"On the Embodiment of Addiction"

2013

Addiction Trajectories, 2013

The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs

Some two hundred years ago-with the help from Benjamin Rush, Thomas Trotter, Christoph W. Hufeland and above all from the Moscow physician v. Brühl-Cramer-a strange disease came into being: people who drank to much suffered from drinking to much. The majority of the colleagues shook theirs heads, and, as everybody knows, to this day the concept remains contested-we cannot even reach an agreement on whether it was discovered or invented. Be that as it may, Brühl-Cramer 1 had labelled it Trunksucht, literally: "addiction to drink," a term he had modelled from the rampant Lesesucht, the "addiction to read" (especially novels like Goethe´s Werther which caused spectacular cases of suicide). Thus, the Trunksucht was framed by a broader idea of pathological excessive behaviour, be it reading, coffee drinking or craving for certain food. For psychological reasons some people became addicted; admittedly, these reasons were mysterious. Trotter and the famous Hufeland, on the other hand, simply regarded alcohol the cause of the craving for alcohol. The latter spoke of an "infection" with hard spirits which "inevitably makes it necessary to drink ever more." Admittedly, it was a mystery why only a minority of the consumers became addicted. Hufeland promoted Brühl-Cramer´s trailblazing work enthusiastically-not realising the difference between the two approaches. In other words: right from its origins the concept of addiction bore a crucial etiological vagueness, if not a void. The starting point of this disease could be seen either in malfunctions

Three perspectives on addiction promulgated during the 1990s are reviewed, along with many earlier contributions to the understanding of addictive illness. It is suggested that these distinct yet overlapping formulations of the dynamics of addiction form a hierarchy for each patient suffering from an addiction. Assessment of a patient's ego strength, and of the relative importance of addictive behaviors in overall character structure, allows referral to various types of treatment, including psychoanalytic therapy. Case examples are presented, including material from the psychoanalysis of a woman addicted to heroin, methadone, cocaine, amphetamines, nicotine, alcohol, and shopping.

2020

As this Handbook demonstrates, the phenomenon of addiction straddles a dizzying number of fields of enquiry; even at a very coarse disciplinary grain, it throws up biomedical, neurological, pharmacological, clinical, social, legal, political, and moral issues, among numerous others. So it is no surprise that the multitude of disciplinary perspectives, methodologies, terminologies, and research programs, all working at crosspurposes, should generate conceptual misunderstandings and disputes. Philosophy is, of course, dedicated as a field of study to the analysis and clarification of such conceptual quandaries, and many of the particular issues that have arisen in the course of the interdisciplinary study of addiction over the past few decades will be extremely familiar to ethicists, metaphysicians, and philosophers of science. Philosophers may address these problems directly; philosophical attention to them can also be hugely beneficial to researchers in the range of other “stakehold...

International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research

I find it to be incredibly fascinating as a researcher to follow the development of a profession and the specializations within it. The history of addiction counseling, a subfield of the counseling profession, has developed in a manner like that of many other helping professions, including social work, psychiatry, nursing, and medicine. In the past, practitioners had less training and supervision when it came to understanding addiction as a condition that would call for professional assistance. It will substantially advance the body of research and aid counselors in their understanding of the values and requirements of various people. In order to comprehend the etiology of addiction, this article also analyses many causation models, such as moral, psychological, family, disease, biological, sociocultural, and multi-cause models. Addiction counselors are not merely specialists who work with alcoholics or addicts in recovery solely on the basis of their former substance use. Addiction...

This paper engages with the construct of addiction by mapping the historical development of the social logic of the concept. In view of the proposed embracement of the term by the new DSM V, this revisiting of the literature surrounding a highly charged concept is considered timely. The paper presents a discussion about the complexities involved in determining the implications emanating from the construct of addiction with special emphasis on the issue of human agency. Different representations of the addiction construct are discussed. These representations are located within various models, which frame and shape the understanding and the handling of the addicted person. Constructs of addiction, as they emerge from the dominant disease model of addiction, are mainly problematised. Finally, this paper highlights the continued 'usefulness' and the validity of the addiction construct despite its complexities and recommends further research on the career model.

History of the Human Sciences, 2020

Mainstream addiction science is today widely marked by an antinomy between a neu-rologically determinist understanding of the human brain 'hijacked' by the biochemical allure of intoxicants and a liberal voluntarist conception of drug use as a free exercise of choice. Prominent defenders of both discourses strive, ultimately without complete success, to provide accounts that are both universal and value-neutral. This has resulted in a variety of conceptual problems and has undermined the utility of such research for those who seek to therapeutically care for people presumed to suffer from addictions. This article contrasts these two contemporary discourses to two others that played vital historical roles in initiating both scientific and popular concern for addiction. These are the Puritan and civic republican discourses that dominated scholarly discussions of addiction in the early modern era. In each case, the place of values in these discussions is highlighted. By comparing them to their early modern historical antecedents, this article seeks to reflexively explore and develop more intellectually sound and therapeutically relevant alternatives to the troubled attempts at universality and value-neutrality now fettering debates in mainstream addiction science.

Journal of evaluation in clinical practice, 2018

This paper stems from the concern that, in certain situations, categorization may lead to the annihilation of the subject. It attempts to answer the question whether there is a way of framing addiction without necessarily putting the addicted persons in categories that hurt them. After showing, in the first section, how stigma is part of the process of becoming (and remaining) addicted, I will turn to the phenomenological tradition in order to re-consider the main descriptive categories that have been used so far to capture addiction as a "pathological" or "deviant" experience. The second section addresses addiction as an experience of hetero-transformation of the psycho-physical unity of the individual, which presupposes a genuine sense of the power of the bodily subject, while the third focuses on the modifications of temporality in addiction, especially in the horizon of trauma. The paper concludes that understanding addiction depends on framing the experience...

Since 1905, when Freud drew attention to the constitutional intensification of oral erotism in men who have a marked desire for drinking and smoking, there have been many detailed contributions to the problem of drug addiction. Rado (32), Daniels (33), Benedek (5), Robbins (37), Fenichel (12) and others confirmed Freud's observations in stressing oral factors in addiction. The relation of drug addiction, particularly alcoholism, to latent homosexuality was investigated by Abraham (1), Freud (16), Ferenczi (13), Juliusburger (25), Tausk (44), Kielholz (26), Hartmann (22), Riggall (35), and many others. Kielholz (26) and Simmel (42) connected narcissism with drug addiction, while Abraham (1) and later Simmel (43) recognized the importance of aggressive factors. This view was confirmed and developed by Edward Glover, who stressed the early aggressive drive and an early oedipal nuclear conflict in drug addiction (20) and related his findings to Melanie Klein's views on aggression and the early oedipal complex (28). There were also attempts to define drug addiction as a disease and understand its relation to other diseases, neuroses or psychoses. Freud (17), Rado (32), Simmel (43), Benedek (5), Weijl (45), and more recently Federn (10), have stressed the relation of drug addiction to mania or depression; others, like Edward Glover, have described the paranoid element. It is interesting that the more important and detailed psychoanalytic papers on the problem of drug addiction were written before 1939. One of the reasons for the scarcity of psychoanalytic contributions during the last twenty years may be the recognition that the treatment of drug addiction in psychoanalytic practice is a very difficult problem.