Addiction is MORE than just drugs…

“Ooops, I did it again!” That drink last night, that extra-large burger, that show you binge watched on Netflix, or that boy`s heart that you`ve played with… welcome, playa, welcome addict! – you are in good company. In fact, psychoanalysis, Lacan, self-declared heir of Freud, thinks you are simply human like the rest of us. To be human means to be an addict.

Again: can`t control your behavior?! Doing atrocious harm to yourself and/or others? In contact with the legal system? Psychoanalysis has your back! Why and how? In his times, Freud worked the spectrum from “perverse” to psychotic to mildly unconventional, thus exploring and challenging the societal codes of his times. This tradition continues.

It goes back to a vision of the subject, short for a vision of “you”, of “me” that differs from how other schools in psychology try to see us. Psychoanalysis sees the subject as defined by lack, thus, we are all addicts of some sort, since we are all craving ways to respond to that lack. Lack causes anxiety and we want to keep anxiety at bay. But as much as we respond to this anxiety, as much as you self-improve, work towards those goals of yours, fall in love, change the world: happiness, fulfillment are nothing but short moments where the drives and the object are short-circuited, in orgasm e.g., or when you have that flash of heroin, that flow at work – in those somewhat narcissistic, autistic experiences when your addiction is actually stilled. As any good drive, your drive will come back, that hunger will set in, the longing, and you will be out there again – perhaps just shopping if this is your “thing”.

… say, shopping for that overpriced lipstick. Are you a “DIOR addict”? Bathing in that glamour set forth by profit-driven, multinational companies and distributed globally on every screen? Chasing that fantasy that puts you into a high-class habitat where Jennifer Lawrence replicates Sharon Stone`s infamous leg-crossing from Basic Instinct? Addiction is a sign of the times. Our economic system capitalizes on the lack it aggrandizes by manufacturing objects which then put the drives in gear. Psychoanalysis states that we “enjoy” too much, that enjoyment engulfs us, that we lead lives where pleasure tips over into pain.

Now, obviously, there are differences between us addicts: the depressive shopping queen who accumulates debt, the barefoot homeless ranting on fentanyl, the workaholic financial analyst or the well-heeled sex addict who avoid meaningful relationships might be offered different regimes of treatment; rehab favors multi-prong approaches. However, when the patients enter analysis proper, they are all the same: psychoanalysis puts them face to face to the question of what caused them to become a user. “Tell me”, “remember”! Was it the experience of physical abuse, of Missy Eliot`s whose father beat her up? Of sexual abuse that also drove Marilyn Monroe? Of repetitions of those scenarios in adult relationships? Is it the racism that drove the needle into Basquiat`s arm? When did “it” all start? What memories are there? How? -- The gamut of transference gets unleashed. Hopefully. Because unearthing memories and unconscious events leads to an understanding and understanding itself is expedient, if not helpful in itself. What does the job, however, and here is THE point of psychoanalysis, is that the addict enters into an exchange: when s/he enters analysis, s/he trades the enjoyment of their drug for words. Words, what Freud called “the talking cure”. The user stops using, scales down using, and talks instead. Hopefully. Words mean an acceptance of this primordial lack that we all feel, simply by being out of the womb and a separate individuum. It means that we attempt to talk about our sorrows, our fantasies, that

we circle the big black hole. That we are trying to arrive at a certain acceptance of separation, alienation, that we let go. This does not come easy. Psychoanalysis produces anxiety which, perhaps, you learn to yoga away instead of shooting up, to stand somehow, to put in its place.