine
what's experienced as coercive rather than merely constraining,
simply because there's so much individual variation in this.
For instance, the requirements in my syllabus will be experienced
by some students as a reasonable constraint if they want to take
my course, whereas others will experience it as unreasonably
coercive (what do you mean, write a 2-3 page paper for *every*
class?!). I told the story of my friends who insisted that their
3-year old join them inside the restaurant and play with his trucks
there; I found this to be a very reasonable constraint, others on
the list found it to be unnecessarily coercive. Aside from instances
of blatant torture, "pain" seems to me such an individually variable
experience, that it seems difficult to draw any definite line between
constraint and coercion.
Robin